Chiropractic: Quackery Hiding in Plain Sight

Chiropractic adjustment is a scam! It’s quackery of the purest kind dreamt up by a snake-oil salesman who claimed he was told from beyond the grave that manual therapy, especially spinal manipulation therapy, restores your body’s “innate intelligence”, curing all of your ailments. There is no scientific evidence that it can restore or maintain health, and only lukewarm evidence that it can help with lower back pain, with most credible research putting it on par with a good massage. Chiropractic adjustments are frequently associated with mild to moderate adverse effects, with serious or fatal complications in rare cases. Yet, despite these well-documented facts, chiropractic adjustment remains a $15-billion industry, with the largest number of chiropractors (approximately 75,000 of them) found in the United States. There, this quackery has wormed its way into the health care system and the psyche of the general population, who have been conned into thinking that this pseudo-medical alternative therapy has real health benefits, and who allow these charlatans to perform potentially fatal manipulations upon them. Up until recently, I thought everyone was on the same page regarding the ineffectiveness of chiropractic, however, my comments section was inundated with people telling me that I was wrong when I listed it as an example of modern-day quackery. After reading the comments defending chiropractic adjustment, which were almost exclusively written by Americans, I realised that there is a lot of misinformation out there. My hope with this blog post is to counter some of that misinformation and attempt to critically evaluate its effectiveness.