100 Fun Facts About Chiropractic

Who founded chiropractic in 1895?

He was a Canadian-born magnetic healer. Andrew Taylor Still had founded the rival system of osteopathy, also in the Midwest.

In which Iowa city was chiropractic founded?

Palmer had practised magnetic healing there and in Burlington since the mid-1880s. Palmer College still has its main campus in the city.

Who was D.D. Palmer's first chiropractic patient, who said his hearing was restored?

He claimed 17 years of severely reduced hearing that had begun with a 'pop' in his spine. Days after the adjustment he said it was almost fully restored.

The word 'chiropractic' comes from Greek roots meaning what?

Cheir means hand and praktikos means practical. The term was coined by Samuel Weed, another of Palmer's patients, not by Palmer himself.

What was D.D. Palmer's occupation before he founded chiropractic?

He had also been a beekeeper, schoolteacher and grocer after emigrating from Ontario in 1865, and dabbled in spiritualism.

In which country was D.D. Palmer born?

He was born in 1845 in Pickering Township in what is now Ajax, Ontario, and moved to the US at age twenty.

From whom did D.D. Palmer claim to have 'received' chiropractic?

He said it came from 'the other world'. He and his son seriously considered declaring chiropractic a religion for legal protection but decided against it.

What did D.D. Palmer call chiropractic?

Its roots lie in the folk practice of bonesetting, mixed with vitalism and spiritual inspiration.

What is the vitalist life force that early chiropractors believed flowed through the nervous system?

They held that interruptions to it caused all disease. Many chiropractors today treat it as a metaphor for the body's self-healing, or homeostasis.

What term did Palmer use for the spinal misalignments he believed interfered with the body's function?

In mainstream medicine the same word means a partial dislocation visible on X-ray; the chiropractic sense is a functional concept the WHO defined in 2005.

In what year did Palmer begin teaching chiropractic to students at his new school?

He had kept it a family secret until then. Palmer College, established in 1897 as the Palmer School and Cure, was the world's first chiropractic school.

Which of the founder's sons took over the school in 1906 and became chiropractic's great promoter?

He rapidly expanded enrollment and later became convinced the upper cervical spine was the key to health.

What happened to D.D. Palmer in 1906 under Iowa's new medical arts law?

He chose jail over the fine and served 17 days before paying up, then sold the school to his son and moved west to found schools in Oklahoma, California and Oregon.

Per court records, what struck D.D. Palmer from behind during a 1913 parade, weeks before his death?

The official cause of death two months later in Los Angeles was typhoid fever, though some blamed the injuries. Father and son had a famously bitter relationship.

What did the Palmers scornfully call chiropractors who used instruments and mixed in other therapies?

They themselves were 'straights'. By 1924 B.J. estimated only 3,000 of America's 25,000 chiropractors were still straight.

What diagnostic technology did B.J. Palmer endorse in 1910, prompting a faculty exodus from his school?

He courted more controversy in 1924 by inventing and promoting the neurocalometer, a temperature-sensing device.

What was the neurocalometer, B.J. Palmer's controversial 1924 invention?

Even fellow straights objected to it. The Activator technique's spring-loaded tool and the Thompson drop table came later.

Which future president got his first broadcasting job at B.J. Palmer's radio station WOC?

He was hired to broadcast sports. The call letters were rumoured to stand for 'World Of Chiropractic' but had actually been assigned to a previous owner.

Which was the first US state to pass a chiropractic licensing law, in 1913?

Louisiana was the last of the fifty, in 1974. B.J. co-founded the Universal Chiropractors' Association to defend arrested chiropractors in the meantime.

Which was the last state to license chiropractors, in 1974?

That same year the US Commissioner of Education recognised the Council on Chiropractic Education as an accrediting agency, opening federal loans and grants.

In what year did Medicare begin covering chiropractic treatment of the spine?

A 2013 Inspector General estimate later found 82 percent of Medicare Part B payments to chiropractors, $359 million, did not comply with program rules.

What did the American Medical Association label chiropractic in 1966?

Until 1980 it told members it was unethical to associate with chiropractors, a de facto boycott that ended with a landmark court ruling.

In which 1987 case was the AMA found to have conspired in restraint of trade against chiropractors?

Chicago chiropractor Chester Wilk led the antitrust suit. The decision ended the AMA's boycott.

What degree does a US chiropractor typically hold?

They may be called 'doctor' but are not physicians. Chiropractors are not normally licensed to prescribe drugs or perform major surgery in the US.

Which body accredits the profession's schools in the United States?

The General Chiropractic Council regulates the profession in the UK. The CCE requires a 'mixing' curriculum, so straight-trained graduates may not qualify in some states.

Which US state was first to let 'advanced practice' chiropractors prescribe certain medications?

In Switzerland chiropractors have been able to prescribe a limited set of drugs since 1995, and only trained medical professionals may practise there.

What is the most common reason people seek chiropractic care?

Back and neck pain are the profession's specialties, though surveys show many chiropractors also treat other complaints.

What do chiropractors call the spinal manipulation that is their main treatment?

It is a high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust that takes a joint just past its normal range, producing an audible release.

Which adjusting method uses a small spring-loaded tool to deliver precise thrusts?

Diversified, or full-spine manipulation, is the most common technique; Thompson uses a drop table.

What is the most widely used adjusting method, used by 93% of Belgian chiropractors in one study?

It is a full-spine approach that draws on several schools of technique.

Which two US states prohibit physical therapists from performing spinal manipulation?

No single profession 'owns' spinal manipulation, which osteopaths and physiotherapists also perform.

What did the World Health Organization conclude about chiropractic care in general?

Mild, temporary soreness or headache follows manipulation in an estimated 33 to 61 percent of patients and usually clears within 48 hours.

How many vertebrae are in a normal human spinal column?

The upper 24 move independently; the lower nine are fused into the sacrum and coccyx in adults.

How many cervical vertebrae are in the human neck?

Almost all mammals, giraffes included, have seven. There are twelve thoracic and five lumbar vertebrae below them.

What is the name of the topmost vertebra, C1, on which the skull rests?

It is named for the Titan who held up the heavens. The axis, C2, has a peg called the dens that the atlas pivots around.

How many fused vertebrae make up the sacrum?

The coccyx, or tailbone, below it usually has four fused vertebrae, though three to five is normal.

What separates the articulating vertebrae from one another?

They form a chain of cartilaginous joints. Degenerative disc disease is among the commonest spinal conditions.

Which gas, dissolved in synovial fluid, forms the bubbles that make a joint crack during a manipulation?

It takes about 20 minutes to redissolve, which is why you cannot crack the same knuckle twice in a row.

What is the inward curve of the neck and lower back called?

The thoracic and sacral curves bend the other way and are kyphotic; scoliosis is a sideways curve.

Which public research institution announced the first D.C. program of its kind in 2024?

Until then chiropractic education in the US had been confined to private chiropractic colleges.

Which earlier manual-therapy profession did chiropractic compete with from its beginnings?

The two grew up side by side in the American Midwest; in its home country osteopathy eventually merged into mainstream medicine while chiropractic stayed separate.

Chiropractors loyal to the Palmers' vitalist beliefs were called what after the 1914 split?

The rival camp wanted to fold chiropractic into science-based medicine; US accreditation now requires a mixing curriculum, which can block the traditionalists from licensing.

Neck manipulation is controversial for its possible link to which rare but serious injury?

The tear can lead to stroke; one review argued the risk of death outweighs any benefit of cervical manipulation, a conclusion chiropractors dispute.

Which science writer was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association over a 2008 column?

The Guardian piece called the BCA's claims for treating childhood colic and asthma 'bogus'; the BCA dropped the case in 2010 after the Court of Appeal sided with him.

Which statutory body regulates chiropractors in the United Kingdom?

It has stated that the 'vertebral subluxation complex' is not supported by clinical research evidence that would allow claims it causes disease.

Who actually coined the word 'chiropractic' from its Greek roots?

D.D. Palmer supplied the method; it was another of his patients who put together cheir (hand) and praktikos (practical) to name it.

Which adjusting technique relies on a drop table and detailed procedural protocols?

Sections of the table give way slightly as the thrust is delivered; Gonstead, by contrast, emphasises spinal evaluation and avoiding rotational vectors.

What was recorded as the official cause of D.D. Palmer's death in Los Angeles in October 1913?

Some blamed injuries from being struck by his son's car at a Davenport parade weeks earlier, a 'patricide' story one chiropractic historian calls absurd.

In 1930 B.J. Palmer bought a second radio station, WHO, in which city?

Fans assumed the call letters meant 'With Hands Only', just as WOC supposedly stood for 'World of Chiropractic', but neither station ever used the slogans.

B.J. Palmer was born in 1881 in an Iowa town with which unusual name?

The family of six lived in the back of the grocery store his father ran before D.D. moved them to Letts, Iowa, and took up magnetic healing.

Which ancient 'father of medicine' is cited as having used spinal manipulative techniques?

Bonesetting and manipulation show up in cultures from ancient Egypt onward. Spinal manipulation only won recognition from mainstream medicine in the 1960s.

According to Lillard's daughter, what really preceded her father's improved hearing?

Valdeenia Lillard Simons said Palmer, laughing at her father's punch line, thumped him with the hand holding a heavy book. She added that the two men had agreed to share any proceeds, and never did.

On what date in 1895 did D.D. Palmer give the first chiropractic adjustment?

The date is still marked by the profession. Sherman College timed its first graduation for September 18, 1976, the anniversary.

What ailment did Palmer say he relieved in his second case, after Lillard's deafness?

He reasoned that if two conditions as different as deafness and a bad heart both came from pressure on nerves, every other disease might too.

D.D. Palmer claimed a subluxated vertebra causes what share of all diseases?

The remaining five percent, he said, came from displaced joints elsewhere in the body. Late in life he swapped his 'pinched nerve' theory for one about nerves vibrating too tense or too slack.

How many times was D.D. Palmer married?

His wives included Abba Lord in 1871 and Molly Hudler in 1906. Three of the marriages ended with a wife's death within the same decade, 1884 and 1885 among them.

In an 1899 paper, D.D. Palmer admitted chiropractic was 'osteopathy gone to' what?

He had publicly denied training with Andrew Taylor Still, yet the papers held at Palmer College record him taking a course in the rival discipline.

What was the trade of 'Crazy Sally' Mapp, an 18th-century English folk healer?

Nicknamed 'Crazy Sally', she learned the craft from her father and worked out of the Grecian Coffee House in London. Royal courts hired such healers when their physicians failed.

Which 1906 book by 'mixers' was ironically used in D.D. Palmer's legal defence?

Solon Langworthy and co-authors wrote the first chiropractic textbook, and Palmer despised them for blending in other cures. It still served him in court.

In court in 1907, 'supremacy of the nerve' was set against osteopathy's supremacy of what?

The distinction freed Shegataro Morikubo in Wisconsin and set the template for marketing chiropractic as a science, an art and a philosophy.

Which attorney defended arrested chiropractors for the UCA and won the 1907 Morikubo case?

With his partner Fred Hartwell he won about 80 percent of the cases. There were more than 15,000 prosecutions in the profession's first 30 years, against only 12,000 practitioners.

B.J. Palmer rejected making chiropractic a religion partly to avoid confusion with what?

Religious status might have given constitutional protection from prosecution. His father wrote in 1914 that a 'religion of chiropractic' was absurd, while also calling himself its 'fountain head'.

In 1909 B.J. Palmer claimed there was no such thing as what?

He said that in a hundred smallpox cases he could find the same spinal cause in every one. Anti-vaccination views followed from the same logic and still divide the profession.

By which decade was chiropractic the largest alternative healing profession in the US?

It got there while its founders' sons were still feuding over instruments. Serious research to test its theories did not begin until the 1970s.

B.J. Palmer spent his final years at a home on St. Armands Key in which Florida city?

He bought the house in 1951, two years after Mabel died, and died there of intestinal cancer in 1961. It still holds his Roycroft furniture and clown collection.

What nickname did David D. Palmer, the third Palmer to run the school, earn?

His grandfather is 'the Founder' and his father 'the Developer'. 'Dr. Dave' renamed the school Palmer College and steered it toward the accreditation it won only after his death in 1978.

Before taking over the family college, David D. Palmer studied business at which school?

The detour to the University of Pennsylvania estranged him from his father for years. He said he wanted to know how to manage the school he knew he would inherit.

Palmer College closed its West campus in June 2025; in which California city was it?

The board blamed a rising lease, the cost of living and the cost of running the program in California. The Florida campus in Port Orange remains open.

What is the nickname of Palmer College's rugby and hockey teams?

The rugby club dates to 1960 and offers tuition scholarships. The men's side won national titles in 1972, 1973, 1978 and 1979.

What subject did Mabel Heath Palmer teach at the Palmer School for four decades?

Known as the 'First Lady of Chiropractic', she studied dissection in Chicago and in 1918 wrote the profession's first textbook on the subject.

What does 'HIO' stand for in B.J. Palmer's upper-cervical technique?

By the late 1950s he had reduced the whole adjustment to a single vertebra at the top of the neck, while mixers kept adding new proprietary techniques.

What illness, which left Clarence Gonstead bedridden at 19, led him to chiropractic?

The South Dakota farm boy credited chiropractic care for his recovery, enrolled at Palmer and graduated in 1923, the year he began developing his own system.

Clarence Gonstead's clinic, seeing 400 patients a day, was in which Wisconsin village?

He built a motel, the Karakahl Country Inn, next door in 1965 for out-of-town patients and the chiropractors attending his seminars.

Who actually invented the neurocalometer that B.J. Palmer patented and leased out?

Palmer planned to lease only 5,000 of the devices, solely to UCA members from Palmer-linked schools, then declared it the only accurate way to find a subluxation. The uproar cost him the UCA.

The Activator adjusting instrument's design was based on what tool?

The spring-loaded handpiece delivers a controlled tap. The cordless Activator V releases no more than 0.3 joules in a three-millisecond pulse.

Who created the Activator Method?

The method checks the patient's prone leg lengths before and after each tap. Critics note that legs are often naturally unequal and that prone measurements are unreliable.

Which chiropractor originated applied kinesiology, or 'muscle testing', in 1964?

Its premise is that every organ problem weakens a specific muscle. A 1988 double-blind study found its nutrient testing no more useful than random guessing.

Which 2007 book by chiropractor Bradley Nelson popularised applied kinesiology?

The practice had already spread through Mormon alternative-medicine circles; Tara Westover's memoir Educated describes her mother taking it up in the 1990s.

The Sacro-Occipital Technique models the spine as what mechanical part?

It was among the procedures received by more than 10 percent of US chiropractic patients in a 2003 survey, alongside applied kinesiology and cranial work.

Roughly how many chiropractic techniques exist, most being variations on manipulation?

Many differ only slightly from one another. Extremity adjusting is used by almost as many practitioners as the dominant full-spine approach.

John J. Nugent, who shut substandard schools, was nicknamed chiropractic's what?

Admirers compared him to the reformer whose 1910 report closed hundreds of medical schools; enemies called him 'Chiropractic's Anti-christ'. His committee evolved into today's CCE.

What did the AMA name the group it formed in 1963 to 'contain and eliminate' chiropractic?

Its plan included keeping chiropractic out of Medicare and blocking federal recognition of any chiropractic accreditor. The committee was disbanded in 1974.

What alias did the anonymous AMA insider who leaked anti-chiropractic papers in 1975 use?

The leak came a year after Watergate made the original alias famous. The papers became the basis of the antitrust suit led by Chester Wilk.

Which judge heard the 1987 Wilk bench trial and ruled against the AMA?

The plaintiffs had dropped their damages claim so the case could be decided without a jury. She pointedly refused to pronounce chiropractic valid or invalid.

What was the title of Simon Singh's 2008 Guardian column that sparked the BCA libel case?

The resulting 'quacklash' produced 500 advertising complaints against individual chiropractors in 24 hours, and the case became a catalyst for the Defamation Act 2013.

Singh's column drew on which book he had just co-written with Edzard Ernst?

The book's subtitle is Alternative Medicine on Trial. In 2010 the Court of Appeal ruled Singh could defend his 'bogus' remark as fair comment, and the BCA withdrew.

Which body did B.J. Palmer found in 1926 and preside over until his death?

He formed it after the neurocalometer row forced him out of the UCA. Its membership today is estimated at a fifth of its larger rival's.

Sherman College, a bastion of 'straight' chiropractic, is in which state?

Founded in 1973 near Spartanburg, it spent three decades as Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic before dropping the word in 2009.

Life University founder Sid Williams played defensive end for which college football team?

He played in the 1952 Orange Bowl win over Baylor. Injuries in his final season sent him to an Atlanta chiropractor, and then to Palmer.

Life University, once the world's largest chiropractic college, is in which Georgia city?

It opened in January 1975 with 22 students on the site of an old placer gold mine. A 2024 federal report put its chiropractic graduates' debt-to-income ratio at 490 percent.

Logan University's Chesterfield, Missouri campus occupies the grounds of a former what?

The old Maryknoll chapel became the library in 2003. The wooded hilltop made MSNBC's 2007 list of America's most beautiful campuses.

The Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, founded in 1945, is in which city?

It is Canada's private program; the public one is at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Its graduates are recognised as having seven to eight years of university-level education.

Europe's first chiropractic college, the AECC, is based in which English seaside town?

European chiropractors bankrolled it in 1965 and it passed its first graduates in 1969. It is now Health Sciences University, with a separate osteopathy school in London.

The second-oldest chiropractic school, begun in 1904, is now a university in which city?

It started as the Marsh School and Cure, run by John and Eva Marsh, and became the University of Western States in 2010.

Northwestern College of Chiropractic opened in 1941 on the sixth floor of what?

It had three students at the W. T. Grant store in downtown Minneapolis. A $500,000 gift from the owner of Jostens later moved it to Bloomington.

In which city was the World Federation of Chiropractic established in 1988?

The idea came out of a 1987 summit in London after a failed attempt to merge America's two rival associations. The WHO still does not formally recognise the federation.

In 2002 chiropractors ranked third among US medical professions after physicians and whom?

They perform more than 90 percent of all manipulative treatments in the country. The American Chiropractic Association counted 70,000 active practitioners in 2025.

In which US state can chiropractors be certified to deliver babies by natural childbirth?

The same certification covers minor surgery. Scope varies wildly: Iowa lets chiropractors treat 'human ailments' broadly while New Jersey keeps it narrow.

Donald Unger won a 2009 Ig Nobel for cracking the knuckles of only one hand for how long?

Neither hand developed arthritis. A 2011 radiograph study of 215 people reached the same conclusion: knuckle-cracking does not cause hand osteoarthritis.

According to a 2022 report, about what share of Americans visit a chiropractor?

Usage is sensitive to co-payments: it fell from 9.9 percent of adults in 1997 to 7.4 percent in 2002, the biggest relative drop of any alternative profession.