The Crack Heard 'Round the Internet Isn't Bringing You Patients
- Dr. Lucas Marchand
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Lucas Marchand, DC - MyChiro - Sioux Falls, SD - 4/21/26
There is a particular kind of video that has colonized chiropractic social media over the last several years. You know it instantly. A patient lies on their side on an adjusting table. A practitioner's hands palpate near the lumbar spine. Then — the crack. Sometimes a single pop. Sometimes a cascade, like someone working their way down a sheet of bubble wrap. The camera cuts. Fifteen seconds, maybe thirty. Two million views.
The profession is divided on what to do with this. Some chiropractors see it as free advertising, a window into a craft that most people have never witnessed. Others — and I count myself here — see something more troubling beneath the surface. Not a marketing strategy. A trap.
A Different Kind of Addiction
Let's be fair to the other side for a moment. The adjustment video works as content because it's genuinely satisfying to watch. The comparison to pimple-popping videos isn't a cheap shot — it's accurate. There is something in the human brain that responds to the release of tension, to the resolution of pressure.
Dermatologists didn't invent that phenomenon, and neither did chiropractors. We just happen to operate in a domain that produces an audible, visceral payoff.
Dr. Sandra Lee, better known online as Dr. Pimple Popper, built a following of tens of millions on this exact neurological quirk. Her content is watchable. It is also, notably, not what brings most people through the door looking for a dermatologist.
That distinction matters more than most people in chiropractic are willing to admit.
Spectators Don't Book Appointments
Here is the problem that rarely gets named directly: the audience for adjustment videos is not your patient population. It is an audience of spectators.
Think about who watches these clips and why. They are not in pain at that moment, research in hand, weighing their options between a chiropractor and a physical therapist. They are procrastinating. They are on the train. They are half-watching while their partner talks to them about something they're not fully following. The crack is the product — and it's a product that fully delivers in fifteen seconds, at no cost, with no appointment necessary.
You have given them everything. They have given you nothing. They will not remember your name tomorrow.
The chiropractors posting these videos often point to follower counts and view numbers as evidence of success. View counts and follower numbers are not revenue. They are the appearance of traction — compelling enough to feel like progress, hollow enough to leave your schedule empty.
The Instagram Model Problem
And then there is the other thing. The thing that, if we're being honest with ourselves, everyone in the profession sees and most people avoid saying out loud.
A significant portion of high-performing adjustment content features, as its primary visual element, an attractive person in minimal clothing. The adjustment is almost incidental. The practitioner moves through the frame. The camera lingers.
This is worth naming plainly: healthcare built on aesthetic appeal is not healthcare. It is something else wearing a white coat.
The issue isn't that the practitioner is being salacious, necessarily. Most aren't. The issue is judgment. When the most prominent signal in your marketing is someone's body, you have communicated something about your priorities to every person who watches — including the people who might otherwise have become your patients. Trust in a healthcare provider is not built through attraction. It is built through demonstrated competence, through clinical reasoning made visible, through the unmistakable sense that the person across from you understands your problem and knows how to address it.
Attraction and trust are not the same currency. They don't convert into one another.
The Zero-Context Problem
Strip away the aesthetics entirely. Imagine the most clinically presented adjustment video you can — no model, no music, just a practitioner, a patient, and a table. Is it good marketing?
Still no. And here's why.
An adjustment without context is a parlor trick. Not because the adjustment isn't real, or isn't effective, but because medicine — and chiropractic is medicine, whether the rest of the healthcare system is prepared to acknowledge that or not — derives its meaning from the clinical reasoning that surrounds it. The history. The examination findings. The differential. The mechanism. The outcome.
When a surgeon posts a video of a procedure, the interesting question isn't what their hands are doing. It's why those hands are doing it, for this patient, at this moment. That's where the expertise lives. That's what earns the trust that eventually becomes a patient relationship.
A fifteen-second adjustment clip answers none of those questions. It is, at best, a demonstration that you know how to perform a manipulation. It says nothing about whether you know when to perform one, on whom, for what reason, and to what end. Those are the questions that distinguish a clinician from a technician.
What Authority Actually Looks Like
This is not an argument against video content. It is an argument for content that does the thing content is supposed to do in healthcare: build trust by making your thinking visible.
The practitioners who are consistently converting content into patients are not doing it with crack compilations. They are doing it by explaining what they found and why it matters. By walking through a case — not to show off a technique, but to demonstrate the reasoning process that led to it. By treating the viewer as a person who deserves to understand what is happening to their own body, rather than as a passive audience for a sensory spectacle.
That kind of content is harder to make. It requires you to slow down, think out loud, and be willing to be understood rather than just watched. It also converts, because it answers the only question a prospective patient is actually asking: Is this person going to know what to do with my problem?
The adjustment video, for all its views, never answers that question. It just makes a very satisfying noise.
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