Is there scientific research supporting Chiropractic?
Like other forms of healthcare that do not involve drugs, chiropractic does not attract the sort of funding that pharmaceuticals companies allocate to research. But scientific evidence for the effectiveness and safety of chiropractic is growing, and practitioners are demonstrating this through peer-reviewed research. In 1990, a detailed study on low back pain was published in the British Medical Journal (vol 300, p 1431). It compared chiropractic with hospital outpatient treatment for managing low back pain. It demonstrated that chiropractic was the more effective of the two. A follow-up study in 1995 confirmed this conclusion, reporting a 29 per cent improvement level for chiropractic over hospital treatment (BMJ, vol 311, p 349). In 1997, at the World Chiropractic Congress in Tokyo, Danish researchers presented results showing that chiropractic reduced the duration of headaches by 69 per cent (compared with 37 per cent for massage) and their intensity by 36 per cent (compared with 17
