Consumer Reports Article on Back Pain

As a Doctor of Chiropractic, I spend a fair amount of time perusing journals for studies related to conservative care of neck pain, back pain and headaches. In our clinic, we employ many different modalities to get our patients better, including adjustments and acupuncture and the two main places I look for research, PubMed and Google Scholar, have a wealth of information related to those modalities. However, I missed one recently and you may have too. That is the purpose of this blog.

The June 2017 issue of Consumer Reports featured the article “The Better Way to Get Back Pain Relief” (www.consumerreports.org/back-pain/the-better-way-to-get-back-pain-relief/ ). Among the conclusions of that article are that over 80% of back pain sufferers surveyed by Consumer Reports reported that manual movement, such as chiropractic care, had helped them. The article also stresses that staying active is a key component of decreasing back pain and adding things such as chiropractic and acupuncture “can help alleviate pain as you work to get stronger.” The article also says that physicians should be thinking about treating the whole patient, not just the “broken parts”. This is a philosophy that DCs have been stressing from the early days of our profession.