Your Choice: Chiropractic or Surgery?

Your idea of what healthcare should be or should not be may determine whether you can enjoy the benefits of conservative care or carry the scars of surgery.

One study shows that the healthier the personal habits are of a doctor the recommendations they make are more likely to be for lifestyle modifications than relying solely on medication or surgery. This concept leads us to a second study and the purpose of this article.

A separate study shows that if a patient with low back pain sees a surgeon as their first choice in doctors then that patient is more likely to have surgery for their low back complaints than if they had seen a Doctor of Chiropractic as their first choice in doctors. The figures are significant with 42.7% of the patients who saw a surgeon first being scheduled for surgery compared to only 1.5% of the patients who saw a Doctor of Chiropractic as their first choice in doctors.  Interestingly, these figures held true even when the severity of the injury and other factors were taken into consideration.

In other words, choose a Doctor of Chiropractic for your first contact when you are seeking relief from low back pain otherwise you may end up with less than satisfactory results and a permanent scar on your back. It is clear that the treatment philosophies of various doctors dictate the type of treatment they recommend for their patients.

An old saying goes, “Surgeons do what surgeons are taught to do.” Apparently, studies are proving the truthfulness of that old saying.

The cost of surgery is much greater than the expense associated with conservative chiropractic care so politicians and bureaucrats involved with healthcare cost containment may become interested in making healthcare decisions based upon the overall cost of various treatment modalities and techniques. This is becoming more obvious as emerging studies become available and even the Mayo Clinic has recognized that back surgery is only indicated in a small percentage of cases.

The choice of expensive surgery or more moderately priced chiropractic care is significant because the direct cost of treating low back pain in the United States in the year 2004 was $193.9 BILLION dollars!

It is because of these factors that researchers delved into various forms of records such as medical bills, administrative claims, medical record review documents, and even performed telephone interviews with patients who had undergone low back surgery to determine the potential variables involved in learning how to predict who would have low back surgery and who would not.

In looking at low back injuries suffered on the job it became apparent that a worker’s initial score on the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ) proved to be one of the most striking predictors of who would have surgery or not. If a worker had an initial score on the RMDQ that was 17 or higher on the 0-24 scale then they were six times more likely to have surgery compared to workers whose initial score on the RMDQ was in the 0-8 range. Apparently, if they were in more pain or disabled to a greater degree it led them to believe that a much more radical treatment such as relatively expensive surgery was necessary. The end result being that conservative (and less expensive) chiropractic care was not initially considered and many more injured workers went to surgery instead of avoiding it by utilizing conservative chiropractic care.