Do you receive chiropractic care for a health condition you live with? Although many doctors prefer to treat your health issues with medications that often come with equal or worse side effects, chiropractic care has been used to improve the health and well being of the recipients for millenniums. In recent years, medical research has been developed that confirms what chiropractors have been saying all along: chiropractic care is a beneficial treatment option for a host of medical issues, without all of the risks and side effects that are associated with unnatural medications.
If you’re skeptical still, we’ve put together a list of few medical studies that show the many chiropractic benefits, below:
Four Benefits of a Chiropractor Care
- Improvement of sciatica symptoms.
Sciatica causes pain in the lower back, outer leg, and hips as a result of a compressed nerve ending in the back. Sometimes sciatica is a result of a degenerative lower disk. Most conventional treatment are only able to address the pain itself, not the source of the pain; this means that if the medications are discontinued, the pain comes back. Not to mention the secondary health issues that arise from the degenerative lower disk. Of course, any time pain medication is used as a medical treatment over a long period of time, there is a host of negative side effects that come with them.
Meanwhile, a 2015 study by the European Spine Journal showed that when sciatica is treated with chiropractic care, they’ve found that 72% of patients found significant relief from the pain and symptoms. The next most successful treatment option, injection of corticosteroid into the spine, only saw a success rate of 50%. Physical therapy had an even less successful improvement rate, of only 20%. - Back and neck pain.
As humans have evolved from physical lifestyles into more sedentary lifestyles that commonly involved desk jobs, and little physical activity, back and neck pain has become very common. Studies show that as many as one-half of employed adults suffer from pain in the neck and back on a regular basis.
In a study published by the British Medical Journal, the success of contemporary treatments for chronic back and neck pain were compared: physical therapy, general physician’s care (including medications), and chiropractic adjustments. The results showed that chiropractic care cost just one-third of the expense of either other option, yet resulted in better, long-term relief from pain in the back and neck.On top of that, the satisfaction of the patients in each demographic was scored, and the patients who received chiropractic care were generally more satisfied with both the care they received and the results of it than either other option. In fact, one-third of patients who received medication as a treatment reported that their pain worsened.
- Reduction of tension headaches and migraines.
The only ailment that plagues Americans more than headaches is back pain (which we just discussed). Headaches are also a medical issue that chiropractic care is very effective at treating. There are literally hundreds of medical studies that confirm that chiropractic care is effective at preventing and healing intense headaches, even tension headaches and migraines, which are notoriously untreatable through conventional medication.
One such study showed that almost half of participants saw a significantly reduced pain level when treated with chiropractic care, and 22% of patients even found that their occurrences of headaches reduced by 90% altogether. - Improvement of chronic ear infections and colic in babies.
The connection between common infant ailments, such as ear infections and colic, is difficult to make, only because medical trials involving infants are very difficult and rare. However, case studies have shown that children who are treated with chiropractic care have almost complete reduction of ear infections and colic.
Colic and ear infections seem unconnected, but chiropractors believe that the nerves that control the gut and the brain are closely intertwined, so that they simultaneously improve through chiropractic adjustments.
Some medical doctors are hesitant about pointing to chiropractic care as a treatment option, despite the longstanding practice of it throughout history. However, the more the research aligns with the ideology behind chiropractic care, the more commonly accepted it is as a treatment and the emptier medical waiting rooms are becoming.