Seems legit. (Source)

You know the noise you hear coming from the microwave when you make popcorn? You'll hear the same soundtrack in a chiropractor's office—though you're a lot less likely to enjoy tasty puffed corn goodness there. In the chiropractor's office, instead of exploding corn, the noise is coming from a live human being's joints, most often their necks and backs. 

That's right; there are people—thousands of them, even—who go into chiropractors' offices and, in exchange for actual money, ask these men and women to jerk, pull, twist, and push on them until their joints crack.

Why, you ask? Well, let's say you've just had a car accident—you were rear-ended at a red light by a guy going forty miles per hour. He hadn't even begun to slow down because Barry Manilow had just come on the radio and he was frantically trying to shut it off before he suffered an aneurysm. So far so plausible.

However, due to his momentary Barry distraction, this guy slams into your car. Based on personal experience, we can pretty much guarantee your neck is going to hurt like crazy for a while. Even several days after the ER sends you home with instructions to take Tylenol (that's the kind of knowledge four years of med school pays for), your neck will still be killing you. Enter the chiropractor.

Essentially, a Doctor of Chiropractic, or "D.C.," or "voodoo magic spinal cracker-fixer," adjusts the spine to temporarily relieve back, neck, and other joint and muscle pains. They make a decent living for it too, averaging just under $60,000 per year (source). 

There are a host of other things some chiropractors claim to be able to do, such as improve your body's general heath, alleviate gastrointestinal stress, cure epilepsy, reduce allergies, predict lottery numbers, regrow limbs, eliminate foot odor, etc. 

Later we'll talk briefly about chiropractic snake oil salesmen, but for the most part we'll stick to the mainstream, because we assume you're smart enough to at least be skeptical of the claim that spinal adjustments can treat heart disease.

It might seem a little counter-intuitive to crack joints for pain relief, but there are legitimate academic studies that show spinal adjustments to be reasonably successful at treating back and neck pain. To some extent, adjustments can relieve pain related to major muscle groups, too. The popping sound itself—that hallmark of chiropractic medicine—is believed to be gas escaping from the joint as it moves.

Huh? Two questions naturally follow from that last statement: How does gas get inside a bone joint? And why did we use the phrase "believed to be"?

Here's the gist: the most common and most movable type of joint in a mammal, narrowly edging out the texting thumb, is known as a synovial joint, so called because of the presence of synovial fluid (a lubricant) in small capsules surrounding the joint.

Oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide are byproducts of synovial fluid, which means those gases exist inside the capsules. When the joint is manipulated enough, the gases escape, creating the famous pop or crack chiropractors are known for. Science is fun, right?

 

Go ahead and try though, if you want. (Source)

As far as "believed to be" goes...well, the explanation above is assumed to be correct, but it's hard to verify because you can't exactly watch gas escape from inside of a joint, can you?

As we mentioned earlier, people often seek chiropractic care after trauma—car accidents, long falls, sports injuries, inadvertently wandering into political fundraisers, etc.—because now they're hurting and they'd really rather not be. 

It's pretty simple. Others seek chiropractic care to correct less dramatic, more long-term problems, like what happens to your neck after sleeping on your stomach for twenty-five years with your head turned ninety degrees to the left. Your neck gets messed up—that's what happens.

Chiropractors aren't medical doctors, though the "Doctor of Chiropractic" title isn't a hoax. There are currently seventeen active chiropractic schools in the U.S. It's a four-year program and, believe it or not, a bachelor's degree isn't always required for acceptance. 

Many schools only require around ninety semester hours of undergraduate education to reach doctor status. However, considering they're competitive programs (only around 200 or so graduate per year), having a bachelor's degree sure wouldn't hurt your candidacy. Pre-med and science majors are probably your best bet.

Some of those ninety hours in school will need to be specific courses—biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, etc. At chiropractor school itself, you'll take all those and more. Anatomy and biochemistry are also likely, as are psychology and nutrition. Chiropractors need to have a broad scope of knowledge, so you should probably expect courses in math and English, too.

That said, as fun as Clarinet Performance 201 may be, you aren't going to impress any potential patient by showing them how to properly change the reed in a woodwind instrument.

One thing to note is, if you're looking for some harmonious relationship with the medical field at large as a chiropractor, you should maybe think about picking a different career. We're not kidding. Chiropractic falls into the category of "alternative medicine," a title that often prompts the standard physician line: "If it were shown to actually work, it would just be called 'medicine.'" Doctors can be so snarky.

To say M.D.s and D.C.s have had their differences is kind of like saying the Hatfields & McCoys once had an argument. M.D.s tend to view practitioners of alternative medicine sort of the way people view chimpanzees at the zoo: they're amusing, even a little funny, and while studying them might yield some good insights, it's generally a bad idea to get into the cage with them.

This isn't entirely fair, but it is what it is. And it isn't simply a matter of M.D.s being stodgy elitists who don't believe anything that wasn't taught in medical school. Considering what some quack chiropractors have claimed to be able to do, you can hardly blame them. 

A common and widely disputed term in chiropractic medicine is subluxation. The battle around the term and its use can get pretty heated, so don't bring it up at dinner parties.

Chiropractors who use the term say it's a misaligned bone or a joint that has gotten stuck and can't move like it's meant to—which then pinches nerves in the spine, causing them to malfunction, which in turn wreaks havoc on a person's health. Makes sense, right? 

There's only one problem: subluxations have never been shown to actually exist. Really. X-ray tests have never definitively demonstrated the presence of subluxations.

That sounds pretty bad, right? That the founding element of an entire career hasn't been proven to be real? It's not great, but it's also not that simple.

Chiropractors who manipulate the spine as therapy for pain relief are using tried-and-true, medically-acceptable methods to correct mechanical problems in joints and muscles. Chiropractors who claim that subluxations are the cause of disease, nerve malfunction, and other medical maladies (and there are a lot of them) are making claims no scientific study has ever been able to verify or demonstrate.

Fudging facts is a pretty shady way to make a living, and shady ways have a tendency to wilt when they're exposed to the sunlight—or a lawsuit from an unhappy patient. Choose wisely.

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