I have been reading for decades about how these MDs "just push drugs," almost always from some guy advocating for chiropractic.

It's a popular, and consistent, canard. It's also one I somehow have yet to experience in real life. As someone who had multiple referrals to physical and occupational therapists, I find the cliché amusing. If anything, docs are especially reluctant to prescribe drugs, especially for pain, these days.

Conversely I had a chiro who helped me through a serious lower back injury including spinal decompression.  I wouldn't let him snap my neck though bc that's just stupid.

In addition, “the more hours studying anatomy and physiology “ line is utter crap.  More hours of false bullshit is still bullshit.

I’ve put in many a dislocated shoulder and hip.  If you are in a chiro’s office, it’s not actually dislocated and he lied to you.

BULLSHIT

Damn...I've got a funny chiro video, but it's a Facebook link...

I have two great friends that are chiros. They’re good, Christian men and I trust them.

But… I don’t go to them. Or any chiropractor.
I thinks it’s pseudo medicine. If you want that stuff, seek a D.O.

This.... who was the hot chick that died a few yrs back.  Vertebral artery dissection.

Franco Columbo was a chiropractor.

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I've had multiple dislocated joints and drove myself to the ER for reductions, never crossed my mind to head to the chiropractor .

In my experience dislocations hurt less than broken bones or torn ligaments.

far more than are killed by firearms

My ex was a good example of a near miss with those quacks. He whole family was into using chiroquacks. Also always popping each other's backs and necks. She did it to dodge surgery. After she finally did have a C-spine fusion, the doc told us she was loaded with bone spurs that had caused some damage. I think it was from all those years of cracking her own neck before she ever had trouble.

Setting aside for the moment your seething hatred for practicing chiropractors, -in your opinion- anatomy and physiology courses taught at chiropractic colleges are...what exactly?

All bullshit?  Because you say so?  

What a riot - the PhD anatomists, physiologists and MDs who taught in my DC program would be so sad to learn they don't meet your standards.  

Bullshit because they teach nonsense like “chiropractic subluxation.”   Something that has not been objectively proven since Palmer channeled his first spirit.  If they were decent “MD and PhDs they’d be teaching at a real school.   Think about what you just said. You have to have MDs teaching medicine at chiropractic schools.  That tells a lot.

"Chiropractic subluxation" had nothing to do with any anatomy, physiology, or other science class I ever took.

And if you took any physiology, anatomy, or pathology from an MD rather than a PhD I feel sorry for you.

Nice double standard mixed in there too... if I said classes were taught by DCs you'd laugh, if they were taught by anyone with a credential you should respect those instructors couldn't be "decent".  Very intellectually honest of you.

Bet you just love seeing all the FMGs at the hospitals these days!

I'm of the opinion that if a chiropractor "fixes" your issue, 1) there probably wasn't anything wrong with you to begin with, 2) placebo effect, or 3) you could have saved money and got the same result from a massage.

When blinded, chiropractors don't even agree with each other's intrepretations of imaging.   There's been multiple reports of this, where different chripractors see subluxations  in completely different spots on the same patient.

That's generally not a problem with radiologists, though then again they have substantially more training.

Can you still get into Chriopractor school with 90 undergrad hours and no BS degree?  That was the case 15 years ago, so theoretically 2.5 years of undergrad for a whopping total of 6.5hrs of post secondary education would be enough to get out into practice.  

Seeing as how it's based on pseudoscience, I'd say that 6.5 hours is far more than necessary.

Which programs' curriculums are you using for your first claim? Most med schools hide the actual number of semester hours and schedules behind their fancy websites so the skull-crushing number of hours isn't apparent.
More time in their education on x-rays and other imagery than a radiologist?

Kharn

D.O. here.  I have several issues with chiropractic.

1. Bones have no intrinsic motor function- cracking someone's neck might temporarily restore range of motion, but without effectively dealing with the muscle hypertonicity that caused the dysfunction, the results won't last.  This is good for the chiropractor's wallet, because patients get stuck on the merry-go-round of weekly adjustments, but bad for patient outcomes.  

2. The top-down "fix the neck and everything will heal!" Approach makes no sense.  The idea that nerve conduction is being restricted by neck dysfunction to areas of the body that aren't even innervated by the cervical nerve roots makes no sense.

3. Overly aggressive approach with high-velocity manipulation.  It's designed to give the patient audible feedback that "it's working" so many chiropractors seek out the cracks over all else because it increases patient buy-in.  There are gentle low impact alternatives to most of these that often give better results.  My med school trains us in cervical HVLA (neck cracking) but I won't do it in my practice.  Too much risk, and my patient results are much better without it.

30 years of chiropractic adjustments done by 4 different docs.
Attached File

FMGs are better than witch doctors , I’d say.

Yes.  90 undergrad hours with a 2.75 to get into one of the Palmer schools.  On their very website, I kid you not, it read at one point “have less than a 2.75? We can work with you.”

1, 2, better not sue!

I hate to tell you this, but if your back was seriously fucked up a chiro is not going to help you. Mild bulge then decompression or taction can help. You can ask anyone in here that has been bad enough to end up having spinal surgery.

Point 1 and 2 are based on misinformation or assumptions ~ that no additional therapies or treatments are applied, and that chiropractic treatments only involve the c-spine.  Neither is chiropractic dogma or the norm in practice IME.

3 carries a little more weight in that I agree it is very easy for DCs and patients to get focused on joint cavitation - a concern specifically addressed in my education.  You might reread your #3 and question why your osteopathic school would teach something you say is designed for buy-in.  Joint cavitation is not the focus of my practice.

Like others in this thread you seem to be commenting on what you've heard about chiropractic ~ largely from biased sources.

Perhaps from a similar level of ignorance or misunderstanding* I might say key issues I have with osteopathy are:
1. The foundational idea that manipulation of the joints can stimulate blood flow enough to improve specific function or overall health does not bear up under the weight of modern science.

2. Based on how few credit hours DO schools list for manipulative technique/therapies your profession probably shouldn't be doing any of it.

3. Most DOs don't give a hoot about holism much less manual therapies they just wanted to get into "medical school".

(Not personal digs - refer back to the *)

A fair amount.  But also there's a LOT more visits to traditional healthcare than chiropractors.

But I'll bet if you dive into those statistics, a lot of errors aren't actually made by the physician.  Not like they're usually giving the injections and such.

Doctors are quacks. Many recommended the covid vaccine that nearly killed me.

If Chiropractic is inherently unsafe compared to the rest of healthcare we sure have the malpractice insurance industry fooled.

I pay a tiny fraction of what even a family practice MD/DO would.

Enough fun for one night, appreciate the respectful parts of the conversation.

Best chiro I ever had was my desk in high school.  It was one of those plastic seats with the wrap around writing surface/armrest.  I could put my hands against the desk portion and push backwards into the seat which would flex and "adjust" 3/4s of my spine.

If you are doing chiropractic and not doing physical therapy as well, you are doing yourself a disservice.  Your doctor should be able to give you beneficial stretching and conditioning exercises that will improve things significantly.


That doesn't have to be an either/or, it can be get both.


I don't need to do chiropractic, but still do yoga and conditioning specifically for back issues and have no pain and no issues.  If I take a few days or a week off, I can certainly notice it.

I'm glad to hear that my first couple concerns aren't mainstream doctrine.  That's how they were explained to me by the chiro that worked on me in my earlier days.  

Fair questions all.  I've got some real disagreements with how manipulation is taught in Osteopathy.  

1. Fully agree- I use manipulation for musculoskeletal pain only.  It bothers me that some of the antiquated techniques are still taught.  I'm not going to waste my patient's time doing lymphatic pumping or something.  

2. Most D.Os don't actually do manipulation.  The ones that do usually have devoted extra time outside the required coursework.  I would wager the hours in those cases are comparable.  

3. Maybe.  D.O. schools have a reputation for being MD safety schools.  It's unfortunate, but that's not everyone's situation (I was accepted to both and opted for D.O.). I am board certified by the same board that handle MDs, so I don't think the quotation marks around medical school are necessary.

I am a huge proponent of OMT, but I also think we exaggerate the precision, specificity and scope of our manipulation for exam purposes, and to make it seem more scientific than it is.  It's a helpful tool for some things, but isn't a cure-all.  

I'm not anti-chiropractor.  If a patient of mine has one they like, I encourage them to keep going, provided they are getting good results.  I just see more shade-tree practitioners in chiropractic than other areas.

Would Soak

"Over 250,000 people in the U.S. die each year because of medical errors, making it the third leading cause of death in this country behind heart disease and cancer, according to a Johns Hopkins study."

It seems everyones opinions in here are out of alignment, go figure. OP needs to adjust his thread title since the content isnt what its cracked up to be

Oddly enough, that information can be found online anywhere. Specifically, where it outlines curriculum for Med vs Chiro students and how much time is devoted to A&P and Imaging.  Also, I'm not sure how having more hours of studying and reading Xrays is "false bullshit" either.

Do you care to explain Chiro vs MD malpractice insurance rates?

I'm sure your a great Doc, NavyDoc1...Can you say that about all of your colleagues or everyone in your profession? If not, then don't go shitting on everyone else because you disagree. There happens to be a General that disagrees with you.  

https://www.beckyhalstead.com/wp-content/themes/beckyhalstead/pdf/healthy-lifestyles.pdf

Oh...and some world class athletes.

https://www.greatercincychiro.com/blog/17218-how-chiropractic-care-changed-tom-bradys-career_2

I missed my calling.

I have an excellent Chiro, but I refuse to let him do my neck. The thought of being paralyzed terrifies me.

I went to one years ago when I developed a neck stiffness that kept me in pain.  I think the key was that he was a small guy and his adjustments were gentle.  He fixed my problem in a couple visits and now I haven't been back in years.  I visited another one closer to home, a big guy, and he separated one of my ribs using too much force.  Find a small chiropractor and your should be ok.  Seriously.

This thread goes all over the place,
But if you’re throwing down examples of a spectrumish looking person raving how it made their fibromyalgia better I’d probably rethink my choice of evidence.

I have a decent amount of experience reviewing high quality density populations.  And it always has to start with objective measure.  And while massage, stretching, adjustment like physical contact, etc. can make musculoskeletal symptoms improve-

The reality is the quality density between a group of orthopedic spine surgeons and neurosurgeons vs a group of chiropractors is a world apart.  The reproducibility and consensus of radiographic reads among them is also dismal compared to radiologists, and even physicians that kind of have to act on their own calls in the spot- such
as surgeons, emergency physicians, intensivists, etc.


Now, the overall quality density of US MD grads, DO grads, and successful fifth pathway FMGs is also significantly higher respectively for each group as well.   And based on science, research, etc. to degrees not remotely approached in your field.

They have expensive malpractice because they have patients arriving with bleeding in their brain, surgeries that need to be performed, heart rates of 280, babies stuck in their vagina, systemic infections with hypotension, doing the Fred Sanford for real, are very old with lots of problems, etc. No 87 year old bed ridden patient with dementia is walking into a strip mall for an adjustment with their pacemaker defibrillator firing, no blood pressure, in acute renal failure.  Or about to have a baby plus trying to die from infected heart valves from shooting up drugs.

Now, before it looks like I am rushing to the defense and virtues of the medical field-
DIE and social justice are hammering away at you. MD  Schools are waiving the real year old Calc, and thus accepting physics for poets instead of physics with Calc, making life science/premed only year of organic courses that are easier then Chem major organic, the MCATs have been readjusted to give less weight to the hard stuff to know and more weight to the easier stuff to know, med schools have repackaged the 120 or so semester hours of academics of the first two years from subject based to systems based to try and keep less from failing or repeating, and step one scores of the boards are now being reported as pass/fail instead of percentile scores to keep poorer candidates from being passed over for residencies.

And there is some expansion occurring in existing MD schools and even a small amount of new schools.  DO schools have long had a slight center of the curve a little to the left of the MD schools, and a much longer tail to the left.  And they have been expanding like mad for a few decades.  Because they are essentially where to go if a candidate failed to matriculate at an MD school. (There is a ton of overlap- does not mean the curves do not overlap and someone from one is automatically inferior or superior to someone from another.). They are popping up without real academic departments and suboptimal clinical education arrangements because they can get people to pay 50K  year to go there.  And the majority have zero interest in manipulations.  They just want to be a doctor.  Then we have contract management groups backed by venture capital groups supporting new residencies.  Not because they want to make things better or cheaper for parents.  Because they want to cut labor and operating costs and increase profits.  The offshore schools for US citizens have always existed to make money from suboptimal candidates.  Most of which will not go on to graduate or get a US residency.

So,
When all is said and done-
There are basically two types of medicine going on concurrently at any given time in America.
One is, for lack of a better word- Serious Medicine.
You’re having a heart attack, can’t breathe because of your heart failure, emphysema, pneumonia, etc.,have been in a bad accident, got shot, are bleeding inside your skull, your appendix burst or your gallbladder is infected and needs to be cut out, etc.  And for serious medicine, the smarter, better educated, better trained, more experienced the doc- and the more scientifically sound and objective research backed what they do is- this is all important.

The other is basically regular medicine.  Your annual physical, a sinus infection, a sprained ankle, a pulled muscle, telling people to eat better, get some exercise, lose some weight, quit smoking, don’t do bad drugs, don’t screw any hole unprotected, take your meds, etc.  We as a whole are horrible at doing a lot of that instruction and between aging and doing stuff bad for us tend to progress from basic regular medicine to serious medicine.  It’s not two distinct corrals we are herded into.  It’s a big open range. A diabetic can be in the regular medicine herd for years, then stop taking their meds and be in the serious medicine herd next week.

So, basically, if Thanos snapped his glove right now, and all the surgeons, ER docs, intensivists, etc. disappeared-
A shit load of people are going to be dying.

If he made all the regular admission, regular our patient kind of docs disappear-
It would take a while but a bunch of people are going to stop dying.

If he did it to all the DCs, most of us wouldn’t notice and nobody is going to die.

So between comparing the quality density of various groups, and the practical impact of the absence of some of those groups-
We have very different results.

And that’s OK.

You guys are so judgmental.
I bet it says similar stuff when you go to the Dartmouth or University of Virginia’s medical school sites.

My mother was a nurse for an orthopedic surgeon.
They used to get many patients that had been to a chiropractor and had been injured.

I've been to a good one, and many bad ones... from profesional medical office buildings to leased structures with hippy voodoo.

Only one actually delivered. Wouldn't think twice about going back... was my go to for years.

Things that will never happen to me.

This