Last week I became aware of an article about chiropractic that was published in The New York Times this past May (not sure why I didn’t know about this until now!) It’s not every day the chiropractic gets ANY press (let alone good press). This article is noteworthy because the main message is at least somewhat favorable concerning the benefits of chiropractic.
Despite the relatively lukewarm tone of the article and decidedly limited perspective it shares, any story coming from a major news source that helps the public learn more about the life changing, money saving benefits of chiropractic care is a major victory!
The article, titled “For Bad Backs, It May Be Time to Rethink Biases About Chiropractors, can be seen here: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/upshot/for-bad-backs-its-time-to-rethink-biases-about-chiropractors.html?mcubz=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com
It is important for me, as your chiropractor, to help you read this article critically.
Here are the Pros:
- The author highlights evidence that a form of chiropractic, “spinal manipulation,” is an effective treatment for lower back pain
- Spinal manipulation is documented not only to be effective in decreasing pain, but in improving function
- Spinal manipulation is also safe, with virtually no adverse events reported in the literature (the ones most of us have heard of are anecdotal and extremely rare)
- Chiropractic costs more than medications in the short term, he says, but in the long term research shows chiropractic patients save money over those who only treat medically
- He points out that while we don’t always know medically “how” chiropractic works to achieve it’s results, “we don’t have a great understanding of why many other therapies work either” (including medical ones)
Here are the Cons:
As the subtitle of the article points out (“it may be time to re-think biases”), there are biases. And it’s great that the author, a medical doctor, acknowledges that these biases exist. These biases stem not just from the different focus and experiences medical doctors versus chiropractors, but also from a whole historical and political story that goes beyond the perspective that this blog is here to provide.
Suffice it to say that there are biases in the medical profession that have created a situation where it is not common for medical doctors to refer to chiropractors, causing millions of people to miss out on life improving, money saving chiropractic care.
The first bias I wish to discuss here is the perspective that decreasing back pain is the only valid purpose for chiropractic, and if you don’t have pain, you don’t have a problem.
We of course know that chiropractic actually works best routinely, over time, including times when a person isn’t experiencing pain or problems. Would it make sense to only go to a dentist when your cavities are so bad that you have tooth pain? To only exercise when you have weight to lose? To only eat kale when you have cancer diagnosis? Preventing problems from happening (rather than waiting until your system is showing the consequences of ongoing stress) is the way to reap the benefits of living a healthy life on a daily basis.
But there’s a whole other realm of benefits to be experienced from regular chiropractic care that go beyond treating the pain (as the author of the article suggests), and preventing problems. The other realm is what we call wellness. Wellness is about optimizing and moving into a whole new realm of experiencing. Network Care has a special way to describe the wellness care we provide. The results are “reorganizational,” in that we reorganize the brain’s relationship to the body through the nerves and the spine so that you can have breakthrough results. It’s this type of experience of optimal health that allows people to live their best life!
You may be thinking, if chiropractic works so well, why isn’t there more press about it? Why isn’t there more research?
There are three main reasons. The first reason is that unlike in the medical realm, most chiropractors finish school and go into private practice for themselves. Becoming part of a hospital-based infrastructure is not a thing. Therefore, the issue of how to create research, and who would be funding it, is often prohibitive.
This is why it is possible for the author of The New York Times article to say that there is no evidence to support chiropractic helping with virtually anything besides back pain. It’s not that it doesn’t help people with allergies, asthma, colic, anxiety, and so on. We chiropractors have whole practices full of people who have been helped in these ways. It’s that the research published concerning these are mainly case studies, as there is no one paying for or coordinating a large research study around it.
Not only does medicine have an infrastructure for research, but they have lots of money to pay for research. The question of who funds the research and for what purpose guides the inquiry and the resulting “knowledge” that is produced. Consider that research paid for by drug companies, which is true for large amounts of research, is going to be less likely to uncover pro-chiropractic results.
The third reason is a bit more big-picture. Not only is there more money to be had in researching disease, it’s also a lot easier in the existing paradigm. Studying diseases and indicators such as cholesterol, blood pressure, and the like, is easy to study in the type of study revered as the standard of knowing, the randomized controlled trial. In the randomized controlled trial, it is easier to minimize the interference of “extraneous variables.”
Chiropractic, on the other hand, as a wellness form of care that people engage in on an ongoing basis, mainly helps people within the context of their lives. It doesn’t easily lend itself to laboratory study. But there are other ways of knowing, besides double-blind randomized controlled trials, even if those aren’t usually considered as important. This is why the research we have on Network Spinal Analysis, that supports the theory that the work helps people reorganize to a higher level of wellness, was not done in a lab; the data being measured are peoples experiences in life.
I hope my thoughts have been helpful for you in considering when chiropractic “meets the press.” Hopefully now you can also understand more about why it is so important for you to spread the word about your positive experience of chiropractic and Network Care. I would love to read your comments below!
