Edzard Ernst writes a critical article in the Groan about chiropractic.
New guidelines on how to treat back pain are published today by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. They include the recommendation to use chiropractic as one of several options. It will not surprise many people – after all, chiropractors have recently fashioned themselves as “back specialists”.
That’s probably because that is what they are – you know, they manipulate the spine…
Anyway, after dropping in the matter of the innate – something no longer accepted in chiropractic, so irrelevant, Ernst suggests that there is no benefit from chiropractic manipulation:
The benefits were aptly summarised in the current Cochrane review of 39 studies, which showed “no evidence that spinal manipulation is superior to other standard treatments for acute or chronic low back pain”.
Well, I don’t know about studies, but I can relate to my own experience. I’ve mentioned here before how my chiropractor was able to diagnose and treat a simple leg ailment that defeated my GP. More recently, he relieved the pain of a trapped nerve. So, do I believe someone wittering away in the groan, someone who clearly has an axe to grind (he’s plugging a book co written with Simon Singh, another anti-chiropractic evangelist), or do I believe my own experience whereby I crawled into the chiropractor’s consulting room and walked out upright? Tough call, eh?
Never had back problems, but several of my friends have, and have shown marked improvement after visiting a chiropractor.
Not just a placebo effect either – I can see the difference in how they walk, move, and hold themselves.
Proof of the pudding, in my book….
People said that about me when I started having chiropractic treatment.
Interestingly, a comment on CiF dismisses the study Ernst quotes as being selective and unscientific. There’s a surprise. Ernst and Singh have bees in their bonnets about this – people who actually have treatment testify to the positive effects. As you say, proof of the pudding.
Seriously, ‘placebo effect’ is, well, pretty null semantically; such chatter is a function first and last of /belief/ and /opinion/, and the rivalry of conditoning systems, na’ doot abaout thet! ‘Placebo’ in short is objectively about on all fours with ‘professional’. It is one of these memes one must be careful of being sucked into using uncritically.
‘Thet’ said, the big thing here at least about chiropractic is that it is trying to get in queue for the The Big Suck too, just in case a national health ‘system’ ever does come along. (In Minnesota at least for a time the Chinese-style needle-doctors were grazing the public nibbled-bare commons, too!)
So I expect YOUR bebunking ax-grinders are all really probably motivated similarly, eh, especially since the prebendary state teat is necssarily running dry and it is become now a matter of rationing scarcity. Gangs and relays of these hatter-mad NHS quacks and psychotic resentful allopaths, sociopaths and other bull-shitters shortly shall be ravaging the chiropratic bagnios with flailing stethoscopes and colonoscopy tubes jetting fire….
The /professional effect/, now…/that’s/ objective and it means something, and it’s something no-good by the way. That’s a real thing, and it’s a bad thing — and we should exert the, alas, placebo effect of the individual vote against it at every point of the compass!