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Comment by sigmaprimus | Hacker News Reader

I hurt my back moving a friend, went to a chiropractor for two weeks. Im not sure if it wad a pinched nerve or what but the pain was excruciating when transitioning from standing to sitting and vice versa. On my 4th visit the pain was still there but the chiropractor put me on the table positined me on my side with my arms arcross my chest and knees bent and amazingly he pushed down and the pain dissapeared instantly.

So I might be an outlier but can attest that a chiropractor fixed my back pain, I was 100% pain free and never needed to go back.

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Lots of people have this kind of experience. If you did a survey asking people whether chiropractors are useful for musculoskeletal problems, you would get a strong response that yes they are. But self reported experience, even through a broad survey is not evidence because people can't be trusted to accurately report what they feel.

I personally think the problem is that the practice has over-medicalized what it does, and medicine does indeed require a high burden of objective evidence, which they can't meet. But there are plenty of things that people do where "do people like it?" and "is it safe enough?" are high enough bars.

I do think the question of "is it safe enough?" is the interesting one with respect to chiropractic adjustments, and I wish that were better separated from the (in my opinion) more tedious debate about whether it is generally BS.

The alternative in past observed experience was going to a doctor for back pain and being prescribed pills that turned you into a pill addict that needed to be weaned off of them.

Personally, I know the adjustments work, but I’ve seen the alternative scenario with guys I’ve played hockey with they were hurt, and even if it were all in my head, it’s still a far superior outcome frankly. I’m pain free and drug free.

>because people can't be trusted...

I suppose that is true, where I live chiropractic visits are subsidized by a government run medical system and because of that, there is a detailed record of treatment. Positive and negative outcome inference should be possible with such a record so trusting people is not required.

In other words, if enough people visited chiropractors and then later visited doctors for pain medication and or surgery then there would be a reasonable argument against funding chiropractic treatments. I can only assume the opposite is also true, hence the reason they are currently and have been funding chiropractor treatments for the last three decades.

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