7 Reasons to Seek Chiropractic Help - Part 3

4. Chiropractic is Less Disruptive to Your Lifestyle

Chiropractic is done on an outpatient basis and has easy recovery, often less than 24 hours of minimal soreness. Consider this in comparison to the recovery of surgery.

After any surgical procedure, the body needs time to repair tissues damaged during the surgery so that the body can return to normal. Surgical recovery is a process that can take time, often long periods of time requiring medication and bed rest. In fact, pushing yourself too hard after surgery will cause setbacks and make your recovery time longer.

Chiropractic, on the other hand, has limited recovery time. At most, chiropractic patients may feel some mild soreness in the area of the manipulation. This soreness is typically gone in a matter of hours, not days or weeks as with surgery.

Additionally, surgical patients that are older, out of shape, overweight, or generally in poor health will take far longer to heal and be ready for every day life. Although different factors will dictate how quickly you are pain free, the ability to resume your lifestyle happens quickly with most patients, often with as little as one manipulation.

5. Chiropractic is Less Expensive

In August 1999, Blue Cross/Blue Shield (BCBS) of Kansas presented a study titled "Lumbago Treatment." When viewed per treatment episode, chiropractic was shown to be more cost effective than anesthesiology, neurosurgery, neurology, registered physical therapy, orthopedic reconstructive surgery, physical medicine and rehabilitation, and rheumatology.

Why so cost effective? Medical doctors and physical therapists rely on:

• Referrals
• Prescriptions
• Surgery
• MRIs
• CT scans
• Hospitalization

 Over 50% of the charges are simply for diagnostic procedures and not for actual pain relief.

On the other hand, the majority of chiropractic expense comes from office based treatment with less than 10% of costs arising from diagnostics, typically in the form of spinal x-rays.

A study in the May 2007 Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics showed that chiropractic resulted in a 60.2% reduction in hospital admissions, 59.0% reduction in hospital days, 62.0% reduction in outpatient surgeries and procedures, and 83% reduction pharmaceutical costs when compared with conventional medicine.

By reducing these items, overall costs associated with chiropractic care are significantly less than that of traditional medical care.