The heading above is the topic of the month because for as far back as I can remember I have heard people ask the questions: ‘Is chiropractic safe’? ‘Is there any research behind chiropractic’? ‘Many people that have tried it, love it and swear by it but why doesn’t mainstream medicine like you guys historically’?
And so on and so forth… As many of you know, I am super passionate about what I do and more so I love teaching people about the capacity of their own body to heal itself. I believe that if you can inspire someone to take control over their own health then you become a health facilitator and join someone on their health journey, rather than the driver for that person where they will always need you in some way to maintain their health. Teaching people where real health comes from (ie inside of them) is more than enough to get me out of bed in the morning for each of my clients, and some would say that it is all the ‘reason’ that I need. However we live in a world that demands scientific proof, analysis and or statistics to justify everything we do.
In this analytical world we are, as a society, continuously using our educated brain and rationale as opposed to our intuition, instincts and inborn (Innate) intelligence. The problem with this is that the human body has far too many processes and functions that science has not yet understood or discovered their total workings. So science does not yet have all the answers! When you state the word ‘based on scientific research or scientifically evaluated’ it seems to be enough for the common person to trust “that” information over their own intuition.
In the world of health care, it has been speculated and highlighted that alternative medicine has not been researched, and does not have as much scientific evidence as mainstream medicine. However this is not necessarily true. When I was studying at university over 10 years ago, there was a large emphasis on the safety of chiropractic care to the general public. Much of the chiropractic research conducted and analysed through looking up papers had the most amount of evidence in terms of treatment impact for our clients. The problem that we faced was that there are different levels of research each with varying weights of validity in the research world.
Chiropractic has a large number of case studies where someone has seen a chiropractor because they had symptom, and therefore something wrong with them, and through the course of treatment they had favourable results with that symptom. This form of research holds less weight as it is just a one off treatment on one person versus other types of research that involve more people in the study with a placebo, control and treatment groups.
Unfortunately it is hard for chiropractic to have this form of research as it takes copious amounts of money and time. It is also hard to tell a patient that is part of a placebo group that they have been adjusted (ie trick them) when you have not touched them, as apposed to taking a sugar pill in some drug trials, I hope that all makes sense.
All this being said we as chiropractors dont have the highest amount of the highest level of research (the Placebo RCCT). What we do have though, are many case studies and a fantastic word of mouth reputation that has been around for over 120 years with enormous client to client feedback. In regard to our safety record I “legally” cant tell you that we are a safe profession but if you compare the results you can make up your own minds about our safety records and compare them to other forms of health care and other ways to die if you so choose.
I love what I do at The IN8 Life and I personally have been using chiropractic for myself for over 25 years and I trust it enough to have my children aged 6 weeks, 2 and 4 years adjusted weekly.
Thanks for reading if you have any questions or would like to know my opinion on other areas then let me know when you’re in next or send me an email.