Do Chiropractors help? Is there evidence that chiropractic works?

Dr. Wainwright here from Tallahassee Spinal Care, and today I wanted to discuss the research supporting chiropractic.

A lot of times if you search on the internet, you’ll find that people will say Chiropractors have no evidence for what they do, there’s no research supporting it, it’s pseudoscience, they’re all you know, some people will say they’re all quacks and things like that. I know that’s not necessarily accepted by everybody but you do see it on the internet and people basically making outlandish claims.

And today I wanted to unpack for you just basically some of the research that I have sitting in my office currently. Okay, so the first piece of research I wanted to share with you is basically this book (shown in the video), this is a book that was written in 1934 by the developer of chiropractic BJ Palmer, he basically tried to catalog and organize all the research that he was doing in his clinic, I guess just under 100 years ago. So obviously this is old research this is not something that is current but I mean this is basically where it all started. So it’s a pretty pretty good amount of information in this book.

Naturally I don’t practice based off of information a hundred years old but it does give us a starting point of where we can build from. Next, we have basically all these different books (shown in the video), each of these books, it does not actually have a research paper in it, what they actually have is the titles and just a quick snippet of what each research paper represents. So, if you look at all of these books stacked together you’ll find that there are literally thousands of research papers that are basically documenting and giving us more information about the effects of the chiropractic adjustment and how certain treatments work and what different parts of the body’s physiology that they affect.

So there are like I said just oodles and oodles of information, I have read through all of these to basically get a better idea of what research does support and what research is still lacking and that is still needed to be done in the chiropractic field. So with that being said if anybody ever says like, hey there’s no research to support that, I always direct them to pick up a book as opposed to just reading through the first couple searches on a Google search. There’s always more you just have to dig for it. So, really like the research here. Now with that being said, some people would ask me if I’m satisfied with the research that the chiropractic profession has put out, as far as the amount of research, the answer is no, I am not satisfied. And the reason for that is we are pursuing truth, we are always trying to get better, we’re always trying to get better ways of taking care of our patients and so the answer pretty much will always be, do we have enough research? No, we always need more research, we can always be getting better, we can always get better information and learn to make you know a better experience for our patients and help them get well faster.

So I will be planning on doing a research paper at some point here in the next several years. I’m really looking forward with my fellowship to improving my level of research even in my own clinical practice. And so with that being said, I hope to be able to add to this stack of research that we have here. So hopefully this kind of gives you guys a better idea if you want specific papers, if you want any kind of specific information on different studies that you’re curious about for chiropractic or for having your spine adjusted or any kind of spine care, I’d be happy to try to send you some information, I can send you a photocopy I can email you, just give me a call, you know my staff a call and they’d be happy to try to send out some information to you.