Hell no, I said. He also recommended a physical therapist, which I think is a good idea. I was just so annoyed that I had to rant for a little bit.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Hell no, I said. He also recommended a physical therapist, which I think is a good idea. I was just so annoyed that I had to rant for a little bit.
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FYI, you and I are just a few months apart in age.
I have visited chiropractors, off and on, over the years.
I recently visited a new one (I move a lot), and he was great.
He wasn’t trying to get me to schedule “the next visit” or several visits afterwards.
He was just trying to heal me. Which he did (more or less, and I waved off the next scheduled visit).
MY EXPERIENCE is most chiropractors doing little to resolve the issue (but this is not totally true, because I’ve been helped), but there is a place for them. The last chiropractor is the best I’ve ever encountered, and I expect him to be unusual, but he was totally all the way through the process, and wasn’t looking for his next check.
I will note that he’s an exception in my experience. But it’s a worthy note.
Yeah, in one of my jobs a colleague went to the chiropractor every other week. For years.
(Pesky subluxations!)
My first wife had a knee injury, and was seeing a chiropractor for about a year. I’m not sure what he did (it was back in the ’90s), but I remember it involving some sort of low-power electrical current through the affected area; and she said it helped a good bit, and the guy was nicer and more helpful than the physical therapists she’d seen. At some point, though, he said he couldn’t do anything more for her and she needed surgery, which she got, and which did improve things quite a bit. So that guy at least seemed competent and honest, and admitted his limits.
Besides that, I know next to jaque merde about chiropractic care. My only recommendation is that you don’t let them mess with your spine.
Change doctors.
Raging Bee, it’s pure woo, since you state you know fuck-all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic
To the degree it’s not harmful, it’s purely because modern types incorporate actual physical therapy or do nothing much.
Like homeopathy, whatever it ‘cures’ is due to the body healing itself when no further damage is caused.
Anecdotal claims such as ANB’s above are also applicable to other forms of woo, for much the same reason.
So yeah. A quack that recommends it is a true quack; whatever benefit accrues is basically placebo.
I have used chiropractors since being the victim of a rear-end collision that gave me serious whiplash. I avoid chiropractors who try to tell me that chiropractic is ‘medicine’. I’ve had a couple of poor ones, but one cured my chronic sciatica and one has reset my cervical spine very nicely. My current ‘practor combines chiropractic with sports medicine, and is truly interested in fixing me, rather than getting me to return repeatedly.
Spinal resets have killed people.
@7: look up ‘iatrogenic’.
True, derek. chiropracty isn’t medicine, so it can’t be that.
More like ‘misadventure’ — as in a fool was treated by a true quack and got hurt thereby.
(“Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.” — Tim Minchin)
—
cf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK91735/
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to summarise all cases in which chiropractic spinal manipulation was followed by death.
DESIGN: This study is a systematic review of case reports.
METHODS: Literature searches in four electronic databases with no restrictions of time or language.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Death.
RESULTS: Twenty six fatalities were published in the medical literature and many more might have remained unpublished. The alleged pathology usually was a vascular accident involving the dissection of a vertebral artery.
CONCLUSION: Numerous deaths have occurred after chiropractic manipulations. The risks of this treatment by far outweigh its benefit.
@9: you missed my point, which is that conventional medicine is also not entirely safe: to the extent that our lexicon includes a word that means “(of a medical disorder) caused by the diagnosis, manner, or treatment of a physician” — http://www.dictiomary.com.
You also missed this part of my response: “I avoid chiropractors who try to tell me that chiropractic is ‘medicine’. ” I regard chiropractic as therapy. When I’m sick I go to an MD.
Although 26 is not a negligible number, I do not see how many treatments were performed to achieve that count. I also note the weasel phrase “many more might have remained unpublished.” It’s a clear sign of bias.
In my jurisdiction, chiropractic treatments are partially covered under our national medical insurance.
The choice of whether or not to use chiropractic treatment is yours of course, as is mine. I have benefitted greatly from it..
“@9: you missed my point, which is that conventional medicine is also not entirely safe”
Then it is not chiropracty. It is regular therapy labelled ‘chiropracty’ for idiots who believe in it.
“In my jurisdiction, chiropractic treatments are partially covered under our national medical insurance.”
Like I said, for fools the label works.
Same here in Oz: https://www.chiropracticboard.gov.au/Codes-guidelines.aspx
Also have homeopathy regulated: https://www.tga.gov.au/sites/default/files/australian-regulatory-guidelines-complementary-medicines-argcm.pdf
Main idea is to prevent the more harmful aspects, not to protect people from scams.
“The choice of whether or not to use chiropractic treatment is yours of course, as is mine. I have benefitted greatly from it.”
No you have not. Either you would have got better anyway (as I noted above) or you did not get ‘true’ chiropracty, but actual physiotherapy.
What a stupid thing to imagine. It is the opposite; it notes that not every case may have been documented, so they are only able to access part of the entirety of deadly outcomes. And this is just deaths.
FWIW: https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2012/07/05/when-chiropractors-play-at-being-real-doctors/
Orac (the pseudonym for David Gorski) has many such posts.
Or: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-war-against-chiropractors/
There are many other such sites. Medical sites.
@11. I have tried to be civil. You should give it a shot, too. My body, my choice.
Chiropracty is unscientific, it’s based on the idea that all that ails you is due to misalignments of your spine, misalignments that don’t show up on x-rays, but which the chiropractor can somehow feel. Some are reasonable physical therapists, but without the formal training, you might as well get yourself a massage, it would likely be cheaper and give as much relief. What makes chiropracty appear to work is time, the time it takes for your body to heal iself.
I have been civil too, derek.
Disputatious, but civil.
And sure. Your body, your choice.
You clearly seek to influence others, though, else whence your protestations?
Their bodies, your influence.
Functionally, you are endorsing wooism via anecdote, civilly as may be.
Evidence-based medicine says otherwise.
Referring to the above comment about the chiro being “nicer” than the physical therapist. PTs are paid to make you hurt and it’s quite on purpose. BUT, they know their craft and know when someone needs to push themselves to heal faster or better. “No pain, no gain” is an adage for a reason. People go to chiros because they want to just sit there and have the magic person make them feel better without putting in the effort to make themselves feel better.
It actually depends why he was recommending it. Chiropractic has been show to be of some help in musculoskeletal back pain, and since ‘of some help’ is about as good as anything gets in chronic back pain it’s not like you’d be missing out on a potentially better therapy to try this. I don’t know whether or not there’s evidence for its use in other joint conditions. Wouldn’t recommend it for neck pain for the reason given above, and it’s not worth a damn in non-musculoskeletal conditions.
So, if recommended for back pain, then I don’t think it was particularly unreasonable (though neither would it be unreasonable for you to decide to go for physio instead, which would be about as likely to be useful). If for joint pain, I’d want to look up the evidence base one way or the other. If for anything else, I agree with the ‘change doctors’ advice unless this is someone you’ve found to be excellent in other ways.
I’ve never been to a chiro. Went to PT for a knee injury in my late teens.
I mostly watch Youtube videos on stretches and exercises for my aging hips and knees. I did have a painful knee issue just recently for about two weeks that may have flared up due to going too many reps (40) and multiple sets of knee bends. Maybe indicative of osteoarthritis? It has mostly resolved on its own for now.
My back was kinda messed up not too long ago. It’s better. Not sure how much happy baby helps or makes it worse.
I had a boss that swore by chiropractic. Went weekly. Encouraged me to go (I didn’t). Right up until whatever they did to his neck resulted in a trip to a real doc, because of the loss of the use of one of his arms. Nerve damage. Long term damage.
So many years ago the Uni I did my degree at decided it would offer a degree in chiropractic. To accommodate this they forced the physics department to relocate, including their world-leading laser laboratory and share facilities with the geology faculty. It gets worse they later decide to introduce another parasite by expanding their MBA offerings by building a new building to include a 5-star hotel for the corporate high flyers who would be attending workshops there. In the process they rendered some species of unique aquatic invertebrates extinct when they diverted construction run-off into the creek they were living in. The biologists were understandably outrage as they had a research program on these that had been running for several years.
Sadly you need to be careful what you say. Chiropractors are viciously defensive of their profession and are very litigious when people criticise them.
derek @ 6
Are you fixed or are you returning repeatedly?
When I was having terrible neck pain due to my terrible work set-up (before I was able to figure out a chair / keyboard combination that worked for me), my doctor immediately recommended physical therapy. Thankfully, as I really liked my doctor and would have had to find a new one had she tried to steer me toward chiro. The PT gave me some heat treatments and several exercises to work on and I didn’t even need all eight visits that my doctor had offered.
Meanwhile, two coworkers were seeing chiropractors for years and years and years and curiously their serious problems were not alleviated until they both had back surgery. Weird, that.
Yeah, it annoys the heck out of me how many people I work with swear by this scam. I don’t remember exact dates, but I am sure you can find a clear timeline for a) when chiropractors where challenged with people dying in their “care”, b) how fast it was for that to get somehow swept under the rug, c) when they “adjusted” their training/expertise, as part of this rug sweep, to first include some basic medical training, which they had, up to that point, never had at all, and finally d) when some of the places training them finally included some limited PT into it, to further shield themselves from consequences.
Its literally the equivalent of the homeopathy stuff on the shelf which falls into three categories – 1) stuff that does nothing at all, because its literally just sugar pills, or water, 2) stuff that may have some limited effect, because the “main ingredients” are homeopathic, but it also includes “secondary” stuff that isn’t (rarer), or 3) stuff that is, “Homeopathic blah, with aspirin added.” One of these things are not like the other, actually does something, with certainty, but still promotes a massive list of scam treatments by labelling itself as the same thing.
@23: You left out my favorite: some years ago a client offered me a free session with their favorite homeopath, so I tried it out of curiosity. I laid on a table while that person waved assorted small vials in the air over me.
Chiropractors are viciously defensive of their profession and are very litigious when people criticise them.
That alone is sufficient reason to avoid them and kick them to the curb. They’re acting just like Donald Trump and $cientology.
Kahegi: Have you heard any homeopathic folks offering plutonium? I’d love to hear one talking about that, just so I can ask “Which isotope, 238 or 239?”
Chiropractors, ah yes. Hahahahahaha. If one of your vertebrae was out of alignment, you’d be in neurosurgical ICU. It’s all a total sham, that has killed people. But it has a lobby.
There used to be big arguments over chiro on the internal Usenet at my workplace — some people swore by it, others at it. My impression from that and here is that some chiros have adapted to the modern world by incorporating PT techniques and largely restricting themselves to musculo-skeletal issues, while others (call them the fundamentalists) continue to push subluxations as the cause of everything, and spinal manipulation as the cure-all. (Found out by surprise some years ago that subluxations are a real thing, they just aren’t what chiros say they are).
I’m currently in PT for chronic back pain, of which I’ve had multiple bouts over the last 40 years, and a couple of times for other joints. Spent a fortune on it last year (one ankle also went out). Since my last round (~2015) every PT clinic in town seems to have started offering dry needing/”acupuncture”. I let one PT do it, just out of curiosity. Can’t say it worked better than the usual stuff they do, and I have refused it since, pleading needle-phobia (which is true enough).
rweiss @24: Sounds like a homeopath’s homeopath!
Or maybe a fractal homeopath?
OFF TOPIC: This was posted on https://mockpaperscissors.com/
I tried it. It is a fun item.
It’s almost as good as noem being fired.
https://www.oreillyauto.com
search for 121G
Also, many chiropractors are making it up as they go along. Many osteopaths have a lots of knowledge of the skeletal human body.
35 years ago and earlier today i researched chiro extensively and found the old time chiropractors are quacks-adjusments dont treat every malady but recent research has shown that it can help with some limited problems. Much to my surprise the AMA,i think said a few years ago-reported in Comsumers’ Reports- that it is helpful with some back problems. I did a lot of it and it was no help at all. Would not let one work on my neck as there is a very slight chance of stroke. Fun to make fun of but they do help sometimes.
Somewhere way back when, Orac (maybe under his other name) recommended chiropractics for certain problems.
I commented something to the effect of “Where is the real Orac and what have you done with him?!?” No reply came, so we must assume the imposter remains in place…
@21: She fixed me up. I have occasional (every couple of years) relapses, which my new chiro fixes.
Sounds like not fixed and repeated returns to me.
@34 I’d say ‘repeated returns’ would mean monthly or more frequently. I aggravate injuries or develop new ones as a result of lifestyle mistakes. Also, I am a senior citizen. I see my MD and my dentist more often than I see my chiropractor.
@Derek (mostly) Chiropracty where it works (and it does) is not unique. See overlap with massage therapy, physio therapy, ie evidence based therapies of whatever sort. Where it is unique, it doesn’t work, is benign at best, and lethal at worst. The stroke thing, when detected by evidence based medicos, was met with denial, legal threats and physical threats to the people who uncovered it. It was not then, and has not now AFAIK led to any change to their practice to stop strokes happening.
You say it works for you. I believe you. But it is only by accident, and if it ever doesn’t work, quite likely, it can have some awful consequences which they will not inform you of (Contrast with the page of stuff no one ever reads that comes with a standard vaccine for example. Or any other evidence based medical intervention. Or any mechanic, sparky, plumber, et al.), or even try to avoid. I hope you stay healthy for many years to come.
If I had a leaky roof and the roofer told me he could fix it but he’d have to come back every year or two to fix it again, I’d get a new roofer.
Oh, one other thing that bothered me @Derek. The ‘my body my choice’ phrasing, even if it does apply, is unfortunate. As I’m sure you know but bears repeating, it is used by anti-vaxxers to kill children. it is therefore, even when apropos, forever tainted.
@37: I go to the MD more often than to my chiro. In fact the MD expects annual checkups. That does not make me reject the utility of medical science.
@38:My association with that phrase is in the pro-choice context. I am pro-vaccine, absolutely.
derek, your protestations are becoming ever more piteous and defensive.
“I go to the MD more often than to my chiro.”
Well, yes. MDs do all sorts of things, all medicinal.
Not just poking your spine,
Also,
“I avoid chiropractors who try to tell me that chiropractic is ‘medicine’.”; and
“My current ‘practor combines chiropractic with sports medicine”
So. Do you go for him for medicine or for chiropracty?
You are being equivocal, you know.
Chiropractors (the true ones) fix ‘subluxations’ that ’cause disease’.
Remember my adduced Wikipedia entry?
Some, such as your wonderful exemplar, call themselves that but also do physiotherapy, AKA ‘sports medicine’, though obs medicine is about external substances, not manipulation.
(Surely you must be rather sporty, to need sports medicine!)
Keep spruiking it, O so very civilly as you are, and I shall myself endeavour to equally civil when I keep retorting.
larpar: @34, 37. I wind up back in physio every few years. Does that mean it didn’t work and it’s bogus? No, it means that perhaps I have a chronic weakness there, and I spend too much time sitting down, and I fall off the wagon on my exercise program after a while, and I try to lift something too heavy, and I’m getting old, and….
Seriously, your roofer analogy is quite stupid. Bodies are not static systems.
@40: “So. Do you go for him for medicine or for chiropracty?” I go for the chiropractic treatment; the sports medicine is a bonus.
I don’t care about your opinion of chiropractic treatment, and I don’t understand why you care about my opinion. If you don’t trust the method, then don’t partake. I do trust, and I do partake.
“I don’t care about your opinion of chiropractic treatment, and I don’t understand why you care about my opinion.”
If you don’t care, you have no problem with it, right? Heh.
And I told you why I care: I don’t like people endorsing woo.
I am doing my bit for public health.
(I feel virtuous thereby)
I don’t, but I also speak up when wooists such as you spruik it.
Like, you know, homeopathy or coffee enemas or detox or ear-candling or suchlike.
“I do trust, and I do partake.”
Sure. You made that plenty clear.
You were fixed, and other than the (ahem) relapses every couple of years, you were fixed.
@43. Apparently, you have provided to me a room in your mind where I live rent-free. Please unlock the door; I’m feeling claustrophobic.
Heh. You don’t care about my opinion, remember?
Me, I’m not fussed about your opinion either; diff is I care about it when you endorse woo.
I hereby quote you: “I avoid chiropractors who try to tell me that chiropractic is ‘medicine’.”
That is your claim, not mine.
So it’s not medicine in the generic sense, as in actual treatment and remediation of ailments.
So, you go to a chiro every couple of years for the relapse of your fixed condition, but clearly it is not medicinal or medicine in your estimation. You’ve made that explicitly clear.
Me, I reckon it follows that it must be either physiotherapy or placebo you are getting, though you imagine it’s chiropracty, and are told as much.
Again: “I go for the chiropractic treatment; the sports medicine is a bonus.”
How is it somehow a bonus, since you don’t go for it?
A bonus is something you partake of, else it’s not really a bonus.
@45 How about those of us that think such things matter, in the bigger picture, put it like this: We have some level, even when greatly strained by the person in question at times, compassion for the wellbeing of others, care greatly about what is real, rather than fake or fraudulent, and thus, by definition must have at least some care with respect to the mere “personal opinions” of people that promote things that are false, fraudulent, potentially dangerous, or promoted as alternatives to sound practice. Since you wonder why anyone “cares” what you opinion is in this case, specifically.
If you existed in a vacuum, in which no one reading your posts, at all, might be tempted to think, “Ah, well, despite all these other people calling it a scam, here is someone who still thinks its useful.”, we would, as you say, have zero reason to care. But, instead, people might do so, and this lends them cause to both a) keep believing themselves, b) convince themselves that, having even one ally among otherwise skeptics means they might be absolutely right, and we are the ones who are wrong, and thus c) promote is even harder as both a valid treatment, safe, and possibly even as an alternative to real medical help. This matters, and we would be disingenuous to not, as you say, “care” about this possible outcome.
I would have thought that even you could have logically reached this conclusion…
Loosely remembered ditty from Ogden Nash:
To him who botches that delicate neck trick
I hope there awaits the fauteuil electric.
This for me would be deal breaker territory, although I live in an area with plenty of primary care doctors. Chiropractic is quackery, plain and simple. To me, the doctor who referred you to a chiropractor suffers from questionable judgement.
@44 Derek Your time is being deliberately wasted by our resident vampire. He will say anything, at all, to continue the conversation. The content does not matter to him. Immediate disengagement is highly recommended. A hearty ‘fuck off’ is about the most productive thing you can offer at this point, and even that is dubious as it will still certainly and definitely provoke a response.
@49. So I inferred. But I am more self-amused by subtle put-downs. When they go over the recipient’s head, even better!
<snicker>