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Comment by Geimfari | Hacker News Reader

There only exists two proven methods for stopping back pain: Physical exercise and rest.

Many things tend to go away by themselves (regression to the mean), back pain appears to be one of them and we haven't found better ways to treat it.

Chiropractors often make one feel good for a few days but the effect does not last.

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I love how everyone thinks they are an expert. I went to physiotherapy for over a year. I took medications for longer. Neither worked. I took a short course of chiro and the pain permanently went away.

No, you went to a bad physiotherapist. Most likely you should have gone to a Physio that actually gets stuck in and manipulates your facet joints and vertebrae to help get the muscles out of spasm and get the joints comfortable moving again.

The reason people get relief from chiropractors is manipulating joints is shown to help free up joints and take muscles out of spasm.

Physiotherapists practice evidence based medicine, chiros try stuff and get lucky, it happens that there is an overlap in the Venn diagram of those two fields.

Physiotherapists are like programmers—there are good ones and there are bad ones. I've met better chiropractors than physiotherapists because they are actually passionate about solving the problem of pain. Because of this interest, the chiropractors become incredibly interested in the only real, long-term solution to back pain short of a broken bone: consistent, smart, exercise specific to the areas in which you experience pain along with a whole body prime. Their practice is the basis for spinal manipulation and a quick massage. The only real solution for you as a patient get off your back and exercise and find the smart people regardless of what it is they are trained in. Smartness beats education anyway.

Agreed, exactly how I recovered from a herneated L5S1

Don't know why people are downvoting the above comment. Yes It's anecdotal, yes it contradicts the articles argument but It's still an interesting personal account.

That's the problem with anecdata: Whenever I had muscle or joint pain, physiotherapy and massages helped massively in easing them. Who of us is right now?

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