What is Chiropractic?
So let me set the scene for you before I answer; Does chiropractic work?
- What is chiropractic?
Chiropractic is a profession that helps identify and relieve issues related to your skeleton, joints and soft tissues. Therefore, a chiropractor is interested in helping you with these issues.
Usually, the treatment is performed by hand.
The methods and techniques individual chiropractors will use vary. With many different competing philosophies regarding what the role of chiropractic is and what the scope of their practice should be.
2. My Chiropractic experience
I became a chiropractor because I was getting a lot of back pain in my twenties, and chiropractic was the only profession that helped me get comfortable. At the time, I thought it was miraculous, as no one had been able to help me with any of my physical problems for many years.
It prompted me to change course (I had trained to be an aerospace engineer) and by becoming a chiropractor, I thought that I would also be able to help others that had suffered like me. I was really pleased about having found a useful, practical profession!
The type of chiropractic I was trained in initially was the diversified chiropractic technique (DCT). This involved quick thrusts to a joint to force a release from it; often helping to improve the motion in that joint. This was the technique that would very often relieve my back pain and I was taught to combine this with massage and stretching techniques to reduce muscle tension.
Working as a chiropractor
After several years in practice, I realised that my body was still slowly deteriorating, despite working hard to maintain my health and having ongoing chiropractic care. I told myself “Not to worry. I just need to work harder and be more consistent with my exercises, treatment and nutrition.”
You can find out more about the issues I was suffering with and what treatments I learned and tried out here – Recovery from chronic pain with Advanced BioStructural Correction.
The standard model of care that I was taught was basically to loosen up the areas of the body that are stiff/tight with DCT and stretches and strengthen the areas that are weak with exercises. Sounds like a good thing to do right?
Well, after some time, I noticed that the same pain would keep returning. No matter how regularly I was treated and no matter how well I stuck to my rehabilitation and conditioning exercises, my body would eventually still fail and I would be in pain.
- Why would the same area keep failing?
- Why did I need to work so hard just to function normally?
- What was the difference between me and others my age that seemed fine?
These questions bugged me all the time and I started to wonder does chiropractic work?
Something in chiropractic was missing
I still was not satisfied with the results I was getting for myself or my patients, so over several years, I did hundreds of hours of research on all sorts of health topics, on top of my chiropractic education. I knew that I must be missing something important; I could not accept that this was as good as it gets.
I used myself as a guinea pig to test many different treatments. A lot of this seemed to help me but in the long term, I was still getting worse!
Being a member of many professional groups and forums, I would ask how others were getting on in the profession; maybe it was just me? People seemed to be having different experiences but many had ongoing physical health issues that they were “managing” but not curing.
During seminars and meetings, I would question my fellow practitioners on what techniques they used, which tests were useful, which protocols they used, successes, failures, etc.
After nine years I was still dissatisfied that I could not fix myself or my patients to my expectations. I was getting plenty of people out of pain, but they were not getting back to what I considered full function – and I wanted to feel amazing which I was not!
Is there a better method in Chiropractic?
I started to wonder if my profession was not as awesome as I had first thought. In my mind, either we can fix people or we cannot, and I thought I was meant to be getting people back to 100%.
I then seriously considered that perhaps chiropractic does not work and that I should give up and move on.
“Does Chiropractic work?”
I was preparing to leave the profession but continued searching for an answer. I came across a protocol called Advanced Biostructural Correction – ABCTM. As soon as I read the basic premise I knew I had hit on something promising. The more I learned, the more everything fell into place.
The best theories are often very simple and the basic theory of ABCTM is this:
- Many physical injuries that you experience, cause bones to be pushed out of place – misaligned.
- Your body can use many of its 600+ muscles to pull some but not all of these displaced bones back into alignment.
- Therefore our bodies have only a partial self-realignment mechanism.
- The bones that remain out of place cause your body to collapse under gravity.
- This compresses your organs and makes your joints and muscles have to work much harder in order to hold you up.
- This underlying situation can then cause you to feel pain, stiffness, aches, tired, etc.
- As time passes, your body suffers from degeneration associated with this chronic stress.
- It doesn’t always have to hurt but your level of physical function will be negatively affected.
- Skeletal misalignment is largely responsible for poor posture.
- Muscles tightness and weakness is a side effect of the misalignment so working on the muscles helps you cope but never corrects posture properly.
- To get a misaligned body healthy and working properly again you correct only the bones the body cannot self-correct, letting the body do the rest.
“The injury at the root of many of your problems is a bone out of place in a direction that there are no muscles or combination of muscles to self–correct. “
Pretty simple theory right?
In practice, the situation can get very complicated, because you may have dozens or even hundreds of these injuries at different times in your life, and because you cannot self-correct them, they accumulate. This leads to different symptoms as time passes but ultimately your condition worsens.
I have practised this way since 2014 and I have found it to be extremely consistent and comprehensive in its theory, methodology and outcomes. I only use this method now and I have found that this community of forward thinkers is more in tune with my way of thinking.
Psychologists have known for a long time that past traumas can affect us today. Well, it seems as though the same is true for your body too.
Often, we cannot fully resolve a physical injury to our body structure/alignment because of the issue of not having muscles to self-correct all misalignments.
I know that many therapists in this sector including chiropractors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, sports therapists, massage therapists, physical therapists, and others are in the same situation as what I was in. They are not returning people to their original, pre-injury condition and the injury either returns or does not resolve and becomes chronic.
Some therapists have not yet realised this and are happily continuing to do what they know, but I know many are unhappy with their results and are searching for a better way. I know this because I talk to therapists from many disciplines. At our clinic, we also treat other practitioners and professionals including orthopaedic nurses, doctors, and others.
Everyone is searching for the truth!
It’s a biomechanical problem
In my opinion, most simple physical injuries are a biomechanical problem so you need someone who thinks like an engineer or mechanic as well as having a biological understanding. Due to what I have learned during my journey so far I have radically changed the way I diagnose and practice in my clinic.
Nowadays, I pay meticulously close attention to your injury history, right back to childbirth, as that seems to be the key to understanding your current situation.
When I dig around a little, it usually becomes apparent to both of us that you have actually been having problems related to your alignment for a very long time. It’s just that you never considered that they were all related to the same underlying issues.
The method a chiropractor uses is most important
There are dozens (if not hundreds) of chiropractic techniques. Not many people know that! So when someone is searching for a chiropractor, they will usually look at cost, location, reputation, etc; assuming that the actual treatment is mostly similar.
From my research into this area, I found that I could group a lot of these techniques and methods into those that work on the primary causes of the misalignment and those that work on the areas of symptoms. The symptomatic areas are often the parts of your body that are performing the compensations to keep you upright. Compensations are often a muscle, joint or organ.
These areas are under a lot of stress so can become damaged and painful. Working on these areas provides relief but unless the primary misalignments are corrected, the compensations almost always start bothering you again. This is because the compensations are needed to help you function. This is why many different types of treatment can seem to work in the short term, but not so well in the long term.
The key direction that you cannot self-correct bones in your spine, are bones that have been misaligned forward. So the thing which upsets me still to this day is that I was taught to manipulate spinal bones into this very direction with the diversified method (DCT).
It will have contributed to my body getting worse even though I was working so hard on my health. The treatments I was having were getting me out of pain, but biomechanically, they were making me more unstable and not very helping my long term body structure.
Nowadays, I only push spinal bones in the opposite direction – backwards never forwards. This works extremely well for me and my patients. I have found that not only can you get pain relief but the biomechanics, posture and function of the body also immediately and simultaneously improve.
With the ABCTM method, I work on any and every bone in your body that needs correcting, including the facial and cranial bones. I test my clients from head to toe every visit and I make sure I correct every bone misalignment that needs it. When done correctly, you are effortlessly upright at the end of each treatment. Breathing also improves as a result of easier chest and rib movement – Find out more about how ABCTM helps chest function, breathing, COPD and asthma here.
The difference between one person and another is which of their bones are affected, in which order did it happen and how long ago. These three variables are enough to produce many different complaints. When a client presents with several symptoms and lots of complaints, I can break their injury history down chronologically and their complaint almost always makes perfect sense.
Chiropractic finally makes sense!
I used to wonder how I could have missed something so obvious. The reason is that if you have been educated to think in a certain way, it becomes very difficult to think outside of the box. The answers are right in front of your face but you are oblivious to them.
I cannot tell you how easy it is to understand and explain complaints when you get the underlying theory right. It is a joy to go to work now and I am constantly on the lookout for tougher and tougher cases to challenge the model. Both I and my ABCTM colleagues have not been able to “break the model” yet; so far it is a very robust theory and the protocol is very safe. In my book that is an incredible achievement.
Testing myself, I also learned that excessive nerve tension meant that my nerve signals were not getting through to my muscles correctly. This tension came from my body being in a forward and twisted alignment. Despite the size of my muscles from all my training, many of them were weak. This became more apparent if I bent my neck forward, as this increased the nerve tension and gravity pulled me more forward.
Now I knew why I had always hurt myself when bending.
Almost all of my symptoms could be explained with a simple theory.
Don’t suffer
I do not want others to suffer like myself and my family members; trying therapy after therapy yet still getting worse as the years pass. I do not believe that once we get hurt there is no way to help ourselves and we just have to make do.
I do not think that physical injury to the skeleton is a disease; it is primarily a biomechanical issue which if left uncorrected can cause disease.
Medical students get even less education on biomechanics than chiropractors and yet GPs are the people that have to deal with the most number of patients with biomechanical injuries. This seems awfully unfair on them in my opinion. We treat GPs, nurse, orthopaedic specialists, oral-facial surgeons, and others and they tell me that they wish they could recommend this type of treatment to their patients.
Fortunately for me, my grounding in lots of physics and maths meant that when someone presented a biomechanical model of injury to me instead of a disease model, it made a lot of sense and I was able to investigate.
Challenges in the chiropractic profession
An issue we face is that healthcare is it becoming more and more specialised to the point that few people understand the whole body. If you don’t understand how everything interacts with each other and is intimately linked, it can make it difficult to make sense of the whole person. This is often a complaint made to me by clients who have been to see many different specialists for several conditions that are actually related.
Yes, we practitioners need to specialise, but we also need to have an understanding of the interconnectedness of the body and our being, to better understand the “whole”.
Does chiropractic work?
So “Does chiropractic work?” Yes, it can work but it depends on the method the chiropractor uses. My current level of skill with Advanced BioStructural Correction has, over the last 12 months, allowed me to achieve 99% symptom improvement success and 100% posture improvement. Compared to other techniques this is night and day. I have the confidence in this method to help almost anyone that seeks help with their structural health.
I want to write up some of these cases to give the public a better understanding of what is actually possible with this method. Here are a few examples:
- Scoliosis reduction from 32 degrees angle to 19 degrees and still improving.
- Improvement of spondylolisthesis from requiring imminent surgery to a return to normal activities. We are awaiting a follow-up MRI to show you the before and after.
- Improving severely arthritic knees to the point that they look normal on x-ray. I will be writing a separate blog on this with before and after x-rays soon.
- 100% improvement rate to sciatica.
Food for thought… Around 50% of our new clients have already had treatment from a chiropractor which they were dissatisfied with. The reasons given were that;
- it did not clear up their issue
- the issue was only dealt with temporarily
- they were worse
In Conclusion
Does chiropractic work? Yes, it does, when the correct method is used. This is true for other professions such as physiotherapists, sports therapists and osteopaths too, as anyone can learn the Advanced BioStructural Correction method.
I hope this helps shed some light on why perhaps no one has been able to help you so far. If something you have read in this article resonates with you, I may be able to help you get to the root of your problem. Please click on the link to tell me your story and book in your free consultation with me.
Are you interested in learning this method?
Please visit I want to learn Advanced BioStructrual Correction to find seminar locations, dates and prices. Our seminars are a small group format with lots of hands-on teaching. You will learn a simple but very effective method to deal with almost any type of biomechanical issue.
Lucky Gidda
- Level 3 ABCP, ENCC, MABC-I, MABC-E
- Registered Advanced BioStructural Correction Practitioner™
- Registered EndoNasal Cranial Correction™
- Associate Member of the Royal Society of Medicine
Does Advanced BioStructural Correction Work?
Get in touch with us today to see how we could transform your life too.
- Advice
- Basics of Body Structure
- Chiropractor Birmingham UK Alternative
- Conditions we treat
- Testimonials
- Videos
Find out even more about Advanced BioStructural Correction at www.abcmiracles.com
