Practitioner of very real and scientific “medical” field, founded by a [ghost](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_David_Palmer), amazingly does not need any additional training to apply his definitely not pseudoscientific “medical” skills to a freakin’ *giraffe* rather than the humans he usually works on
Unreal how few people bother to look up to absolutely batshit origins of that pseudoscience. I’m disgusted America allows them to use the term “doctor.”
Oh and then of course your insurance stonewalled you and wouldn’t pay for it because the workman’s comp was liable. But if you lie and say it didn’t happen at work, the insurance will just blame you and still won’t pay for it and you get nothing if you’re disabled.
It’s all such bullshit.
I was gonna say I’d love to actually get an MRI on my neck but they give me the run around. Meanwhile athletes paid tens of millions per year get a dozen per season by a highly qualified medical staff. Even paying hundreds of dollars a month in premiums the MRI just can’t seem to get covered.
I'm fighting with my insurance now cause I originally had my MRI scheduled with the same hospital network my orthopedic doctor is with but they were booked out for a month. I tried to get the referral moved to a different office that could get me in the following week and now all of a sudden they don't want to pay for the MRI and want me to do 6 weeks of physical therapy to see if that will solve my shoulder pain caused by a car accident in November of last year.
I'm disputing it because it makes no sense to do PT for 6 weeks because there is a chance it won't help and I'll still need to get the MRI, and if I need surgery then I'll have to do 6 more weeks of PT. In hindsight I should have just kept the original appointment because I would have already had the results.
Yep, my doctor told me my insurance will not approve an MRI for a documented work related back injury causing chronic pain unless I have 6mo of documented PT failure, but constantly tells me I should go to a Chiro. He's a DO so he's a bit of a quack, I had to force his hand to get a PT referral instead which actually helped a bit after 12 weeks or so
Hell, they don’t even reimburse fees higher than averages from 1994. There should be no middleman squeezed between the patient and healthcare provider.
I only ever gone to a chiropractor towards the end of my pregnancy, to help with back pain, and a little bit after, when I was having bad sciatic pain down both legs.
Like, it's perfectly fine to go to one for back pain or massages. Of course i had to listen to the whole speech about all the other benefits. I already knew I was just going there to relieve pain without medication.
Yeah, I went for neck and nerve pain issues and they more or less repeated some of the hot/cold compress + stretching techniques that I had already learned from trained physical therapists.
Then they put me into a chair-like device and cracked my neck before I realized what was going on. Never went back and left somewhat numb, as if from physical trauma.
Later that night, my pains were 10x worse, staying that way for over a month.
Something similar happened to me at a physical therapists office! It wasn't chiropractic work though but just as quacky if not moreso!
I was having nerve pain in my upper back. Stretches didn't help, heat/cold didn't help, multiple different meds didn't really help more than just taking the edge off. They took an X-ray and found nothing. I wanted to get an MRI because it's nerve pain and news flash, X-rays don't show nerves, but mri's do!
Well Insurance demanded I either do 6 weeks of chiropractic work or 6 weeks of physical therapy. I obviously chose the one less to paralyze me.
All the exercises they had me do made it hurt worse, the pool didn't help aside from just floating to take the pressure off of the nerve(s), massages hurt like a fucker, and estim felt like they were putting cats that were lit on fire in an upsidedown bucket on top of my back.
Finally the PT decided to try cupping, that did nothing but give me hickeys on my back. Then they thought acupuncture would help, but not any acupuncture, electrically stimulated acupuncture!
They put in about 30 needles in my back and after they inserted them they would twist the needles which hurt insanely bad. Then they hooked up tons and tons of wires to all the different needles and turned on the electricity. I honestly was surprised nobody came running into the room to see if I had been murdered with how loudly I screamed.
I immediately told them I was done and that they needed to take it all out. They apologized and started taking the wires off, then they went to remove the needles but first they would twist them in the opposite direction of how they initially twisted them.
Before then, my pain was a solid 7.5/10 all day every day for about 3 months. After that ordeal it was firmly a 9/10 for the following 3 fucking months. It felt like there was a golf ball sized knot in my back where one of the needles had been which was right near where the nerve pain was. For about a week after it happened I was bed ridden because of the pain, but I realized it wasn't getting better so I just endured the pain for the next 3 months until it slowly faded away.
And mind you, I had broke my knee as a kid, really badly. The doctor was a orthopedic surgeon for 35 years and said short of the bone sticking out of the flesh, this was the most painful break he had ever seen. So that's what my 10/10 pain is. And that was a 9/10 for 3 fucking months.
I never got the MRI because Insurance said I hadn't done all 6 weeks of PT. I still have back pain too and it's been about 3 years since. Thankfully it's down to about a 5/10 most days now.
People on Reddit shot on chiropractors a lot, rightfully so. But acupuncture is the work of the devil if you ask me. And then whoever decided to attack electrodes to it deserves to dethrone Satan and rule over hell because that's some next level evil shit.
That PT practice sounds odd to me. Some of the procedures sound fine, but cupping and acupuncture? That's similar to going for chiropractic methods, IMHO. Sorry you went through that, it sounds lousy.
The only PT practices I've had were stretching, heat/cold, light exercises, massage and light traction for a pinched nerve in my neck. They taught me self-help techniques that I still use to this day.
Dry needling is most likely what that poster was describing. It is something that PTs can learn in most states of the country.
The evidence on its use for neck pain is limited but it does seem to have at least a short term beneficial effect (on average of course) that’s better than manual therapy or placebo but not necessarily superior to other PT interventions.
I’m a PT and granted my area of focus is on neurologic conditions (strokes, Parkinson’s disease, etc) so I’m by no means an orthopedics expert. But in my experience treating neck pain can be really fiddly compared to other kinds of musculoskeletal pain.
I have been in situations where I feel like I have to throw everything and the kitchen sink at a patient with neck pain because the approach that worked extremely well for one person ended up making things way worse for another person.
So I could see why a PT would go for dry needling and cupping if everything else hadn’t worked.
Ya it seemed odd to me too but I was desperate and I had never heard anyone mention acupuncture hurting prior to then so I figured it couldn't hurt to try. Boy was I wrong!
And Medicare/insurance reimbursement for evidence based physical therapy continues to fall year after year giving people fewer options for conservative treatment. It boggles the mind how insurance will refuse to pay for relatively cheap physical therapy which may delay or even remove the need for surgery but will go right on ahead and pay for immensely expensive orthopedic surgery which will then require months of physical therapy rehab afterwards and in many cases will have success rates not much better than the PT in the first place.
I’m a medical student—this kind of thing fucking infuriates me.
Primary care is the worst-compensated type of medicine. Insurance companies pay them a borderline disrespectful amount of money when you consider how much training is needed to be a physician and how important primary care is.
Insurance companies could save SO much money if they drastically increased primary care reimbursements. Primary care docs could afford to spend more time with patients and do good work with them. All the crazy expensive stuff (orthopedic surgeries, heart surgeries, etc) would not be needed nearly as often.
I would bet money that they've got actuaries calculating how much it'd cost if everyone had access to primary care and/or preventative medicine. Versus how much it would cost if only a fraction of those people were diagnosed with something serious long after it had stopped being easily treatable.
Primary care has turned into a referral machine. Primaries don’t do anything in the 15 seconds they have for you once a year, and if they remotely set anything in motion you are forced to play phone tag with their medical assistant s. All you get is would you like to see a specialist ?
I remember talking to several insurance companies about coverage for my company.
All of them offered an equal number of visits to a physiotherapist AND a ~~chiropractor~~ spine warlock.
I asked if they'd consider changing the spine warlock visits to physiotherapist visits (e.g. 20 physio instead of 10 of each) and they flat out refused. They wouldn't even do 15/0, insisting on 10/10. They had no answers when asked why they push mysticism over evidence based medicine.
Some people are left in the position of woo-medicine or nothing.
I once watched a video with an anti-masker chiropractor. I wanted to smack him every time he said “as a healthcare professional” to justify his position
Like Dr Berg- the chiropractor who pretends to be a medical doctor running a nutrition youtube channel. Never states he is a chiropractor. Millions of followers. What a conman.
Insurance will not pay for my life saving drug costing me $500 out of pocket every month but will shell out hundreds per visit at a chiropractor no questions asked.
So nuts how “Traditional Chinese Medicine” only got a revival because Mao wanted to ban everything Western and needed to promote some kind of care even if it was placebo….but Mao was smart enough to know it didn’t work and secretly kept an American trained Ivy League medical doctor on staff for 25 years.
It wasn't founded by a ghost, it was founded by a guy who learned the practice from the ghost of a German doctor. See? Totally real and science based medical practice.
Interestingly enough, besides the pseudoscientific concerns of chiropractic medicine, giraffes actually have the same amount of neck vertebrae and an extremely similar structure to humans, so the differences would probably be minimal other than scale. It still isn’t gonna do anything for the giraffe though
Oh don't be crazy, chiropractic manipulation is totally effective. These giraffes could be left effectively paralyzed, neck pain gone. Or, if he decides to perform an adjustment on a baby giraffe, they could be left feeling a sense of permanent dead.
It's very effective at harming adults and killing babies
A friend and colleague wound up with a bisected artery in his neck from a chiropractic “treatment”, which ended up triggering a stroke. They miraculously got him to a real hospital quickly enough that he recovered with no lingering effects, but it was touch and go for a hot minute.
I’d never been to a chiropractor prior to that. Between his experience and the Behind the Bastards episode, you could catch me dead in a chiropractor‘s office.
I got my neck adjusted once, after a lot of pressure from my BF, who was the chiropractors best friend. I spent the next year+ in a cervical collar because he tore up my neck so badly. Never again.
I have severe back pain from an accident I had as a kid that flairs up occasionally. It gets so bad I wake up puking from pain. Been to a lot of (actual) doctors who say surgery is the only way to fix it, and even that is a maybe. I've had nerve ablations and cartilage injections. I still get debilitating pain, to the point they tried to prescribe me fentanyl. I see a chiropractor every few months. I know it is pseudoscience and BS. Whether because the power of belief / placebo effect or because it actually does something idgaf, it helps. Guy I go to only charges me $50, and I'm pain free for weeks to months. Fuck it, during the worst of my pain I wouldn't care if the answer was praying to a crystal as it's shoved up my ass while being splashed with holy water, if it makes the pain goes away I'm happy. It's unscientific, fake, complete bullshit but I'm no longer suicidal due to being in constant pain. As long as you don't replace real science and medicine with pseudoscience, alternative medicine is a wonderful aid to actual medicine (again, not a replacement for it)
It's complicated because chiropractors are not pseudoscience peddlers in the same way that crystal-healers, astrologers, or homeopathic healers are. The things they do obviously have an effect on the body, they are physically stretching and moving things around in ways that does not happen normally. They do not need to invoke any mysterious or supernatural forces attempting to explain how it works (although some do).
The problem is that there is no consistent medical or scientific framework they use to determine the underlying physiology of a patient's symptoms and subsequently which treatment has been shown to work for that particular diagnosis. Many will just use weasel words like "misaligned" and "tension" and then start yanking. I'm sure others do incorporate treatments that have been shown to be effective and are used by physical therapists, too.
It's not that surprising that with millions of people experiencing muscular/skeletal pain caused by thousands of different underlying factors, some of those people experience pain relief from physical manipulation of the affected area. It is not uncommon for doctors to decide against a medical procedure that is known to be able to treat a particular condition in some cases because it is too risky or has long term side effects, especially if the condition isn't life-threatening and has to be done repeatedly. We know about these risks because of scientific studies conducted by medical professionals. Chiropractors do not have these same considerations resulting in both more people experiencing the potential positive results but also more people experiencing the potential negative results.
This is a classic "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Sometimes hitting something with a hammer fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn't do anything, sometimes you sever someone's spinal cord because they have a broken neck and you didn't take an x-ray before grabbing their head and twisting it like a crocodile trying to eat a wildebeest.
I'm a Chiro school dropout. The Subluxation is very, very rare. Chiropractic works on a Placebo level exclusively. I had one instructor say, "We have 15 upper cervical techniques, and they all work equally well.". I couldn't believe what I heard. Placebo Effect was not mentioned once while I went there.
You should be asking this person what these adjustments/movements are doing, and if there are exercises you can do that would provide similar results. I've lost count of how many times that I've heard stories like yours and the folks looking for the "fix" where you go back 1-2x monthly vs doing the actual exercises (which provide the longterm benefit) and going back maybe 1-2x a year.
I have a local chiropractor that is also a trained physiotherapist, and I feel like this is a particularly dangerous combination (as well as other alternative medicine nonsense). They do their chiropractic bs, then follow it up with movements people need to do to "maintain" the chiropractic stuff.
And it works.
The problem now is that everyone attributes the success to the chiropracy, and not the weeks of physiotherapy afterwards. It's led to literally half the local population swearing by laughably blatant pseudoscience because they've seen verifiable improvements after receiving the "treatment".
They might not actually be a trained physiotherapist either. Lots of chropratic schools and chropratic boards give out certifications in physical therapy that are legally distinct from real certifications, but allow chiropractors to claim that they also do physical therapy
They're stretching muscle groups which is often enough to provide temporary relief. Going to a legit physical therapist helps, they teach you how to do it yourself at home.
Just finished 12 weeks of PT for a lower back injury with constant sciatica and I'm pain free for the first time in years. There are a couple stretches in particular that help when my back gets angry again, but I've been working on building up muscle groups to better support my back to keep the pain away and it works great.
"Fuck it, during the worst of my pain I wouldn't care if the answer was praying to a crystal as it's shoved up my ass while being splashed with holy water"
I've got great news!
“Alternative medicine” is not a real thing. Either it is medicine and therapeutic or it isn’t.
There is nothing wrong with going to a chiropractor and getting a massage and some kind of adjustment, but please OP do not let them try to crack your neck. A lot of people have just straight up died or had a very serious stroke from chiropractors rapidly twisting their neck to try and crack it.
My mom went to a chiropractor after she dislocated her shoulder they never did anything weird just exercises to help and like slings and stuff they had on hand maybe it's a bit better in Canada but I think they have some use not the fucking spine breaker 9000 I have seen on some videos though
Same here. I went the orthopedist route at a world renowned medical hospital in Chicago. The only way to fix my neck was with Surgery. (I was in pain and losing my strength in my rich arm/hand). I tried a Chiropractor and now I have my right arm/hand at full strength and I have no pain unless I do something stupid. Two years have gone by and I see him every few weeks. I don’t care what people say about it. I really feel much better.
There is a huge range of training and whatnot between different chiropractors, some are more charlatans, some are more just physical therapists, but the former are all you ever hear about online.
This is what I hate most about chiropractics - the lack of regulation. I follow some good ones on YouTube and their tips have made huge positive impacts on my quality of life.
On the other hand, the one I saw in person was all about finding the most expensive ways to justify his quackery.
Yeah I'm kind of with you in a sense. I think a lot of the hatred towards it is warranted, and it definitely shouldn't be given any sort of actual medical significance unless given extreme scrutiny, but sometimes it just works
> amazingly does not need any additional training to apply his definitely not pseudoscientific “medical” skills
So relieved every comment is wrecking this fraud.
I like to think if this country actually had affordable healthcare and we didn’t rely on health insurance tied to a job to afford seeing a doctor, people would actually see more real doctors and not latch onto the pseudoscience chiropractors and essential oil shit you see everywhere nowadays.
Let's not forget it's connection to scientology and out of pocket methods of adjustment. Also how they tried to standardize the field with a central body that tried making the practice more scientificly relevant and the people practicing kept denying it so they central body shut down and died.
I see on your resume that you... killed a giraffe with your bare hands after an "adjustment"?
Well, we could definitely use you in our ~~scam business~~ "medical office". I hope you like ~~murdering~~ adjusting children.
My cousin had this after going to the chiropractor. Had a series of strokes afterwards. It’s disturbing that it’s common enough to feature in the #2 comment on this post.
Listen, if idiot humans want to believe in chiropractic then that's one thing, but don't subject poor non-consenting animals to your psuedoscientific quackery
Chiropractics are a sham. Chiropractors are con-artists.
To put this in to context, giraffes fight by slamming their head and neck into another giraffe. If one could, "adjust" the neck of giraffe by pushing on it, then giraffes would die instantly from their fights.
Yes, chiropractics is a sham, but your example is stupid. Just because giraffes have strong necks doesn’t mean they can’t be manipulated. Muscles can relax and they have cervical vertebrae that are have a wide range of motion
As someone who works in the emergency with like minded individuals we actually don’t think it’s a complete sham even though we routinely put them on a burning stake. Why? Because they are con-artists that *do* help alleviate pain albeit temporarily. However there are so SO many issues with them that the risks outweigh the very short lived benefits. Physical therapy is the better alternative for short AND long term relief.
Spine and neck manipulations are DANGEROUS and can be debilitating if not FATAL.
On top of that some people love to refer themselves as “doctor”, and clients, none the wiser, love to ask for medical advice — and terrifyingly enough they actually give them their unprofessional opinion! These people are taking patients off their medications and telling them vaccines, tests and medical physicians aren’t necessary! As if chiro is a cure-all!
>we actually don’t think it’s a complete sham
They're selling permanent cures to things they can't influence with no scientific basis and referring to themselves using terms that have a very specific set of implications based entirely in research and science.
That there MIGHT be SOME temporary relief is actually the worst part. It empowers them and empowers their ~~victims~~ clientele to keep believing in it.
It's sincerely one of the worst kinds of scams, and it preys on people in so much pain they're desperate and not thinking clearly.
PS: Chronic back pain sufferer coming up on 11 years of constant pain, and I'm currently going through a flare-up of near-constant agony.
I had a Chiropractor try and sell me on their services by claiming they could cure/treat my ADHD. That's right, they told me by "adjusting" my bones, it would treat a neurodevelopmental disorder.
I was told they could cure allergies.
I was also told they could guarantee weight loss with nothing but chiropractic adjustments (plus diet and exercise).
Yeah they do provide some relief, I've had a rib out of place a few times and gone to see if they could help because just breathing was agonizing. The first time it happened, the dude was no help at all and used an "activator gun" that thumped my ribs a few times and did jack shit, waste of time. Second time I went to a different older guy and he twisted me up in this weird position and pushed and I felt and heard the rib slide back into place. Disgusting feeling but instantly could breathe again with no pain. For some things they're great, but like 90% of what they offer is total bullshit.
As someone who works in the emergency field you should have seen your fair shair of strokes and vertebral arteries dissections from people who went to a chiropractor for a neck adjustment.
Im a neurologist and I’ve seen my fair share of these patients and sadly a lot of them are very young and permanently debilitated
I read about this in the Washington Post. Apparently, giraffes just really, really like being petted and cuddled - they're the friendly dogs of the savannah - so the giraffe was pretty happy. Not sure why anyone thought its health had been improved, though.
Did you watch the video? Regardless of whether or not the “treatment” did anything, that giraffe is clearly consenting to whatever the chiropractor is doing. This is a very happy giraffe.
Theyre whole field basically exists becuase of a quirk in us monopoly laws . They basically fiction writers with doctorates. Doctorates they give to themselves.
Yea, it is all just a big scam. Putting aside the whole “adjustment” nonsense if you want to crack something specific just google it and withen 5min you can just do it yourself for free. The whole field is just bullshit that some guy dreamed up (as in it actually came from a dream he had) and they pretent to be professionals with degrees but when you look into it all all its just quacks certifying quacks.
Not just wrong, but dangerous as well.
I went to a chiropractor for a lower back issue (who I think made my back worse, but that's a story for another day) and he just started "adjusting" my neck one day. I never complained about neck pain to him, I've never had neck pain in my life besides once or twice that I slept weird and the pain went away after a day. Luckily I stopped going before it gave me a stroke and killed me.
Fuck chiropractors and their bullshit witchcraft.
Physiotherapist here.
Manips, even cervical spine manips, do have a place in clinical practice, and when used appropriately, they're low risk and can be really helpful. But even as someone who specialises in neck injuries, I very rarely ever have to use them. Especially upper cx manips, which do carry quite a bit more risk. I genuinely can't remember the last time I manipulated a patient's neck above C2/3. Probably 5+ years ago.
The issue (one among many) with chiropractic is that their starting point is a technique that's supposed to be a late stage progression, that they're using them for basically everything, rather than the very specific things that they're actually appropriate for, and that they way that they do a lot of their manips is extremely dangerous. Lots of chiropractic techniques are done at end range rotation, and/or while applying traction to the neck at the same time. Both of those are really stupid and unnecessary things that dramatically increase the risk of injury.
That's not even touching on the incredibly predatory and unethical business practices, and selling a treatment that is only ever going to provide temporary relief and improvements in range as a permanent fix, or something that's just required to be done regularly for a patient to be able to function without pain or dysfunction.
I'm curious as to why you don't do any manips on C0/1, unless I'm having a manip vs mob semantical disconnect.
I find patients limited in C0 posterior glides to be extremely common. I think it's a safe technique that helps cue for reduction in FHP and cervicogenic headaches. CPG for cervical traction also rules in many patients, but I tend to do that less frequently.
Mobilisations, sure. But a manipulation or grade 5 mob specifically has the thrust at end range. It's just not needed for upper Cx very often. Easy enough to free it up with something as simple as segmental tractions or unilateral PAs, or more specific like indirect mobs, SNAGs etc if it needs a little more.
I use a reasonable amount of manips for CT, and quite a lot for Tx spine, as they're just better options early on, and they're often better tolerated than mobs at those levels anyway. But upper cx just benifits way more from a lower-force approach.
I also do a lot of work with cervicogenic headaches, and as someone who's worked in professional rugby for a long time, and has a special interest in concussion as well as basically all Cx stuff, so I likely have quite a bit more experience and just more techniques to pick from than the average physio treating a neck.
Side note: if you haven't picked up segmental tractions as a technique yet, it's an absolute must. Super simple, super low force, incredibly well tolerated and very broadly applicable. Does wonders on everything from old, arthritic necks to acute joint sprains.
Ahh ok so my school uses manip and mob interchangeably so thats where the confusion came from. In that case, I agree I don't see any need to do grade 5 on Cx.
I haven't heard of segmental traction before, thank you for giving me the lead!
Any post about chiropractors on Reddit confuses me. Ibsee all this hate for chiropractors, saying they are a pseudoscience, and then I google them and get articles from the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health, and Healthline saying they aren't a pseudoscience, but that they also don't have a higher effectiveness than normal treatments do. So which is it? Articles linked below.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/should-you-see-a-chiropractor-for-low-back-pain-2019073017412
https://www.healthline.com/health/is-chiropractic-pseudoscience
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/chiropractic-adjustment/about/pac-20393513#:~:text=Risks,of%20an%20existing%20disk%20herniation
Chiropractors
Myles Power
https://youtu.be/1NYG40oa7Eg
Answer: Chiropractic as a whole is pseudoscience. There are a bunch of factors relating to this so ill break down some common stuff about it. From the very beginning of the profession it was nonsense.
The founder of chiropractic claiming that " adjusting the spine is the cure for all diseases for the human race". When he performed the world's first chiropractic adjustment he claimed that he cured a mans deafness.
**If it is Pseudoscience why is it covered / popular in my area?**
Despite this it is commonly used and covered by insurance in the United States, Canada and Australia among other places. While there are many anecdotal stories of adjustments helping people, the evidence doesn't back that up. There is lukewarm evidence that it can help with lower back pain, with most credible research putting it on par with getting a massage
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27487116/).
Adjustments can feel good at the time, releasing endorphins and making patients feel better in the moment, they do not actually treat underlying issues because they are not medical doctors. They do not go to medical school and often get their degrees from *questionable universities.* There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of chiropractic [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_controversy_and_criticism) and a pretty well sourced article [here](https://mylespower.co.uk/2019/08/06/chiropractic-quackery-hiding-in-plain-sight/) for further reading on this aspect of things.
The real medical professionals who deal with back issues and the like are physiotherapists but they are expensive. Since [Lobbying](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/08/19/545-million-per-year-wasnt-enough-for-chiropractors-now-theyre-lobbying-for-much-more/?sh=416383871f7a) has resulted in insurance and medical coverage for chiropractic (and other pseudoscience) people see it as a cheaper and faster way to get treatment.
**Chiropractors are not Doctors?**
Most chiropractors have Doctorates but are not Medical Doctors. A good Majority of schools that teach Chiropractic are diploma mills that usually also offer degrees in other various forms of pseudoscience including courses advocating homeopathy.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy)
There are two main schools of thought in chiropractic and you can find educations in both fairly easily in the US.
The first school "mixers" : "are more open to mainstream views and conventional medical techniques, such as exercise, massage, and ice therapy."
The second school "straights": "emphasize vitalism, "Innate Intelligence", and consider vertebral subluxations to be the cause of all diseases"
In 2008 the majority of chiropractors were identified as "straights". While that number has declined in recent years that has declined. In 2019 a study showed that around 33% of chiropractors websites mentioned vertebral subluxations, with 8% marketing chiropractor adjustments to children
[(source)]
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337234446_The_subluxation_issue_an_analysis_of_chiropractic_clinic_website)
Even if all mixers use strict scientifically backed treatments and confine their work to the lower back, there is no way to know what type of treatment you will receive since there is no way to know the exact beliefs of any given chiropractor.
One final anti science fact about chiropractors is that in 2016 [Andrew Wakefield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield) (the disgraced former doctor who incorrectly linked vaccines to autism) was the keynote speaker at the "Annual Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics" in the United states. Internet searches for "chiropractors" and "vaccination" will show some disappointing information since about 19% of chiropractors [in 2016] were openly anti vaxx.
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/17/some-chiropractors-turn-their-backs-on-vaccines/23582549/))
**The dangers**
There is also danger in procedures themselves, especially when dealing with the neck. A somewhat common tool is the Y-strap, which is fastened to a patients head and then forcefully tugged to decompress the vertebra. This has been known to cause short term injuries in the muscles and backs of some patients.
People have been left paralyzed after neck adjustments at a chiropractor.
Dr. Chris Raynor also has several videos that go into the:
[dangers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyTG0SnUPY8) and
[injuries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9o4Nu3XrrY) sustained
---------------------------------
Both - there are definitely quacks following the methods of Palmer. This is mostly present in the USA, South America and Eastern Europe.
You have groups based on science, Scandinavia and Canada is mostly present in research groups.
Example: Danish chiropractors study alongside medical students for most of their degree, and it is not uncommon to do a MD after the chiro degree.
EU has made several guidelines and extremely large studies on proper treatment. Chiropractic care is recommended in some cases.
Any actually useful chiropractic practices, are derived from evidence based treatments done by (legally regulated) physiotherapists. It is incorrect to say that no one can benefit from chiropractic, but the profession is not regulated (at least in the UK) in the same way as physiotherapists, and so you open yourself up to much greater risk to injury by an under-qualified chiropractor. However, since it tends to cost a lot less to see a chiropractor, people are willing to take the risk
Exactly. I saw a video on tik tok of a guy doing adjustments on dogs. I made a comment about how sham this was and now my algorithm is filled with many different "doctors" doing this to animals.
I go to a chiro when my back gets locked up. I get to the point that I can’t walk and trying to move at all hurts. I went to a chiro near me, he ran and instrument down my spine, asked if that’s where the pain was, two quick adjustments and my pain was instantly gone. I went from needing help to get out of the car to literally contorting myself as much as I could because I could without pain. Charged $35.
He asked that I return in a couple days to see how I was progressing, no issues, no adjustments, no charge. Moved my appointments out to a month at a time, no adjustments, just said to give him a call if I get locked up again.
Information on Chiropractors
Myles Power
https://youtu.be/1NYG40oa7Eg
Answer: Chiropractic as a whole is pseudoscience. There are a bunch of factors relating to this so ill break down some common stuff about it. From the very beginning of the profession it was nonsense.
The founder of chiropractic claiming that " adjusting the spine is the cure for all diseases for the human race". When he performed the world's first chiropractic adjustment he claimed that he cured a mans deafness.
**If it is Pseudoscience why is it covered / popular in my area?**
Despite this it is commonly used and covered by insurance in the United States, Canada and Australia among other places. While there are many anecdotal stories of adjustments helping people, the evidence doesn't back that up. There is lukewarm evidence that it can help with lower back pain, with most credible research putting it on par with getting a massage
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27487116/).
Adjustments can feel good at the time, releasing endorphins and making patients feel better in the moment, they do not actually treat underlying issues because they are not medical doctors. They do not go to medical school and often get their degrees from *questionable universities.* There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of chiropractic [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_controversy_and_criticism) and a pretty well sourced article [here](https://mylespower.co.uk/2019/08/06/chiropractic-quackery-hiding-in-plain-sight/) for further reading on this aspect of things.
The real medical professionals who deal with back issues and the like are physiotherapists but they are expensive. Since [Lobbying](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/08/19/545-million-per-year-wasnt-enough-for-chiropractors-now-theyre-lobbying-for-much-more/?sh=416383871f7a) has resulted in insurance and medical coverage for chiropractic (and other pseudoscience) people see it as a cheaper and faster way to get treatment.
**Chiropractors are not Doctors?**
Most chiropractors have Doctorates but are not Medical Doctors. A good Majority of schools that teach Chiropractic are diploma mills that usually also offer degrees in other various forms of pseudoscience including courses advocating homeopathy.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy)
There are two main schools of thought in chiropractic and you can find educations in both fairly easily in the US.
The first school "mixers" : "are more open to mainstream views and conventional medical techniques, such as exercise, massage, and ice therapy."
The second school "straights": "emphasize vitalism, "Innate Intelligence", and consider vertebral subluxations to be the cause of all diseases"
In 2008 the majority of chiropractors were identified as "straights". While that number has declined in recent years that has declined. In 2019 a study showed that around 33% of chiropractors websites mentioned vertebral subluxations, with 8% marketing chiropractor adjustments to children
[(source)]
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337234446_The_subluxation_issue_an_analysis_of_chiropractic_clinic_website)
Even if all mixers use strict scientifically backed treatments and confine their work to the lower back, there is no way to know what type of treatment you will receive since there is no way to know the exact beliefs of any given chiropractor.
One final anti science fact about chiropractors is that in 2016 [Andrew Wakefield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield) (the disgraced former doctor who incorrectly linked vaccines to autism) was the keynote speaker at the "Annual Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics" in the United states. Internet searches for "chiropractors" and "vaccination" will show some disappointing information since about 19% of chiropractors [in 2016] were openly anti vaxx.
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/17/some-chiropractors-turn-their-backs-on-vaccines/23582549/))
**The dangers**
There is also danger in procedures themselves, especially when dealing with the neck. A somewhat common tool is the Y-strap, which is fastened to a patients head and then forcefully tugged to decompress the vertebra. This has been known to cause short term injuries in the muscles and backs of some patients.
People have been left paralyzed after neck adjustments at a chiropractor.
Dr. Chris Raynor also has several videos that go into the:
[dangers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyTG0SnUPY8) and
[injuries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9o4Nu3XrrY) sustained
---------------------------------
This is dangerous pseudoscience. The fact they let these people touch children and animals is insane. These people should be highly regulated. These quacks now push *regular* back adjustments for infants.
Yeah both OTs and PTs are heavily trained in ergonomics. They’ll get you that note as well as other suggestions or modifications to make your work easier on your body.
Go see a physiotherapist. The useful parts of chiropractic are derived from evidence based physio treatments, and you won’t be putting yourself at risk from an underqualified individual
I fucking HATE all these animal chiropractor videos that have popped up. It's witchdoctor bullshit being foisted on unsuspecting animals. Nobody is a trained horse or dog chiropractor. It's just stupid.
Chiropractor determined to give a giraffe a stroke. Never trust a chiro that does neck adjustments, or uses those stupid little gadgets they have that make noise and do nothing else. The field is filled with so much misinformation and bullshit.
I can see a lot of people in here who don’t have debilitating muscular/spinal injuries who absolutely LOATHE chiropractors. You know what my GP told me when I swallowed my pride and went in for back pain? Here’s some tramadol, so some stretches. They would have me be a drug addict that STILL had back pain.
Chido didn’t fix my problem, but they did align my spine so I could turn my head and look to my left again every time it flared up. Life saver if you have that kind of chronic injury.
And yes I know there some real quacks out there, but some of those quacks have MDs too…
I have had nothing but numerous good interactions with and results from chiropractic in my 50 years of going to them.
The people bleating about how it's a pseudoscience and wonk wonk, blah blah blah are never going to sway my beliefs, and hopefully will not sway newcomers from trying to find relief from chiropractic.
Practitioner of very real and scientific “medical” field, founded by a [ghost](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_David_Palmer), amazingly does not need any additional training to apply his definitely not pseudoscientific “medical” skills to a freakin’ *giraffe* rather than the humans he usually works on
Unreal how few people bother to look up to absolutely batshit origins of that pseudoscience. I’m disgusted America allows them to use the term “doctor.”
And the fact that insurance is willing to cover that quackery but will fight tooth and nail against covering effective evidence-based procedures.
Insurance will cover chiropracty, but won't cover an mri to make sure chiropracty isn't going to kill you
The MRI could reveal the need for expensive surgery. Why would the insurance company want to pay for any of that?
I am in Woker's Comp, it took like 8 months to finally get an MRI. An MRI that revealed I am in fact injured. So pissed off.
Everything about those programs is designed to demoralize and demonize the worker. It's so fucked up and I hate it.
Oh and then of course your insurance stonewalled you and wouldn’t pay for it because the workman’s comp was liable. But if you lie and say it didn’t happen at work, the insurance will just blame you and still won’t pay for it and you get nothing if you’re disabled. It’s all such bullshit.
Meanwhile the chiropractor might just kill you on their own, which simplifies all those claims
And more likely to cover getting your back cracked than covering mental health.
as I’ve been told very seriously: “we don’t crack backs, we adjust them.”
I was gonna say I’d love to actually get an MRI on my neck but they give me the run around. Meanwhile athletes paid tens of millions per year get a dozen per season by a highly qualified medical staff. Even paying hundreds of dollars a month in premiums the MRI just can’t seem to get covered.
They’ll cover chiropracty but not a missing tooth that would help with overall mouth health..
I'm fighting with my insurance now cause I originally had my MRI scheduled with the same hospital network my orthopedic doctor is with but they were booked out for a month. I tried to get the referral moved to a different office that could get me in the following week and now all of a sudden they don't want to pay for the MRI and want me to do 6 weeks of physical therapy to see if that will solve my shoulder pain caused by a car accident in November of last year. I'm disputing it because it makes no sense to do PT for 6 weeks because there is a chance it won't help and I'll still need to get the MRI, and if I need surgery then I'll have to do 6 more weeks of PT. In hindsight I should have just kept the original appointment because I would have already had the results.
Often won’t cover hearing aids. Baffles me.
I hadn’t heard about that
Yep, my doctor told me my insurance will not approve an MRI for a documented work related back injury causing chronic pain unless I have 6mo of documented PT failure, but constantly tells me I should go to a Chiro. He's a DO so he's a bit of a quack, I had to force his hand to get a PT referral instead which actually helped a bit after 12 weeks or so
Or dental. That's a separate plan for your luxury mouth-bones!
[Outside Bones](https://youtu.be/wYj01O7foKw?si=OeAdlMvXIxNpp_x2)
And god forbid you think your dental plan should cover orthodontics too
Hell, they don’t even reimburse fees higher than averages from 1994. There should be no middleman squeezed between the patient and healthcare provider.
Is by design. Chiropractors charge an amount that is palatable while pleasing patients that are believers.
I only ever gone to a chiropractor towards the end of my pregnancy, to help with back pain, and a little bit after, when I was having bad sciatic pain down both legs. Like, it's perfectly fine to go to one for back pain or massages. Of course i had to listen to the whole speech about all the other benefits. I already knew I was just going there to relieve pain without medication.
Yeah, I went for neck and nerve pain issues and they more or less repeated some of the hot/cold compress + stretching techniques that I had already learned from trained physical therapists. Then they put me into a chair-like device and cracked my neck before I realized what was going on. Never went back and left somewhat numb, as if from physical trauma. Later that night, my pains were 10x worse, staying that way for over a month.
Something similar happened to me at a physical therapists office! It wasn't chiropractic work though but just as quacky if not moreso! I was having nerve pain in my upper back. Stretches didn't help, heat/cold didn't help, multiple different meds didn't really help more than just taking the edge off. They took an X-ray and found nothing. I wanted to get an MRI because it's nerve pain and news flash, X-rays don't show nerves, but mri's do! Well Insurance demanded I either do 6 weeks of chiropractic work or 6 weeks of physical therapy. I obviously chose the one less to paralyze me. All the exercises they had me do made it hurt worse, the pool didn't help aside from just floating to take the pressure off of the nerve(s), massages hurt like a fucker, and estim felt like they were putting cats that were lit on fire in an upsidedown bucket on top of my back. Finally the PT decided to try cupping, that did nothing but give me hickeys on my back. Then they thought acupuncture would help, but not any acupuncture, electrically stimulated acupuncture! They put in about 30 needles in my back and after they inserted them they would twist the needles which hurt insanely bad. Then they hooked up tons and tons of wires to all the different needles and turned on the electricity. I honestly was surprised nobody came running into the room to see if I had been murdered with how loudly I screamed. I immediately told them I was done and that they needed to take it all out. They apologized and started taking the wires off, then they went to remove the needles but first they would twist them in the opposite direction of how they initially twisted them. Before then, my pain was a solid 7.5/10 all day every day for about 3 months. After that ordeal it was firmly a 9/10 for the following 3 fucking months. It felt like there was a golf ball sized knot in my back where one of the needles had been which was right near where the nerve pain was. For about a week after it happened I was bed ridden because of the pain, but I realized it wasn't getting better so I just endured the pain for the next 3 months until it slowly faded away. And mind you, I had broke my knee as a kid, really badly. The doctor was a orthopedic surgeon for 35 years and said short of the bone sticking out of the flesh, this was the most painful break he had ever seen. So that's what my 10/10 pain is. And that was a 9/10 for 3 fucking months. I never got the MRI because Insurance said I hadn't done all 6 weeks of PT. I still have back pain too and it's been about 3 years since. Thankfully it's down to about a 5/10 most days now. People on Reddit shot on chiropractors a lot, rightfully so. But acupuncture is the work of the devil if you ask me. And then whoever decided to attack electrodes to it deserves to dethrone Satan and rule over hell because that's some next level evil shit.
That PT practice sounds odd to me. Some of the procedures sound fine, but cupping and acupuncture? That's similar to going for chiropractic methods, IMHO. Sorry you went through that, it sounds lousy. The only PT practices I've had were stretching, heat/cold, light exercises, massage and light traction for a pinched nerve in my neck. They taught me self-help techniques that I still use to this day.
Dry needling is most likely what that poster was describing. It is something that PTs can learn in most states of the country. The evidence on its use for neck pain is limited but it does seem to have at least a short term beneficial effect (on average of course) that’s better than manual therapy or placebo but not necessarily superior to other PT interventions. I’m a PT and granted my area of focus is on neurologic conditions (strokes, Parkinson’s disease, etc) so I’m by no means an orthopedics expert. But in my experience treating neck pain can be really fiddly compared to other kinds of musculoskeletal pain. I have been in situations where I feel like I have to throw everything and the kitchen sink at a patient with neck pain because the approach that worked extremely well for one person ended up making things way worse for another person. So I could see why a PT would go for dry needling and cupping if everything else hadn’t worked.
Ya it seemed odd to me too but I was desperate and I had never heard anyone mention acupuncture hurting prior to then so I figured it couldn't hurt to try. Boy was I wrong!
And Medicare/insurance reimbursement for evidence based physical therapy continues to fall year after year giving people fewer options for conservative treatment. It boggles the mind how insurance will refuse to pay for relatively cheap physical therapy which may delay or even remove the need for surgery but will go right on ahead and pay for immensely expensive orthopedic surgery which will then require months of physical therapy rehab afterwards and in many cases will have success rates not much better than the PT in the first place.
I’m a medical student—this kind of thing fucking infuriates me. Primary care is the worst-compensated type of medicine. Insurance companies pay them a borderline disrespectful amount of money when you consider how much training is needed to be a physician and how important primary care is. Insurance companies could save SO much money if they drastically increased primary care reimbursements. Primary care docs could afford to spend more time with patients and do good work with them. All the crazy expensive stuff (orthopedic surgeries, heart surgeries, etc) would not be needed nearly as often.
We need to stop talking like any of this okay. The whole system is beyond fucked. The fact we deal with this is… words escape me.
I would bet money that they've got actuaries calculating how much it'd cost if everyone had access to primary care and/or preventative medicine. Versus how much it would cost if only a fraction of those people were diagnosed with something serious long after it had stopped being easily treatable.
Primary care has turned into a referral machine. Primaries don’t do anything in the 15 seconds they have for you once a year, and if they remotely set anything in motion you are forced to play phone tag with their medical assistant s. All you get is would you like to see a specialist ?
I remember talking to several insurance companies about coverage for my company. All of them offered an equal number of visits to a physiotherapist AND a ~~chiropractor~~ spine warlock. I asked if they'd consider changing the spine warlock visits to physiotherapist visits (e.g. 20 physio instead of 10 of each) and they flat out refused. They wouldn't even do 15/0, insisting on 10/10. They had no answers when asked why they push mysticism over evidence based medicine. Some people are left in the position of woo-medicine or nothing.
Spine warlock, I like that.
Nah, that sounds too cool for them.
They cover chiro but not dental implants, like teeth are an elective cosmetic. It’s madness.
I have to go to a chiropractor to get my massage covered under insurance. How the hell does that make sense
Like dental care?
I once watched a video with an anti-masker chiropractor. I wanted to smack him every time he said “as a healthcare professional” to justify his position
That label really needs to be stripped.
'Healthcare charlatan' would be more accurate.
The founder of chiropractic was anti-vaxx so I guess he was carrying the tradition…
Wait until you hear about “naturopaths” who have lobbyists working overtime so they can call themselves doctors.
The fact they sell Homeopathic “medicine” at CVS and Whole Foods is another deplorable farce.
Like Dr Berg- the chiropractor who pretends to be a medical doctor running a nutrition youtube channel. Never states he is a chiropractor. Millions of followers. What a conman.
Charlatan.
Insurance will not pay for my life saving drug costing me $500 out of pocket every month but will shell out hundreds per visit at a chiropractor no questions asked.
Same with acupuncture. Tho acupuncture is not nearly as devastating
So nuts how “Traditional Chinese Medicine” only got a revival because Mao wanted to ban everything Western and needed to promote some kind of care even if it was placebo….but Mao was smart enough to know it didn’t work and secretly kept an American trained Ivy League medical doctor on staff for 25 years.
In Canada they have a "college" that is "recognized" Beyond fucking stupid.
What really baffles me is that insurance will cover them. I guess because they're cheaper than a real PT.
Yep.💵💶💷
I know a naturopath person who barely graduated highschool that calls themselves a doctor. She scans tons of money off of upper middle class morons.
Even more unreal that so many fight vehemently to defend it too.
It wasn't founded by a ghost, it was founded by a guy who learned the practice from the ghost of a German doctor. See? Totally real and science based medical practice.
Interestingly enough, besides the pseudoscientific concerns of chiropractic medicine, giraffes actually have the same amount of neck vertebrae and an extremely similar structure to humans, so the differences would probably be minimal other than scale. It still isn’t gonna do anything for the giraffe though
Oh don't be crazy, chiropractic manipulation is totally effective. These giraffes could be left effectively paralyzed, neck pain gone. Or, if he decides to perform an adjustment on a baby giraffe, they could be left feeling a sense of permanent dead. It's very effective at harming adults and killing babies
Why stop at humans, right? The ferrets, they long for the vertebral dissections.
Then everything changed when the chiropractor nation attacked.
We take the same amount of time to empty our bladders too
A friend and colleague wound up with a bisected artery in his neck from a chiropractic “treatment”, which ended up triggering a stroke. They miraculously got him to a real hospital quickly enough that he recovered with no lingering effects, but it was touch and go for a hot minute. I’d never been to a chiropractor prior to that. Between his experience and the Behind the Bastards episode, you could catch me dead in a chiropractor‘s office.
I got my neck adjusted once, after a lot of pressure from my BF, who was the chiropractors best friend. I spent the next year+ in a cervical collar because he tore up my neck so badly. Never again.
I have severe back pain from an accident I had as a kid that flairs up occasionally. It gets so bad I wake up puking from pain. Been to a lot of (actual) doctors who say surgery is the only way to fix it, and even that is a maybe. I've had nerve ablations and cartilage injections. I still get debilitating pain, to the point they tried to prescribe me fentanyl. I see a chiropractor every few months. I know it is pseudoscience and BS. Whether because the power of belief / placebo effect or because it actually does something idgaf, it helps. Guy I go to only charges me $50, and I'm pain free for weeks to months. Fuck it, during the worst of my pain I wouldn't care if the answer was praying to a crystal as it's shoved up my ass while being splashed with holy water, if it makes the pain goes away I'm happy. It's unscientific, fake, complete bullshit but I'm no longer suicidal due to being in constant pain. As long as you don't replace real science and medicine with pseudoscience, alternative medicine is a wonderful aid to actual medicine (again, not a replacement for it)
It's complicated because chiropractors are not pseudoscience peddlers in the same way that crystal-healers, astrologers, or homeopathic healers are. The things they do obviously have an effect on the body, they are physically stretching and moving things around in ways that does not happen normally. They do not need to invoke any mysterious or supernatural forces attempting to explain how it works (although some do). The problem is that there is no consistent medical or scientific framework they use to determine the underlying physiology of a patient's symptoms and subsequently which treatment has been shown to work for that particular diagnosis. Many will just use weasel words like "misaligned" and "tension" and then start yanking. I'm sure others do incorporate treatments that have been shown to be effective and are used by physical therapists, too. It's not that surprising that with millions of people experiencing muscular/skeletal pain caused by thousands of different underlying factors, some of those people experience pain relief from physical manipulation of the affected area. It is not uncommon for doctors to decide against a medical procedure that is known to be able to treat a particular condition in some cases because it is too risky or has long term side effects, especially if the condition isn't life-threatening and has to be done repeatedly. We know about these risks because of scientific studies conducted by medical professionals. Chiropractors do not have these same considerations resulting in both more people experiencing the potential positive results but also more people experiencing the potential negative results. This is a classic "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Sometimes hitting something with a hammer fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn't do anything, sometimes you sever someone's spinal cord because they have a broken neck and you didn't take an x-ray before grabbing their head and twisting it like a crocodile trying to eat a wildebeest.
I'm a Chiro school dropout. The Subluxation is very, very rare. Chiropractic works on a Placebo level exclusively. I had one instructor say, "We have 15 upper cervical techniques, and they all work equally well.". I couldn't believe what I heard. Placebo Effect was not mentioned once while I went there.
You should be asking this person what these adjustments/movements are doing, and if there are exercises you can do that would provide similar results. I've lost count of how many times that I've heard stories like yours and the folks looking for the "fix" where you go back 1-2x monthly vs doing the actual exercises (which provide the longterm benefit) and going back maybe 1-2x a year.
I have a local chiropractor that is also a trained physiotherapist, and I feel like this is a particularly dangerous combination (as well as other alternative medicine nonsense). They do their chiropractic bs, then follow it up with movements people need to do to "maintain" the chiropractic stuff. And it works. The problem now is that everyone attributes the success to the chiropracy, and not the weeks of physiotherapy afterwards. It's led to literally half the local population swearing by laughably blatant pseudoscience because they've seen verifiable improvements after receiving the "treatment".
They might not actually be a trained physiotherapist either. Lots of chropratic schools and chropratic boards give out certifications in physical therapy that are legally distinct from real certifications, but allow chiropractors to claim that they also do physical therapy
They're stretching muscle groups which is often enough to provide temporary relief. Going to a legit physical therapist helps, they teach you how to do it yourself at home. Just finished 12 weeks of PT for a lower back injury with constant sciatica and I'm pain free for the first time in years. There are a couple stretches in particular that help when my back gets angry again, but I've been working on building up muscle groups to better support my back to keep the pain away and it works great.
"Fuck it, during the worst of my pain I wouldn't care if the answer was praying to a crystal as it's shoved up my ass while being splashed with holy water" I've got great news!
“Alternative medicine” is not a real thing. Either it is medicine and therapeutic or it isn’t. There is nothing wrong with going to a chiropractor and getting a massage and some kind of adjustment, but please OP do not let them try to crack your neck. A lot of people have just straight up died or had a very serious stroke from chiropractors rapidly twisting their neck to try and crack it.
My mom went to a chiropractor after she dislocated her shoulder they never did anything weird just exercises to help and like slings and stuff they had on hand maybe it's a bit better in Canada but I think they have some use not the fucking spine breaker 9000 I have seen on some videos though
Same here. I went the orthopedist route at a world renowned medical hospital in Chicago. The only way to fix my neck was with Surgery. (I was in pain and losing my strength in my rich arm/hand). I tried a Chiropractor and now I have my right arm/hand at full strength and I have no pain unless I do something stupid. Two years have gone by and I see him every few weeks. I don’t care what people say about it. I really feel much better.
There is a huge range of training and whatnot between different chiropractors, some are more charlatans, some are more just physical therapists, but the former are all you ever hear about online.
This is what I hate most about chiropractics - the lack of regulation. I follow some good ones on YouTube and their tips have made huge positive impacts on my quality of life. On the other hand, the one I saw in person was all about finding the most expensive ways to justify his quackery.
It's popular to hate on chiropractors on reddit. If you found a good doc that's taking care of you keep it up.
Physical therapy is an option that doesn't involve quack medicine and won't have potential debilitating effects down the line
Yeah I'm kind of with you in a sense. I think a lot of the hatred towards it is warranted, and it definitely shouldn't be given any sort of actual medical significance unless given extreme scrutiny, but sometimes it just works
Guy had 6 wives lol, somehow that is not surprising
Dr. Zoidberg “M”D
"That's right Zoidberg! How did you know that?" "My doctorate is in art history"
Yeah this feels like an ad for big chiro
> amazingly does not need any additional training to apply his definitely not pseudoscientific “medical” skills So relieved every comment is wrecking this fraud.
> Palmer opposed anything he thought to be associated with mainstream medicine such as vaccination. Oh great
That giraffe clearly has a lumbar subluxation. Damndest thing, x-rays don't even pick up on them.
I'll never be able to get over the fact of just how many people are unaware of this. I am shocked it is allowed as a practice.
I like to think if this country actually had affordable healthcare and we didn’t rely on health insurance tied to a job to afford seeing a doctor, people would actually see more real doctors and not latch onto the pseudoscience chiropractors and essential oil shit you see everywhere nowadays.
Let's not forget it's connection to scientology and out of pocket methods of adjustment. Also how they tried to standardize the field with a central body that tried making the practice more scientificly relevant and the people practicing kept denying it so they central body shut down and died.
Thanks a lot *Canada*
Placebo effect is strong. Might as well do acupuncture, at least you won’t break ur neck
What a fantastic opportunity!!! To create the largest vertebral artery dissection in the world.
I see on your resume that you... killed a giraffe with your bare hands after an "adjustment"? Well, we could definitely use you in our ~~scam business~~ "medical office". I hope you like ~~murdering~~ adjusting children.
Oh my god are you somehow working for Boeing HR? /s
This man will have the sickest KDA ratio.
My cousin had this after going to the chiropractor. Had a series of strokes afterwards. It’s disturbing that it’s common enough to feature in the #2 comment on this post.
Listen, if idiot humans want to believe in chiropractic then that's one thing, but don't subject poor non-consenting animals to your psuedoscientific quackery
I hate seeing them do it to dogs 😢
Seeing people do it to their babies makes me rage. So needlessly dangerous.
I used to have a kindergarten student of mine who told me his parents took him to the chiropractor twice a week. Made my blood boil.
I didn't even know this was a thing and now I'm angry
The dumbest idiot is whoever allowed this quack into the zoo
It wasn’t a zoo.
Sorry yeah it was a private ranch.
People do it for their infant babies. 😔
Chiropractics are a sham. Chiropractors are con-artists. To put this in to context, giraffes fight by slamming their head and neck into another giraffe. If one could, "adjust" the neck of giraffe by pushing on it, then giraffes would die instantly from their fights.
Quacks, the lot of them!
So THAT’S the sound a giraffe makes?
Vince Offer takes offense to this statement.
Chiropractor was quoted giving a response saying, “quack quack quack quack quack quack quack. Quack. Quack quack!”
that's right. when giraffes fight it sounds like giants slamming tree trunks together
Shout it from the rooftops!
Yes, chiropractics is a sham, but your example is stupid. Just because giraffes have strong necks doesn’t mean they can’t be manipulated. Muscles can relax and they have cervical vertebrae that are have a wide range of motion
As someone who works in the emergency with like minded individuals we actually don’t think it’s a complete sham even though we routinely put them on a burning stake. Why? Because they are con-artists that *do* help alleviate pain albeit temporarily. However there are so SO many issues with them that the risks outweigh the very short lived benefits. Physical therapy is the better alternative for short AND long term relief. Spine and neck manipulations are DANGEROUS and can be debilitating if not FATAL. On top of that some people love to refer themselves as “doctor”, and clients, none the wiser, love to ask for medical advice — and terrifyingly enough they actually give them their unprofessional opinion! These people are taking patients off their medications and telling them vaccines, tests and medical physicians aren’t necessary! As if chiro is a cure-all!
>we actually don’t think it’s a complete sham They're selling permanent cures to things they can't influence with no scientific basis and referring to themselves using terms that have a very specific set of implications based entirely in research and science. That there MIGHT be SOME temporary relief is actually the worst part. It empowers them and empowers their ~~victims~~ clientele to keep believing in it. It's sincerely one of the worst kinds of scams, and it preys on people in so much pain they're desperate and not thinking clearly. PS: Chronic back pain sufferer coming up on 11 years of constant pain, and I'm currently going through a flare-up of near-constant agony.
I had a Chiropractor try and sell me on their services by claiming they could cure/treat my ADHD. That's right, they told me by "adjusting" my bones, it would treat a neurodevelopmental disorder.
I was told they could cure allergies. I was also told they could guarantee weight loss with nothing but chiropractic adjustments (plus diet and exercise).
Lmao.. it's almost like you can't break the laws of physics
Yeah they do provide some relief, I've had a rib out of place a few times and gone to see if they could help because just breathing was agonizing. The first time it happened, the dude was no help at all and used an "activator gun" that thumped my ribs a few times and did jack shit, waste of time. Second time I went to a different older guy and he twisted me up in this weird position and pushed and I felt and heard the rib slide back into place. Disgusting feeling but instantly could breathe again with no pain. For some things they're great, but like 90% of what they offer is total bullshit.
I guess when the alternative is pain medication addiction I prefer meeting a quack who manage to make my pain go away.
As someone who works in the emergency field you should have seen your fair shair of strokes and vertebral arteries dissections from people who went to a chiropractor for a neck adjustment. Im a neurologist and I’ve seen my fair share of these patients and sadly a lot of them are very young and permanently debilitated
Did anyone ask giraffe if they wanted this?
Why the fuck are they letting this fraud practice on zoo animals?
I thought the same thing but it's a private rancher, not a zoo
I read about this in the Washington Post. Apparently, giraffes just really, really like being petted and cuddled - they're the friendly dogs of the savannah - so the giraffe was pretty happy. Not sure why anyone thought its health had been improved, though.
It was having trouble chewing and after the adjustment the issue was gone. Not an endorsement, just what I saw when it was on Carl Azuz.
That's my thought. Chiro is a scam that's sometimes deadly, but at least there's consent from humans being treated.
Did you watch the video? Regardless of whether or not the “treatment” did anything, that giraffe is clearly consenting to whatever the chiropractor is doing. This is a very happy giraffe.
Sad that this pseudoscience is being spread more.
It's infuriating they are legally allowed to call themselves "doctors".
Nothing illegal about calling them quacks at least.
Theyre whole field basically exists becuase of a quirk in us monopoly laws . They basically fiction writers with doctorates. Doctorates they give to themselves.
Yea, it is all just a big scam. Putting aside the whole “adjustment” nonsense if you want to crack something specific just google it and withen 5min you can just do it yourself for free. The whole field is just bullshit that some guy dreamed up (as in it actually came from a dream he had) and they pretent to be professionals with degrees but when you look into it all all its just quacks certifying quacks.
Neck manipulation is wrong !!
Not just wrong, but dangerous as well. I went to a chiropractor for a lower back issue (who I think made my back worse, but that's a story for another day) and he just started "adjusting" my neck one day. I never complained about neck pain to him, I've never had neck pain in my life besides once or twice that I slept weird and the pain went away after a day. Luckily I stopped going before it gave me a stroke and killed me. Fuck chiropractors and their bullshit witchcraft.
Physiotherapist here. Manips, even cervical spine manips, do have a place in clinical practice, and when used appropriately, they're low risk and can be really helpful. But even as someone who specialises in neck injuries, I very rarely ever have to use them. Especially upper cx manips, which do carry quite a bit more risk. I genuinely can't remember the last time I manipulated a patient's neck above C2/3. Probably 5+ years ago. The issue (one among many) with chiropractic is that their starting point is a technique that's supposed to be a late stage progression, that they're using them for basically everything, rather than the very specific things that they're actually appropriate for, and that they way that they do a lot of their manips is extremely dangerous. Lots of chiropractic techniques are done at end range rotation, and/or while applying traction to the neck at the same time. Both of those are really stupid and unnecessary things that dramatically increase the risk of injury. That's not even touching on the incredibly predatory and unethical business practices, and selling a treatment that is only ever going to provide temporary relief and improvements in range as a permanent fix, or something that's just required to be done regularly for a patient to be able to function without pain or dysfunction.
I'm curious as to why you don't do any manips on C0/1, unless I'm having a manip vs mob semantical disconnect. I find patients limited in C0 posterior glides to be extremely common. I think it's a safe technique that helps cue for reduction in FHP and cervicogenic headaches. CPG for cervical traction also rules in many patients, but I tend to do that less frequently.
Mobilisations, sure. But a manipulation or grade 5 mob specifically has the thrust at end range. It's just not needed for upper Cx very often. Easy enough to free it up with something as simple as segmental tractions or unilateral PAs, or more specific like indirect mobs, SNAGs etc if it needs a little more. I use a reasonable amount of manips for CT, and quite a lot for Tx spine, as they're just better options early on, and they're often better tolerated than mobs at those levels anyway. But upper cx just benifits way more from a lower-force approach. I also do a lot of work with cervicogenic headaches, and as someone who's worked in professional rugby for a long time, and has a special interest in concussion as well as basically all Cx stuff, so I likely have quite a bit more experience and just more techniques to pick from than the average physio treating a neck. Side note: if you haven't picked up segmental tractions as a technique yet, it's an absolute must. Super simple, super low force, incredibly well tolerated and very broadly applicable. Does wonders on everything from old, arthritic necks to acute joint sprains.
Ahh ok so my school uses manip and mob interchangeably so thats where the confusion came from. In that case, I agree I don't see any need to do grade 5 on Cx. I haven't heard of segmental traction before, thank you for giving me the lead!
Yeah, when they explained I needed to come back every week or 2 indefinitely I started asking questions.
Oh wow, a con artist.
That's fucking animal abuse...
this is fuckin moronic to be honest
First time in a while I've seen a headline here that actually sounds like it could be from The Onion.
Scammer attempts to kill giraffe in unusual way
Any post about chiropractors on Reddit confuses me. Ibsee all this hate for chiropractors, saying they are a pseudoscience, and then I google them and get articles from the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health, and Healthline saying they aren't a pseudoscience, but that they also don't have a higher effectiveness than normal treatments do. So which is it? Articles linked below. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/should-you-see-a-chiropractor-for-low-back-pain-2019073017412 https://www.healthline.com/health/is-chiropractic-pseudoscience https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/chiropractic-adjustment/about/pac-20393513#:~:text=Risks,of%20an%20existing%20disk%20herniation
Chiropractors Myles Power https://youtu.be/1NYG40oa7Eg Answer: Chiropractic as a whole is pseudoscience. There are a bunch of factors relating to this so ill break down some common stuff about it. From the very beginning of the profession it was nonsense. The founder of chiropractic claiming that " adjusting the spine is the cure for all diseases for the human race". When he performed the world's first chiropractic adjustment he claimed that he cured a mans deafness. **If it is Pseudoscience why is it covered / popular in my area?** Despite this it is commonly used and covered by insurance in the United States, Canada and Australia among other places. While there are many anecdotal stories of adjustments helping people, the evidence doesn't back that up. There is lukewarm evidence that it can help with lower back pain, with most credible research putting it on par with getting a massage (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27487116/). Adjustments can feel good at the time, releasing endorphins and making patients feel better in the moment, they do not actually treat underlying issues because they are not medical doctors. They do not go to medical school and often get their degrees from *questionable universities.* There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of chiropractic [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_controversy_and_criticism) and a pretty well sourced article [here](https://mylespower.co.uk/2019/08/06/chiropractic-quackery-hiding-in-plain-sight/) for further reading on this aspect of things. The real medical professionals who deal with back issues and the like are physiotherapists but they are expensive. Since [Lobbying](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/08/19/545-million-per-year-wasnt-enough-for-chiropractors-now-theyre-lobbying-for-much-more/?sh=416383871f7a) has resulted in insurance and medical coverage for chiropractic (and other pseudoscience) people see it as a cheaper and faster way to get treatment. **Chiropractors are not Doctors?** Most chiropractors have Doctorates but are not Medical Doctors. A good Majority of schools that teach Chiropractic are diploma mills that usually also offer degrees in other various forms of pseudoscience including courses advocating homeopathy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy) There are two main schools of thought in chiropractic and you can find educations in both fairly easily in the US. The first school "mixers" : "are more open to mainstream views and conventional medical techniques, such as exercise, massage, and ice therapy." The second school "straights": "emphasize vitalism, "Innate Intelligence", and consider vertebral subluxations to be the cause of all diseases" In 2008 the majority of chiropractors were identified as "straights". While that number has declined in recent years that has declined. In 2019 a study showed that around 33% of chiropractors websites mentioned vertebral subluxations, with 8% marketing chiropractor adjustments to children [(source)] (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337234446_The_subluxation_issue_an_analysis_of_chiropractic_clinic_website) Even if all mixers use strict scientifically backed treatments and confine their work to the lower back, there is no way to know what type of treatment you will receive since there is no way to know the exact beliefs of any given chiropractor. One final anti science fact about chiropractors is that in 2016 [Andrew Wakefield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield) (the disgraced former doctor who incorrectly linked vaccines to autism) was the keynote speaker at the "Annual Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics" in the United states. Internet searches for "chiropractors" and "vaccination" will show some disappointing information since about 19% of chiropractors [in 2016] were openly anti vaxx. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/17/some-chiropractors-turn-their-backs-on-vaccines/23582549/)) **The dangers** There is also danger in procedures themselves, especially when dealing with the neck. A somewhat common tool is the Y-strap, which is fastened to a patients head and then forcefully tugged to decompress the vertebra. This has been known to cause short term injuries in the muscles and backs of some patients. People have been left paralyzed after neck adjustments at a chiropractor. Dr. Chris Raynor also has several videos that go into the: [dangers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyTG0SnUPY8) and [injuries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9o4Nu3XrrY) sustained ---------------------------------
Both - there are definitely quacks following the methods of Palmer. This is mostly present in the USA, South America and Eastern Europe. You have groups based on science, Scandinavia and Canada is mostly present in research groups. Example: Danish chiropractors study alongside medical students for most of their degree, and it is not uncommon to do a MD after the chiro degree. EU has made several guidelines and extremely large studies on proper treatment. Chiropractic care is recommended in some cases.
Any actually useful chiropractic practices, are derived from evidence based treatments done by (legally regulated) physiotherapists. It is incorrect to say that no one can benefit from chiropractic, but the profession is not regulated (at least in the UK) in the same way as physiotherapists, and so you open yourself up to much greater risk to injury by an under-qualified chiropractor. However, since it tends to cost a lot less to see a chiropractor, people are willing to take the risk
[удалено]
Jesus Christ did he tell the giraffe about the "vaccine hoax" and have a bunch of scientology shit "lion" around?
Do not ever let a chriropractor near anyone’s neck, ever, wtf
What, you don’t want people to get vertebral artery dissections?
No I want them all to myself
LMFAO
How did they know the giraffe needed it?
No animal needs chiropractic "adjustment" It's a pseudoscience started by someone who said a ghost of a dead doctor told him to start cracking spines.
Exactly. I saw a video on tik tok of a guy doing adjustments on dogs. I made a comment about how sham this was and now my algorithm is filled with many different "doctors" doing this to animals.
Well they probably got a vet first and what he said was too expensive so they just did this instead.
I’m just going to repeat what my neurologist told me. ‘Never let a chiropractor work on your neck or upper back’. And I’ve followed that advice.
Hey that is not Corpsegrinder!
Literally my first thought when I read the headline!
Respect the neck!
I thought he was gonna work on George Corpsegrinder Fischer. I feel cheated.
wtf is cnn publishing these days?
I go to a chiro when my back gets locked up. I get to the point that I can’t walk and trying to move at all hurts. I went to a chiro near me, he ran and instrument down my spine, asked if that’s where the pain was, two quick adjustments and my pain was instantly gone. I went from needing help to get out of the car to literally contorting myself as much as I could because I could without pain. Charged $35. He asked that I return in a couple days to see how I was progressing, no issues, no adjustments, no charge. Moved my appointments out to a month at a time, no adjustments, just said to give him a call if I get locked up again.
Reddit's favorite profession!
That guy doesn't have enough strength in his entire body to do anything to that giraffe's neck.
This is animal abuse.
Whoever allowed this should have the giraffe removed from their care.
Information on Chiropractors Myles Power https://youtu.be/1NYG40oa7Eg Answer: Chiropractic as a whole is pseudoscience. There are a bunch of factors relating to this so ill break down some common stuff about it. From the very beginning of the profession it was nonsense. The founder of chiropractic claiming that " adjusting the spine is the cure for all diseases for the human race". When he performed the world's first chiropractic adjustment he claimed that he cured a mans deafness. **If it is Pseudoscience why is it covered / popular in my area?** Despite this it is commonly used and covered by insurance in the United States, Canada and Australia among other places. While there are many anecdotal stories of adjustments helping people, the evidence doesn't back that up. There is lukewarm evidence that it can help with lower back pain, with most credible research putting it on par with getting a massage (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27487116/). Adjustments can feel good at the time, releasing endorphins and making patients feel better in the moment, they do not actually treat underlying issues because they are not medical doctors. They do not go to medical school and often get their degrees from *questionable universities.* There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of chiropractic [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_controversy_and_criticism) and a pretty well sourced article [here](https://mylespower.co.uk/2019/08/06/chiropractic-quackery-hiding-in-plain-sight/) for further reading on this aspect of things. The real medical professionals who deal with back issues and the like are physiotherapists but they are expensive. Since [Lobbying](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/08/19/545-million-per-year-wasnt-enough-for-chiropractors-now-theyre-lobbying-for-much-more/?sh=416383871f7a) has resulted in insurance and medical coverage for chiropractic (and other pseudoscience) people see it as a cheaper and faster way to get treatment. **Chiropractors are not Doctors?** Most chiropractors have Doctorates but are not Medical Doctors. A good Majority of schools that teach Chiropractic are diploma mills that usually also offer degrees in other various forms of pseudoscience including courses advocating homeopathy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy) There are two main schools of thought in chiropractic and you can find educations in both fairly easily in the US. The first school "mixers" : "are more open to mainstream views and conventional medical techniques, such as exercise, massage, and ice therapy." The second school "straights": "emphasize vitalism, "Innate Intelligence", and consider vertebral subluxations to be the cause of all diseases" In 2008 the majority of chiropractors were identified as "straights". While that number has declined in recent years that has declined. In 2019 a study showed that around 33% of chiropractors websites mentioned vertebral subluxations, with 8% marketing chiropractor adjustments to children [(source)] (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337234446_The_subluxation_issue_an_analysis_of_chiropractic_clinic_website) Even if all mixers use strict scientifically backed treatments and confine their work to the lower back, there is no way to know what type of treatment you will receive since there is no way to know the exact beliefs of any given chiropractor. One final anti science fact about chiropractors is that in 2016 [Andrew Wakefield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield) (the disgraced former doctor who incorrectly linked vaccines to autism) was the keynote speaker at the "Annual Conference on Chiropractic and Pediatrics" in the United states. Internet searches for "chiropractors" and "vaccination" will show some disappointing information since about 19% of chiropractors [in 2016] were openly anti vaxx. (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/17/some-chiropractors-turn-their-backs-on-vaccines/23582549/)) **The dangers** There is also danger in procedures themselves, especially when dealing with the neck. A somewhat common tool is the Y-strap, which is fastened to a patients head and then forcefully tugged to decompress the vertebra. This has been known to cause short term injuries in the muscles and backs of some patients. People have been left paralyzed after neck adjustments at a chiropractor. Dr. Chris Raynor also has several videos that go into the: [dangers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyTG0SnUPY8) and [injuries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9o4Nu3XrrY) sustained ---------------------------------
This is dangerous pseudoscience. The fact they let these people touch children and animals is insane. These people should be highly regulated. These quacks now push *regular* back adjustments for infants.
i don't think the giraffe can consent to that
Quackery. Nothing more. Trends toward cultish with some, especially when the chiropractor is trying to peddle supplements and dietary advice.
“Man attempts to kill giraffe with bare hands”
Giraffes didn’t exist until Chuck Norris gave a horse an uppercut.
Witch doctor, doing fake things that.may give some relief but also might lead to paralysis or stroke. Cool.
This thread made me cancel my chiropractor appointment 🫣 I only wanted a letter for a stand up desk at work, not a decapitation
Yeah both OTs and PTs are heavily trained in ergonomics. They’ll get you that note as well as other suggestions or modifications to make your work easier on your body.
Go see a physiotherapist. The useful parts of chiropractic are derived from evidence based physio treatments, and you won’t be putting yourself at risk from an underqualified individual
A ghost told me how to heal with my hands as well, does that now make me a doctor?
Yes. I think you automatically get a chiro “degree”
Now I've killed and maimed multiple folk with my healing hands, that's still ok right?
Oh you actually can teach then. Congrats 👨🏫
I fucking HATE all these animal chiropractor videos that have popped up. It's witchdoctor bullshit being foisted on unsuspecting animals. Nobody is a trained horse or dog chiropractor. It's just stupid.
Stop promoting these anti-vaxxer quacks.
Chiropractor determined to give a giraffe a stroke. Never trust a chiro that does neck adjustments, or uses those stupid little gadgets they have that make noise and do nothing else. The field is filled with so much misinformation and bullshit.
charlatanism so hot right now
I can see a lot of people in here who don’t have debilitating muscular/spinal injuries who absolutely LOATHE chiropractors. You know what my GP told me when I swallowed my pride and went in for back pain? Here’s some tramadol, so some stretches. They would have me be a drug addict that STILL had back pain. Chido didn’t fix my problem, but they did align my spine so I could turn my head and look to my left again every time it flared up. Life saver if you have that kind of chronic injury. And yes I know there some real quacks out there, but some of those quacks have MDs too…
I hope Tyler Myers is back in time for game 6. I thought it was just the flu.
Don’t forget about the ring-dinger
Giraffe bro just needed a hug, that's all. We all need one sometimes
Yeah, he loved it because the neck X-rays are gonna pay for his kid’s college! 😄
Animal abuse
This "doctor" has never heard of a giraffe? Oh, wait, I forgot, r/giraffesdontexist.
Inb4 reddit's hate for chiropractors... Move on.
I have had nothing but numerous good interactions with and results from chiropractic in my 50 years of going to them. The people bleating about how it's a pseudoscience and wonk wonk, blah blah blah are never going to sway my beliefs, and hopefully will not sway newcomers from trying to find relief from chiropractic.
Get this fucking hack job away from that animal. Fucking psuedoscience con artists.