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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

At best, Chiropractors are bullshit. At worst, they kill or paralyze people.

Their manipulations offer temporary pain relief because they forcefully mobilize the joint/bone structure. The only way to fix this long term is by correcting the muscle imbalances through physical therapy. Most people would rather get immediate pain relief vs months of therapy and exercise, so they have a constant supply of victims.

Chiropractic care should be outlawed as snake oil or health plans should stop covering it.

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Some chiropractors do have the education and experience to operate as physical therapists. When I was doing competitive weight lifting, I saw a chiro who had a masters in sports medicine and had spent years as a college football trainer. He ran his office like a rehab clinic, and a lot of his clients were high school, college, and amateur athletes like me. He wasn't just popping some bones and moving on, he was working to keep his patients healthy through identifying weaknesses and imbalances and making training recommendations to correct them. Being a chiro got people in the door who didn't understand what their problem was to begin with, just that they needed relief.

I realize the industry is full of snake oil practitioners, but some of them are actual professionals.

Then the not snake-oil subset should abandon the label of chiropractor. Otherwise they're just giving cover to the charlatans.

This is unfortunately a common pattern for bullshit pseudomedicine. They make up something random that looks like treatment and has some limited, short-term effect. By doing so they gain followers, who keep repeating the standard story.

It's scary effective.

When I read a sentence like your first one, it sounds to me like somebody saying, "at best, massages are bullshit", which just strikes me as odd. At the very least it's clear that lots of people self report feeling better after partaking in their services, in both cases.

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