If you open Instagram and search “Chiropractor,” it’s inevitable that you’ll find a video of someone lying on a table, moaning in agony as their chiropractor presses down as hard as they can on their spine to realign it. It’s hard, watching those videos, to imagine the amount of medical training chiropractors have to go through to put that amount of pressure on your body safely.
It’s even harder to imagine that Chiropractors spend less time in school than someone with a master’s degree and receive almost no real medical training.
Knowing that, the question becomes “Who on earth decided this was a good idea?”
In 1895, outside of his “magnetic healing” office, a man named D.D. Palmer met the building’s janitor. The janitor, who had a hearing impairment, also just so happened to have a large bump on his back. Lillard believed that fixing the lump on his back would cure his hearing, and performed the first chiropractic adjustment on the spot. Where did he get such a wonderful idea?
He got it from a ghost.
The inventor of Chiropractic medicine, the one who started an entire alternative health movement, claimed that he had spoken to the ghost of Dr. Jim Atkinson. More than that, Palmer had no medical training. In 1905, he was jailed for practicing medicine without a license.
Not all chiropractors are lying about having medical licenses, curing deafness, or doing time in prison. However, what most of them are doing is injuring people.
In a study done in 2020, around 50% of people who had a spinal adjustment done by a chiropractor claimed that they had some kind of adverse effect. 82% of chiropractors admitted that at least one patient had experienced adverse effects after a spinal adjustment. To put that in perspective, you’re twice as likely to have a bad reaction to a chiropractic adjustment as you are to have a bad reaction to actual brain surgery.
A lot of that is because of how little training chiropractors have in comparison to brain surgeons. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you generally have to complete 15 years of training to actually practice. Chiropractors need a minimum of 6 years. To put crazy amounts of force on your literal spine, they need just over one-third of the amount of schooling as neurosurgeons, who often treat things like spinal injuries. These spinal injuries can be caused by, you guessed it! Chiropractors!
None of this is to say that chiropractors are completely useless. It’s only to say that if you’re having health issues, you should go to a doctor to get recommendations. Chiropractors, especially those with more specialised degrees, can do a lot of good for certain people’s health. At their best, they’re more violent massage therapists. At their worst, they’re people masquerading as medical professionals who do not have nearly enough training for what they’re doing.
So the next time you see a video online, maybe featuring some super satisfying cracking sounds while a chiropractor pushes their entire body weight onto some poor sucker’s back, imagine a much better ghost than Dr. Jim Atkinson. Imagine a ghost who reminds you that just maybe, you can book a normal massage.
