I have a pinched nerve. I went to many doctors, done many tests, went to months of PT and was still in pain. I went to my acupuncturist and she is able to release the muscles around the pinch enough that my right arm doesn’t feel constantly numb. I a man of science. I don’t believe in he Chi traveling my body etc but the physical result of the acuponcture cannot be denied.
There isn’t much evidence there. There’s dry needling, which is the evidence-based alternative with different techniques - but much of that is built on the same evidence behind massage therapy.
I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.
My brother was in total kidney failure and his chiro said the pain was likely “toxins” released from his session. Utter quack. They arent all hacks, but they can do real damage. They can paralyze you for life or even worse. I hope you will not have firsthand experience
I used to believe the “they aren’t all hacks thing” until I met more chiropractors. While I would like to believe that there’s a subset of them out there who treat it more like a science of doing adjustments and what not, I don’t think that’s actually the case. My mom works for a chiropractor and has gone to several of their conventions over the years, and from what it sounds like they are all nutjobs who believe aligning your spine will cure you of all disease.
I would really love to see the numbers of how many chiropractors are antivaxxers. I bet it’s in the high 90%.
A friend went in for a colonoscopy and died from a series of complications. First they nicked the inside of her colon, and it started bleeding. Then there was a whole series of stupid responses, based on the meds she was taking and had disclosed. They just made one mistake after another, until she died.
None of us knew she was walking into that hospital for the last time, because we were all relying on the doctors to be masters of their craft.
To find religious behavior in the medical field doesn’t take long. Another friend has described being unable to process patients because the blood pressure equipment is broken. They’re down to one machine, and the manual squeeze bulbs have all failed, so there’s a massive backlog in their clinic.
Now, they know clinical outcomes are suffering as a result of the lack of throughput, but they have to take blood pressure on every patient before they do anything else. So they’re beholden to this policy, and can’t practice medicine in a rational manner. But they’re embedded in a system that won’t let them use their eyes and brains to operate on what’s in front of them.
So even without belief in the supernatural, doctors are serving a “false god” which is the bureaucracy, and because they can’t serve two gods that means actual medical practice itself takes a second seat.
Oh I know, and I don’t trust any that ask me what other non-skeletal ailments I have (I had one tell me my acid reflux could be cured by chiro). But I have a few skeletal problems I go to them for about 3 times a year, and it helps.
MDs give you incorrect information too. I had a GP for 5 years who, when I talked about my cataplexy - a well-documented condition that is directly related to my (at that time, undiagnosed) narcolepsy - he told me to go on birth control, then he changed my antidepressant meds, and then when those things didn’t help me, he said “try exercising more and lose some weight”. If he would had looked up the symptoms I was describing (like I eventually did), he would have probably recommend I see a sleep doctor, but instead, I lived with narcolepsy under his care for 5 years, almost getting fired for falling asleep at my job.
I know it’s not the same, as your brother had a life-threatening condition, but all this to say that MDs aren’t all outstanding professionals either.
It’s true that malpractice is a thing, and lord knows I’ve met plenty of doctors ranging from asshole to idiot. You’re especially at risk if you’re a female or minority which is just another layer of bullshit with healthcare outcomes. That said, I’ll take the person with a decade of school and required practice over a chiro any day. Sucks that it’s still something of a crapshoot :/
The issue with chiropractors is that they treat the symptom and not the cause. If your back is misaligned, it’s because your muscles are pulling on it the wrong way, the chiro will pull it back in place but now your muscles are still pulling the wrong way and they may have pulled on the muscle to make it move and may have injured it, now your muscle says hell no you don’t and starts pulling even more. It’s instant relief with little lasting result. which is a great business model, instant result and returning customers because the problem isn’t treated. It’s like going to the mechanic because your motor is out of oil but not trying to fix the leak so you come back every week to refill the oil.
The problem is I’ve been to numerous doctors, working with a pain management specialist now, done physical therapy with a few different places for months, do physical therapy every morning, do yoga, exercise every day, and still no relief. So, like, sometimes it gets so bad I go to the chiropractor because at least they can give me some relief.
Have you tried visiting a register massage therapist? They can provide even better immediate relief without the pseudoscience. It pairs very well with physical therapy.
Not covered by my insurance, sadly. Chiropractic is, but not massage therapy. Plus, it’s very hard to find a pro massage therapist where I live. But thanks for the advice.
This is why you skip the chiropractor and go to the rolfer instead. They’ll free up the fascial tension and release the forces pulling your system out of whack.
I had to look this up. Honestly, I think that the connective tissue is my problem as the ortho surgeon(s) have said there’s nothing wrong with my bone structure, but also said they have no idea what’s wrong. Same same with the pain management specialist, he is just out to treat my symptoms (something an earlier poster said was an issue with chiropractors).
I honestly think there’s a lot of types of medicine out there that work for people, even the “pseudoscience” or “new-age” ones. No one should put their lives in the hands of medicine that has no scientific basis (ie if you have terminal cancer), but when it comes to chronic pain and other non-urgent but life-impacting ailments, as long as you do your homework as to who you’re seeing and the potential risks of treatment, it’s your choice. I get that people had bad experiences (proposing chiropractic can cure kidney failure), but if you’ve tried the “scientific” avenues (even going to multiple doctors), and no one can give you relief, you have to look elsewhere.
Just FYI two options you have are myofascial release and rolfing. Rolfing is myofascial release plus an extra layer of theory about how to target and sequence the releases for maximum long-term effect.
Part of the theory is that these tension patterns tend to exist across the entire body at once, so a rolfer will work on multiple body parts that are all related to the same pattern. The idea is that releasing just one component will cause the tension to just re-form again quickly, because it’s also stored in the other places.
The few things they do that are effective are better delivered by an evidence-based provider (e.g., physiotherapist, massage therapist) without the pseudoscience.
Where’s the proof that massage therapy is more evidence-based than chiropractic? Honest question, a cursory search seems to show that it’s not. Also, interesting that my chiropractic and physical therapy visits are covered by my insurance, but massage therapy is not. Wish I could afford it.
I should probably specify that it does vary by jurisdiction when it comes to massage therapy. We have registered massage therapists here. Some massage therapists might employ some pseudoscience, but there’s solid evidence on the near-term therapeutic benefits of massage. For chiropractic, it’s pretty much entirely based on pseudoscience.
If you need to fix a problem, a physical therapist is the way to go. If you want temporary relief, a massage therapist can be helpful. There’s no good reason to see a chiropractor - and it’s unfortunate that insurance providers (including my own) don’t allow those funds to be spent on actual treatments.
See an osteopath instead, in the UK at least, they are trained and regulated unlike chiropractors who regularly kill or permanently disable people with unsafe and inappropriate “manipulations”.
Thanks, I’ll check it out (though I’m in the US). Also, I researched my chiropractor very thoroughly to ensure that he’s not likely to kill or disable me.
edit: turns out my insurance covers osteopathic manipulative medicine, and there’s 1 practitioner in my area (25 miles, probably more in the 50 mile range since I’m close to a big city). I will be making an appointment with her. Thanks kind stranger!
The guy who told you to see an osteopath is a little misinformed and had things a bit upside down. Osteopathy is basically just chiropractic and has the same pseudoscientific origins.
However, for historical reasons osteopaths are very different either side of the Atlantic.
In the UK, osteopaths are basically just chiropractors with pretensions. In the US, doctors of Osteopathy are basically just doctors who went to a school that teaches osteopathic nonsense alongside real medicine, and they are licensed and operate as real physicians.
My former boss, who is one of the biggest pieces of shit I know, has a severe back injury and goes to a chiropractor for it. Dude’s gonna end up paralyzed or worse. He works with doctors daily.
my statutory health insurance (germany) pays for acupuncture. so it seems to be proven that it works so well that they cover the costs for the treatment
The information being passed isn’t just nerve signals.
Basically, imagine a human body as being like a whip. If you take parts of the whip and make them stiff, then you can’t crack the whip. The whip in its pliable form is capable of conducting a wave down its length. The whip with a stiff section can’t conduct that wave.
In the whip, this wave is its “chi”. A stiff section of the whip blocks its chi from flowing. It has a chi blockage. If the whip’s chi channels are open, then it can be cracked.
The more of your body you can recruit into each movement, the more efficient that movement is. I believe that different parts of the body “communicate” (more precisely they respond to one another’s actions) via tension and pressure. When a section of your body is stiff, that tension and pressure is less readable across that barrier. Your neck muscles will have a harder time predicting and responding to – and ultimately optimizing – the actions of your quadriceps, for example, if your trunk doesn’t convey the mechanical “signals” well enough for your neck muscles to tell what’s going on at the other end of the body.
To understand what I mean about responding, think of the way your body wobbles when you stand on one leg. That’s tons of muscles in your body responding to information about your balance point. Your gut muscles might clench for a fraction of a second in response to your knee detecting that your leg has become less stable. Just an example. This action is coordinated, classically, by peripheral ganglia of the nervous system. But I believe it also relies on mechanical signals – waves of pressure and tension, because mechanical signals conduct faster than nerve signals. (nerve conduction is about 50 m/s, speed of sound in the human body is about 1500 m/s)
Think of a flock of birds. Those birds each carry about a swarming algorithm: they make real-time decisions based on the positions and velocities of the other birds. The result is a flock that moves like an intelligent amoeba in the sky. Now imagine if you created some visual barrier in the middle of the flock. Now the birds on one side of that barrier can’t effectively swarm with the birds on the other side. The flock has been split into two flocks. That visual information is the flock’s “chi”, and the blockage makes the flock less integrated.
Various body parts – muscles, organs, nerve ganglia, senses – are a swarm, and a chi blockage is something that splits that swarm into two or more smaller swarms.
I have a pinched nerve. I went to many doctors, done many tests, went to months of PT and was still in pain. I went to my acupuncturist and she is able to release the muscles around the pinch enough that my right arm doesn’t feel constantly numb. I a man of science. I don’t believe in he Chi traveling my body etc but the physical result of the acuponcture cannot be denied.
And there are physical therapists who do acupuncture strictly for muscle release without all of the chi stuff.
Yes absolutely. They call it needling though
Acupuncture has actually been shown to help in some cases beyond a placebo effect.
There isn’t much evidence there. There’s dry needling, which is the evidence-based alternative with different techniques - but much of that is built on the same evidence behind massage therapy.
Not really.
I feel the same about chiropractic - many people call bullshit, but I’ll be damned if they don’t help me. Like you, I don’t believe “your spine is where all your problems originate” like some chiropractics try to peddle, but the dude pushes on my back and it pops and it feels better.
My brother was in total kidney failure and his chiro said the pain was likely “toxins” released from his session. Utter quack. They arent all hacks, but they can do real damage. They can paralyze you for life or even worse. I hope you will not have firsthand experience
I used to believe the “they aren’t all hacks thing” until I met more chiropractors. While I would like to believe that there’s a subset of them out there who treat it more like a science of doing adjustments and what not, I don’t think that’s actually the case. My mom works for a chiropractor and has gone to several of their conventions over the years, and from what it sounds like they are all nutjobs who believe aligning your spine will cure you of all disease.
I would really love to see the numbers of how many chiropractors are antivaxxers. I bet it’s in the high 90%.
I base that solely off the fact that some have MDs and a dislike of sweeping generalizations… no matter how true 😅
Yeah but so can regular doctors.
A friend went in for a colonoscopy and died from a series of complications. First they nicked the inside of her colon, and it started bleeding. Then there was a whole series of stupid responses, based on the meds she was taking and had disclosed. They just made one mistake after another, until she died.
None of us knew she was walking into that hospital for the last time, because we were all relying on the doctors to be masters of their craft.
To find religious behavior in the medical field doesn’t take long. Another friend has described being unable to process patients because the blood pressure equipment is broken. They’re down to one machine, and the manual squeeze bulbs have all failed, so there’s a massive backlog in their clinic.
Now, they know clinical outcomes are suffering as a result of the lack of throughput, but they have to take blood pressure on every patient before they do anything else. So they’re beholden to this policy, and can’t practice medicine in a rational manner. But they’re embedded in a system that won’t let them use their eyes and brains to operate on what’s in front of them.
So even without belief in the supernatural, doctors are serving a “false god” which is the bureaucracy, and because they can’t serve two gods that means actual medical practice itself takes a second seat.
Oh I know, and I don’t trust any that ask me what other non-skeletal ailments I have (I had one tell me my acid reflux could be cured by chiro). But I have a few skeletal problems I go to them for about 3 times a year, and it helps.
MDs give you incorrect information too. I had a GP for 5 years who, when I talked about my cataplexy - a well-documented condition that is directly related to my (at that time, undiagnosed) narcolepsy - he told me to go on birth control, then he changed my antidepressant meds, and then when those things didn’t help me, he said “try exercising more and lose some weight”. If he would had looked up the symptoms I was describing (like I eventually did), he would have probably recommend I see a sleep doctor, but instead, I lived with narcolepsy under his care for 5 years, almost getting fired for falling asleep at my job.
I know it’s not the same, as your brother had a life-threatening condition, but all this to say that MDs aren’t all outstanding professionals either.
It’s true that malpractice is a thing, and lord knows I’ve met plenty of doctors ranging from asshole to idiot. You’re especially at risk if you’re a female or minority which is just another layer of bullshit with healthcare outcomes. That said, I’ll take the person with a decade of school and required practice over a chiro any day. Sucks that it’s still something of a crapshoot :/
The issue with chiropractors is that they treat the symptom and not the cause. If your back is misaligned, it’s because your muscles are pulling on it the wrong way, the chiro will pull it back in place but now your muscles are still pulling the wrong way and they may have pulled on the muscle to make it move and may have injured it, now your muscle says hell no you don’t and starts pulling even more. It’s instant relief with little lasting result. which is a great business model, instant result and returning customers because the problem isn’t treated. It’s like going to the mechanic because your motor is out of oil but not trying to fix the leak so you come back every week to refill the oil.
The problem is I’ve been to numerous doctors, working with a pain management specialist now, done physical therapy with a few different places for months, do physical therapy every morning, do yoga, exercise every day, and still no relief. So, like, sometimes it gets so bad I go to the chiropractor because at least they can give me some relief.
Yeah and the idea that a doctor is going to treat the root cause is laughable.
You go to a doctor with pain caused by muscles pulling too much out of alignment and they (a) won’t recognize the fact about muscles at all, (b) will start talking surgery, and © will either give you a prescription for pain meds that you wouldn’t need if they simply fixed the pain, or make the whole thing about denying you the meds that you aren’t even asking for.
Doctors and root causes are like oil and water.
Have you tried visiting a register massage therapist? They can provide even better immediate relief without the pseudoscience. It pairs very well with physical therapy.
Not covered by my insurance, sadly. Chiropractic is, but not massage therapy. Plus, it’s very hard to find a pro massage therapist where I live. But thanks for the advice.
This is why you skip the chiropractor and go to the rolfer instead. They’ll free up the fascial tension and release the forces pulling your system out of whack.
I had to look this up. Honestly, I think that the connective tissue is my problem as the ortho surgeon(s) have said there’s nothing wrong with my bone structure, but also said they have no idea what’s wrong. Same same with the pain management specialist, he is just out to treat my symptoms (something an earlier poster said was an issue with chiropractors).
I honestly think there’s a lot of types of medicine out there that work for people, even the “pseudoscience” or “new-age” ones. No one should put their lives in the hands of medicine that has no scientific basis (ie if you have terminal cancer), but when it comes to chronic pain and other non-urgent but life-impacting ailments, as long as you do your homework as to who you’re seeing and the potential risks of treatment, it’s your choice. I get that people had bad experiences (proposing chiropractic can cure kidney failure), but if you’ve tried the “scientific” avenues (even going to multiple doctors), and no one can give you relief, you have to look elsewhere.
Just FYI two options you have are myofascial release and rolfing. Rolfing is myofascial release plus an extra layer of theory about how to target and sequence the releases for maximum long-term effect.
Part of the theory is that these tension patterns tend to exist across the entire body at once, so a rolfer will work on multiple body parts that are all related to the same pattern. The idea is that releasing just one component will cause the tension to just re-form again quickly, because it’s also stored in the other places.
The few things they do that are effective are better delivered by an evidence-based provider (e.g., physiotherapist, massage therapist) without the pseudoscience.
Where’s the proof that massage therapy is more evidence-based than chiropractic? Honest question, a cursory search seems to show that it’s not. Also, interesting that my chiropractic and physical therapy visits are covered by my insurance, but massage therapy is not. Wish I could afford it.
I should probably specify that it does vary by jurisdiction when it comes to massage therapy. We have registered massage therapists here. Some massage therapists might employ some pseudoscience, but there’s solid evidence on the near-term therapeutic benefits of massage. For chiropractic, it’s pretty much entirely based on pseudoscience.
If you need to fix a problem, a physical therapist is the way to go. If you want temporary relief, a massage therapist can be helpful. There’s no good reason to see a chiropractor - and it’s unfortunate that insurance providers (including my own) don’t allow those funds to be spent on actual treatments.
See an osteopath instead, in the UK at least, they are trained and regulated unlike chiropractors who regularly kill or permanently disable people with unsafe and inappropriate “manipulations”.
Thanks, I’ll check it out (though I’m in the US). Also, I researched my chiropractor very thoroughly to ensure that he’s not likely to kill or disable me.
edit: turns out my insurance covers osteopathic manipulative medicine, and there’s 1 practitioner in my area (25 miles, probably more in the 50 mile range since I’m close to a big city). I will be making an appointment with her. Thanks kind stranger!
Awesome I hope they are helpful to you ☺️
The guy who told you to see an osteopath is a little misinformed and had things a bit upside down. Osteopathy is basically just chiropractic and has the same pseudoscientific origins.
However, for historical reasons osteopaths are very different either side of the Atlantic.
In the UK, osteopaths are basically just chiropractors with pretensions. In the US, doctors of Osteopathy are basically just doctors who went to a school that teaches osteopathic nonsense alongside real medicine, and they are licensed and operate as real physicians.
My former boss, who is one of the biggest pieces of shit I know, has a severe back injury and goes to a chiropractor for it. Dude’s gonna end up paralyzed or worse. He works with doctors daily.
Trust me bro.
I Trust you what we doin’?
my statutory health insurance (germany) pays for acupuncture. so it seems to be proven that it works so well that they cover the costs for the treatment
I’d just caution that coverage doesn’t necessarily mean effectiveness.
It just depends how you define the chi.
One simple way might be “responsiveness”. Chi is present wherever your body is capable of receiving and transmitting information.
So nervous system…
The information being passed isn’t just nerve signals.
Basically, imagine a human body as being like a whip. If you take parts of the whip and make them stiff, then you can’t crack the whip. The whip in its pliable form is capable of conducting a wave down its length. The whip with a stiff section can’t conduct that wave.
In the whip, this wave is its “chi”. A stiff section of the whip blocks its chi from flowing. It has a chi blockage. If the whip’s chi channels are open, then it can be cracked.
The more of your body you can recruit into each movement, the more efficient that movement is. I believe that different parts of the body “communicate” (more precisely they respond to one another’s actions) via tension and pressure. When a section of your body is stiff, that tension and pressure is less readable across that barrier. Your neck muscles will have a harder time predicting and responding to – and ultimately optimizing – the actions of your quadriceps, for example, if your trunk doesn’t convey the mechanical “signals” well enough for your neck muscles to tell what’s going on at the other end of the body.
To understand what I mean about responding, think of the way your body wobbles when you stand on one leg. That’s tons of muscles in your body responding to information about your balance point. Your gut muscles might clench for a fraction of a second in response to your knee detecting that your leg has become less stable. Just an example. This action is coordinated, classically, by peripheral ganglia of the nervous system. But I believe it also relies on mechanical signals – waves of pressure and tension, because mechanical signals conduct faster than nerve signals. (nerve conduction is about 50 m/s, speed of sound in the human body is about 1500 m/s)
Think of a flock of birds. Those birds each carry about a swarming algorithm: they make real-time decisions based on the positions and velocities of the other birds. The result is a flock that moves like an intelligent amoeba in the sky. Now imagine if you created some visual barrier in the middle of the flock. Now the birds on one side of that barrier can’t effectively swarm with the birds on the other side. The flock has been split into two flocks. That visual information is the flock’s “chi”, and the blockage makes the flock less integrated.
Various body parts – muscles, organs, nerve ganglia, senses – are a swarm, and a chi blockage is something that splits that swarm into two or more smaller swarms.