SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
published 10/9/06, updated 7/25/11
A 2006 Gallup Poll found that chiropractic rated dead last among health professions with regard to ethics and honesty.1 Why? My clients are curious about the poor reputation of chiropractic, and confused about the nature of chiropractic.2 Often inspired by their own negative experiences, they ask me what I think.
This article is a survey of chiropractic controversies and issues that patients should be aware of.
I actually pay for chiropractic therapy myself on occasion, and I do recommend some chiropractic therapy to my patients. At the same time, I respect the judgement of many expert critics who believe that, “The concepts of chiropractic are not based on solid science and its therapeutic value has not been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.”3
The first thing one wants to know about any treatment — alternative or otherwise — is whether it works. Until that is decided, all talk of qualifications, regulation, and so on is just vacuous bureaucratese.
Dr. David Colquhoun, “Doctor Who? Deception by chiropractors”
And yet “chiropractic” is many things. Does chiropractic work for what? Does what kind of chiropractic treatment work? How much treatment?
Asking if “chiropractic works” is not specific enough to have a clear answer. It is not really a fair question to ask of chiropractic as a whole. But it is nevertheless the question that people ask, and so we have to deal with it as well as we can.
I believe it’s obvious that some chiropractic therapy does “work” in certain ways, for some people, some of the time. But the most important factor in the usefulness of chiropractic therapy is not the nature of chiropractic as a profession, but the skill and good sense of the particular chiropractor whose hands are on your neck. Ethical, intelligent practitioners of any helping profession will always deliver better care than less competent members of their own or any other profession. It’s important to Choose the Therapist, Not the Therapy. Consumers need to be aware of the issues to help them choose a chiropractor.
The best consumer guide to chiropractic therapy available, written by a chiropractor and America’s leading expert on pseudoscientific health care. If you want to know if chiropractic therapy “works,” stop reading my article and go get this book.
No! And so I don’t. What I will do is summarize the issues in a readable way, and quote the experts who are qualified, and cite some of the same scientific evidence that they do. I’m just another health care professional, with no special knowledge or experience with chiropractic. Furthermore, I have no wish to re-invent the wheel: there are already many excellent books available on this topic (see the further reading section at the end of the article). This is a quick tour of the topic, not a tour de force.
Judging the value of chiropractic therapy is best left to the experts who have already done it, to the progressive chiropractors and critics from within the profession like Dr. Samuel Homola4 and Dr. Donald Murphy;5 progressive chiropractic regulatory agencies like the Chiropractors Registration Board of Victoria in Australia;6 activist physicians like Dr. Stephen Barrett,7 Dr. Stephen Novella,8 or the especially credible Dr. Edzard Ernst9 (who has such great experience with both medical science and alternative therapies); and science journalists like Simon Singh,10 who is in the news lately because he is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association for comments he wrote in a column in The Guardian in 2005, in connection with his book, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine.11
Whatever anyone thinks about chiropractic, there is an undeniable history of scientific controversies swirling around the profession, from its earliest days to the present. What are those controversies?
An example of the diversity of conditions that chiropractors claim that they can treat, from an advertisement.
I’m not answering these questions here — I’m just asking them! And I’m pointing out that they have been asked (and answered) for decades. Many credible critics rule against chiropractic on all of these issues and several others.
And while you might think that all chiropractors would defend themselves against these accusations, that’s not even the case. In fact, many chiropractors are also critical of common chiropractic beliefs and practices. Thus, one of the most important things to understand about chiropractic is that it is a divided profession: there is significant controversy within the profession itself.
The chiropractic profession was founded about a century ago by Daniel David Palmer. Chiropractic owes its existence to this one unusual man and his son — always referred to as “D.D.” and “B.J.” palmer — whose ideas remain the foundation of the profession today. Both DD and BJ were colourful characters, and were arguably marketing geniuses. DD in particular was known for his extravagant ego. Here’s an entertaining example of his flamboyant personal style:
I was the first to adjust the cause of disease .... The man who had the intellectual capacity to comprehend the displacement of the vertebrae; the mental abability to grasp the significance of nerve impingement; the power to conceive and discriminate between normal and abnormal positions; the foresight and wisdom to discern the outcome; the genius of originality to create such a unique science; the judgement needed for the occasion; the brain caliber of reasoning on this heretofore perplexing question — the cause of disease; the sense of touch required to discover a racked vertebra and the skill and tact to replace it, was the one destined to discover and develop the science which he named chiropractic.
Shall Chiropractic Survive?, by BJ Palmer
Wow. Clearly, DD’s arrogance was dialed up to 11.
According to DD Palmer, “A subluxated vertebra … is the cause of 95 percent of all diseases.”18 Those were big words, and indeed they have been called the “big idea” in chiropractic ever since. In 1966, a group of physicians damningly wrote, “In all the years that they have been talking about them, chiropractors have never been able to furnish proof of these mysterious subluxations which they alone are able to see. They may convince their clients, but never have they provided proof of their pretensions to men of science.”19
Today, some chiropractors reject subluxation theory:
Chiropractic, which celebrated its centennial in 1995, is a curious mixture of science and pseudoscience, sense and nonsense. Much of it is based on the theory that misaligned spinal bones produce nerve interference that causes disease. Many chiropractors claim that correcting these misalignments (“subluxations”) can restore health and that regular spinal adjustments are essential to maintain it.
Neither logic nor scientific evidence supports such a belief. Although spinal manipulation can relieve certain types of back pain, neck pain, and other musculoskeletal symptoms, there is no scientific evidence that it can restore or maintain health. As a result of expressing my opinion on this subject, I have been called a chiropractic heretic.
The chiropractic profession has little tolerance for dissension. Its nonsense remains unchallenged by its leaders and has not been denounced in its journals. In fact, many chiropractic journals continue to publish articles that attempt to justify subluxation theory. Although progress has been made, the profession still has one foot lightly planted in science and the other firmly rooted in cultism. Without appropriate criticism, the good in chiropractic will never be sifted out, and competent chiropractors will not receive the recognition they deserve.
This book denounces the cultism in chiropractic but supports the appropriate use of spinal manipulation and the research efforts required to solidify its scientific basis. If you are contemplating or receiving chiropractic care, it might help protect both your pocketbook and your health.
Inside Chiropractic, by Samuel Homola, pvii
This controversy between chiropractors themselves is highly relevant to the consumer. The profession is divided between chiropractors who still embrace subluxation theory (known as “straight” chiropractors), and those choose to limit their expertise and therapy to musculoskeletal health, especially spinal care (known as “mixers”).20 A chiropractic college instructor writes of this “well-known division between ‘straights’ and ‘mixers’” that “we are at risk of returning to the antiscientific and dogmatic traditions that we have worked so hard to shake off during the past several decades.”21
If you go to a chiropractor, you’d probably like to know what kind of a chiropractor is treating you, regardless of your own opinion about this controversy. Whether you prefer a “straight” or a “mixer,” you would probably prefer to know what sort of chiropractic therapy you are getting.
Unfortunately, it is difficult for patients to tell which is which.
The idea of “adjusting” the spine refers to many different manual therapies that wiggle, pop and otherwise manipulate spinal joints. The correct umbrella term for these treatments is “spinal manipulative therapy” or SMT. Expert opinions on SMT range widely, with some prominent medical scientists expressing strong concerns, primarily because its provenance in chiropractic subluxation theory is dubious, but also because whatever benefits it has are clearly not major, and there are serious risks, even including paralysis and death in the case of SMT for the joints of the neck. For more information about the risks of treating the neck, see What Happened To My Barber? Either atlantoaxial instability or vertebrobasilar insufficiency causes severe dizziness and vomiting after massage therapy, with lessons for health care consumers.
Despite all the controversy, there has been little high quality scientific research to determine whether or not SMT is safe and really works. Every published review of the literature comments on the lack of good quality evidence, making it impossible to be confident of anything.22 Even the most promising sources of research have had serious quality control problems.23 Major reviews of that literature published in recent years came to underwhelming conclusions,2425 and recent experiments continue to damn SMT with faint praise, showing that it works … a little.26 Thus, SMT fails the “impress me” test — if it’s working any miracles, they must be rare and small ones.
And yet spinal joint popping in particular is something that people crave, and most clinicians — including myself, and including skeptics like Dr. Homola — believe that some forms of SMT can be helpful to some of their patients, some of the time. There seems to be almost no doubt that there is something of therapeutic interest going on in SMT.
There is no definitive evidence that spinal manipulative therapy is more effective than other forms of treatment for patients with acute or chronic low-back pain. However, manual therapists know from experience that spinal manipulation is often more effective for providing immediate short-term relief for some types of back pain.
“Can Chiropractors and Evidence-Based Manual Therapists Work Together?”
Occasionally I recommend chiropractic therapy to my own patients. Sometimes I believe my clients need more skilful and direct stimulation of spinal joints than I can provide myself, and I believe that the scientific evidence shows that approriate spinal manipulation has the potential to help back pain in this way, with acceptable risks.
Many of my own clients have reported this kind of positive result from chiropractic treatment. I have experienced it myself on many occasions, and I have also observed many clients expressing relief and pleasure in response to incidental spinal “adjustments” — joint pops that occur in the course of doing massage therapy, little explosions as I glide up the spine.
Many people seem to feel that a happy spinal adjustment feels like “scratching an itch you can’t reach.” Why might that be?
Whatever you have been told before, and despite the availability of many explanations on the internet, the nature of joint popping is not well understood.27 It is firmly in that category of trivial mysteries for which there is simply no research funding, and as such it will probably remain unexplained for some time to come. We simply do not know.
Whatever a joint pop really is, it probably providees a novel sensory experience: a little blast of proprioceptive stimulation.28 Since all living systems seem to thrive on sensory input, and generally suffer without it, I speculate that a joint crack essentially feels like getting “unstuck,” and is analogous to finally getting to stretch your legs after getting off a long flight — which is not intended to trivialize it.
The strength of this idea is that it just isn’t claiming much: it both accounts for the extremely satisfying feeling that many people report, but without promising the moon. Indeed, it also seems consistent with another widely reported feature of SMT: the benefits often don’t last long! Soon the “itch” needs to be “scratched” again. It also could explain why the benefits of SMT are so variable and uncertain: it is highly dependent on many factors. For instance, whether a joint crack feels “refreshing” to you depends on how you feel about the whole idea of joint cracking.
Unfortunately, many people are not comfortable with having their spinal joints “cracked” or manipulated.
This is one of those “there are two kinds of people in the world” things: some people crave spinal joint cracking, expertly applied or otherwise, and to others it seems like fingernails on a chalkboard. My wife, for instance, wants at least one spine-cracking hug per day, and clearly becomes impatient when it has been too long since the last one! Other people would view such a hug as an alarming assault — people with such anxiety about spinal joint popping typically have never been to chiropractor and never will, or they take a dim view of what happened to them when they reluctantly tried it.
“I will never let a chiropractor touch me again” is just as common a patient report as “I have to get adjusted at least once a month.”
Clearly, those who find joint cracking to be unpleasant are not good candidates for “scratching the itch” with a nice round of lumbar facet joint explosions! You know who you are, and you don’t really need to be reading this: chiropractic is certainly not going to work for you!
Here are some books I recommend:
Dr. Homola is a chiropractor, and the most prominent critic of his own profession. His book is an essential patient guide to a profession that is so full of controversy that consumers need a guide before going to chiropractic office. If you like getting your spine cracked, or you think you need to be “adjusted,” read this book before making your next chiropractic appointment! Athorough examination and judgement of more than thirty of the most popular “alternative” treatments, such as acupuncture, homeopathy, aromatherapy, reflexology, chiropractic and herbal medicine. The ultimate verdict on alternative medicine is delivered for the first time with clarity, rigour and authority. I include this selection as much for its Canadian content as because it is a good book. Canadians visit chiropractors about thirty million times a year, and surveys show that patients are generally satisfied with their treatment. But studies also show that as many as two hundred Canadians a year may suffer strokes brought on by neck manipulation. Spin Doctors takes a hard, dramatic, and spine-chilling look into the world of chiropractic medicine. You will be surprised to learn what chiropractors treat and why — and how much it costs you as a taxpayer. Most important, you'll learn how to protect yourself and your family from dangerous adjustments, practice-building tactics, bogus treatments, and misleading information. Paul Benedetti is an award-winning journalist who, for more than a decade, has written investigative stories about alternative medicine and health fraud. Wayne MacPhail is a journalist who has written about AIDS, alternative medicine and other health, science, and social issues for twenty-five years.And some more immediately accessible resources:
BACK TO TEXT Comments: Dr. Edzard Ernst is a highly qualified critic of sloppy researchers in alternative medicine. In this review of The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) studies of chiropractic therapy, he finds that “their quality was frequently questionable. Several randomized controlled trials failed to report adverse effects and the majority was not described in sufficient detail to allow replication.” But if NCCAM cannot produce the best quality studies of alternative medicine, who can? No organization has ever been better funded (or motivated) to validate alternative therapies.
Comments: This Cochrane review came to the underwhelming conclusion that “there is no evidence that spinal manipulative therapy is superior to other standard treatments for patients with acute or chronic low back pain.” It also performed no worse, though, and was more effective than fake interventions. BACK TO TEXT Comments: In this reasonably good test of SMT, researchers took a hundred patients with nasty, fresh cases of low back pain, and delivered half of them into the care of chiropractors, and the other half into “standard care” — advice and ordinary pain medications, namely. Note that it has often been argued that SMT is best for acute low back pain, not chronic, so this is right in chiropractic’s strike zone: if there is anything special, anything even remotely impressive about SMT, it should have done rather well in this contest. It should actually pretty much pull out a can of whupass on “advice and meds.” It didn’t.