Sports doctors were never immune to misguided treatments. The regular ice baths after an injury have already been thoroughly proven to slow down recovery. You need ice only after the initial trauma, afterwards ice just hinders the healing process. But million dollar bodies were subjected to it for years and still are.

And a lot of treatments are known by the doctor to be fake but are still performed so the player benefits from the placebo effect.

In the sports where the team doctor would routinely administer PEDs to the players under the guise of “vitamins” or whatever, after the practice became harder to pull off some doctors kept administering sugar pills to avoid the nocebo effect. They just follow the ritual that doesn’t harm the player but gives them peace of mind.

Athletes are often highly superstitious and ritualistic, (and young and dumb), its not surprising they would engage in something like chiropractic.

Sports science is mostly just guesswork.

Yes, rich people get scammed too.

none of us is as dumb as all of us...