Chiropractic care can be a controversial topic, and some online communities have strong opinions about it. Let’s take a look and see what kind of discussions are happening on Reddit on Chiropractic Care. In today’s conversation, Dr. Frederick Schurger and Dr. Beth Bagley sifted through the threads to find the truth about chiropractic care. Both doctors agreed that chiropractors need to be mindful of potential risks and refer patients to other specialists when necessary. There’s a generally positive attitude towards chiropractic care within the Reddit community. We found the discussions to be interesting and perhaps even surprising. Join Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger to sip more hot tea on chiropractic care.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
What Does Reddit Say About Chiropractic?!
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Dr. Schurger?
I’m doing excellent. I’m having a little bit of technical difficulty. That happens when you have an older machine.
In an older body.
Yes, but that’s a different technical difficulty. Eat more meat and that difficulty goes away. I had a couple of patients. As we were about to start here, I saw a message and I wanted to make sure I got them on the schedule. Funny story. A new patient called in. This is from a group up in Iowa that had been referring down towards me. They got about a 2.5-hour, 3-hour drive. The friend came for companionship for the drive and her friend’s like, “I wonder if I could get in today too.” I look at my schedule and I’m like, “I can make that happen.”
Especially with the new CBCT technology, it’s so much easier to take pictures.
That technology is not giving me grief. We came up with this idea that I’ve had in the back of my head for a while for the episode theme. I’ve been dreading doing this at all.
I’m excited about it.
I’m glad you are because part of me, and this gets back to the technical difficulty, I’ve never subscribed to this. I’ve never looked at it. This will be my first time seeing it. Let’s start with it’s Reddit. Reddit has some cool stuff on it, and Reddit also has all the cesspool stuff on it as well. Depending upon the rabbit hole, you can find both. Be careful what search terms you use because you can go to some interesting places that you may or may not want to. It’s that part of the pool where you don’t know what’s going on. For whatever reason, it doesn’t look good.
We’re on the Reddit chiropractic board, right?
Exactly. I’ve been having a problem just even opening the page at all.
I have no problem opening it. That’s a Springfield, Illinois problem. Here in St. Louis, we have the internet and network.
That might be the case but for whatever reason, just this group keeps.
It’s the government. The government’s listening in and they don’t want us to do this information. Everyone, what we’re going to go over in this episode is so important. The government’s trying to keep us from it. Let’s get into it.
The interesting aside is how many people on Reddit at higher levels apparently, driving some of the subreddits are coming off of an East Coast military base is what I’ve heard in the ether. It’s not as far-fetched but in any case.
The first one I pulled up, and I’m going to read a few of them, is more for a chiropractor. It’s if you’re a patient but this is going to be interesting for both sides, whether you’re a chiropractor, a chiropractic student, or a patient listening to it from the doctor’s perspective but it’s F insurance changed my mind. I’m reading this verbatim from what the strat 767 had written.
I have a cash practice and I couldn’t be happier. However, seeing as I have never taken insurance nor worked somewhere that does, I may have a blind spot when it comes to insurance-based practices and the upsides. Insurance-based chiropractors, please chime in with what you see as the main benefits and reasons why you like taking insurance. I’m going to read a couple of these and then I’m going to chime in with mine. At any point, if you want to chime in with what your answer would be. Preach on.
I dropped insurance completely in 2018 and have continued to have substantial growth every year since. This is from just being 500. Insurance is certainly good for getting new patients in the door. If you just take some time to network and talk to your community about what you do, you can build up a cash patient-based, no problem. I have also found that cash patients will tend to be more of your target demographic. I’m going to chime in with mine right away because since opening my doors, I’ve been in cash practice.
What that means, if you are new to that term is that I don’t directly take anyone’s insurance. If you’re like, “Are you in network with Anthem?” I’ll say, “No, I’m not networked with any insurance companies,” but I do my best to try to get patients their maximum out-of-network benefits. Out-of-the-network benefits would mean I charge whatever I feel is what I need to charge. You get as many visits as you want as the patient but then you get a bill whenever you want that has all of the money that you paid with all the codes that all chiropractors use.
You can turn that directly into your insurance and get reimbursement directly from that. Now that being said, you have to have out-of-network benefits. There’s a deductible and you have to meet that deductible. Many people have a super high deductible for out of network and many people don’t have out-of-network benefits. Some people do and that’s why I’m like, “Let’s give you that bill and you can try and turn it in. You can call your insurance company and check it.” First of all, I don’t have to have a team of people in my back office running insurance.
Second of all, I’m never at the mercy of the insurance company. That’s why I decided from day one when I started my office that I would not take insurance. Does that mean sometimes we get a phone call and somebody says, “Do you take Cigna?” We say what I said and they’ll say, “We’ll check the next.” They start calling all these practices trying to find somebody that takes their insurance. I get it. Do you have something to chime in? I have a couple more I want to read.
Go ahead and I’ll come back.
This one is interesting because it’s talking about why we wouldn’t take insurance. I haven’t checked in a couple of months but according to this week’s worth of patients, this is chaos 780. I’m at 70% insurance and 30% cash. Maybe that’s a good representative of the whole, I don’t know. I’m in a network with three insurers and one is a government plan and it’s seemingly good benefits. I’m at $0 copay, $250 deductible. It’s hard to convince those patients to pay cash when they would get effectively free care from someone in the network.
My practice is near the state capital so a lot of my patients have that insurance. It drives a lot of patients and allows for referrals. Not only is this good guy good but he’s free. You should go. I get that. It’s so easy to get a referral if you’re like, “It’s free. You don’t even have to pay any money. That’s exciting.” Back in what they called the Mercedes ‘80s, chiropractors or any medical professional would bill whatever they wanted and they get paid. They call it the Mercedes ‘80s because all the doctors were driving Mercedes.
Now, back in what they called the Mercedes '80s, chiropractors or any medical professional would bill whatever they wanted, and they get paid. Share on XThey were the new Mercedes right off the block.
They were brand new. Every year, they get a new one. It’s because the insurance game was so easy. Insurance companies caught on quickly that they were gaming the system. I’m not saying they were gaming the system. Many of those chiropractors and doctors were probably billing correctly but what they realized is the insurance companies could keep more of their money. If they could keep more of the money, then they could have shareholders that are more happy. There could be billions and billions of dollars of profit every year.
Billions of dollars of profit means they’re not paying out money. You’re paying money into the insurance like I pay for my family $1, 600 a month of insurance. It’s crazy. I’ve got a huge deductible and we never even use it. It’s in case somebody was to get into a horrible predicament. We pay all this money in and we never get any money out or very little money out. That’s how they’re making all this money.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody down the street who had $50, 000 paid by insurance. It does somewhat even out but it’s like gambling. The house always wins. The insurance company always wins on that. The last one that I was going to read was, “I graduated in 2012 and private practice with another DC.” This is Dr. Mac 8812. “Took insurance for six years and was going broke. Switched to cash in 2018 so it’s been six years of zero fights with insurance billing, approved services or MRIs, and no R overhead.”
“I’m so much happier. I see about 60% of the patient volume that I used to see but I bring home twice as much money. I pay someone part-time to answer my work cell phone. I rent a small room in another DSA’s office. It’s been so amazing for me. I can never imagine taking insurance again.” That’s a small practice but if I ever started taking insurance, that’s how I feel like I would feel about it. You can have a little bit of a different perspective on insurance than I do. What do you get going?
I did take insurance in the first days of practice. While it wasn’t Mercedes ‘80s and they were paying everything, the two big things that I had rarely come in that I can think of were the state of Illinois workers. They were two decent plans and some people would get an even lesser plan in the state but very rarely. They were paying well, something like 80%. The patient deductible wasn’t too bad. They had to pay some. This lasted for at least 3 years or 4 years that I would accept it. I had both and I had a lot of cash patients as well.
Sometimes they’d run out and they’d need more visits than what their plan covered. In about 3 years or 4 years in, so we’re talking 2010, 2011, 2012, somewhere in there, it got bad. The state of Illinois has all sorts of money problems. One of the things that they did is they said, “We can’t pay for your insurance so we’re going to change up your coverage rates to be effectively 60-40.” Now, were they paying the 60 or were they paying the 40?
I’ll let you guess which one it was because either way, it wasn’t great and their deductibles started going up. I started doing the math and I realized to move away from the insurance model completely. What they were paying out of pocket for a care plan with their insurance, as is, was comparable. It had a little bit of coverage but not a lot. I moved away from that 100% and started handing super bills to everybody. It was not that much more expensive for them to pay cash out of pocket with the deductibles. Their insurance hasn’t gotten any better.
It’s interesting to take a look. I still accept Medicare because that’s a federal program and everything else. One of the things we realized along the way as people started holding and you cannot charge a wellness visit for Medicare. If you give the Medicare patients the heads up, “Some of your visits will be covered by Medicare and some of them won’t. This is what it’s going to cost for care, that’s what it is.” Most people are open to that. If they have a problem, we work with them as far as payment plans. The bottom line came down, it was a lot easier. My wife had been doing all of the insurance and we wonder why she’s got so many problems.
Medicare is a federal program. And you cannot charge a wellness visit for Medicare. Share on XThat would make anyone sick.
This is the biggest cause of turnover in any insurance-based office, dealing with insurance companies. When you ask why is your bill so expensive at the hospital or a doctor’s office, you see a nurse and the doctor but they have potentially 2 or 3 other nurses that are working behind the desk, doing insurance and all the paperwork.
If you’re in a hospital, they’ve got a whole department. The hospitals have a floor of the hospital doing this.
A Stroke After Adjustment
You have to pay for that department. That’s why those things are set where they are and that’s why they can mark up pricing as such. That’s where that one is. How about this one? I found one that was interesting. Some patients must have got in the group because it’s generally not a chiropractic question but, “Can I decline a neck adjustment? I’m a 27 year old female. I do like going to the chiropractor for mid-low back pain but I worry about the chance of a stroke after a neck adjustment. Will declining and neck adjustment affect my treatment outcomes only in our office?”
Largely because that’s all we do. What she’s describing is traditionally a rotary style adjustment of the neck. The one doc chimes in. There are many studies on this that the chances of getting a stroke from a chiropractic adjustment are equivocal to walking into a hospital or a grocery store if you’re having that same neck pain.
The stroke is not caused by the adjustment, rather the stroke is probably in process already. You decided because you like chiropractors better you don’t like medical doctors, or you like medical doctors better and you were able to get in to see your doc. Oftentimes, the course of outcome is the same down the line. The intervention looked like the chiropractor did something.
Here’s the good news about what we do. There is no rotation going on when we do the adjustment. You are lying in a side-lying position. You don’t move. We do a little tap behind your ear. The only movement you have is more of a downward direction as the headpiece drops. We were joking. Would we rather read through Reddit and have some fun on the Reddit sub or the chiropractic subreddit or me reading through research articles? I’m still with the research articles.
I’m with the Reddit. This is more interesting.
The one article I was reading from Dr. Dan Murphy’s group of blogs on research review was talking about the different phases of the vertebral artery which is usually where they suspect the stroke is happening and how they name the different parts. The part of the base of your neck comes off right behind your clavicle or collarbone. The first part is called V1 before it enters into the foramen that runs along your neck, which is V2.
V3 is where it comes out of C2 through C1 and does what they call the torturous turn before it goes up into your skull which is V4 and then joins the basilar artery which feeds the base of your brain. They’ve been looking at that V3 around the atlas axis thinking that that’s the problem because sometimes they see problems there. If you’re turning your neck and trying to get to an end range of motion for those traditional chiropractic adjustments, yes, you end up with a situation that some people do not tolerate.
When someone says it’s impossible for a chiropractor to cause a stroke, I’m going to say it is possible.
It’s a small percentage.
It’s not somebody like that same person who could have had a stroke getting their hair done over the bowl of the hair at the hair salon or turning their head to see oncoming traffic because of the underlying issue that was already there. We are here in Baldwin, Missouri and my house is. My office isn’t in that city. There are a couple of patients’ questions. It hit the local news that a woman had a stroke after a chiropractic adjustment.
She napped on the plane in a funky position and had a stiff neck after that. She turned home here in St. Louis and sought relief at the chiropractor. “He got me right in and started doing manipulations. As soon as I opened my eyes, my vision was completely crossed.” She left in an ambulance. Her face started to become numb.
At the hospital, they saw that the right vertebral artery had been torn and with that tear, a little piece broke off and went. The tear caused a clot, I’m guessing. A little piece of the clot is what she’s in. I’m not saying exactly what she said. It went to her brainstem and that’s what caused the stroke. That’s super scary. The chiropractor did the right thing and called 911 right away. I love that because there’s been some cases I’ve heard that they didn’t do that.
Here’s the thing, the doc chimes in and says, “You’re probably not going to have your chance of stroke from a chiropractor versus a medical doctor when you’re seeking that situational advice is probably going to be the same.” This one person points it out. It’s oftentimes when it’s not a new patient for us but it’s a regular patient who has been coming regularly, got off the plane, was having trouble, and all of a sudden, we’ve got to say, “What else is going on?” We, as the doctors, needed to maybe do a proper reevaluation to ask them questions.
One of my older patients comes in. He’s fantastic and fun. He’s an engineer. He likes moving around. He’s been mowing the lawn. He wakes up and can’t put his shoes on because his feet and ankles have swollen up like crazy. My brain is like, “We got to watch this.” My first thought was, “Let’s go see what your blood pressure is.” It wasn’t bad. It was 146 over 80 something.
It was on the high side but not crazy high. I’m thinking of heart problems. He’s in his late 70s or early 80s off the top of my head. I’m like, “Let’s see what’s going on. Let’s get him adjusted.” We have a very gentle adjustment. I’m not worried about a stroke. I’m worried about other things that are going on. Sure enough, after the twenty minutes of rest, his blood pressure dropped. It was 120 or 130.
It dropped 10 points on systolic and almost 10 points on the diastolic, which is the more important number when you think about it. We don’t want that bottom number to be too high because that’s your resting. It dropped. He already felt like the swelling was less. The sandals were fitting looser. I checked on him again and he said it’s still a little swollen but it’s coming down.
My brain’s like, “That is a vascular thing. What else is going on? Should he make an appointment with his cardiologist sooner than later? We’ll see if it calms down.” He said, “It was better last night. It’s better this morning yet.” It’s going in the right direction but what else potentially is going on that we should be worrying about?
The final part of that was causation and correlation. Honestly, it’s probably a mixture of both. The person is a healthy individual who doesn’t have an injury is not going to have a stroke from a chiropractic adjustment. With the type of adjusting that we do, I agree. I’m not concerned that we’re going to cause vertebral artery dissection because we do not twist the neck.
With that being said, we still have to be mindful because somebody could come in with the signs of a stroke and we cannot miss that. That’s a 911 immediate, go to the hospital, and figure things out. The question on Reddit was, “Can you decline a neck adjustment?” My answer is you can but that doesn’t mean that the chiropractor will continue to take care of you. If it’s my office, I probably would refer you to a chiropractor who specializes in lower back.
It’s because I can do a little bit of manipulation to the lower back but that’s not how an upper cervical chiropractor helps people as we adjust the upper cervical spine, which is in the neck. In my office, I may either talk to you about it and try to say, “This is why we do it. This is how safe it is,” but I also might refer you. No bad blood about it. I’m not angry. I’m just saying there’s probably a better chiropractor out there for you because I am not everyone’s chiropractor. I like that Reddit because it’s okay. I don’t find any questions uncomfortable most of the time.
I’m excited when somebody asks me a hard question because I have the answers. I’m excited to talk about it. The other one I saw, which was interesting, was a newer review of the joint. The joint is a chiropractic franchise of offices that typically does the type of adjustment you’d see on TikTok and stuff with the pop, cracking, and twisting. We call it diversified. It’s a technique that’s done in many chiropractic offices, especially around my office but I’m not sure about your office. We see a lot of it because of Logan.
Most of the docs around here are Logan practitioners as well. Logan graduates as well. It’s very common. Around here, I’ve got one Gonstead practice that I would refer to when I’ve got a hot lower back that’s not responding. There’s myself and one other who does upper cervical in the area. Almost everybody else feels like they’re doing whatever the Logan basic plus all the therapies would involve.
Chiropractors will get mad like, “The joint, they’re terrible.” I don’t think that at all. It’s different. We’re separated from what the joint does. I feel like we could almost call what we do not chiropractic call something else but it is all under the umbrella of chiropractic. This is a long thing from D. Jekyll. I’ll read part of it. “The joint is different. They charge per month. You get four times in that office for $79.”
I went in for the $29 intro, which I ended up paying the $79 instead. No appointments. Come as you want. You can use a health savings account, which is nice. They don’t take insurance there. It’s a good option for someone who doesn’t have a big neurological case. You don’t have migraines, manures, or something like that if you have general lower back pain and you want to get crunched. Is it safe? The problem there is you never know what doctor you’re going to get.
A lot of them are brand new out of the out-of-school, which is okay but there are cons and a few quite alarming to me. This is his quote again. “Your adjustment for the day is based on who is there and who can adjust you. I’m 330 pounds and 6’2”. My adjustment was by a 5-foot, 100-pound woman. It was okay. She cracked my neck fine. Taking care of the rest of me was challenging and she didn’t quite adjust me at all. I noticed many of the team using their foot to hook their knees at the bend when you’re on your side. You have your bottom leg extended down and knee bent.”
That’s a real typical diversified adjustment. “They rolled you to one side and they hook your bent knee with their shoe to push down while they turn your body away. It seems okay but when they go to adjust your back, they cannot tell if you’re getting cracked or not because the hand is nowhere near the spine. When they make this maneuver, it’s also a quick and jerky sort of motion. I’ve been to different chiropractors for nine years now and I’ve never been adjusted this way.”
It sounds like he’s been to three different offices. The protocols are the same. “They might listen to have what you got going on but then you get the same adjustment through your care. The initial sales pitch is like buying a car. I’m there to get adjusted, not adjusted, not to hear a 15-minute or 20-minute on how I need to be seen 3 times a week or more. Most people know they don’t need to be seen that often. The other side is that you get three free. Should you go on this route? I’m sore more than I normally am as I go on. I go quite often. It makes sense for me.”
He’s going more often because it’s making sense to him. I find that interesting because it’s a different mindset when you go in there. When you come into my office, I want to hear your story. I want to unravel what’s going on with your health. We sit down for a consultation. At that point, if I think you’re a case, we can move forward with the exam. You have to qualify even to get an exam in my office. Once you get through the exam, then you’re qualifying for the cone beam CT.
You’re already passing two stages before I am even qualifying to take imaging. At the joint, they do not take any imaging. They have no idea what’s going on. One of the things that scares me about this is because of how many anomalies I see in the cervical spine every day. An anomaly would be two bones that are connected since birth, or somebody has had neck surgery yet doesn’t remember on their intake form, which happens probably once a month when someone says, “I had no surgeries.” I was like, “No surgeries.” I take an image and there’s hardware in their neck.
They were like, “I had that three years ago. I forgot about that.” I’m like, “You forgot you had neck surgery?” Yes, they’ve forgotten. If you don’t take a complete history and get images, we have no idea what we’re doing in there so that could cause harm. The last thing he says is long. I’m going to keep going. “If you’re getting adjusted and you don’t need a plan, sure, you’re getting adjusted more regularly. It makes sense. You might feel sore after the first one. It’s been a while.”
Honestly, I tell my patients that. “After the first adjustment, you can get sore.” I agree with that. “The joint is like a machine cranking patients in and out. I feel it’s very impersonal too. This is coming from an introvert. I feel this might be different based on location. I’ve been to the location three times, one out of three, pleasant so far.” She’s been in multiple locations.
If somebody calls my office and says, “I want a quick pop,” and we get that, I don’t answer the phones but my front desk gets that. She refers them to the joint. Maybe we get one of those once a month but that’s not who we are. Typically, we can’t get you on the same day unless the other doctor has a spot. I don’t have any same-day spots in my schedule. The other doctor in our office, Dr. Thomas, typically can get someone in a day or two within at least this month.
I can be flexible depending on how hungry I am for lunch. I’ve had people who are having problems. I had a guy call in saying, “On my lower back, I need a little bit of a little pop on that.” As soon as I get that message, I’m like, “Let’s give you the straight-up truth that that’s not us.”
That’s okay.
This gets back to my lower back pain cases that I wish I had more because they do great but sometimes you have to clarify, “This is not going to be a quick one and done. This is going to take a little bit of time to get you better. You won’t know that you even had a problem beforehand until it goes back out of place,”
I have to read one Reddit troll on this same thing from Sterling Hancock. “A 330-pound patient goes to McDonald’s of chiropractic and then isn’t satisfied when he gets a Big Mac.”
That is a very apt point.
Honestly, this guy said the pros and cons. It’s not like he stopped going. He’s saying it’s not that personal. It’s true. If you go to McDonald’s and you’re expecting a filet mignon and some asparagus, that’s not what you’re going to get.
You are not going to get that at McDonald’s.
I’m going to say Dr. Schurger and I are both filet mignons.
The next one I’ve got is the stories about those who got injured from chiropractic adjustment. “Is this just the risk that comes with it or is it a lack of skill issue?” It goes on to say, “I’ve seen even those popular YouTube chiros when I look up their clinic, even they have some poor reviews with the patient stating they are a much worse pain post-adjustment. This patient wants to get cervical work done but this stuff concerns them.”
One of the first comments is, “Every single health intervention, chiropractor, or otherwise carries some level of risk. That’s the truth. We do everything possible to minimize that risk for the individual patient. The literature across the board demonstrates that chiropractic care carries a very small risk profile in general and in comparison with other treatments for the same condition and the adverse effects that do happen are generally mild.” You have anecdotes and that’s the fact. I’ll be the first one and you’re right there with me. We don’t show our adjustments on video on our socials.
I do a little bit.
Still, it’s so minor and I wouldn’t do it with audio.
No, I don’t show it with audio because the sound of the table would be scary.
The table is loud and flat out.
We warn everybody beforehand, “It’s not your neck making that noise. The table is called this clunk.”
Somebody chimed in. I recognized the name and I might know who that is because he’s published some research if it’s who I think it is. He pointed out a study that was done in Hong Kong, published in 2023, a retrospective analysis of the incident of severe adverse events among recipients of chiropractic spinal manipulative therapy. This is nice because it’s peer-reviewed. These were chiropractic clinics in Hong Kong.
The adverse event data were extracted from a complaint log. They had 96,140 chiropractic sessions almost 55,000 patients. Of those, only 39 had an adverse event and both of those were grade 3, and that was the highest. They had five grades. The severity of an adverse event was mild, which is a 1, moderate was 2, 3 was severe, 4 was life-threatening, and 5 was death. We had no death. We had no life-threatening ones in this study, which is pretty impressive considering the age group.
We had no death. We had no life-threatening ones in this study, which is pretty impressive considering the age group. Share on XThe two were grade three, both of which were rib fractures occurring in women over the age of 60 with osteoporosis. No 4 and 5. None were higher than four. You’re going to have some 1s and 2s because your body is going to be going through the healing process. We found that in our study when we studied 1,000 patients with upper cervical adjusting back around 2009 when that got published, chiropractic had a great track record. Compare that to what happens in a hospital.
Granted, why are you going to the hospital? It’s not a minor thing, usually. You have something more going on. In this other article that somebody else published from 2000 in the British Medical Journal, medication errors have led to manslaughter charges. If done wrong, medicine is very dangerous and yes, results in death. That’s going to be with any healthcare procedure. I’m not a big fan of adjusting ribs to be quite honest.
That’s going to be the big one that I have to worry about. Back to what we were talking about with doing a proper exam and saying, “Something else is going on. Let’s hedge our bets here and put into consideration, is there something bigger going on?” If you have a rib that’s bothering you, I’m not going to drop it. My tables don’t allow for that. I’m going to get an activator out, moderately low setting, and I’m going to tap it a little bit to try to get mobility back into that joint.
Sometimes you need a couple of visits on that but typically that helps. That’s a good point. I found one more.
Go. I got one.
Why are chiropractors controversial? This is from Caged Crow. “I started working as a receptionist at a chiropractic office and have heard some people, not patient with their staff, say that chiropractic therapy is a hoax. I’m not sure why they think that, though there is probably a reason behind it. I’ve received chiropractic care that has fixed issues and I’ve watched hundreds of people walk in with a problem and walk out without it or with a decreased issue.” Why do some people think chiropractic therapy isn’t legit? Are there good points to be made or is it just some outdated myth?”
There are two good answers. They’re both long but I’m going to read the first one from KidBBitts. “There are a few things at play here. Chiropractic has had a long history and has been at odds with mainstream medicine since its inception. Back when chiropractic was in its infancy so was medicine. There’s a lot of interesting history on how medicine consolidated power and influence absorbing or eliminating other healthcare competition. Chiropractic has always been seen as an enemy.”
“A lot of myths and lies were created against chiropractic and it culminated in the Wilkes versus AMA trial. The medical war against chiropractic was an institution. Unfortunately, due to the influence and money behind their directives, those myths have long-standing ripples even to this current day.” The other thing is that those who criticize chiropractic the most are typically people online, likely young and with no health issues who like to be trendy. On Reddit, for example, it is cool to hate chiropractors. It’s the reason they pull up our severely outdated and easily refutable.
When they bring up points, it’s like, “That’s not real.” The volume of echoes is too loud for a single voice to counter it. Most of the arguments come from an uninformed emotional place and you can’t argue against it with logic. Isn’t that true when somebody is coming at you and they’re coming at with like, “You’re the worst? You’re terrible.” You’re getting to the insults. You can’t argue with insults. All you can say is, “I know you are but what am I?” You can’t argue with it.
“There are shortcomings in chiropractic. Every profession in healthcare has shortcomings. Ain’t that the truth? The way we approach health, in general, has shortcomings but the issues brought up online are not those legitimate criticisms. Chiropractors have one of the highest satisfaction rates if not the highest satisfaction rates among healthcare providers.” I do think that that’s true. “Our malpractice premiums are some of the lowest due to how safe the procedures are. Insurance covers chiropractics.”
Sometimes we are part of the socialized medicine of Medicare. I wish we weren’t. People love chiropractors and love the idea of keeping their bodies healthy rather than responding to an established problem. The only antagonistic voices are those who are armchair experts. Hopefully, they never get to the point where they’ll need chiropractic services but because they’ll be so against that. That’s true.
If they’ve been against it for so long, they may not get the help they need just because they thought that it was a bunch of hocus pocus. Truthfully, I get to change people’s minds every day. That’s exciting for me. It is cool when you see somebody who comes into your office with their arms crossed and is like, “My wife may be coming here or not.” I’m like, “Let’s see what’s going on.” They are the best people.
They become your most rabid fans.
They’re telling their friends. It’s so cool to see a mind change. You don’t have to believe in chiropractic for it to work because it’s not a religion. All you have to do is give it a chance to experience it. Once you are under chiropractic care with a chiropractor who knows what they’re doing, like us, and does the work and imaging, you get that first adjustment. It’s very rare that someone comes into my office and does not see a change in their health. Can it happen? Yeah, because it could be that they have toxic mold exposure at their house and I’m not going to go test for it.
That’s a nightmare path to go down. I’ve read and my brain hurts knowing that I probably need to go down that rabbit hole and I don’t want to.
We came up with a topic that we need to learn about toxic mold.
Any more on that one? I got one more.
There’s a whole other person who is great. There are some good replies and I’m pretty impressed by some of the ways. These sound like these are the doctors who replied to that.
I’ve got one here that is interesting and it’s right up our alley. Birdcom_AVI asked, “How can the same joints of two different people require different directions of force to pop? For instance, three of the fingers on my hand will pop when pressing the knuckles downward, while the other two only pop if they are manipulated in the opposite direction with toes. Mine will pop only if pulled straight out, while my husband’s will only pop if they are pressed downward. How can the same joints of two people require different directions of force to pop?”
I’m assuming she’s a she because she said her husband but who knows? What’s curious is she’s looking at the joints of the hand, and the joints of the feet, and seeing a different response right off the bat. In chiropractic, one of the things that brings chiropractic a little bit more together is something called a listing system. These are the generally agreed upon positions that joints will go out of place based upon their anatomy.
This drives a lot of what the profession sees and drives things. You could have something that is turned to the right but the question is, is it moved on the right side or is it moved on the left side that made it turn to the right? In what we do as Blair chiropractors, this is exactly what we look for in that anatomical variability, and how the joint has been disrupted is what it comes down to.
Has that joint moved forward? Has it moved backward? Has it moved just on the right side versus just on the left side? What we find is I can have two people come on in. Your pair of twins could come in and we could have almost identical “listings” but one needs to be adjusted from the right and the other one needs to be adjusted from the left. That is the nature of the nervous system and how structurally, things have again been disrupted at those joint capsules.
This sometimes makes people’s heads hurt because everything seems like, “I’m coming from the right so maybe it’s gone just to the right.” Maybe it’s gone to the left and I’m pulling it up from the right because that is more advantageous biomechanically for your adjustment. Maybe your neurology is better for that. I saw this and I’m like, “That is exactly what we do back to back.”
It’s interesting that someone who isn’t a chiropractor would notice that and like it. She should look into chiropractic as a profession.
Tipping A Chiropractor
Part of me thinks she’s an early tri student who’s trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m looking to see if there’s any more that I want to take a look at. Have you found any others? Here’s the good news and bad news if you want to go take a look at our chiropractic. Most of these are asking for advice for building your practice. If you’re a chiropractor, what help do you need? What do you get?
Tipping a chiropractor. This was about massage here but it came up in conversation on Facebook from the women’s chiropractors group. This chiropractor was going to another chiropractor to get adjusted. When the bill came up on the credit card, it said, “Add a tip.” Tipping culture has gotten out of control. Everyone’s talking about it.
Everyone pretty much chimed in and said, “Absolutely not.” Do not tip the chiropractor unless you’re bringing us farm-fresh eggs or some vegetables from the garden. We will take that kind of stuff. Or as Dr. Schurger has bestowed upon us, honey from his family’s farm. All of those things. We would love to take that stuff but no, you were not supposed to tip a chiropractor.
Do not tip the chiropractor unless you bring us farm-fresh eggs or vegetables from the garden. We will take them. Share on XWhat we all think is that the same practice has massage therapists and the tipping line comes up automatically on their credit card machine. That should be explained to all the new patients as, “No, ignore the tip line. That’s for massage therapists.” Massage therapists do receive tips many times but chiropractors that is we are doctors. I wouldn’t go to my podiatrist and give them a tip.
Be careful. Make sure you know how to do 10% and 20% tips in your head very quickly so you can do the math because I saw somebody post a video of some restaurant. The one thing that I did here is two things on tipping. 1) If you have to stand to get your food, do not tip. Quite honestly, it’s out of hand. 2) Make sure that the percentage of the tip matches the percentage that it should be because one person was showing how they hit 15% and it was closer to a 20%-plus tip.
I’m watching this video at 9:00 at night. My math skills were out the window at that point in time but I looked at the amount and it’s like, “No, that’s 20%.” They went up to 15%, 20%, and 25%. All the numbers were skewed wrong. Sometimes you might get gouged. The 25% was almost half of the bill.
Essentially though, we also were supposed to be tipping before taxes. You’re supposed to look at that subtotal before taxes come in and tip on the subtotal. I typically tip 20% or 25% if it is fabulous. If I’m going out to dinner, I’m expecting to tip someone.
If I’m going to Ruth’s, you’re getting a good tip because if it wasn’t good service, they’re getting a one-star review and they don’t want one-star reviews. They already know that you’re going to give them a good tip because they’re going to deliver that service. That’s how we act too. That’s why we cost what we do.
If I go out to lunch or dinner, I do that expecting to pay the person serving me. I get that in other countries. They’re paid more so they don’t get tipped. In this country, we tip and that’s how they get paid. In my opinion, if you can’t afford to tip people, you do not go out to dinner. That’s not what you do. The final law is to not tip your chiropractor except for eggs. I like eggs and bacon.
Eggs are good. Eggs, bacon, steak.
Vegetables. I know you don’t eat vegetables but I do. It was nice having this chat and getting down the rabbit hole of Reddit. That was fun. We should do that again.
Maybe we should go and find some ones that were like, “These stand out.”
Those are fun. I do think we should start doing a little research on toxic mold because I’ve barely touched that in my research. I’m one of those people who is ignorant of this. I’m going to become educated.
We should ask Dr. Joe to join us because he’s the one who has gone down this rabbit hole fully and he might be able to give us all the insight that we’re looking for.
I would love that. I’d love to have him as a guest.
I’ll reach out to him and see if he’d be game to do that sometime. Make sure you like, subscribe, and leave a review. We’ve got a couple. We have about 22 followers on Apple.
We are hitting the big time.
Double digits. We’re about 18 to 20 on Spotify. We got about 20 people on YouTube. Keep sharing the show because quite honestly, the more you share the show, the more you get friends and family to take a listen. For people who are skeptical and are asking questions, this might be an episode for them to read. Make sure they hear some of these messages because oftentimes, people are afraid to try something that they know nothing about. Dr. Bagley, where can they find you?
I’m at Precision Chiropractic. We are in St. Louis. It’s PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com and you can find me on the socials @Dr.BethBagley on TikTok.
I am at Keystone Chiro SPI, Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois. I’m also on Instagram but don’t fall. There’s not a whole lot there. Sometimes I get stuff posted and sometimes it’s just me working out. In any case, we look forward to sharing with you again. That’s what I’m trying to say. Reddit has me going down rabbit holes trying to see. If somebody said, “Grandfather’s got a couple of chiropractic tables,” I’m like, “Do you have a toggle table? Is there a way?”
Can I see them? Send me a picture.
They’re not that good but you never know.
You never know what you’re going to get.
In any case, thanks again. Like and subscribe. We’ll talk to you again.
Important Links
- PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com
- @Dr.BethBagley – TikTok
- Keystone Chiro SPI
- Instagram – @KeystoneDoc
- The Blonde And The Bald – Linktr
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