“Systematic reviews of controlled clinical studies of treatments used by chiropractors have found no evidence that chiropractic manipulation is effective, with the possible exception of treatment for back pain.[8] A 2011 critical evaluation of 45 systematic reviews concluded that the data included in the study “fail[ed] to demonstrate convincingly that spinal manipulation is an effective intervention for any condition.”[10] Spinal manipulation may be cost-effective for sub-acute or chronic low back pain, but the results for acute low back pain were insufficient.[11] No compelling evidence exists to indicate that maintenance chiropractic care adequately prevents symptoms or diseases.[12]”
You’ve got it in reverse. See that “possible exception for back pain”? Chronic pain related to joint issues is ALL chiros do, insurance used to cover that when you had a back injury or whiplash, things it works for. Then insurance stopped covering that, pretty sure it’s because they favor you getting a prescrip for pain killers but that’s conspiracy on my part, and a lot of chiros started to turn to less savory things, as they did that more and more snake oil types who claim chiropractic work is some fuckin miracle come out of the woodwork.
I’ve worked with these issues a lot in representing injured workers, including litigating coverage of chiro treatment. In my experience, insurers will always cover chiropractic if it is under the direction of a doctor. A lot of orthos send their patients to chiros for treatment. Insurer is fine approving eight or twelve sessions as ordered by the treater. Where they have a problem is when it’s the chiropractor directing the care. You know, if you get hurt and you just go straight to the chiropractor, they will say they need to treat you indefinitely, twice a week or something.
As for efficacy, it’s undeniable that chiropractic care feels good. If it feels good and the patient believe it’s working, that’s enough to make it work for real. No doubt, there are plenty of studies that bear out improvements of objective functional capacity and subjective pain ratings after chiropractic care. The mechanism is that the “adjustments” affect the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic nervous systems, and prompt the release of neuroendocrine factors such as serotonin and dopamine. For some people that is enough to feel better and even heal. For insurers, many of them are happy to pay for a course of chiro care because doing so may save them from having to pay for continued Ortho followups, skilled PT, guided injections, or even surgical interventions.
On the other hand, chiropractic education and practice is highly subjective, and the entire field lacks consistency and validity, and IMO is inadequate for the forces it exerts on the most sensitive part of the human body: the cervical spine. Cervical manipulations are highly dangerous. It can severe arteries, cause strokes, cause stroke-like symptoms from nerve palsy, and can break vertebrae; this can easily paralyze or kill a patient, and the chiro cannot know these forces are likely safe for a patient unless they’ve reviewed prior imaging of the cervical spine and know for sure there are no preexisting stress fractures, lesions, or neural impingement.
At this point the industry is so large and powerful that the medical industry and regulatory structure has decided that patients may decide to bear these risks for themselves.
This comment is a hot mess of personal experience and fatalism wrapped in the vaneer of scientific authority. Chiropractor bad … Unless doctor say go. Then bad not bad anymore.
Just my medicolegal experience. Not sure what you mean by fatalist or veneer of scientific authority, though medicolegal science is a thing, I said up front I wasn’t a scientist and that my experience was in resolving and litigating coverage disputes or how you’d simplify my conclusions into such a slogan. I clearly said the entire art suffers from inadequate validity and training that ends up getting people seriously injured or killed.
Oh, it’s fatalist of me to say the law and insurance industry say patients may elect that risk? I suppose, that’s the way it is right now. Certainly doesn’t have to be. The political will of regular people is too distracted by culture wars and disinformation to be hopeful that Congress is going to step in and regulate chiropractic. We have serious challenges like maintaining democratic governance to be so focused on this. You want to regulate something that maims and kills people, I have about twenty other things way more urgent before we get to chiropracty. If you want to spend all your political capital in this one place, have at it. I hope you’re right and chiropractic medicine is the most imminent of our problems; is that fatalist?
Welcome to Lemmy. Enjoy your stay. 🤷
The reason is that if the doctor says go, they’re just going to do what a physical therapist does.
I personally would prefer to go to the person whose training was based in reality instead of a fraud who might paralyze me.