Is chiropractic medicine based on real science? At work I

>>8565786
>Is chiropractic medicine based on real science?

Depends, most people see Chiropractic methods as being a glorified massage (and AFAIK there's some evidence that it's more effective for lower back issues than just massage). However actual chiropractors see their methods as being panacea, based on some nonsense about doing spinal adjustments to open blocked channels, which is clearly bullshit. The only reason they don't openly advertise chiropractic medicine as being a cure all is that they're not allowed to.

>>8565799
That makes sense. People do often comment about it feeling good, but they also thing it's some sort of medicine. In the videos chiropractors also seem to be able to fix an unrealistically wide range of problems. Most of ones I've seen improved over time and not right away, so the cause of the improvement became less clear even though the chiropractors insisted it was because of the "adjustment" that they made.
I remembered this video https://youtu.be/wtIV33HoT8g and vast majority of the video is a chiropractor adjusting a patient's back. He claims the muscle loosens up and shows a before and after comparison at 2:26 (which isn't even at the same angle)so you can't even make a useful comparison. Funny thing is the chiropractor is claiming the muscle is loosening up as it happens, with the person behind the camera agreeing. But I don't see anything.
I'm looking at Wikipedia and I see that it does say there's evidence for lower back pain relief but upon checking the sources for it, at least one of them says "CONCLUSION:
Collectively these data fail to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition." So I dunno why that study is there.

Chiropractic treatments can be helpful for relief of general muscle issues and pain, and many chiropractors combine muscle manipulation with a review of the patient's diet and physical activity and provide suggestions on how to live and eat healthier.

That's about it as far as evidence-based services, and it's not different from any regular physical therapist.

Also, an important note: there are many variants of chiropractors, and even within variants you have variation in the tools they use. The plain-jane chiropractors you probably are thinking of use a tool like the Activator, that spring-loaded piston thing. There's still plenty of chiropractors using manual manipulations where they put you into weird positions and thrust on your joints with all their weight. It is more painful for the patient and is notorious for fucking up the chiropractor's own joints over time.

There's also lots of really really wacky variants: Koren Specific Technique, Wave Chiropractic, fuck I know there's one or two others I wanted to mention but I'm forgetting them.

Anyway, back to plain mainstream practice. Once you get out of that realm where they're just physical therapists, you're into the realm of subluxations, mysterious 'blockages' or 'misalignments' in nerves which are invisible on x-rays and have never been demonstrated except through the symptoms they cause. They don't exist, pounding on the spine doesn't do shit, and any changes they make to the spine are reversed in minutes to hours. There's also the problem that some of their basic diagnostic techniques like checking for variations in leg length are highly susceptible

Chiropractors also tend to use other bunk tools like live blood analysis, low level laser therapy, shit like that.

>>8565840
Other problems: chiropractic education is absolute garbage. They aren't educated to anywhere near the rigor or length of proper medical professions. They're ostensibly required to have practical internships as part of their education but a large portion of their "on the job training" just ends up being practicing one or two techniques on other students instead of the full range of manipulations they'd need to do in the wild.

A lot of chiropractors use their practices as just money mills where they churn people through and tell them to come back several times a week indefinitely, each time pinging their insurance or their wallet. They don't actually care about the patients, just about getting as many of them as they can on the table every day.

Some chiropractic treatments are themselves risky. Any abrupt manipulation of the neck has a non-zero risk of causing a micro-tear in a blood vessel which could end up producing a stroke if the clot dislodges. It's rare (something like 1 in a million manipulations has complications) but it's still real.

So to sum up: Best case, you get to lie down on a padded table for half an hour while someone gives you a shitty massage and tells you to eat vegetables and get exercise. Worst case, they gouge your wallet with tests that don't do anything and constant treatments and might even injure you a little more than you came in.

>>8565849
I mentioned Koren Specific Technique, which is a WILD example of some of the extremes chiropractic gets up to.

The core claim is that you can "ask" the body whether a body part is causing it pain by measuring something called the occipital drop. Basically, the practitioner stands behind the patient, touches a body part on the patient, and runs their thumbs down the back of the skull until they reach that overhanging bit at the back. If their thumbs are even, the body is ok with that part. If the thumbs are offset because the head is tilted, the body has a problem with it.

They then use a special percussive instrument to tap on different places on the body to ostensibly direct healing effort or relieve pain or whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPCjzjxtlgA

Sometimes they just pound on a specific vertebra that they think the body is complaining about but other times they're tapping on some random lump of muscle or body fat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChgsySDgMWs

>>8565786
I dunno if its legit or not but it seems to have helped this kid https://youtu.be/l33ot5y-XxY

I used to think it was a meme too but i saw this and a law school classmate of mine went to one she swore by after injuring her back. I think it really depends on what you need and if they chiropractor is a quack

>>8565855
I think it's reasonable to assume the techniques you linked in the video are bullshit, but to me it's harder to really know the videos where they physically pop your shit in what looks like a legit doctor's office and also sit down and use models of the spine structure to explain what they're doing as if it's actual medicine backed up by science. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: https://youtu.be/catbXN22Slw now is this real? This type of practice? Or is it a "glorified massage" like someone said?

>>8565897
Upon further research I think I might be confusing parts of orthopedic medicine with chiropractic pseudo-medicine. I don't know exactly.

>>8565901
There really is a lot of overlap between parts of what chiropractors do and parts of what other medical disciplines do. What the guy is doing in your other comment at >>8565897 may be slightly more effective than placebo at managing back pain, shoulder pain, and sciatica, although it may not by any better or worse than the treatment you'd get at a traditional physical therapist.

Some chiropractors put way more emphasis on looking for subluxations and trying to fix every ailment under the sun. Avoid those. Other chiropractors just focus on trying to do the things chiropractic methods have been shown in an evidence-based manner to be effective at treating, and those practitioners might be worth your time and money if that's what you prefer.

>>8565914
Thanks for your responses my friend. I appreciate them very much.