That’s a good question, and here’s the answer in simple, understandable terms. Several evaluations of the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment have been published. Invariably, they include studies of manual therapies “other than” chiropractic treatments. Because the chiropractic approach is distinct from that of other professions, it is important to evaluate this approach separately.
In 1996, Assendelft and colleagues published an assessment of treatments performed by chiropractors that they picked to be in the study. Their review included 8 randomized clinical trials of chiropractic for treatment of low back pain. All of these studies had “serious flaws” in their design, execution, and reporting. The authors found “no convincing evidence for the effectiveness of chiropractic for acute or chronic low back pain.” The caveat to this is, they didn’t want to find any convincing evidence that it worked.
Flaws are flaws. If you pay a group of scientists to publish something in your favor, and they get a check for a million dollars do you think… they might be swayed to assess treatments correctly? If you get results and the people that did the study tell you that you didn’t, who are you going to believe? Them or you? You of course, so just because a study says negative things about chiropractic, does not mean it doesn’t work or it’s true. It’s just their tainted ideas.
There have been a lot of miracles associated with chiropractic adjustments, but those are never addressed by anyone, and if they are, they are written off as placebos. You do the math on your own. If it doesn’t work, it’s been around for over 100 years. Either you rely on your own thoughts, results and processes or you let someone, who doesn’t understand chiropractic, tell you that it doesn’t work, it never worked, and you’re basically just dreaming. If that’s all it takes, people would just stay home and “dream” of getting out of pain which in my humble opinion is never going to happen.