Why are chiropractors particularly susceptible to Conspirituality?
tl;dr: it's baked into the origin myth
On Conspirituality 88, we investigated one question: Why are chiropractors particularly susceptible to pseudoscience and grifting? To reiterate the context of the episode, this is not a takedown of chiropractic in general; I’ve gone to hundreds of sessions in my life, and while I no longer use this modality, I’ve benefited from it in the past. That said, there’s an entire cohort of chiropractors that are anti-vax and anti-medicine, and that also make a number of impossible health claims. Why? Because it’s baked into the field’s origin myth.
In 1895, Daniel David Palmer performed the first chiropractic adjustment on a partially deaf janitor in Iowa named Harvey Lillard. Palmer was working as a magnetic healer when he noticed a vertebra out of alignment on the Lillard’s back, who was working shirtless at the time. Lillard claimed the “pop” he heard when bending over cured his deafness; he said he could hear fully again the day after the adjustment.
This magical adjustment was later disputed by Palmer's daughter, who said that Palmer actually slapped the janitor on the back after hearing a joke; the janitor reported that his hearing improved a few days after the slap, making the very origin story was in dispute from the beginning.
This didn’t stop Palmer, who had previously worked as a beekeeper, school teacher, and grocery store owner before becoming a magnetic healer. He was also a believer in spiritualism—the dead live on in a spirit world and communicate with the living, often to provide moral and ethical guidance.
Here we have an opportunist who believed he had discovered a new healing modality, one that he immediately wrote into his own mythology. In fact, Palmer later claimed to have "received" chiropractic from the "other world" via a deceased physician, Dr. Jim Atkinson. Spiritualism bleeds into this world: Palmer regarded chiropractic as religious, stating he was the "fountain head" in the spirit of Christ, Mohammed, and Martin Luther.
The word chiropractic comes from heiros and praktikos, “done by hand,” and given the religiosity you get a sense that Palmer also believed he had some magic juju in his healing hands. He believed the body provided all natural healing power through the nervous system and invented the notion of a “spinal misalignment,” which he said caused a shortage in “nerve supply” (otherwise known as a subluxation).
Chiropractic supposedly realigned the nerve supply, which Palmer regarded as the root cause of all disease—well, to be exact, he claimed that 95% of all diseases are caused by subluxated vertebrae, while the other 5% is caused by displaced joints other than those in the vertebral column.
And, surprise, surprise, Palmer was an anti-vaxxer and germ theory denialist. Among his many writings, he stated,
It is the very height of absurdity to strive to 'protect' any person from smallpox or any other malady by inoculating them with a filthy animal poison.
Chiropractic wasn’t created whole cloth, however. Osteopathy was founded a decade before Palmer started cracking backs. An immediate turf war ensued—though to their credit, osteopaths started looking for mainstream medical accreditation much earlier than chiropractors.
In 1896, Palmer apparently borrowed the philosophical principles of chiropractic from osteopathy, as both describe the body as a “machine” that can be cured without drugs; they both claim that spinal manipulation improves health; and subluxation is effectively synonymous with the osteopathic “somatic dysfunction,” though the latter affects the circulatory system, not the nervous system.
While osteopaths somewhat rightfully considered chiropractic a bastardized form of osteopathy, Palmer initially denied studying osteopathy. A change of heart followed when, in 1899, Palmer claimed that he had indeed taken an osteopathy course, and that “chiropractic is osteopathy gone to seed.” Palmer also studied electropathy, cranial diagnosis, hydrotherapy, and facial diagnosis.
In 1897, Palmer founded the Palmer School and Cure in Davenport; it was later renamed Palmer College of Osteopathic. He was soon jailed for practicing medicine without a license. After spending 17 days in the slammer, he finally paid the fine. He ended up selling the school to his son, BJ Palmer, then moved to the west coast and established chiropractic schools in California, Oklahoma, and Oregon.
Daniel had a fraught relationship with all his children. BJ claimed he was barely a father and often beat his three children. Daniel died after being struck from behind by a car driven by BJ, though the official cause of death was listed as typhoid fever—which he probably got after the car accident, though the accident is contested.
Chiropractic is clearly rooted in mysticism and pseudoscience. To his credit, BJ evolved chiropractic by allowing X-rays in 1910, whereas his father was opposed to any mainstream medical intervention. As chiropractic made its way into the mainstream, there's long been a combination of “mixers”—chiropractors who perform spinal adjustments with other treatments—and “straights,” who rely only on spinal adjustments.
The "straight versus mixers" camps date back to near the origins of chiropractic. Even though he allowed x-rays, BJ didn’t like mixers, yet he was slightly less metaphysical than his father. In 1924, BJ speculated that only 12 percent of the nation's 25,000 chiropractors were actually straights, so we do see an early impulse to mix spinal manipulation with other modalities—which, again, puts it more in alignment with osteopathy than as its own island. By the thirties, chiropractic was the largest “alternative healing” profession in America. Clinical trials on chiropractic's efficacy began in 1935.
The road to mainstream medicine for chiropractic was not easy, in part due to straights almost making it a religion; Daniel Palmer wasn’t the only one who wanted to fuse back-cracking with spirit.
In 1963, the American Medical Association (AMA) formed a “Committee on Quackery” specifically to combat chiropractic pseudoscience. Three years later, they labeled chiropractic an ‘unscientific cult,” and in 1980 warned medical doctors not to associate with the profession. Seven years later, the AMA was found guilty of trying to demonize and eliminate the profession, based on a 1976 anti-trust lawsuit; this capped off a growing interest by the profession at large in potential treatments around spinal manipulation.
One reason my parents were able to bring me to a chiropractor in 1991 was because insurance accepted it—which is, sadly, a marker of acceptance in the Western medical system. (I write “sadly” due to how much we rely on private insurance as a marker of efficacy in this country, compared to clinical trials.)
Chiropractic should continue to follow the evidence. Sadly, chiropractors dominate the conspiritualitist realm today—Joe Dispenza, Phil Good, Melissa Sell, Ben Tapper, and Devin Vrana among them—and we can point back to its origins to understand the reason.