While sports injuries or accidents can cause back pain, sometimes the simplest of movements — for example, picking up a pencil from the floor — can have painful results. In addition, arthritis, poor posture, obesity, and psychological stress can cause or complicate back pain. Back pain can also directly result from disease of the internal organs, such as kidney stones, kidney infections, blood clots, or bone loss.

Research supports chiropractic spinal manipulation:

Access to essential health care is limited in economically depressed urban areas. Federally qualified health centers strive to bridge the gap of care to these areas by providing affordable, comprehensive health care. Some of the risk factors for chronic pain happen to be the same risk factors that are common among those who utilize FQHCs (low education level, low socioeconomic status, and higher rate of substance dependence or abuse). Therefore, those more likely to have chronic pain are also more likely to have their healthcare needs met at FQHCs.

Older Medicare patients with chronic low back pain and other medical problems who received spinal manipulation from a chiropractic physician had lower costs of care and shorter episodes of back pain than patients in other treatment groups. Patients who received a combination of chiropractic and medical care had the next lowest Medicare costs, and patients who received only medical care incurred the highest costs. – Weeks et al (2016), Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics

For Headaches

“6 to 8 sessions of upper cervical and upper thoracic manipulation were shown to be more effective than mobilization and exercise in patients with CGH (cervicogenic headache), and the effects were maintained at 3 months.” – Dunning et al. (2016) BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders

In Comparison to Other Treatments

“Chiropractic users had 64% lower odds of receiving an opioid prescription than non users.” – Corcoran et al. (2019) Pain Medicine

A growing list of research studies and reviews demonstrate that the services provided by chiropractors are not only clinically effective and safe but also cost effective. Following are excerpts and summaries from a few of those studies. The evidence supports the natural, whole-body, nondrug approach of chiropractic for a variety of conditions.

For Acute and Chronic Pain

Chiropractic is a system of therapy focused on the structure of the body, particularly the spine. Chiropractors manipulate the body’s alignment to relieve pain and improve function and to help the body heal itself.

In addition to revealing trends in chronic pain, a new study also provides a glimpse of what might be causing the increase.

The information necessary for a detailed explanation isn’t part of the NHIS (National Health Interview Survey) data set, but the researchers did look at a host of variables to determine which ones were most closely associated with the pain trends.

Muscle relaxant drugs are largely ineffective for low back pain, despite being widely prescribed for this condition, suggests an analysis of the latest evidence published by The BMJ. The findings show that muscle relaxants might reduce pain in the short term, but the effect is too small to be considered clinically meaningful, and there is an increased risk of side effects.

Widespread pain is linked to a heightened risk of all types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, finds research published online in the journal Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine. This association is independent of potentially influential factors, such as age, general health, and lifestyle, the findings indicate.