Study Finds That For Chronic Spinal Pain Nothing Is Better Than Chiropractic

A study published in Spine magazine compared Chiropractic, Acupuncture and medication for the treatment of spinal pain that had persisted for longer than three months and found the best results came from Chiropractic.

A clinical trial was done at an Australian Public Hospital from February, 1999 to October, 2001. In this study 115 patients were enrolled at the Multi-Disciplinary Spinal Pain Unit and were treated with either Chiropractic spinal adjustments, needle Acupuncture or medication. The patients were given a health survey question-naire and a number of standard diagnostic tests at the beginning of the clinical trial and again at two weeks, five weeks, and nine weeks into the treatment.

The clinical trial found that while all three showed some improvement in the health survey questionnaire, Chiropractic achieved the best overall improvements in almost all of the objective tests, as well as the highest percentage of patients becoming pain free – 27.3%.  Acupuncture was found to be twice as effective as medication and got a better result than Chiropractic on one of the diagnostic tests.

Medication was found to be the least effective of the three by any standard of the study.  

Source:  "Chronic Spinal Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial Comparing Medication, Acupuncture, and Spinal Manipulation"  by Lynton G. F. Giles, DC, Ph.D, and Reinhold Muller,  PhD. Published in Spine. Volume 28, Number 14, 1490-1501 (2003)