A new study came out recently in the journal Chiropractic and
Osteopathy.  This study examined the various disorders that people have when they come to a chiropractic clinic.  To study this, they examined  the body of evidence that exists in the scientific literature.  In this review of the literature they wanted to see how effective chiropractic care, manual therapy, and other manual techniques are with the relief or the cure of various musculoskeletal problems.  They found the chiropractic care does very well with the relief of low back pain mid back pain, and neck pain.

They found that chiropractic care and Manual therapy in general does a very good job with those disorders that have a biologically plausible explanation for their relief. This means that any condition in the body that can be relieved with physiological movement and sound soft tissue healing techniques will get a good result with care received in the chiropractic office.  What the researchers don’t know now for sure is how other conditions will respond to chiropractic care.  There just simply is not enough evidence out there for the research is to know for sure if chiropractic care helps with other conditions not related to the spine or the musculoskeletal system.  These are conditions that chiropractors see clear up in their offices, and are still confident in treating, but do not have evidence from scientific reviews to support what they’re doing.  This is not a bad thing to try to treat a condition as long as it it is relatively safe to do so.  It is safe for a properly trained and skilled chiropractor to deliver care in any part of the spine as long as the chiropractor has decided that it is safe to proceed.

This reminds me of a time when I was going for school and I started getting really bad stomach aches.  I tried to be stoic during that time by not taking any medications to relieve the pain.  But, the pain from the stomach aches got pretty severe.  This was happening when I was in chiropractic college and we had a lot of stressful course work to complete.  I told this to my intern who was treating me about this, and he proceeded to adjust me in my mid back three times a week for several weeks.  What we saw was a gradual improvement in the symptoms that were coming from my stomach.  This kind of cure has no biological plausible explanation except for the fact that the nerves that go to the stomach come from the spine in the mid back.  Other than that, the stomach is pretty well detached from the rest of the spine.  This is an example of where chiropractic treatment to the spine resulted in the cure for an organic condition.  We wouldn’t have done this if the treatments are rendered was dangerous, but because chiropractic care is so safe we went ahead with a treatment to see if it would affect of a cure.

In my office we put a particular emphasis on the relief of back pain.  Many chiropractors who I talk to do not like to treat back pain, but this is something I see good results in, and I enjoy seeing people get relief in a short period of time.  Low back pain is the number one condition for which people refer other people to me.  People know that I am the guy to see when the low back starts feeling stuck.  My patients also know that when somebody they know has something in there and neck that is causing them pain or shoulder pain that I am the guy to see.  I see good results in my office for this, and now the scientific literature continues to back me up.

Todd Lloyd DC
The chiropractor in Sonoma