This article, "Confessions of a Former Chiropractor," lifts the lid on chiropractic.
These are excerpts from that:
"My practice partner believed she could diagnose disease by testing the strength of specific muscles, a method known as applied kinesiology (AK). Patients loved it. ... I asked her once how often her diagnoses were correct. “About half the time,” she said, without irony."
"Fifty years of accumulating studies have failed to make a compelling case for chiropractic’s widespread clinical utility."
"Chiropractic does not compete well with medicine—or even with itself. When studied carefully, its apparent effectiveness dissolves into non-specific factors: expectation, attention, ritual, and natural history. When chiropractic researchers properly control for placebo and natural recovery, the specific effect of spinal manipulation reliably shrinks or disappears altogether. Paradoxically, better science makes chiropractic look worse."
"50 percent accuracy in a two-outcome probability space is not success at all." 

Chiropractic: Quackery Hiding in Plain Sight 

"Here in the UK, chiropractic adjustment is relatively unpopular, with only 3,000 registered chiropractors nationwide. This is probably due, in part, to the fact that most Brits see it for what it is – a scam, and it is often lumped together with other New Age alternative therapies. Even the NHS calls it a “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)."

Chiropractic claims in the English-speaking world

Conclusions: The majority of chiropractors and their associations in the English-speaking world seem to make therapeutic claims that are not supported by sound evidence, whilst only 28% of chiropractor websites promote lower back pain, which is supported by some evidence. We suggest the ubiquity of the unsubstantiated claims constitutes an ethical and public health issue.

The hallmark therapy of chiropractors is spinal manipulation. Nearly all patients consulting a chiropractor will have their spine manipulated. This often means that the chiropractor applies a sudden, powerful thrust to a vertebra which takes the spinal joint beyond its physiological range of motion. In about half of all patients, this causes mild to moderate pain that usually lasts two or three days and often is strong enough to affect patients’ quality of life.

The most common serious adverse events are vertebrobasilar accidents, disk herniation, and cauda equina syndrome. Estimates of the incidence of serious complications range from 1 per 2 million manipulations to 1 per 400,000. Given the popularity of spinal manipulation, its safety requires rigorous investigation.

From: Don't Believe What You Think: Arguments for and against SCAM by Edzard Ernst

Page updated 17 March 2026