Finally, in July 2021, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a “Patient Page” to educate the public on the best options to treat acute and chronic low back pain. Chiropractic was listed ahead of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and muscle relaxers. This is very big news for consumers and helped right a long standing wrong. In 1986 the AMA lost an eleven-year anti-trust case which found the AMA guilty to trying to “contain and eliminate chiropractic as a profession.” It is now estimated that chiropractors treat 35 million adults annually.
Also, the Joint Commission, which accredits more than 22,000 US health care organizations and programs stated in 2019 that organizations are required to provide non-pharmacologic pain treatment strategies that include spinal manipulation, massage therapy and physical therapy. This is in direct response to the horrors of the continued opioid epidemic. Medicine wants to get people off pain medication and spinal manipulation is one of the best studied modalities to reduce acute and chronic spinal pain. Chiropractors perform over 90% of the spinal manipulations in the US annually.
The AMA and the Joint Commission are highly esteemed organizations in Medicine, and their endorsement of chiropractic should eventually benefit millions. It is about time.