Does chiropractic really helpful for lower back pain and neck pain?

Is chiropractic safe, effective and cost-effective for back pain? Does the full spinal x-ray cause any harms to the body? Why are there some practice of chiropractic still continue on without a clear x-ray image? Is the x-ray mandatory for chiropractic?

My first chiropractic experience was out of desperation. I had such pain in my hands and numbness and every doctor offered surgery to cure the carpal tunnel syndrome I had. The chiropractor explained that not all hand pain is from carpal tunnel and checked me out. His opinion was that I had pinched nerves in my neck, treated it and over the course of a couple weeks, eased the discomfort and also taught me ways to help myself. I haven't had to go back because now I know how to help myself. He also brought me through a serious bout of muscle spasm in my back. my regular doctor had me off work for 3 weeks, taking lots of muscle relaxers and laying around the chiropractor told me of natural muscle relaxers and how to care for myself and had me back to work in 3 days but kept treating me for about a week. As far as I am concerned, he is a gift from God!! He also did the exrays and diagnosed the arthritis in my spine years before my regular Doctor did.

It will help for a while, but you will have to keep going back. I know a guy thats in his sixties and swears that chiropractics saved his back. He says he goes twice a year... Im not sure about it though.

Yes, chiropractic is VERY safe. In many cases, it works far better and far more deeply than any other treatment, but not always. As Georges Ohsawa once said, "All conditions can be healed, but not all people..." Some people karmically need their sickness, on a soul growth level, as well as other levels, in order to work out the issues that that sickness brings out and up. If you remove their sickness, before they are ready to be done with it, they will go on to quickly manifest another one, or the same one all over again.

Chiropractic is highly effective. I also find it to be highly cost-effective. As far as the notion that having to go back to the chiropractor over and over again is a sign it's not working, let's look at your car: Do you drive it over and over again, and expect not to have to perform routine maintenence or replace worn out parts EVER? I find most people take better care of their cars than they do their bodies.

Yes, I believe x-rays are harmful to the body. So does anybody telling the truth. This is why folks wear a lead apron when getting dental x-rays, for example. It is also why they ask women if they could be pregnant, or are nursing BEFORE they do the x-rays. Chiropractic began with using palpation (the sense of touch) to determine when something is/was awry in the body, so "No!", it is NOT mandatory, nor was it ever. I do find that many chiropractors in their intent to be "more mainstream", or to come across to themselves and their patients as "true doctors", which I deeply state they are, have felt the need to go high tech. My very best chiropractic experiences, however, have been with those chiropractors who were low to no tech and used their hands, sight, sense of touch and intuition to fix me. Those chiropractic doctors who work this way, IMHO, are the doctors working closest to the original intent and methodology of chiropractic. It's the same thing with midwives. A good midwife can tell by touch, sometimes even by sight, the position (or "lie") of the baby. She doesn't need an ultrasound machine to do this. Part of the "sickness" of allopathic, male-dominated medicine, has been to destroy the art of healing and medicine, and to teach practitioners NEVER to trust their impressions, only to trust what the machines say. True healing has never been, and never will be found by using machines and methods that kill and surveille (sp?). It's part of the historical attempt to murder the feminine, intuitive, healing arts throughout history. And like I've always said: "It's time for that mentality to declare itself a failure, and to step down. It's run it's course, and it's damn near destroyed us all."

As a massage therapist, I can usually tell you by touch, with my eyes closed even, what my client does for work, whether they take any drugs or drink alcohol on any sort of a regular basis, how much or how well they are exercising and moving around through space, whether or not they've had children or are currently pregnant, what they typically eat (ie, how well), and almost all of what they're struggling with emotionally, I am that attuned and that gifted at picking up energy and physical impressions. So are most of my professional colleagues, the ones I like to hang out with, anyway. This is not unusual, especially with gifted or experienced or learned professional bodyworkers. This is the norm. I can tell you when someone is being abused, or has been, even long ago in their childhood. I can also tell you if they are an abuser. As far as bodywork and healing is concerned, I can usually tell you by touch within a few minutes what someone's exact physical condition is and each and every vertebra that is subluxated. Again, this is not voodoo or quackery. It is a professionally trained, extremely observant and highly intuitive person doing their job. We all have gifts like this, it's just that some of us use them and so the gifts grow and become stronger, and some of us deny our gifts and they diminish. I'll say this now: There are aspects and practitioners of allopathic medicine that are mentally ill, highly destructive, and about anything BUT healing. It's up to you as the consumer to determine who and which these aspects and practitioners are and to educate yourself first. I recommend NOT starting with those practices which use cutting, poison, denial and repression, radiation and synthetic chemicals to "heal". Those methods are always there, if needed, but that is not the place to start. This would seem to be common sense to me.