Dozens of medical science specialists have issued a serious warning about the spread of chiropractic. Say the experts in their letter: “it is the involvement of chiropractors in “adjustments” for children suffering from everything from attention deficit to bed-wetting to asthma etc that is particularly disturbing to us.”
Chiropractic techniques can, a report from the Australian Medical Association says, do some good for short periods of time when it comes to certain kinds of back pain.
Lots of people will bear witness to that. Others will say it’s all nothing more than a sCAM (spurious complementary and alternative medicine).
I hate to admit it, but in desperation after being let down by general practice on three occasions, a sports physio, a massage therapist, an osteopath, and even an enforced (incredibly painful) referral by the failed osteopath to his acupuncturist colleague, I visited a chiropractor to treat chronic sciatica several years ago. After several weeks of treatment I was pain free…still am, but with gastrocnemius muscle wasting. However, might my recovery have been nothing more than spontaneous receding inflammation after a year or more of pain and numbness? My GP never stumped up for an MRI on my spine so I have no idea whether I had a prolapsed L4-L5 lumbar disc or some other problem that impinged on my sciatic nerve. Moreover, the specialist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital simply told me I probably had “slipped a disc”, but that conservative treatment (the chiro manipulation) had remedied the problem and he wouldn’t put me under his knife.
Unfortunately, it is probably just chance that chiropractic works on backs, because its theoretical basis is spurious nonsense despite the doctorates. The item I quote here says that, chiropractic subluxations and adjustments are “at its core, [based] on a vague and unprovable supernatural understanding of an inherent energy in the spine that can be manipulated to treat all manner of ills.” Of course, the same might almost be said of how we view the placebo effect in conventional medicine.
The full story here.