A physical therapist costs significantly more, which is why a lot of chiropractors in rural areas with a lot of manual labor are well looked upon. They are mostly just practicing physical therapy without a medical license which could get them in trouble if it wasn't considered chiropractic work. The pure quackery doesn't get them as far because most of their customers are too poor to regularly spend on woowoo crap.
In my area someone's insurance might cover the first 3-4 sessions of physical therapy, but nothing after that despite them needing it for longer. So the physical therapist will at the end of insurance billing send them down the road to do the exact same thing at the chiropractor for significantly cheaper.
In places without a lot of manual labor they are probably mostly just the quackery. Their clients are lots of hypochondriacs and office workers who really just need to get more exercise but are willing to find anyone who says they can make them better without significant effort. Im sure the massages and stretching does feel good though atleast, but im sure a massage parlor would set out some crystals and do a massage for cheaper.
> The pure quackery doesn't get them as far because most of their customers are too poor to regularly spend on woowoo crap.
Yeah, but them very same type of folks (like where I grew up in "rancher territory") who can't (or won't) regularly spend on "woowoo crap" will happily budget a reasonable monthly (or even weekly) fee for a bit of good advice, some stretching exercises and "adjustments", and a bit of basic applied physical therapy techniques that provide a measure of genuine relief. That's how chiropracters in "farm country" make their money.
They basically are as you say "practicing physical therapy" (and some other similar and related services) under a different license (chiropractic). If they didn't provide a valid service in places like that, they'd be outta business downright quick-like, because them small-ish towns, word gets around pretty quick if you done somethin' bad like scammin' a hard-workin' neighbor with "woowoo crap".
> If they didn't provide a valid service in places like that, they'd be outta business downright quick-like, because them small-ish towns, word gets around pretty quick if you done somethin' bad like scammin' a hard-workin' neighbor with "woowoo crap".
Because rural areas are immune to scams or quackery? I think you'll find them just as immune as city folk.
As someone who lives in a small, rural town... I assure you that's not true. There's a HUGE customer base for "woowoo crap": Bored housewives (many of whom have token jobs like realtor or school substitute).
Medical != medicine. Physical therapists provide therapeutic interventions. Doctors of Medicine (M.D.) practice medicine. This is why they can prescribe medicine. Same with Doctors of Medicine in Dentistry (D.M.D., also known as Dentists).
Psychiatrists are also Doctors of Medicine and can prescribe medicine. Other mental health professionals (Licensed Professional Therapist, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Psychologist) are not and provide therapeutic interventions.
EDIT: I just realized I'm coming at this from a USA-centric point of view. I have no idea how this applies to other places.
I'm sorry, but going to a quack doctor is not medical care, much like McDonald burgers would not be a healthy meal regardless of whether or not that's all you can afford.
Except at least in the McDonald's case you have to eat food to survive, so you may not have a choice. You don't have to go to a chiropractor to survive, so it's better to not go there at all than it is to go and receive possibly dangerous treatment from a con artist.
Remember, there is no science behind what they do. They don't know if they're going to hurt or paralyze you because they never went to medical school!!
My insurance covers physical therapy, chiropractor, and/or massage all in the same category. I get 12 total visits a year, mix n match style.
I don't really understand what people need a physical therapist for... They basically just instructed me on how to do exercises that significantly worsened my pain. Brilliant? And then she had the nerve to say riding my bicycle is a bad idea?! Fuck that stupid bitch I never went back.
My chiropractor was much more pragmatic. He asked if bicycling made my back feel better. Guess what?! It does!!!
While a massage therapist or chiropractor does things I can't do to myself. So PT seems kind of like a waste of time and money.
I suggest Bob and Brad on YouTube. Do it at your own pace and do things that actually feel good and don't hurt!
This doesn't really make any sense, because the entire point of chiropracty is pain and function improvement. This is measurable by people. The Wiki page on the topic is loaded with vitriol and agenda, but the study [1] they relied on to try to discredit chiropracty concludes: "When spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) is compared to sham SMT/placebo, it may result in a small improvement in pain and medium improvement in functional status in adults with chronic low back pain. When compared to no treatment, SMT may result in a medium improvement in pain and a large improvement in functional status."
The issue they had is that the data were very noisy due to the SMT being conducted across different populations, with differing frequency, and differing application formats. In any case, if that's the worst our agenda-driven editor could dig up, then I can only conclude that chiropracty is, at the minimum, certainly not a scam.
> This doesn't really make any sense, because the entire point of chiropracty is pain and function improvement.
That's a function of massage which has an large overlap with what chiropractors actually do.
On the other hand, the function of chiropracty is changing the alignment of the spine to solve any and all ailments.
What chiropractors do nowadays isn't really chiropracty any more, it's some combination of PT and massage. It can be effective, I won't deny that but the reason they are doing things to my body is important to me and chiropractors have some odd ideas.
Sports doctors were never immune to misguided treatments. The regular ice baths after an injury have already been thoroughly proven to slow down recovery. You need ice only after the initial trauma, afterwards ice just hinders the healing process. But million dollar bodies were subjected to it for years and still are.
And a lot of treatments are known by the doctor to be fake but are still performed so the player benefits from the placebo effect.
In the sports where the team doctor would routinely administer PEDs to the players under the guise of “vitamins” or whatever, after the practice became harder to pull off some doctors kept administering sugar pills to avoid the nocebo effect. They just follow the ritual that doesn’t harm the player but gives them peace of mind.
People who realize that if their athlete believes it'll make them better, and it doesn't actually hurt them most of the time, there's value in indulging them.
We're talking about a field that is well documented to have been started by an absolute charlatan who believed in magical "subluxations" causing basically all diseases.
We know by all objective measures that the entire idea is a level of nonsense that's almost religious in scale, which is a great analogy because it similarly demonstrates how "lots of people believe in it" is an absolutely meaningless argument.
DOs are sorta weird in the US. They go to real medical school for 4 years like MDs and practice actual licensed medicine at the same level as an MD. They can even call themselves physicians.
Non DO osteopaths are not trained with any sort of scientifically backed curriculum.
Chiros started as a scam, continued as a scam, and are now a widely accepted scam. The legit work they do is often just physical therapy.
Just go to a physical therapist.