In studying actual science along with the fake stuff, mostly. Nowadays they have anatomy, physical therapy classes, etc.
Some of their techniques are also proven to be useful-ish for short term pain management (not for the reasons they claim, it’s similar to acupuncture). So someone who actually tells the patient that the treatment is exclusively for physical therapy and only short time benefits might be useful.
Few are that honest, but for some people that kind of short term help is vital.
It might be what gets you through the wait for a long term procedure, or what lets you rest and sleep to improve actual recovery, for example. Pain management is a need for some people.
They have more scope to experiment, in my case it was a way for me to access PRP injections before wider adoption. They are paid rather orthography to treatment, they can treat other things while also giving you regular spinal adjustments - similar to the idea that researchers should be paid to teach as paying them to research will pollute the research. We need a way to continue paying dentists so they can stop finding ‘soft spots’ that don’t exist.
I dislike the quackery but traditional science isn’t free from it either. I wish everyone was rational, evidence based and disinterested (as in not having a particular interest on biasing an outcome). But the world we live in is far from that. Consider the percentage of ‘normal’ medical doctors in Germany who believe in homeopathy. A large part of that is due to the terrain school of thought in medicine which lost out to germ theory. An artifact of history rather than rational people and rational study. I’m still looking for a better way the phrase it; but it seems to me that the belief in the belief of science far exceeds the actual belief in science.
If doctors / medical researchers really were so good at research they wouldn’t have taken so long to rediscover the ancient practice of prolotherapy.
(To be fair, chiros are not unique in grifting PRP -- I've seen traditional doctors selling it too.)
> Consider the percentage of ‘normal’ medical doctors in Germany who believe in homeopathy.
I hadn't heard of this, but, yeah, that's also quackery. Wild. 32% of German GPs report "using" homeopathy once a week. The US medical system may have some problems, but at least believing in homeopathy isn't one of them.
I had a limp from an injury that persisted for 8 years before PRP cleared it up in 3 months. I would have gotten the French sucrose injections earlier but France was a far way off and I couldn’t afford it at the time. I put it in the bucket of prolotherapy not in the bucket of stem cells and on that basis it absolutely works. Being a substance derived from the patient allows it to skip over regulatory hurdles, as mentioned I would have taken sucrose but that wasn’t on offer. The evidence for prolotherapy working is extensive, far exceeding a single study.
