thisismyspitesong

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

Pretty sure @thebibliosphere mentioned getting fucked up by a chiropractor, and I don't have ehlers danlos but I am hypermobile. I went to a very well trained osteopath (theoretically better than chiropractors and, at least in the UK, more regulated but still use some of the same techniques) for a few years and while I would feel better after each appointment, nothing ever really got better and I now look back at the way he handled my neck (which was way, way less extreme than chiropractic work but again, still on the same kind of track) and cringe.

What did help me was finding a physio who specialised in hypermobility and who actually checked my strength and range of motion to figure out where my stability was the worst and give me stabilising exercises. My bad joints are always going to need work but at least with a decent physio I have a hope of strengthening them and reducing pain and damage rather than getting easy temporary relief and making things worse in the long run.

It turns out the whole “your spine is out of alignment” thing is very convincing when your spine is literally out of alignment due to a subluxated tailbone, hip, shoulder, etc etc.

And then, again on a recommendation from an MD doctor for my chronic migraines, I got my neck adjusted, very gently I might add, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI for a possible brain bleed because something in my neck tore.

Thankfully it wasn't a brain bleed and I wasn't about to die.

Unfortunately, they’d torn every inch of soft tissue on the right side of my neck from my upper trap muscles all the way around the right side of my skull. I could barely hold my head up for weeks. Everything was agony.

Its been several years and I’m still dealing with the damage.

The spinal specialist I saw during recovery was very adamant about never letting anyone touch your neck like that, no matter how gentle they are. He told me the majority of his patients used to come from motoring accidents, and now a good solid chunk of them were from people being irreparably harmed by chiropractors. From torn ligaments to strokes, he’d seen it all. All because chiro is cheaper than physical therapy.

When I was finally diagnosed with EDS and started getting proper help, the horror that went through every EDS-aware physical therapist when I told them the chiropractor story was palpable. One straight up told me I should be paralyzed.

And then we started working on stabilizing my joints and muscles so that they don’t dislocate/subluxate as much because while the chiro might have been putting my joints back in without knowing it, they weren’t actually doing anything to address the root cause or stabilize the area.

It was just a weekly stop-gap measure that was inadvertently helping my immediate pain but ultimately lengthening my long term recovery.

I SHOULD have been recommend physical therapy from the start, even before we knew I had EDS, but because chiropractic care is cheaper, that’s what my insurance agreed to cover.

And now my head sits at a slight angle from scar tissue at the base of my skull and sometimes my fingers feel a little numb.

“If Chiropractic* doesn’t work, why does insurance cover it?”

Well, it’s very simple you see, insurance hates paying for things, and chiropractors are cheap as fuck.

Let’s say you injure your back scrubbing a toilet or something. You go to a real doctor, a good doctor who doesn’t blow you off. That doctor may tell you to take some Motrin and call them if it doesn’t get better, but they also might prescribe you a stronger anti-inflammatory, or a muscle relaxer. Your insurance has to pay out for the visit and the medicine.

Let’s say they do that and two weeks later your back still hurts. Your doctor orders an MRI. Your insurance now has to pay for an MRI, which can be a couple thousand dollars, well more than the premium you’ve paid this month, which means they’ve lost money on you.

So you’re lucky and the MRI comes back that you’re okay but you need physical therapy. That’s another couple grand that your insurance has to pay out.

But maybe you weren’t lucky. Maybe the MRI comes back and you have a herniated disc. You’re gonna need surgery and physical therapy, and now you’ve not only cost them more than your premiums bring in in a year, you’ve hit your annual maximum which means they have to pay everything from now on. They aren’t happy.

So let’s start back at the beginning. You injure your back, you instead go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor doesn’t have a decade of medical training, they have a certificate from a for-profit college that says they’re a chiropractor. They charge your insurance for an office visit, crack your back a bit, and send you on your merry way.

You might feel better for a while, because the placebo effect is more powerful than you think. But even if you do feel better, there’s still the chance that you’ve got damage. You may still need physical therapy, you may still have a herniated disc.

But if you keep going back to that chiropractor, they’re never gonna tell you that, and even if they do, it’ll be after 2-3 sessions, so 6-8 weeks at a minimum, during which time you’re putting more wear and tear on that injury, and eventually, you have to go to a real doctor.

But here’s where the magic happens. See, you injured your back in December. Now it’s February. Because your insurance put off sending you to a real doctor for two months, some actuary gets a big fat bonus for “reducing costs” in quarter 4. Meanwhile, your real doctor orders an MRI that shows that the damage is, in fact, much worse than it probably was to begin with. And there’s some evidence of injuries after the fact from the chiropractor. Oh, and by the way, there’s a chance you’re gonna be in pain for the rest of your life even with surgery.

But hey, your insurance managed to post a profit in Q4.

Pretty sure @thebibliosphere mentioned getting fucked up by a chiropractor, and I don't have ehlers danlos but I am hypermobile. I went to a very well trained osteopath (theoretically better than chiropractors and, at least in the UK, more regulated but still use some of the same techniques) for a few years and while I would feel better after each appointment, nothing ever really got better and I now look back at the way he handled my neck (which was way, way less extreme than chiropractic work but again, still on the same kind of track) and cringe.

What did help me was finding a physio who specialised in hypermobility and who actually checked my strength and range of motion to figure out where my stability was the worst and give me stabilising exercises. My bad joints are always going to need work but at least with a decent physio I have a hope of strengthening them and reducing pain and damage rather than getting easy temporary relief and making things worse in the long run.

It turns out the whole “your spine is out of alignment” thing is very convincing when your spine is literally out of alignment due to a subluxated tailbone, hip, shoulder, etc etc.

And then, again on a recommendation from an MD doctor for my chronic migraines, I got my neck adjusted, very gently I might add, and I ended up having to get an emergency MRI for a possible brain bleed because something in my neck tore.

Thankfully it wasn't a brain bleed and I wasn't about to die.

Unfortunately, they’d torn every inch of soft tissue on the right side of my neck from my upper trap muscles all the way around the right side of my skull. I could barely hold my head up for weeks. Everything was agony.

Its been several years and I’m still dealing with the damage.

The spinal specialist I saw during recovery was very adamant about never letting anyone touch your neck like that, no matter how gentle they are. He told me the majority of his patients used to come from motoring accidents, and now a good solid chunk of them were from people being irreparably harmed by chiropractors. From torn ligaments to strokes, he’d seen it all. All because chiro is cheaper than physical therapy.

When I was finally diagnosed with EDS and started getting proper help, the horror that went through every EDS-aware physical therapist when I told them the chiropractor story was palpable. One straight up told me I should be paralyzed.

And then we started working on stabilizing my joints and muscles so that they don’t dislocate/subluxate as much because while the chiro might have been putting my joints back in without knowing it, they weren’t actually doing anything to address the root cause or stabilize the area.

It was just a weekly stop-gap measure that was inadvertently helping my immediate pain but ultimately lengthening my long term recovery.

I SHOULD have been recommend physical therapy from the start, even before we knew I had EDS, but because chiropractic care is cheaper, that’s what my insurance agreed to cover.

And now my head sits at a slight angle from scar tissue at the base of my skull and sometimes my fingers feel a little numb.