Yes they can. And according to the latest research, they do it as effectively as medications.
This is great news for people like me who love a sneaky disco nap. And it’s great news for any of you taking blood pressure medication. After all, who wouldn’t love to be taking less medications!
In a 2019 article on the website MedicalNewsToday, 212 people were studied. These were not the healthiest people – average age of 62, plenty of smokers and people with type 2 diabetes. Yet even with these complicating factors, the study found …

Headaches are caused by a number of different things. A lot of headaches are the result of tension in the neck muscles and compression of the nerves in the upper part of the neck. A new study has compared massage with mobilising the joints of the upper neck to release pressure on these nerves.
The study found that mobilisation techniques of the neck produce better results than massage alone for people suffering from headaches. The abstract is copied below and outlines that a group of people were given either neck massage …

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 …