3 ms·

Its a con that is trying very hard to become legitimate. Chiros started as a scam, continued as a scam, and are now a widely accepted scam. The legit work they

by chneu 2mo ago

Its a con that is trying very hard to become legitimate. Chiros started as a scam, continued as a scam, and are now a widely accepted scam. The legit work they do is often just physical therapy. Just go to a physical therapist.

burnt-resistor 2mo ago
It's a con like osteopathic "medicine". D.O. should be shunned and rejected because it's pretending to be legitimate and/or legitimized.
- dghlsakjg 2mo ago
  DOs are sorta weird in the US. They go to real medical school for 4 years like MDs and practice actual licensed medicine at the same level as an MD. They can even call themselves physicians. Non DO osteopaths are not trained with any sort of scientifically backed curriculum.
  - toast0 2mo ago
    I have a cousin who is a DO (in the US). It seems like it's basically an out to get effectively an MD with a slightly lower bar for admission. Once you're in the program, it's basically the same as an MD program, and then you go through residency programs on an equal basis with MDs.
aorloff 2mo ago
Its such a scam that professional sports teams all hire chiropractors to work on the bodies they invest millions of dollars into each year.
- senectus1 2mo ago
  none of us is as dumb as all of us...
- azan_ 2mo ago
  Yes, rich people get scammed too.
- Jtarii 2mo ago
  Athletes are often highly superstitious and ritualistic, (and young and dumb), its not surprising they would engage in something like chiropractic. Sports science is mostly just guesswork.
  - aorloff 2mo ago
    I'm not talking about athletes. I'm talking about the people who own the teams, they invest in chiropractors. People who are thinking about the ultimate economic benefit of an investment into a human body, not the athletes themselves.
    - wolrah 2mo ago
      People who realize that if their athlete believes it'll make them better, and it doesn't actually hurt them most of the time, there's value in indulging them.
      - aorloff 2mo ago
        I suppose you can find conspiracies and scams everywhere if you want to not look very hard
        wolrah 1mo ago
        We're talking about a field that is well documented to have been started by an absolute charlatan who believed in magical "subluxations" causing basically all diseases. We know by all objective measures that the entire idea is a level of nonsense that's almost religious in scale, which is a great analogy because it similarly demonstrates how "lots of people believe in it" is an absolutely meaningless argument.
- close04 2mo ago
  Sports doctors were never immune to misguided treatments. The regular ice baths after an injury have already been thoroughly proven to slow down recovery. You need ice only after the initial trauma, afterwards ice just hinders the healing process. But million dollar bodies were subjected to it for years and still are. And a lot of treatments are known by the doctor to be fake but are still performed so the player benefits from the placebo effect. In the sports where the team doctor would routinely administer PEDs to the players under the guise of “vitamins” or whatever, after the practice became harder to pull off some doctors kept administering sugar pills to avoid the nocebo effect. They just follow the ritual that doesn’t harm the player but gives them peace of mind.
AngryData 2mo ago
A physical therapist costs significantly more, which is why a lot of chiropractors in rural areas with a lot of manual labor are well looked upon. They are mostly just practicing physical therapy without a medical license which could get them in trouble if it wasn't considered chiropractic work. The pure quackery doesn't get them as far because most of their customers are too poor to regularly spend on woowoo crap. In my area someone's insurance might cover the first 3-4 sessions of physical therapy, but nothing after that despite them needing it for longer. So the physical therapist will at the end of insurance billing send them down the road to do the exact same thing at the chiropractor for significantly cheaper. In places without a lot of manual labor they are probably mostly just the quackery. Their clients are lots of hypochondriacs and office workers who really just need to get more exercise but are willing to find anyone who says they can make them better without significant effort. Im sure the massages and stretching does feel good though atleast, but im sure a massage parlor would set out some crystals and do a massage for cheaper.
- arcfour 2mo ago
  > They are mostly just practicing physical therapy without a medical license Oh, well as long as they're only practicing medicine without a license, I suppose that's okay then...
  - AngryData 2mo ago
    It is when it is the only medical care these people can afford.
    - arcfour 2mo ago
      I'm sorry, but going to a quack doctor is not medical care, much like McDonald burgers would not be a healthy meal regardless of whether or not that's all you can afford. Except at least in the McDonald's case you have to eat food to survive, so you may not have a choice. You don't have to go to a chiropractor to survive, so it's better to not go there at all than it is to go and receive possibly dangerous treatment from a con artist. Remember, there is no science behind what they do. They don't know if they're going to hurt or paralyze you because they never went to medical school!!
somenameforme 2mo ago
This doesn't really make any sense, because the entire point of chiropracty is pain and function improvement. This is measurable by people. The Wiki page on the topic is loaded with vitriol and agenda, but the study [1] they relied on to try to discredit chiropracty concludes: "When spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) is compared to sham SMT/placebo, it may result in a small improvement in pain and medium improvement in functional status in adults with chronic low back pain. When compared to no treatment, SMT may result in a medium improvement in pain and a large improvement in functional status." The issue they had is that the data were very noisy due to the SMT being conducted across different populations, with differing frequency, and differing application formats. In any case, if that's the worst our agenda-driven editor could dig up, then I can only conclude that chiropracty is, at the minimum, certainly not a scam. [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41494147/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41494147/
- parineum 2mo ago
  > This doesn't really make any sense, because the entire point of chiropracty is pain and function improvement. That's a function of massage which has an large overlap with what chiropractors actually do. On the other hand, the function of chiropracty is changing the alignment of the spine to solve any and all ailments. What chiropractors do nowadays isn't really chiropracty any more, it's some combination of PT and massage. It can be effective, I won't deny that but the reason they are doing things to my body is important to me and chiropractors have some odd ideas.

by chneu 2mo ago

burnt-resistor 2mo ago

It's a con like osteopathic "medicine". D.O. should be shunned and rejected because it's pretending to be legitimate and/or legitimized.

dghlsakjg 2mo ago
DOs are sorta weird in the US. They go to real medical school for 4 years like MDs and practice actual licensed medicine at the same level as an MD. They can even call themselves physicians. Non DO osteopaths are not trained with any sort of scientifically backed curriculum.
- toast0 2mo ago
  I have a cousin who is a DO (in the US). It seems like it's basically an out to get effectively an MD with a slightly lower bar for admission. Once you're in the program, it's basically the same as an MD program, and then you go through residency programs on an equal basis with MDs.

aorloff 2mo ago

Its such a scam that professional sports teams all hire chiropractors to work on the bodies they invest millions of dollars into each year.

senectus1 2mo ago
none of us is as dumb as all of us...
azan_ 2mo ago
Yes, rich people get scammed too.
Jtarii 2mo ago
Athletes are often highly superstitious and ritualistic, (and young and dumb), its not surprising they would engage in something like chiropractic. Sports science is mostly just guesswork.
- aorloff 2mo ago
  I'm not talking about athletes. I'm talking about the people who own the teams, they invest in chiropractors. People who are thinking about the ultimate economic benefit of an investment into a human body, not the athletes themselves.
  - wolrah 2mo ago
    People who realize that if their athlete believes it'll make them better, and it doesn't actually hurt them most of the time, there's value in indulging them.
    - aorloff 2mo ago
      I suppose you can find conspiracies and scams everywhere if you want to not look very hard
      - wolrah 1mo ago
        We're talking about a field that is well documented to have been started by an absolute charlatan who believed in magical "subluxations" causing basically all diseases. We know by all objective measures that the entire idea is a level of nonsense that's almost religious in scale, which is a great analogy because it similarly demonstrates how "lots of people believe in it" is an absolutely meaningless argument.
close04 2mo ago
Sports doctors were never immune to misguided treatments. The regular ice baths after an injury have already been thoroughly proven to slow down recovery. You need ice only after the initial trauma, afterwards ice just hinders the healing process. But million dollar bodies were subjected to it for years and still are. And a lot of treatments are known by the doctor to be fake but are still performed so the player benefits from the placebo effect. In the sports where the team doctor would routinely administer PEDs to the players under the guise of “vitamins” or whatever, after the practice became harder to pull off some doctors kept administering sugar pills to avoid the nocebo effect. They just follow the ritual that doesn’t harm the player but gives them peace of mind.

AngryData 2mo ago

A physical therapist costs significantly more, which is why a lot of chiropractors in rural areas with a lot of manual labor are well looked upon. They are mostly just practicing physical therapy without a medical license which could get them in trouble if it wasn't considered chiropractic work. The pure quackery doesn't get them as far because most of their customers are too poor to regularly spend on woowoo crap. In my area someone's insurance might cover the first 3-4 sessions of physical therapy, but nothing after that despite them needing it for longer. So the physical therapist will at the end of insurance billing send them down the road to do the exact same thing at the chiropractor for significantly cheaper. In places without a lot of manual labor they are probably mostly just the quackery. Their clients are lots of hypochondriacs and office workers who really just need to get more exercise but are willing to find anyone who says they can make them better without significant effort. Im sure the massages and stretching does feel good though atleast, but im sure a massage parlor would set out some crystals and do a massage for cheaper.

arcfour 2mo ago
> They are mostly just practicing physical therapy without a medical license Oh, well as long as they're only practicing medicine without a license, I suppose that's okay then...
- AngryData 2mo ago
  It is when it is the only medical care these people can afford.
  - arcfour 2mo ago
    I'm sorry, but going to a quack doctor is not medical care, much like McDonald burgers would not be a healthy meal regardless of whether or not that's all you can afford. Except at least in the McDonald's case you have to eat food to survive, so you may not have a choice. You don't have to go to a chiropractor to survive, so it's better to not go there at all than it is to go and receive possibly dangerous treatment from a con artist. Remember, there is no science behind what they do. They don't know if they're going to hurt or paralyze you because they never went to medical school!!

somenameforme 2mo ago

This doesn't really make any sense, because the entire point of chiropracty is pain and function improvement. This is measurable by people. The Wiki page on the topic is loaded with vitriol and agenda, but the study [1] they relied on to try to discredit chiropracty concludes: "When spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) is compared to sham SMT/placebo, it may result in a small improvement in pain and medium improvement in functional status in adults with chronic low back pain. When compared to no treatment, SMT may result in a medium improvement in pain and a large improvement in functional status." The issue they had is that the data were very noisy due to the SMT being conducted across different populations, with differing frequency, and differing application formats. In any case, if that's the worst our agenda-driven editor could dig up, then I can only conclude that chiropracty is, at the minimum, certainly not a scam. [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41494147/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41494147/

parineum 2mo ago
> This doesn't really make any sense, because the entire point of chiropracty is pain and function improvement. That's a function of massage which has an large overlap with what chiropractors actually do. On the other hand, the function of chiropracty is changing the alignment of the spine to solve any and all ailments. What chiropractors do nowadays isn't really chiropracty any more, it's some combination of PT and massage. It can be effective, I won't deny that but the reason they are doing things to my body is important to me and chiropractors have some odd ideas.