And the winner is….
Osteopathy! A new article (published January 3, 2012) compared the effectiveness of spinal manipulation with medications and exercises for neck pain. The medications in the study included aspirin, ibuprofen, muscle relaxants and narcotics.
Neck manipulation was proven to be statistically significant to medication at the 2 month follow up, and again at 3, 6, and 12 months, with nearly two thirds of people receiving neck manipulation reporting a 75% reduction in pain. The exercises (basic stretches and neck retractions) were also proven to be more effective than medications, …

I recently read a review of “the adverse events” associated with manual therapy. That is to say, the bad things that can happen when you get a hands on treatment. An adverse event included both ‘minor’ events like feeling sore after a treatment, as well as ‘major’ side effects like nerve injury, paralysis, and stroke. I have listed the definitions at the bottom of this page.
Here is a summary of the data they collected:

The risk for adverse events after manual therapy were about the same as for doing exercise,
The risk …

Following on from my last post which compared the safety of visiting a Chiropractor vs visiting a GP, I will not attempt to summarise the findings of the other study cited in the New Scientist article. If you just want the bullet points, Richard Brown wrote ( http://bit.ly/unO7B) that the conclusion of this study was that the authors “found no causative association between chiropractic manipulation and stroke.”
Let’s go through what they did find.
In this study they looked at the outcome of treatment for nearly 20,000 patients, and found that in …