I has been reported that a man is pleading to steer clear of chiropractors. Last year, Tyler Stanton endured “the worst pain I had ever experienced in my life,” a hospital stay, and the beginning of an ongoing struggle that has left him unable to work. All started immediately after a chiropractor cracked his neck — and something popped.
After adjusting Stanton’s back, the chiropractor moved on to his neck. “It didn’t crack on the first time. On the second time where he tried to crack my neck, he put a lot of force behind it, and I heard one huge and painful pop. I knew immediately that something was wrong.” Stanton recalled that when he tried to sit up, the room began to spin. “My equilibrium was just completely f—ked. I was instantly, profusely sweating.”
After laying on the table for half an hour, Stanton made the short trip back to his home, where he became “violently ill.” Throwing up uncontrollably and unable to see straight, he got into bed, hoping rest would alleviate his symptoms. The following morning, Stanton woke up to “the worst pain I had ever experienced in my life. The entire right side of my body was numb. It was really scary.”
He was taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a herniated disc between the C5 and C6 vertebrae in his neck. Due to the acute pain he was experiencing, he stayed in the hospital for several weeks. “They ended up giving me epidural injections into my spine, and they didn’t even make a dent into the pain,” he said. Ultimately, doctors gave him two choices: spinal fusion therapy or physical therapy to manage his discomfort.
Fearful of the consequences of surgery, Stanton opted for PT. “I had a pharmacy of pain medication to help the nerves be less inflamed so I can get mobility and feeling back into the right side of my body. Essentially, I just had to go home and lay down for about two more months.”
Unable to work, Stanton burned through his savings, and six months into his recovery, he is just beginning to regain sensation in his right arm. “I still deal with pain. I’m still limited in what I can do physically. It just destroyed me. Mentally, financially, physically, all of it.” With limited mobility and mounting medical bills, Stanton is consulting with lawyers and considering legal action. “I kinda feel like I just don’t have another choice because this really just derailed my entire life overnight,” he said.
While proponents say chiropractors help alleviate pain, many doctors describe the field as pseudoscience — and warn that it can actually lead to serious problems. ““There are reports of severe side effects with chiropractic treatment, including blood clot formation, herniated discs, fractures, artery dissection, stroke, paralysis, and death,” explained Gbolahan Okubadejo, MD, a spinal surgeon and the head of The Institute for Comprehensive Spine Care. Dr. Charles R. Wira III, an emergency medicine doctor at Yale Medicine, told the Huffington Post that there’s a known link between chiropractic neck manipulations and major artery tears that can cause strokes. “Thankfully, overall the incidence of neck dissections are small,” he said. “But intentional and aggressive manipulations of the neck merits strong consideration for concern.” Cardiologist Dr. Danielle Belardo said she was “heartbroken” to see a young patient with “dissection of the vertebral artery” following a neck adjustment. “How can we live in a world where it’s legal to perform something with zero evidence for benefit (neck adjustment from a chiro) when there are such incredibly dangerous and life changing risks?” she wrote on Twitter. “[My patient] trusted a licensed healthcare practitioner to provide care that has more benefit than harm. This is a disgrace.”
Stanton hopes his story can serve as a warning for others. “I think it’s important that I share this story because I just don’t want what happened to me to happen to someone else,” he said. “Please don’t go to the chiropractor, OK? If I can do anything with my platform to share the story and save somebody from experiencing what I had to experience, then hopefully, something positive can come out of what I went through. Please hear me when I say this: Please be careful. This is the last thing that you want to experience.”
In a disturbing parallel, a young woman who felt a “crack to her neck” during a gym workout in 2021 died weeks later after going to a chiropractor to treat her neck pain. In 2022, a Georgia woman became paralyzed after a routine neck adjustment ended up rupturing her spinal arteries in several spots. In 2023, an Australian man suffered a stroke after cracking his neck in an ill-advised attempt to cure his chronic back pain.
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None of these are proper case reports in a medical sense, of course. Such publications are relatively rare.
I wonder why.
Could it be related to the fact that many chiropractors are in denial and, as a profession, they still have no adequate monitoring system for adverse event?
10 Responses to Chiropractic neck manipulation: “This is the last thing that you want to experience”
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Is there no Mandatory Adverse Events Reporting System in the UK health system? There is in the aviation industry world-wide and that has led to the safest form of travel.
Without proof of safety and efficacy, chiropractors are merely frauds.
The stories in this piece don’t seem to be about events in the UK.
Chiropractors would tend not to be employed in the NHS; assuming they are actually licensed, they are regulated by the General Chiropractic Council, but I don’t know if they require mandatory reporting of severe incidents and don’t want to look at their site.
“I don’t know if they require mandatory reporting of severe incidents”
the answer is no, they don’t require mandatory reporting of severe incident
I’ve been in practice as a Doctor of Chiropractic for forty years and I’m still waiting for my first catastrophic event.
Maybe dead patients do not return???
@Michael Epstein
Serious problems as a result of chiropractors mistreating people’s necks are pretty rare.
Here in the Netherlands we have some 500 chiros. I recall Dutch neurologists mentioning ‘a few’ cervical arterial dissections being associated with chiropractic neck manipulation every year.
So when erring on the generous side, and attributing on average just one CAD event per year to chiropractic treatment, the average chiro has an annual chance of 1 in 500 of causing very serious problems or even death in a customer. Which means that most chiros and their customers will never experience this problem – just like you.
This, however, is no excuse to continue yanking people’s necks. The risk of this type of manipulation may be very small, but its potential consequences are extremely severe – which means that there must be a very good reason to perform this treatment, e.g. averting serious and debilitating problems of a comparable nature. There is no such reason, and chiros should at the very least stop this neck manipulation once and for all.
(And as for all the rest their treatments do not have any clear advantage over e.g. physiotherapy yet are considerably more expensive, I consider chiros to be a pretty useless bunch of quacky grifters whom people should avoid. But this is my personal opinion.)
“I’ve been in practice as a Doctor of Chiropractic for forty years and I’m still waiting for my first catastrophic event.”
Keep trying. Sooner or later you’ll be successful at it.
In the unlikely event that you give a damn about my opinion of your comment, here it is: in typical chiropractic fashion you express no sympathy/empathy for the victim of a calamitous event caused by one of your colleagues.
There are also people who have driven while drunk all their lives without killing anyone. Does that make it safe, in your view?
Do you apply high velocity force to the neck?
Old Micky Epstein, the quack who was carrying out his nonsense illegally in Indonesia and was chased out of the country.
Micky, it is on the web forever.
I miss my Sandy’s laugh…her sweet angelic voice and her infectious smile. Going for walks, traveling the world. The sound of her playing the piano into those early mornings hours. Leaving behind her successful career, who knew that learning how to swallow again would be one of her hugest victories.
There is not a day that passes, when I do not regret letting her fall victim to rapid neck adjustments. All for the sake of “maintaining good health”.
Sandy’s life and exceptional health was essentially destroyed but it is our hope and prayer that other’s will heed the warnings being expressed on this blog site and avoid chiropractors at all costs. It’s just not worth taking this type of gamble with your life. For those who “survive” sometimes death would be an easier sentence.