We can learn a lot from patient satisfaction surveys and studies. The Craniocervical Foundation provides subsidized Upper Cervical Chiropractic Care to active military, veterans, and those going through financial hardships. There was a paper titled "Symptomatic Reactions, Clinical Outcomes and Patient Satisfaction Associated with Upper Cervical Chiropractic Care: A Prospective, Multicenter, Cohort Study" published in the Journal of Musculoskeletal Disorders in 2011 (see link below).
https://bmcmusculoskeletdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2474-12-219
How Did They Perform the Study?
There were 3 Upper Cervical Chiropractors that were involved in the study and they were looking at 5 Clinical Outcomes:
1) Neck Pain Disability Index (0-100)
2) Oswestry Back pain Index (0-100)
3) Numerical Rating Score (0-10) for neck pain, headache, midback pain, and low back pain
4) Treatment satisfaction
5) Symptomatic Reactions
A Total of 1,090 consecutive new patients from 83 chiropractors nationwide were recruited for this practice-based study. Data was collected at the beginning of a patient's care to get the baseline and after 2 weeks of care.
Subclinical status for pain and disability was defined as <3 on Numerical rating scale and <10% respectively.
Symptomatic reaction was defined as a new complaint or a worsening of the complaint >30 % on a Numerical rating scale of 0-10 and was less than 24 hours after an upper cervical correction.
What Were the Results of the Study?
With those 1,090 patients, there were 4,920 total office visits, which is 4.5 office visits per patient over approximately weeks.
There were a total of 2,653 corrections (2.4 per patient) over 17 days. So, patients only needed to have an adjustment at about half of their visits, which means when they weren't being adjusted they were holding their alignment.
31% of the 1,090 patients (383 patients) had a symptomatic reaction, and only 5.1% of the total patients (56 patients) had an intense symptomatic reaction.
Outcome assessments were significantly improved for neck pain and disability, headache, midback pain and low back pain. Following the 2 weeks of care, patients also reported a high level of patient satisfaction with a mean of 9.1/10.
The 83 Upper Cervical chiropractors used in the study were very experienced on there field and had administered over 5 million corrections over their careers without a reported incidence of a serious adverse event.
What Does This Study Show Us?
Although it may be fairly common for upper cervical chiropractic patients to experience mild symptomatic reactions for a short period less than 24 hours following an upper cervical correction, outcome assessments were significantly improved after less than 3 weeks of care with a high level of patient satisfaction. The results are in! And the data shows that the benefits of upper cervical chiropractic care outweigh the risks!
