As long as I have been in professional practice as a Chiropractor, the most common questions I am asked are: How does Chiropractic work? What does Chiropractic treatment do? And why is Chiropractic so effective for back pain, neck pain, headaches, and a whole range of musculo-skeletal problems, including injuries, arthritis, and the most common types of joint and muscle pain?
The answer I always give is very simple. Chiropractic gets to the ‘cause’ of the problem. You see, every form of pain or injury the human body is capable of developing has a distinct and logical cause. You must determine the cause if you are to have any hope of ridding yourself of the problem long-term.
Short-term approaches, including pain killers, tablets and medications, that focus solely on pain relief or temporary symptom reduction, almost always fail at solving a problem long-term. They simply do not address the cause of the problem. Basic logic. With these approaches, it’s like driving your car and the engine’s warning light comes on, and to solve the problem you put a piece of tape over the warning light to cover it up. The symptom is now gone, you keep driving, and for a short while you can forget about it altogether. But what do you think will eventually happen?
The pitfall with all the various temporary “pain-relief” therapies out there, including tablets and medications, is that they’re convenient – they provide some amount of fast and relatively inexpensive relief, and they take little time or effort. However, in failing to address the underlying cause of the problem, and in covering up the symptoms, which were designed to serve the body as a warning system, we become at increasingly high risk (the longer these short-term strategies are employed) of developing cumulative damage and serious long-term ailments: chronic pain, recurrent injuries, progressive impairment and disability, etc. These approaches lack basic logic and are, simply put, scientifically invalid. They are the “fast-food” of healthcare, and in the long run they will always do us more harm than good.
So what about Chiropractic?
Chiropractic is fundamentally different. It is philosophically different. Chiropractic focuses almost entirely on the cause, understanding that by directly addressing the cause of the problem, you accomplish not only relief of pain and symptoms, but you succeed in eliminating the problem altogether, thereby providing the patient with a viable long-term solution. Chiropractic therefore offers the patient a real opportunity to get better.
Chiropractors are highly trained Doctors in physical and musculo-skeletal medicine, with advanced expertise in diagnosing and determining the underlying cause of musculo-skeletal pain and injury. Chiropractors then apply specific and targeted treatment therapies that are safe, effective, scientifically valid and evidence-based, and that truly get to the cause of the problem. And they combine this with an approach that emphasizes (and optimizes) the patient’s inherent ability to heal and recover.