Chiropractors offer a possible alternative to traditional pain management. Originating as a medical philosophy, it has since become a way to deal with back pain.

Modern chiropractors are an alternative to traditional physical therapy, but it can also be used together with pain management from traditional medicine. Especially with lower back pain, many people have found relief in receiving chiropractic care.

Pain can originate in a variety of ways, but the cause is often an injury. Injuries vary in severity and cause. One can injure a back through an improper lifting technique. Traffic accidents can easily lead to prolonged back pain that requires extensive physical therapy. Repetitive stress injuries and injuries caused by posture problems can also lead to back pain. Chiropractors treat pain based on specific assumptions about the human body.

The body, in chiropractic theory, is made up of several parts, but at the same time, is seen as having properties as a whole. This concept is known as holism. Specifically, chiropractors see the body as a whole as having to maintain a certain equilibrium based on the alignment of the spine, because the spine protects the nervous system, an essential network of nerves including the human brain itself.

Vitalism is also influential on chiropractic theory. It is closely related to the concept of holism in that vitalism claims that life is greater than the sum of the various processes, both chemical and physical, that allow life to exist. Implicitly, this is a widely held belief in our society. Culturally, we tend to place a great deal of value on life itself, while at the same time, studying and controlling life in its material form. At stake are various philosophical conflicts, including materialism versus idealism. Emergentism is a related philosophy that is relevant to the origins of chiropractic theory抯 focus on vitalism and holism.

The concept of emergence has become relevant across many scientific disciplines. The basic idea is that wholes, including bodies, organisms and ecosystems, emerge from numerous complex interactions. Networks of relations and flows can be used to describe chemical reactions, social movements, and life itself. In chiropractic theory, this is relevant, because it sheds light on reasons why the central nervous system, itself a network of nerves spread throughout the body, could be seen as important to the overall health of the human body as a whole. In practice, chiropractic care tends to focus on pain, which itself is an indicator of an imbalance in the equilibrium of what is considered a health human body.

Some chiropractors are considered 搒traight,?which simply means that they adhere literally to the holistic and vitalistic origins of chiropractic theory. Most chiropractors at this point, however, are 搈ixers?who combine techniques and ideas from mainstream medicine to supplement the original body of theories. Perhaps this split in the body of the theory is indicative of the tension between the whole and its parts that stretches across the history of philosophy.

One who is considering chiropractic care should conduct research and speak to chiropractors themselves to find out their positions on relevant issues and to discover which chiropractor might be a match for your pain issues.