Chiropractors: Are They Legit?

Tons of people visit the chiropractor, saying it helps soothe pain in their neck or back. But we’re now hearing claims that chiro can do a whole lot more. Like, some say it can help kids with stuff like asthma, colic, even breastfeeding problems. So … can chiro really do all that?? To find out what’s cracking here, we talk to chiropractor Carl Cleveland III, physical therapist Anita Gross, neurophysiologist Dr. Marcello Costa — and the parents of former Senior Producer Kaitlyn Sawrey. We originally published a version of this episode several years ago; we’ve updated it with new science. Check out our full transcript here: https://bit.ly/sciencevschiropractors 00:00 Welcome to Science Vs chiropractors 01:09 Baby Kaity and the Sawreys 04:54 The origin of chiropractic 07:35 The theory behind subluxation 10:19 Neck and back pain 13:18 The science on taking kids to the chiro 19:07 The evidence on subluxation 24:42 What are the risks? 27:14 Let’s round it all up This episode was produced by Rose Rimler and Wendy Zukerman, with help from Kaitlyn Sawrey, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Shruti Ravindran and Heather Rogers. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design by Martin Peralta and Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord. Recording help from Asher Griffith. Special thanks to Dr. Richard Deyo, Prof. Tim Mirtz, Prof. Gregory Whitcomb, Dr. Adam Cifu and Julie Knaak. An extra big thanks to Rachel Ward, Emma Morgenstern, Christina Sullivan, Jasmine Romero, Phoebe Flanigan, Alex Ward, Russell Gragg, Fiona Croall and Judy Adair. Also, a shout-out to the Sawreys! Thank you, Bill & Chris. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus. This is the show that pits facts against

• 0:08Wendy Zukerman?

  ah, the satisfying sound of a back being cracked. Because today on the show, chiropractors, are they legit?

• 0:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Millions of people have back and neck pain and it can be pretty hard to treat. There are drugs that can help, but they can also have some pretty nasty side effects. And so people are desperately looking for other solutions, like going to the chiro. Around one in 10 adult Americans went to the chiro in 2022, mostly for pain. That's according to the National Institutes of Health. And of course, it's not just Americans going to the chiropractor. Several years ago, producer Kaitlyn Sorey called up her parents, who are big feds of going to the chiro.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Katie, how is New York going?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  It's good.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  So you're still riding your bike to work?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. Don't worry, I'm safe.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Your mother is worried.

• 1:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Katie's mum is Chris and her dad is Bill. And the whole Sorey family had been going to the chiro for years. So Katie, tell us all about it.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my parents have been going to the chiro for ages. And I actually didn't know about this until we called them up to talk to them about it. But I was actually taken to the chiropractor as a newborn baby.

• 1:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Wait, why did they want to take you to the chiro?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Because my delivery, my birth was really rough. They had to really yank me out. And so the idea was that maybe my bones were misaligned. So they wanted to take me to the chiropractor to see if it could help.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you had such a traumatic birth.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  You know, like you had huge marks around your face where the forceps grabbed your teeth. So you didn't look too terrific for the first few days because of that.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  And mum says visiting the chiro seemed to be good for me. I slept better. And so when my brothers were born, they were also taken off to the chiro. And my parents still go for neck and back pain. Dad has smashed himself a fair bit over the years.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  So I've fallen out of a tree, I've fallen off a motorbike.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, dad's been thrown off a motorbike, he's fallen off a ladder. So the chiro makes him feel better, same with mum.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  My muscles feel a lot more relaxed and my neck feels like it's not so grindy. Is the best way to describe it.

• 2:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Wait, so do you remember going as a kid?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the whole family, we went right up until I was 18, all five of us, every six weeks or so.

• 2:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, so I've never been to a chiro. What do they actually do when you get in there?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the main thing that chiro's do is this thing called spinal manipulation. So they're basically checking your spine, all the little segments in your spine, to see if anything's out of place. And then they're popping it back into place. And they can use a little tool or they can use their hands. But it's a quick thrust. It's not like a massage where you're kneading, kneading your back. It's like pop back into place. Anyway, it was just a thing the whole family did.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  And we'd skip out happy little Vegemite's.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  We were happy little Vegemites coming out of the chiropractor's office. It's an Aussie thing.

• 3:26Wendy Zukerman?

  So is this thing that we did throughout my childhood total BS?

• 3:31Speaker 02

  So tell us about the science, come on.

• 3:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Because not everyone out there reckons that going to the chiro will make you a happy little Vegemite. People on social media have been calling them out for being dangerous, for having a strange mystic history. And they're really starting to question whether this is legitimate medicine or a scam.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Why am I only just learning that chiropractors are not real doctors? Yeah.

• 4:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Letting a chiropractor touch your neck is a threat to your life.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  I don't believe in chiropractors at all. I think it's 98% horse.

• 4:09Wendy Zukerman?

  We at Science Versus first looked into the science of chiropractors several years ago. But we've cracked open this episode once more, updated the research. And today we are going to find out. One, can chiro's help your back and neck pain? Two, should you take your baby Katie to the chiro? And three, what are the risks here?

• 4:33Wendy Zukerman?

  When it comes to chiropractors, there's a lot of-

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Happy little Vegemites.

• 4:37Wendy Zukerman?

  But then there's science.

• 4:42Wendy Zukerman?

  Science versus chiropractors is coming up.

• 4:50Wendy Zukerman?

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• 6:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today, we've got a cracking episode for you. We are looking at whether chiropractic can help treat pain. And yes, chiropractic. It sounds like an adjective, but it's actually a noun. It bothers us, too. But moving on. So why did chiropractors think they could help little baby Katie? And everyone else in her family, too? Well, it turns out that you can trace it back to one guy who lived in Iowa more than 100 years ago.

• 6:41Wendy Zukerman?

  And to get this story, we spoke to chiropractic royalty.

• 6:45Speaker 07

  Carl S. Cleveland III.

• 6:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, Carl comes from a long line of chiropractors.

• 6:52Speaker 07

  My great-grandmother was a chiropractor. My grandfather and grandmother were chiropractors. And my mother and father were chiropractors. As a child, I thought everybody grew up to be a chiropractor.

• 7:03Wendy Zukerman?

  And he's the president of Cleveland University, Kansas City, which was founded as a chiropractic college. In fact, his family started it.

• 7:13Wendy Zukerman?

  And so Carl told us about the birth of chiropractic. It began with a man called Didi Palmer.

• 7:20Speaker 07

  He was Canadian, appeared to be a stocky man, had a full beard.

• 7:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Didi Palmer was a magnetic healer in the late 1800s. So he thought he had a personal excess of magnetic energy that he could channel through his fingers to treat people. It was a thing back then. But something changed for Didi Palmer, and soon he would switch from magnetic healing to back cracking. Here's basically how the legend goes. Didi Palmer met this janitor who was hard of hearing and also had a hump on his back. And Didi Palmer thought he could help. So he pushed the janitor's back with a big thrust. And a few days later, the guy came back with some very curious news.

• 8:10Speaker 07

  Saying, "Mr. Palmer, I hear the racket of the wagons in the street."

• 8:17Wendy Zukerman?

  A new profession was born, and Didi Palmer named it chiropractic, meaning in Greek, "a practice done by hand."

• 8:25Speaker 07

  And Palmer then thought he found a cure for deafness, put out a sign, "Didi Palmer, healer of the deaf."

• 8:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Soon, Didi shifted away from just curing deafness by manipulating spines. He now wanted to cure practically everything.

• 8:43Wendy Zukerman?

  And this brings us to the theory behind chiropractic. Basically, Didi Palmer started to think that the spine was the key to health. And here's what he thought was going on. Didi believed that there was energy flowing through the spine to keep us healthy.

• 8:59Speaker 07

  He was a spiritual man, and he saw that when spinal joints didn't move right, that that in some way obstructed the flow of nerve energy and life force through those nerves to the body parts.

• 9:15Wendy Zukerman?

  That is, he reckons that these kind of blockages in the spine, or what he called subluxations, could make you sick by interfering with that mystical energy. At other times, he said those subluxations tweaked people's nerves. Dee Dee ultimately thought that 95% of diseases were the result of subluxations. And in fact, he wrote that it was unjust to blame germs for disease. And today, Dee Dee Palmer's term "subluxation" is still used by a lot of chiro's. The word means slightly different things to different chiropractors. For Carl, a subluxation is basically a joint that doesn't move properly.

• 9:56Speaker 07

  And that could result in pathological changes that affect nerves, muscles, ligaments, the vascular tissue in the area, as well as the connective tissue.

• 10:06Wendy Zukerman?

  And some other chiro's even say that this could lead to things like asthma and high blood pressure. For Carl, he reckons that people need to visit the chiro not just when something's sore, but for regular checkups, kind of like how you go to the dentist.

• 10:25Speaker 07

  A periodic spinal checkup to maintain posture, to maintain function and mobility of those joints. We think that's important.

• 10:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Despite the mystical origins of chiropractic, it is actually starting to get some real cred. In fact, in the US, Medicare, the federal health insurance program, covers the chiropractic treatment of subluxation. And in 2017, in the search for better ways to fight back pain, the American College of Physicians included spinal manipulation on their list of suggested treatments.

• 11:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Which brings us to this question of, how good is the evidence that chiro's can help you treat your pain? And specifically, let's look at back and neck pain, which is why most people go to the chiro. To get some answers, we called up Anita Gross, a physical therapist and researcher who specializes in neck and back pain at McMaster University in Canada.

• 11:27Speaker 08

  Hello, how are you?

• 11:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Several years ago, Anita and her team combed through almost forty trials looking into whether spinal manipulation, the thing that chiro's do, can actually help with neck pain. And a lot of what she found were crappy trials.

• 11:46Wendy Zukerman?

  So for example, many of them were small, often involving no more than thirty people. And by the way, in science, you don't officially call these studies crappy. Instead, you call them low quality.

• 11:59Speaker 08

  Low quality actually is not the worst. The worst is very low quality. So low quality, believe it or not, has a little bit of hope in it.

• 12:11Wendy Zukerman?

  And she did find some hope. Anita found that for people who had multiple sessions with a chiro, well, they actually did tend to have less pain in their neck. And one of the studies she looked at even compared spinal manipulation to conventional medication, like taking anti-inflammatory drugs, muscle relaxants, and even opioids. And it ultimately found that going to the chiro turned out to be more helpful than drugs. That is, after a year, the people going to the chiropractor had less pain than those who were on the meds. Now, we do need more data here to see if this holds up. But for now, it sounds pretty impressive. So the studies are showing

• 12:56Wendy Zukerman?

  that spinal manipulation actually does help.

• 13:00Speaker 08

  Is valuable, yeah.

• 13:02Wendy Zukerman?

  And just this year, in 2025, another review on whether spinal manipulation helps neck pain came out. And ultimately, they found the same thing. Low-quality evidence that, for some people, it helps. So those were studies in neck pain. And then when you look at back pain, the research is pretty similar. So again, we don't have great studies, but what we do have suggests that spinal manipulation can help. And when patients walk through Anita's door, she'll sometimes give spinal manipulation a go.

• 13:35Speaker 08

  So it's something that I use clinically in my own practice.

• 13:39Wendy Zukerman?

  Since you do these big reviews and you find that there's low-quality evidence that it helps, how come you give it to your patients?

• 13:49Speaker 08

  To do nothing with your patients. Isn't of any value either. You're getting them better in their everyday life, their function and being able to actually do their activities.

• 14:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Ultimately, Anita says that mainstream medicine just doesn't have a lot of great options for treating this kind of pain. And so spinal manipulation is sometimes useful. And she did point out that she typically doesn't just use spinal manipulation on its own. She also likes to combine it with these other exercises that can help make people stronger and move their bodies better. So going to the chiro might help you with pain along your spine. But some chiro's reckon that it should be used for way more than that. And one of the most controversial claims is that even kids should be going to the chiro. The American Chiropractic Association openly encourages this, and according to the National

• 14:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Institutes of Health, chiropractic is one of the most common forms of non-traditional medicine used in kids in the US. Which takes us back to little baby Katie getting her tiny little spine aligned.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Can you describe how they did it? Like, what was, what was actually happening? Kind of just massage your head and then they, they would just lift you up by your ankles and just swing you, but just really gently, really, really gently, and then just lay you back down again. I'm so nervous for me in retrospect. They recommended I did that every day, which I did for about, oh, three months, I think. And then why did you stop at three months? Because you're getting a bit heavy and I was like, hmm, this is not good.

• 15:27Wendy Zukerman?

  And recently, there's been quite a bit of controversy about taking kids to the chiro. A few years ago, a video of an Australian chiropractor holding a baby up from its ankles and using a tool to manipulate its spine started making the rounds on social media and in the news.

• 15:45Speaker 09

  A two-week-old baby squirms as he's dangled upside down before a spring-loaded instrument is used to prod the newborn's neck.

• 15:54Speaker 10

  We're going to come into here.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  The video sparked widespread condemnation, particularly from the medical community.

• 16:02Speaker 10

  If I had a child in this age group right now, I would not let this happen to them.

• 16:07Wendy Zukerman?

  It caused such a scare that Australia temporarily banned spinal manipulation in kids while experts tried to figure out what the hell was going on here. They ultimately came to the conclusion that there just isn't any good evidence that supports taking your kids to the chiro. And while they pointed out that really scary outcomes from doing this are very rare, they still didn't think it was worth the risk. And right now, in Australia, there is a ban on kids under two going to the chiro.

• 16:39Wendy Zukerman?

  And it's not just Australia that's having this conversation. An international team of researchers, including Anita Gross, recently did this big review looking at chiropractic treatments for kids on a bunch of conditions, from asthma to autism to breastfeeding difficulties, excessive crying, bed wetting. And ultimately concluded that there is, quote, "no good evidence to explicitly support the effectiveness of spinal manipulation or mobilization for any condition in pediatric populations," end quote. And when I asked Carl about that study, he acknowledged that when it comes to kids in chiro, the research is not there.

• 17:21Speaker 07

  Currently, there's insufficient research to either support or refute the use of manual therapy in children.

• 17:32Wendy Zukerman?

  But if there's limited evidence that chiropractic can help, why would you take your child to a chiropractor for those things?

• 17:41Speaker 07

  Because those patients respond to care. And I think it's a matter of time before we have formal evidence. But from a practical standpoint, where the satisfied patient that sees the child that is pain free, that's improvement. It's just a period of time before those studies, in my opinion, that those studies will be completed.

• 18:06Wendy Zukerman?

  So it's also possible that in the future, as we do clinical trials, those trials will show that it doesn't help.

• 18:14Speaker 07

  That's a possibility. This is an area where we require additional research.

• 18:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Carl told us that since the risks for children are low, and you know, if chiro's are doing this gentle manipulation, the risks are low. And since Carl told us that a lot of parents report being happy with the chiro they get for their kids, he reckons there's still a role for chiropractic in kids. But we spoke to Katie's parents about the research here.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Do you want the science on the kids? Do you want to know that?

• 18:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, it pretty much, there's pretty much no good science that it works for anything when it comes to kids.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we got sucked in.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Wait, what did your dad just say? He said they got sucked in. They just trusted the chiropractor.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Back in the day, everyone was going. So like everyone was the same sort of thing. So we didn't question as much. It feels a little bit like you're sort of sucked into this vortex almost of believing everything they say.

• 19:19Wendy Zukerman?

  After the break, we go further into the vortex.

• 19:31Speaker 11

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  Anopheles stevensi.

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  Anophele steveni is the perfect malaria supervillain.

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  And this mosquito has been spreading. It's native to South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, but it's been popping up in parts of Africa. So scientists like Ryan have been trying to keep track of it. And one way they do this is through Citizen Science apps. These are apps where people post photos of animals or bugs or other stuff they see in nature. But it can be hard to identify mosquitoes from just a photo and the naked eye. Like Ryan's colleague came across an old photo of a mosquito larva taken in Madagascar. They suspected it was Anophele steveni, but there have been no recorded sightings of it there before. Plus...

• 21:26Speaker 12

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• 21:38Speaker 11

  So Ryan and his team started training in AI by feeding it thousands of confirmed photos of the Anophele steveni.

• 21:44Speaker 12

  Where we'll flip and rotate and modify the images as well to give some variability to the dataset. And then the algorithm essentially figures out what the features or patterns are that are tied to each species. So it basically says, okay, this image is classified as Anophele steveni. These are the pixels that were most important in making that prediction.

• 22:08Speaker 11

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• 22:32Speaker 12

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• 22:43Speaker 11

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• 25:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. So today, we're talking about chiropractors and this thing they do called spinal manipulation. And we just heard that it may help with back and neck pain, but there's no good science behind taking kids to the chiro. Now, we're going to dive right into the core beliefs of chiropractic to see if the idea of spinal manipulation holds up.

• 26:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, a lot of people might have heard about a spine being out of alignment or misaligned, and that's why you go to the chiro. But what exactly is a misaligned spine? Well, to understand that, we have to go back to old Iowa.

• 26:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Didi Palmer, the guy who came up with chiropractic, thought that a lot of our health issues could be traced back to a misaligned spine. And the thing that was making your spine misaligned was what he called subluxations. Now, at one point, he thought these subluxations could block a mystical force that flowed through the spine, causing disease. Now, that's clearly not science. But Didi also had this theory that's shifted a little, but has basically stuck around today. And that is that subluxations are bones out of place, or some say stiff joints, that then squish against our nerves in some way, making us sick. And this could lead to things like asthma

• 27:15Wendy Zukerman?

  or high blood pressure.

• 27:18Wendy Zukerman?

  And now, not every chiro thinks this way anymore, but a lot of them still do. A study of several hundred Canadian chiro's found that almost one in five thought fixing a subluxation was the key to health.

• 27:33Speaker 15

  The science behind it is not likely to come because the science behind it is simply not there. The belief system is entirely contrary to our knowledge of physics and chemistry and biology.

• 27:43Wendy Zukerman?

  That's Marcello Costa. He was a professor of neurophysiology at Flinders University in Australia. And Marcelo says that there's no good evidence that problems with your spine are to blame for many of the diseases that some chiro's claim to fix. So let's take asthma, for example. We don't know exactly what causes asthma. It's been linked to genetics and immune reactions. But here's the important thing. We don't have any good evidence that manipulating the spine could have any effect on asthma.

• 28:17Speaker 15

  There's no basis whatsoever that it can cure asthma. That's a complete nonsense. There's no, not only there's no evidence that one can believe, but there's no reason whatsoever to assume that manipulating the spine will help the asthma of a young child. And so, in a sense, it's a complete bongus. It's a complete nonsense.

• 28:38Wendy Zukerman?

  And maybe this asthma thing is low-hanging fruit. Like, it kind of seems obvious that it's a bit bonkers. But Marcelo says that even if you just zoom out to this idea that a back could be misaligned and afflicted with subluxations, well, he says that even that concept is spineless.

• 28:58Speaker 15

  And the subluxations simply do not exist physically.

• 29:01Wendy Zukerman?

  They don't exist at all?

• 29:03Speaker 15

  They don't exist at all. It's simply just telling you a complete fib. The fact that some of them believe this is even more worrying.

• 29:10Wendy Zukerman?

  And some of them actually don't believe it. And they want to ditch this idea of subluxations altogether. Several papers have now been written by chiro's acknowledging that there is no good evidence behind subluxation. One paper called it an untested hypothesis and said that it was like, quote, "an albatross around our collective necks," end quote.

• 29:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, Marcello says that there are clear-cut medical conditions that affect your spine, like a slipped disc. That's where the jelly-like stuff in between the bones of your spine push against the nerves, and this can hurt. But that's often not what chiro's are talking about when they talk about misalignments or subluxations. And Marcello says that if you do have these conditions...

• 30:00Speaker 15

  You do really need a proper doctor and not a pseudo-doctor.

• 30:04Wendy Zukerman?

  And if Marcello sounds particularly narkey, it's because he hates that chiro's have this veneer of legitimacy around them. Like, they call themselves doctors even though they don't have a medical degree. And so, here's a kind of fun fact about chiropractors. A survey of more than 1,000 chiro's found that 1 in 4 of them agreed with this statement. Quote, "There is a lack of evidence from clinical trials to support most of the treatments I use in my practice." Yeah, 1 in 4 thought that. But still, there is evidence that going to a chiro

• 30:47Wendy Zukerman?

  might help you with back and neck pain. But if chiro's aren't fixing subluxations, then what are they doing to help with your pain? Well, scientists aren't quite sure how spinal manipulation works. Research into this very question says that it could be that that sharp thrust triggers a chain of events that might block pain receptors, or it could reduce muscle tension or stiffness. And then, there's another explanation. That it's not to do with pain receptors or stiffness, but actually, it's just about someone taking care of you, and from that, you're expecting to feel better.

• 31:31Wendy Zukerman?

  It's that thing we call the placebo effect. We put this to Bill and Chris, Katie's parents. Would it matter to you if it was placebo? And it wasn't sort of aligning your back and, you know, whatever they say it might be?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Hmm, no. No, we'd still go.

• 31:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Why?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Why? Because it helps. The pain, you know? It's all about whether it feels good for you.

• 31:56Wendy Zukerman?

  Fair point, right? If it's making people feel better, what is the problem here? Well, there are some risks. And we talked about them with Anita Gross, the physical therapist from the start of the show. Because while she was doing her big assessment on the evidence around chiropractic care and neck pain, she also looked at the risks here. Because getting a spinal manipulation, particularly the kind that twists and cracks your neck, it does seem scary. And what Anita found is that sometimes people said that their neck pain actually got worse after a spinal manipulation. Other people would get headaches, nausea, or even dizziness. Here's Anita.

• 32:41Speaker 08

  The manipulation happens so quickly, then ah, you got that dizziness.

• 32:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Now, we don't know how often this happens because many studies actually don't record the side effects. Either way, those things that Anita talked about, they tend to go away on their own. But very rarely, there are more serious problems that can happen. Bones can fracture. A twist or a push to the neck can actually dislodge a blood clot or even cause a small tear in the artery. And there are cases where people have actually died.

• 33:16Speaker 16

  May was seeking treatment for what she said was just a pinched nerve, and less than a week later, she was dead.

• 33:23Wendy Zukerman?

  Several years ago, Katie May, a 34-year-old model, died soon after going to the chiro, and her family blamed the treatment. This year, a report came out into another death after a 29-year-old woman died after a chiropractor adjusted her neck. Now, we didn't talk about those cases specifically with Anita, but she did tell us that this kind of thing, it's rare, really rare, but it can happen.

• 33:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, a young person, between the age of 20 and 40-something, goes, gets their neck manipulated, and then they die. Like, we've had a few cases like that.

• 34:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh my gosh, what are they dying of?

• 34:05Speaker 08

  From aneurysms or the vascular system just being torn in the neck. And then they get, bleeds into the head.

• 34:18Wendy Zukerman?

  So what are the chances that this will happen to you if you go to the chiro? Some say that one out of every few million manipulations could lead to a death. Others say it's more common, and some even question whether chiropractors caused these deaths or something else did. So when it comes to science versus chiropractors, does it stack up like a nice, healthy spine? Well, for people with back or neck pain, the research shows that getting a spinal adjustment from a chiropractor might help, but we don't really know why. As for taking your kids to the chiro, there's no good evidence that it will help them. And what about the whole point of chiro?

• 35:01Wendy Zukerman?

  That our spines need to be aligned for our overall health, that subluxation thing? Well, there's no good evidence that it's real. And finally, this isn't a totally risk-free option. Very rare, but very serious consequences can occur from spinal manipulation. Bill Sorey, Katie's dad, sees it this way.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  It's a bit like religion, you've got to filter out the bull. I reckon.

• 35:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Wait, what did your dad just say?

• 35:33Speaker 02

  He said chiropractors are a bit like religion. You've got to filter out the bull.

• 35:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Bill Sorey.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I know, he's so sassy.

• 35:44Wendy Zukerman?

  That's science versus chiropractors.

• 35:54Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode has 137 citations in it. If you want to see them, go to our show notes and click on the link to the transcript. They're all there. If you want to get in touch with us, we'd love it if you want to say hello. Let us know what you thought of the episode. We're on Instagram, science underscore VS. I'm also on TikTok, at Wendy Zukerman. We interviewed Marcello Costa for this episode in 2017. We really appreciated his help and we just wanted to note that he died last year.

• 36:33Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from me, Wendy Zukerman, Caitlin Soory, Akendi Foster-Keez, Shruti Ravindran and Heather Rogers. We're edited by Blythe Jorrell. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design by Martin Peralta and Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord. Recording help from Asher Griffith. For this episode, we also spoke to Dr Richard Deyo, Professor Tim Mertz, Professor Gregory Whitcomb, Dr Adam Chifu and Julie Knack. Thank you for your insights. An extra big thanks to Rachel Ward, Emma Morgenstern, Christina Sullivan, Jasmine Romero and Phoebe Flanagan, as well as Alex Ward, Russell Gragg, Fiona Croall and Judy Adeow. Also, a shout out to the Soorys. Thank you, Bill and Chris. I'm Wendy Zukerman.

• 37:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Back to you next time.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  It's a new bike. It's a good one. It's got two brakes on it.

• 37:28Speaker 10

  Okay.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  That has nothing to do with cars colliding with you though, Caitlin. It doesn't matter the bike you have.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Means I can stop more quickly.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  What about your helmet?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yep, new helmet. Okay. We've got to go. We'll let you go, okay?

• 37:41Speaker 10

  I got it.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Love you.

• 37:42Speaker 10

  Nice to have you all.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Night.