According to the General Chiropractic Council, there are around 3.5k chiropractors in the UK at the moment.
If you’re not familiar, chiropractors use their hands to help relieve problems with the bones, muscles and joints. Chiropractic is considered an alternative and complementary treatment.
The NHS said that while this can help with bone and muscle issues, “There’s little evidence that it can help with more serious conditions or problems not affecting the muscles or joints, such as asthma, allergies and mental health problems.”
So, for some people, chiropractic can be very effective. However, the origins of the treatment are, uh, spooky.
The origins of chiropractic
So, I’m going to need you to bear with me here because the original inspiration for chiropractic was in fact... a ghost.
While the founder of chiropractic, David Daniel Palmer, credited his understanding of magnetism for the creation of the practice, he later admitted that there was a little bit of help from a doctor.
Not just any doctor, though, one that had become a ghost.
Palmer wrote in The Chiropractor’s Adjuster: The Science, Art and Philosophy of Chiropractic: “My first knowledge of [chiropractic practice] was received from Dr Jim Atkinson who, about fifty years ago, lived in Davenport, Iowa, and who tried during his life-time to promulgate the principles now known as Chiropractic.
“The intellectuality of that time was not ready for this advancement.”
Basically, Atkinson allegedly was ahead of his time and imparted his wisdom of chiropractic down to Palmer.
In a paper published in the Chiropractic Journal of Australia, Wiggins and Engel argued that his spiritual influences should be separated from the physical practice of chiropractic.
They said: “Palmer claimed Atkinson was an ‘intelligent spirit being’ from the ‘other world’ who frequently conversed with him on a range of matters including chiropractic.
“However, no consensus has been reached on how Palmer and Atkinson ’communicated. Palmer claimed that he ‘conversed’ with Atkinson through ‘inspiration’ or ‘spiritual promptings’, a method referred to by other 19th century spiritualists and medico-religious writers of the time.”
The two concluded that this may actually have just been a story created to add an air of mysticism to the practice at a time when American spiritualism was popular.
They said: “By curing individuals in this world, Palmer claimed to be saving them from another life of disease, an approach that could be interpreted as being either a true act of altruism or a stroke of entrepreneurial genius.”
I’ll leave you to decide.