Chiropractic + Medical Care = Good Stuff

Back in May, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study in which they found that the addition of chiropractic care to normal medical care improved health care outcomes for members of the armed forces. This is excellent news! Chiropractors and chiropractic patients already know the many benefits that come from chiropractic care, and it's always positive to have those benefits validated in a high-quality study in a respected journal.

From the study (and please note that "LBP" stand for low back pain):

In the US military, LBP is one of the most common reasons members seek medical care and one of the most likely conditions to interrupt combat duty. Common medical therapies for LBP, including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, opioids, spinal fusions, and epidural steroid injections, demonstrate limited effectiveness; furthermore, many of these treatments have unacceptably high risk profiles.

The US opioid crisis creates an urgent need to evaluate cost-effective and low-risk nonpharmacological treatments. One option is chiropractic care. Doctors of chiropractic provide conservative care focused on diagnosis, treatment, comanagement, or referral for musculoskeletal conditions, including LBP. The primary therapeutic procedure used by doctors of chiropractic is spinal manipulative therapy.

The use of chiropractic care is common, with annual rates among US adults estimated between 8% and 14%. Current guidelines recommend the use of spinal manipulative therapy and/or chiropractic care for LBP.

The study's authors claim, rightly, that the strength of this study is that chiropractic care for these patients was not merely compared against medical care (a comparison that has been done many times in the past). Instead, since the military services have a large number of patients already receiving medical care, the authors investigated if the addition of chiropractic care for some of the patients would help them improve. The results were impressive:

Chiropractic care, when added to UMC [note from Dr. Johnson: "UMC" means usual medical care], resulted in moderate short-term treatment benefits in both LBP intensity and disability, demonstrated a low risk of harms, and led to high patient satisfaction and perceived improvement in active-duty military personnel. This trial provides additional support for the inclusion of chiropractic care as a component of multidisciplinary health care for LBP, as currently recommended in existing guidelines.