I don’t think you understand the level to which people take chiropracty. People use it in a “cures what ails you” mentality. Colds, flu, hand arthritis, all sorts of diseases. There is a ton of danger in allowing “back cracking for healing” when it doesn’t do anything that couldn’t be done with massage.
Everyone will have different experiences. Going to a chiropractor helped me with my posture in the long term. After my first visit it was no longer uncomfortable to stand up straight. I used to have this lump in the back of my neck and whatever they did made that go away. I did initially go for back pain and I can't say if the visits helped with back pain in the long term but the adjustment did help me with my posture.
I went nine times. I don't think I needed to keep going but I kept agreeing to the next appointment lol. My HSA covered it at least. Except for the first few appointments I'd go once a month. I don't plan on going again for now.
My insurance has chiropractors as a separate category with its own maximum $. Meanwhile physio & every other athletic therapy excluding RMT gets lumped into a single category. It’s fucking bullshit and I can only assume someone was payed off to make it happen. $500 a year of insurance $ I can’t use without endangering myself.
YSK that Medical Doctors are also not Chiropractors. This is why the letters after their names are different. M.D. means Medical Doctor, and D.C. means Doctor of Chiropractic. The major differences in their educations being Surgery, and Drugs for the MDs, and Nutrition, Physical Therapy, Manual Therapy are studied more by DCs. Depending on licensure laws both can order imaging, laboratory testing, and prescribe massage or physical therapy. Also the MD will only have 3-7 minutes to spend with you, and the DC will have much more time to do intake, history, therapy, and to explain what is going on with you and what can be done to improve your situation. Here's a fun fact for ya, some of the injuries attributed to joint manipulation, and this is well documented, were from barbers, kung fu teachers, and yes, MDs and PTs who went to a weekend course in manipulation, instead of the numerous semesters of learning that a DC will have as part of their normal coursework.
@NataliePortland, what's your issue? Why do you care so much about this particular topic?
Yeah NataliePortland, why do you care that people are getting ripped off and, in some cases, injured or killed for no benefit? They’re not even you, it makes no sense.
I could start spending my time bashing various professions, I suppose, but I've got better things to do. However, since you are obviously interesting in people being ripped off, injured or killed here's this, the first article that came up on search from PubMed:
Our prescription drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in the United States and Europe. Around half of those who die have taken their drugs correctly; the other half die because of errors, such as too high a dose or use of a drug despite contraindications. Our drug agencies are not particularly helpful, as they rely on fake fixes, which are a long list of warnings, precautions, and contraindications for each drug, although they know that no doctor can possibly master all of these. Major reasons for the many drug deaths are impotent drug regulation, widespread crime that includes corruption of the scientific evidence about drugs and bribery of doctors, and lies in drug marketing, which is as harmful as tobacco marketing and, therefore, should be banned. We should take far fewer drugs, and patients should carefully study the package inserts of the drugs their doctors prescribe for them and independent information sources about drugs such as Cochrane reviews, which will make it easier for them to say "no thanks".
It is a free article, so you can read the whole thing, if you wish to be better informed.
No professions are being bashed here, just liars and thieves. One can be a professional thief, of course, but it’s not a respectable line of work and I won’t waste too much time hand-wringing over what they and their supporters feel about what I say.
Here’s one simple test: for a risk to be acceptable, there must be a benefit which can be achieved through taking that risk. Low risk, high benefit is good and high risk, low benefit is bad. I’m not going to defend the whole prescription drug industry because obviously it has its share of shitheads. Still, the broad range of products tends to fall on the favorable side of the risk/benefit balance when used as intended which is something I can’t say for no-benefit practices like chiropractic, osteopathic or any of the other imitation medicine offerings out there.
I’ve been cracking nearly every joint in my body for my whole life. So, I understand that it can feel amazing when you get 10 good pops down your spine.
On two occasions (over 40 years) my neck was so stiff, it caused incredible pain to move it at all.
Both of those times, someone I know recommended a chiropractor. Each time, I went in for an initial appointment and a follow up, and every single time, I left feeling exactly as miserable as when I walked in the door.
The first guy karate chopped my neck, which made it hurt more for the rest of the day. And the second guy just put some electrodes on my back and left the room while the machine zapped me for ten minutes. Neither of them ever claimed to know what was wrong or how to fix it. They just said, “We can try this and see how you feel. 🤷🏻♂️”
I’ve seen no evidence that they can do anything more than what I was able to figure out with a chair in 4th grade.
Even if they made me feel better it is so temporary that I’d have to come again, and again. I’d rather go to a massage therapist who could also get the rest of my body too without the risk of vertebral artery dissection.
The best thing I’ve found for my back is slow, varied motions and stretches. I do tai chi and qigong and they really loosen me up.
I went to a chiro for a while and it did help but I think it was mainly because they'd have me do a fairly comprehensive set of stretches at the beginning of each visit. I stopped going to the chiro but I keep doing the stretches.
It seems to me that atlas orthogonal adjustment is more of a real thing offered than just getting your neck twisted, then again as someone who probably needs that (I had whiplash many years ago) I have no idea if the places near me have the equipment for it (or x-ray stuff needed) so that along with paperwork/scheduling has stopped me.
I think in this case MMO is another word for “people will people”.
IRL people talk behind each other’s backs, online they sockpuppet, spreading rumors and half-truths, or even outright lies. It’s always been like that, but places like Wikipedia have better transparency tools to track them down, better than trying to track what some people talked about over a cup of tea, or while walking their dogs in the park.
I will give some more info on what I saw at wikipedia, which arguable is common knowledge.
After I translated pages, I noticed people coming in to make small edits. I don’t mind those, but is baffled that people seem to be making meaningless changes all the time. Not to mention I am pretty sure I am more knowledgeable on said subjects than those “editors”.
I later realized that the number of edits and the number of edited pages count towards some arbitrary numbers which people can use to claim and move up the ladder of admin rights. It all made sense on why there are so many minimal edits performed by individuals. They are looking for low hanging fruit.
It soured my feelings toward wikipedia. I thought of it as a good volunteer project. Turns out some people play it as a numbers game. And they have enormous influence on the site.
Those people than use their power to suppress whatever they don’t like to see on wikipedia, similar to what OP posted.
By the way, to understand how absurd wikipedia’s system is, please take a look at the following news:
Why Emily St John Mandel asked for help getting divorced on Wikipedia
Well, edit count actually doesn’t matter at all in the scheme of admin rights, but some people think it to be some part of their ego. Getting admin rights is apparently exhausting and people usually oppose territorial people from getting admin. Also I’m curious how meaningless the edits were, copyediting is also important.
That was more than 10 years ago. Maybe the changes are indeed meaningful and maybe I was too young at that time. And I honestly don’t mind people making changes.
What made me quit was accidentally reading about wikipedia dramas and realized I was participating in a giant MMO in text. It was not a good feeling.
I do volunteer work to feel good. (Yes, really.) I still sometimes do volunteer work. Just not on wiki.
I know about those, and I have to partially disagree.
The number of edits limits were introduced to filter out people who had no clue, or wish to have a clue, about how Wikipedia worked. I remember having to spend some time on the latest edits page looking for vandalism, or searching for misspellings, or helping people with the formatting of their articles, to get to a minimum number of edits needed for some vote. I learned a lot during that time, and I think it was a reasonable way of achieving it.
Where it started getting out of hand, is when over time the minimum number of edits got increased, and increased again, and again… getting into silly amounts more fit for a bot than for an actual human.
I haven’t looked at it for several years, probably lost my voting rights long ago.
Why Emily St John Mandel asked for help getting divorced on Wikipedia
This isn’t absurd, it’s one of the safety mechanisms to keep a minimum of quality to the information included in the Wikipedia: to be a tertiary source.
Anyone can be a primary source; they might be the ones with the most knowledge… or some rando making stuff up. Wikipedia doesn’t have a panel of experts capable of judging this, or even people in charge of verifying the identity of anyone, so instead it simply rejects all primary sources as a rule.
Because of that, Wikipedia is based on secondary sources and their reputation, on people deciding to analyze, and verify more or less, what someone else is saying.
It isn’t absurd, it’s the only way to run a project where everyone can edit everything, including people totally clueless of the subject at hand… who can nonetheless report on the analyses done by secondary sources, help with the formatting, spell checking, or double check the validity of sources added by others.
I am pretty sure I am more knowledgeable on said subjects than those “editors”.
That’s the thing: you may be pretty sure, but Wikipedia has no way of knowing whether that’s true, and doesn’t even try to.
If you are more knowledgeable, you’re free to become a primary source and publish your stuff, whether through academic means or simply on a website.
If you’d rather apply your knowledge to analyzing the articles of others, you can become a secondary source just as easily, start a WordPress or Medium blog and go ahead… but don’t forget to cite your primary sources.
Wikipedia is the entry point for people totally clueless about a topic, aimed not towards presenting knowledge, although it does some of that, but mainly towards presenting where to learn more.
It isn’t a perfect system, ideally you’d hire a panel of experts and have them curate all content… but that comes with a whole set of problems, that would never have let Wikipedia reach the size it has as fast as it has.
Keep in mind the original Encyclopédistes took 19 years to publish a single edition with little over 70,000 articles, while the Wikipedia has grown to 6.7 million articles in just 22 years (Size of Wikipedia as of Nov 2023)… plus some more in a bunch of different languages.
I’ve checked it now, and I see the permission systems have been changed since I was last seriously active on Wikipedia.
Somewhat ironically, I’ve now found a years old notification for a deletion vote… which I couldn’t take part in, because at the time I was busy almost dying. Funny how these things work.
As someone who only tried making some random corrections here and there and wasn’t all that “in” in the whole editing world, over time the experience was miserable enough that I simply don’t bother anymore.
More than once I tried correcting the Finnish version of some pages on a specific subject that had pretty blatant misrepresentations of what the source material actually said (as in they actually ended up claiming the opposite of what the source or the English page said), and my edits were reverted by some “power admin” who was treating the pages on that subject as their personal fiefdom. They refused to have any sort of rational discussion about it, and it turned into them just using obscure (to me, anyhow) Wikipedia policy references to get their way and I simply couldn’t be arsed to figure out how to get around this particular asshole.
As someone here in the comments said, “people will people.” Too many Wikipedia admins are in it simply for the feeling of power, and Wikipedia’s frankly quite complicated policy is used more as a weapon against people who dare encroach on their turf rather than as rules for ensuring good-quality pages.
Edit: also, am I the only one who keeps accidentally clicking on Lemmy’s “delete comment” button when meaning to edit a comment? Why in the everliving fuck doesn’t it ask for confirmation?
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