Dear friends of Roscoe Chiropractic,
Here's to hoping everyone had a marvelous Independence Day and enjoyed the perfect weather last week/end. Last Friday I was perusing the headlines on Yahoo! and came across a health article outlining tips for common ailments. Back pain was listed and I read eagerly on to find out what options they offer as treatments for common back pain. I suppose I shouldn't have been terribly surprised but they proudly listed over the counter drugs, prescription drugs and then surgery as the options to take care of your back pain. They didn't even offer any "alternative" treatments as options. Not that you or I, see Chiropractic as alternative but apparently it's not even worth mentioning. I meant to save the link and forgot, but I did a simple Google search on "back pain treatments" and while this article does offer three sentences or so on Chiropractic on the last page of the article, it wasn't until they listed 4 previous pages of drugs and types of surgeries you should get first! Feel free to check it out, it's kind of funny in a scary way: http://www.spineuniverse.com/conditions/back-pain/back-pain-treatment-acupuncture-chiropractic
I say scary because so many people do not know the many benefits of Chiropractic not just for back pain but a myriad of other areas of overall health. Then they read these articles that throw it in not as a real, viable option but as something "alternative" and unproven and instead peddle them drugs and expensive, possibly dangerous surgeries as their only "real" options. This is clearly my own opinion but I'd like to share some studies that show that Chiropractic is more effective in low-back pain treatment than other medical care.
The study was published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and it compared chiropractic care to medical care for patients with chronic low back pain. It is important that this study looked at chronic back pain because it is already pretty widely proven that chiropractic is effective alleviating acute back problems from injury, so this study focused on the long term less specific issues of chronic back pain. The patients all entered the study with back pain for 12 weeks or longer and similar levels of pain. They were split randomly into a medical treatment group and a chiropractic treatment group.
In the medical treatment group the patients were treated with oral and injected medications and electrical nerve stimulation. In the chiropractic treatment group the patients received standard adjustments to alleviate vertebral subluxations. The findings from this study showed that the chiropractic patients "enjoyed significant improvement" over those in the medical treatment group, in the reduction of disability as well as a reduction of pain intensity. The findings were supported by identical patient evaluations given throughout the duration of the study for both groups.
I know the language in those findings is vague but please feel free to look up the actual study for more specific numbers, the title is as follows:
A Comparison Between Chiropractic Management and Pain Clinic Management for Chronic Low-Back Pain in a National Health Service Outpatient Clinic. June 2008 in the aforementioned journal.
I hope you found this as interesting as I did, especially looking at how the general populations views chiropractic, its kind of up to those of us who are "in the know" so to speak, to share it's benefits with those we love, otherwise they may get their information from some article they googled.
I hope everyone is well! Take care and stay cool in this hot weather.
Karla H.
Roscoe Chiropractic Centre
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