Chiro for migraine fails

• Nov 28, 2016 • by Paul Ingraham

Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Fresh science! And bad news: clearly negative results from a good quality test of the efficacy of three months of regular chiropractic therapy for migraine, with follow-up for a year afterwards. Over one hundred patients received spinal manipulative therapy (SMT), a sham, or just their standard meds. Spinal manipulation for migraine was no better than the sham by any measure. On two secondary outcomes, it was trivially better than the control group only (not the sham), but too little to care. Therefore, the authors reasonably concluded that “the effect of chiropractic spinal manipulative therapy observed in our study is probably due to a placebo response.”

The full summary has about 3× more detail: see Chaibi 2016. Articles updated with this citation: • Does Spinal Manipulation Work? • The Complete Guide to Chronic Tension Headaches • The Complete Guide to Neck Pain & Cricks