The Importance of Research for the Chiropractic Profession

The Importance of Research for the Chiropractic Profession

The chiropractic field is growing more and more, which can be much attributed to the increase in quality research studies. These newest findings have substantial support for chiropractic care our profession provides. A recent study published showing chiropractic care to be just as effective as a spinal disectomy for sciatica. A single study such as this pushes our field even further into becoming part of the orthodox health care system, showing that chiropractic needs to be a regularly used form of care. If our profession becomes one that is integrated throughout the health care system we can help patients with their musculoskeletal problems. This is the number two reason patients seek their medical doctor with the most common musculoskeletal problem being low back pain.

Chiropractic struggled for a while in researching the benefits our techniques for several reasons. One reason is that chiropractic is a manual therapy, which makes creating a placebo a struggle. It is difficult to blind both the doctor and the patient to a therapy that is manual, meaning that they can usually feel the method of healing. Also, chiropractors often use a variety of modalities in their methods of care, but only one modality is usually used in clinical trials. This makes it hard to show how beneficial our profession is since we don’t just do one method. Finally, until recently there was a lack of funds to support chiropractic research, which slowed down the progress of chiropractic research. However, this has changes in the recent years and more fund have been placed into our professions research, which can be seen by the many recent studies showing numerous benefits of chiropractic.

We need to have the evidence to back up the techniques we use and for other care that we provide. There needs to be a reason behind all of our methods to give our profession increased validity. We need to be performing techniques not for just patient preference or because as doctors we prefer one to another, but because it is in the evidence that (blank) technique is best for (blank) problem. To be able to advance our profession we as doctors (or for me a future doctor) need to put the effort in, to critically read the most up to date research and apply that to our patients. We also need to publish research, even if the research we submit may only be a case report. Our profession needs more and more basic findings so that we can continue to build and build, to eventually immerse our field in endless amounts of Randomized Controlled Trials that continuously show the benefits that chiropractic care has for an infinite amount of problems that our patients have experience, currently experience, and may experience in the future. But to prove ourselves to the scientific world we need to research, research, research.

It is our obligation as doctors to maintain educated as more information comes to the surface. We must always remain a student and continue to learn throughout our career so that our patients can receive the best quality care.