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Comment by abatilo | Hacker News Reader

This generalization is insane. I don't go to chiropractors regularly, and my situation was clearly be anecdotal, but there was one afternoon where any movement in my back caused me extreme pain. I scheduled a body massage to try to alleviate at least some of the pain but when I went it didn't help. Then my fiance suggested trying a chiropractor and I walked in, explained my pain, and in about 30 seconds it was all gone. I know there are skeezy chiropractors as well because I have a friend who worked for those kinds of people who swore they could cure anything. That's bull shit. But this article is a gross over generalization of a practice. The chiropractor I went to didn't try to sell me anything afterwards, he didn't promise any mirale weight loss, I just explained my pain and he fixed it. I respect that.

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I'm in Germany and the two chiropractors I've dealth with have all been orthopedist (which is tightly regulated and requires a 72 months education) also.

My anecdotal experience has been similar. The orthopedist I occasioanlly go to use chiropractic methods only sometimes. Other times he just tells me to take some pain medicine and to rest. Besides, I don't have back pain often anyway (luckily).

You should read up on the placebo effect.

edit: Just to clarify, there is no scientific evidence that chiro is effective as anything other than placebo. All evidence provided is anecdotal and hence useless.

Could very well have been a pinched nerve or super tight muscle that needed to be tweaked a certain way to release. I've been there, although didn't see a chiropractor to fix it.

I say this as a long time skeptic of chiropractic; my dad, in fact, had a terrible moment in his youth where he had lower body paralysis for 2 days after a chirp visit... My partner has ahhh unusual wrist physiology and when we moved to a new city (near where she grew up), she wanted to go visit her old chiropractor to get her wrist looked at (the same guy had looked at it 30 years ago). I bit my tongue and didn't say anything. His advice: you need to get X-rays and I'll schedule you to see a (mainstream MD) specialist.

I'm still skeptical, but it gives me a little faith that in spite of whatever quackery exists, some of them do at least recognize problems that are the domain of conventional medicine.

OK. So let's say it is the placebo effect. You can pay $50 for a massage that will manage your pain or better yet get rid of it or you can pay 100's of dollars and your insurance 1000's to be relieved of the pain with pain killers and medicine you don't need. For my money I'll choose the $50 and if it doesn't work then I'll consider other treatment options. Its seems hospitals are starting to wise up to this too. Here is Rutgers University Hospital Pain Management Center for example: "We also refer patients for alternative techniques such as acupuncture, chiropractic care, bio-feedback, and self-hypnosis."

http://njms.rutgers.edu/departments/anesthesiology/pain_cent...

Not sure what the contention is. We agree.

Almost all signal can have most of it's information expressed as a sine wave, but it's the jitter in the wave that has all the 'important' information. There's a fallacy where getting the majority of certain types of information leaves you blind to the important but "smaller" types. I think medicine and personal health is one such domain where this fallacy is abundant.

The weakness of heuristics is that they don't turn into reusable models but vice versa models can leave you blind. The constant disdain for heuristics is a huge weakness of many scientifically minded people IMO.

>almost all signal...

this the silliest misinterpretation of Fourier analysis I've ever seen and I'm not going to try refute it except to say that with the clarity you're implying Fourier decomposition applies only to periodic signals (ie saying that a signal that has a continuous time FT "has most of its information expressed as a sine wave would be an egregious exaggeration so you must talking about series expansion and that only applies to periodic signals [and I'm at a loss for how to interpret info about chiropractors as periodic]).

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