I see firsthand on a daily basis how chiropractic care helps with your low back pain. It works very well even as a stand-alone treatment modality. It’s always good to examine the evidence, though, to see if what we are doing in our clinic is the best approach for our patients. Without evidence, we are making a guess that what we are doing is the best therapy for our patients. And we need to always be collecting new evidence.
Researchers are always scrutinizing chiropractic adjustments and other forms of spinal manipulation as a therapeutic approach to take care of your low back pain. In the September 28th edition of Spine, researchers at an orthopedic clinic in Bremen compared patients with acute low back pain with three types of therapies. This was a randomized double blinded control trial with 101 patients.
Group 1: Spinal manipulation and a placebo pill.
Group 2: Sham manipulation and Diclofenac, a powerful anti-inflammatory pill.
Group 3: Sham manipulation and a placebo pill. The control group.
They measured the following outcomes in their patients:
- Satisfaction with care.
- Function of the patient.
- Off-work time.
- Rescue medication.
What they found is that the spinal manipulation (chiropractic adjustment) group “was significantly better than the Diclofenac group.” The placebo group did so poorly that they had a high dropout rate; so much so that they had to close that group prematurely. This study illustrates the value of chiropractic care for acute and severe low back pain.
Dr. Todd Lloyd
Chiropractic physician in Salt Lake City
