Why Does Chiropractic Give Everyone the Ick? (A Chiropractor Explains)

By Dr. Lucas Marchand, DC — MyChiro

Let me be honest with you about something: chiropractic has a reputation problem. Not a PR problem — an actual, earned, fully-deserved reputation problem. And I say that as someone who has been a chiropractor for over a decade.

The ick is real. It exists on both sides of the table. Patients walk in with baggage — weird experiences, half-remembered warnings from their GP, a YouTube video they probably shouldn't have watched. And chiropractors, if they're being honest, have a few pet peeves of their own.

But here's the thing nobody in my profession likes to say out loud: a lot of the patient behavior that drives chiropractors crazy? We created it. The skepticism, the unrealistic expectations, the "just crack my back and let me leave" energy — that's not coming from nowhere. It's a response to an industry that spent decades behaving badly enough to justify it.

So let's talk about all of it. The things patients do that make chiropractors internally scream. The things the profession does that make patients walk in already defensive. And where both of those lists trace back to the same root cause.

This is not a hit piece. It's a mirror. And yes, it's a little funny, because if you can't laugh at a profession that regularly asks strangers to trust you with their spine, you're in the wrong line of work.

Things That Give Chiropractors the Ick

Every chiropractor has a list. We don't usually share it publicly because we're trying to be professional. But it exists, it's long, and it gets recited in group chats at a frequency that would concern our patients deeply.

"I just need a quick crack" — The Drive-Thru Patient

The adjustment is the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. It is not the sentence. When someone walks in asking for "just a quick crack," what they're describing is skipping the exam, the assessment, the soft tissue work, and the clinical reasoning — and going straight to the procedure. That's not chiropractic. That's a party trick. And the fact that some chiropractors have been happy to perform it on demand, for years, is exactly why the profession is still having this conversation.

"My Last Chiropractor Did My Whole Body in Two Minutes"

Cool. So did a car crash. Speed is not a quality metric. Two-minute full-body adjustments are the clinical equivalent of a restaurant sending out every course simultaneously — technically efficient, completely wrong. The reason this gets said to us is because some chiropractors normalized it. The patient isn't wrong for expecting it. They're just reporting their experience. The experience, however, was not good care.

Patients Who Brace Harder Than a Plank Mid-Adjustment

This one is not the patient's fault at all, and every chiropractor knows it. If someone is bracing that hard, they're scared. And if they're scared, someone — somewhere in their history — gave them a reason to be. The reflex is valid. It just makes the job approximately four times harder and the adjustment about half as effective. Fear-based tension is the most honest feedback a patient can give you, and it usually says something about previous experiences rather than the current one.

"I Googled It and I Think It's a Slipped Disc" — The Self-Diagnosed Patient

Look, we understand. The healthcare system has made "go Google it" a rational response to not being able to get an appointment for six weeks. We get it. But "slipped disc" is not actually a medical term, the disc doesn't slip anywhere, and the human spine is not a Jenga tower. When patients arrive with a confident self-diagnosis, it creates a small but real problem: now we have to assess them AND have a delicate conversation about why the thing they read at 11pm on a forum is not the same as a clinical evaluation.

The Self-Diagnosed "Pelvis Out" Guy

He deserves his own entry. He has been told — by a previous chiropractor, by a gym bro, by his own confident reading of his body — that his pelvis is "out." He will describe this to you in detail. He has a theory about which side. He has mapped it. He will be genuinely surprised when the assessment suggests something more nuanced than a pelvis that has simply left its designated location. The pelvis is not a parking spot. Nothing has "gone out." But he is very sure.

No-Showing After Saying "I Can Barely Move"

You sent the message. It was urgent. The all-caps were convincing. We rearranged the schedule. And then: silence. Crickets. Not even a reschedule. Just a ghost. This happens with a frequency that chiropractors have simply accepted as part of the job, which does not mean it doesn't sting every single time.

"Can You Just Do My Neck?" — While Everything Else Is on Fire

The neck is connected to the rest of you. That is not a philosophy — it's anatomy. Asking a chiropractor to "just do the neck" while your thoracic spine looks like a question mark and your hips are having an argument is like asking a mechanic to replace the wiper blades while the engine is on fire. We can do it. It just won't solve the problem.

People Who Hold Their Breath Like They're About to Deadlift 500 Lbs

Breathe. Please. We will ask you to breathe out before the adjustment because it works better that way — for physiological reasons that are real and documented. Holding your breath and bracing like you're about to get hit is the exact opposite of helpful. And yet. Every single session. There they are.

"Do You Take Insurance?" — Followed Immediately by Ghosting

This one is specific to cash-based practices, but it's universal enough to mention. The question is fine. The answer is no. The part where the conversation immediately ends — not a "thanks anyway," not a "let me think about it," just a clean evaporation — has its own particular flavor. You were never really there, were you.

The Post-Adjustment Test: "Hmm… Still Feel It a Little"

You walked in folded in half. You've had this problem for four years. It has been twelve minutes. And you're doing the post-adjustment assessment with the energy of a Yelp reviewer who expected more from a three-star restaurant. The body doesn't work on a twelve-minute timeline. Neither does anything worth doing.

Expecting a Lifetime of Problems to Disappear in One Visit — Then Being Mad When They Don't

This one deserves more grace than frustration, because it's partly a failure of communication on the profession's part. If patients expect one visit to fix everything, it's often because nobody explained the timeline clearly. But it's also true that chronic problems are chronic. They built up over years. They will take more than a Tuesday afternoon to resolve. Anger at that reality is understandable. It just isn't useful.

---

Things That Give the Public the Ick About Chiropractors

This is the harder list to write. Not because it's longer — though it might be — but because it requires honesty about a profession I'm in and care about. The public's skepticism toward chiropractic is not irrational. It was earned, methodically, over decades, by a subset of practitioners who made choices that gave the rest of us a permanent credibility deficit.

Here's what created it.

The $29 "Exam + X-Rays" That Somehow Becomes a 36-Visit Life Commitment

This is the single most effective trust-destroying practice in chiropractic. The $29 new patient special is a loss leader — and the patient is the loss. You come in for a bargain. You leave with a treatment plan, a financial agreement, a folder full of spinal X-ray printouts with ominous red circles, and a commitment that feels less like healthcare and more like a timeshare you can't escape. The bait-and-switch is so well established that it has become a cultural shorthand for bad faith in healthcare settings.

Getting Handed a Treatment Plan Before Anyone Has Touched You

The 47-point new patient intake. The consultation. The posture photos. The extensive X-ray series. And then, before the first adjustment has happened, before any clinical data has actually been interpreted in real time with the patient present: the treatment plan. Pre-printed. Laminated, possibly. Already decided. The assessment was never really an assessment — it was documentation for a conclusion that existed before you arrived. Patients feel this. They always feel this.

The Fear You'll Never Be Allowed to Stop

This is the emotional core of the public's distrust of chiropractic, and it rarely gets named directly. It's not just annoyance at pushy upselling. It's the specific, creeping dread of being trapped in a care relationship with no clear exit. Patients who have been through high-volume clinic experiences describe the same feeling: there was always one more reason to come back, always one more thing that needed to be addressed, always just a little more time before they'd be "done." That fear is not paranoia. It was installed deliberately by practices that needed the recurring revenue.

"Come 3x a Week Forever" Energy

Defined endpoints are a basic feature of competent healthcare. You go to physical therapy for a set number of sessions. You take antibiotics for ten days. You get a follow-up in six weeks. Chiropractic, in too many practices, operates on an implied infinite timeline. Three times a week becomes twice a week becomes once a week becomes "maintenance," and at no point does anyone say: here is what we're trying to achieve, here is how we'll know when we've achieved it, and here is what the end of treatment looks like. That ambiguity is not an accident.

Feeling Like a Number on an Assembly Line

Volume-based chiropractic is a real business model. See as many patients as possible, keep appointments short, move the line. From a purely operational standpoint it can work. From a patient experience standpoint it feels exactly like what it is: a factory. When you're one of thirty patients a day, the chiropractor is not managing your case — they're executing a protocol. Patients know the difference, even if they can't always articulate it.

Vague Explanations: "Your Spine Is Just… Off"

"Your nervous system controls everything" is technically true and clinically useless as an explanation. When patients ask what's wrong and receive mystical non-answers about energy, subluxations, and their body's innate intelligence, they don't leave feeling educated — they leave feeling managed. Informed patients make better decisions, comply better with treatment, and have better outcomes. Keeping patients confused about what's actually happening to their bodies serves one party in the relationship, and it isn't the patient.

Clinics That Smell Like Sales, Not Healthcare

This is sensory and immediate. You walk in and something is off — the energy of the front desk, the framed testimonials on every wall, the staff member who greets you with the specific warmth of someone on commission. Healthcare has a particular feel to it. It's not cold, but it's not a showroom either. When a chiropractic office feels like the latter, patients pick up on it within thirty seconds. That instinct is almost always correct.

Not Knowing the Price Until You're Already Halfway Adjusted

This is a power dynamic masquerading as an administrative oversight. Patients who don't know what something costs before receiving it are patients who have lost negotiating leverage. In chiropractic, this often plays out through intentionally opaque fee structures, insurance billing complexity, and the careful sequencing of care before financial disclosure. By the time you know what you owe, you've already received something. That sequencing is not accidental.

Being Told Everything in Your Life Traces Back to One Adjustment

The first visit is supposed to be about your chief complaint — the thing that brought you in, the pain that motivated the appointment. Instead, you leave with a comprehensive theory of your entire health history reframed through spinal misalignment. Your headaches, your fatigue, your digestion, your sleep, that weird thing with your knee from 2011 — all of it, apparently, traceable to C3. This is not clinical assessment. It is scope expansion in real time, and it serves the treatment plan more than the patient.

Walking In With Back Pain, Leaving With a Lecture on Your Entire Existence

Related to the above, but distinct. This is the wellness lecture nobody asked for — the unsolicited deep dive into your posture, your diet, your stress levels, your sleeping position, your relationship with your phone, and the general trajectory of modern civilization as it relates to spinal health. Some of this is legitimate patient education. Most of it is delivered at a volume and duration that the patient did not consent to, about problems they did not come in to address, in ways that extend the appointment and the dependency.

Chiropractors are doctors. That is accurate and not in dispute. The DC degree is a doctoral degree, the training is extensive, and the title is earned. The problem is the small subset of practitioners who deploy it in contexts specifically engineered to create the impression of medical authority they don't have — positioning themselves adjacent to physicians in ways that blur scope of practice for patient benefit. The profession's credibility problem is partly a borrowed-authority problem, and we need to own that.

Fixing Allergies, ADHD, and "Basically Everything" With an Adjustment

The adjustment is a real intervention with real, documented effects on musculoskeletal pain. It is not a cure for autoimmune conditions, pediatric neurodevelopmental disorders, or fertility issues. The fringe of chiropractic that has made these claims — and continues to make them — is not a small or harmless fringe. It actively damages the public's ability to trust the profession's legitimate claims. Every chiropractor who stays quiet about it is complicit in the damage.

The Supplement Wall, the Cold Laser, and the Essential Oils — All in the Same Room

There's nothing inherently wrong with any single one of these things existing in a chiropractic office. The problem is the cumulative signal they send. When a patient walks in and sees a waiting room that looks like a wellness boutique, alarm bells go off — because it suggests that the clinical judgment in this office may be less important than the revenue streams. Patients are not wrong to draw that inference. It is often correct.

Testimonials About Cancer

This one is not funny. It doesn't get a dry aside. Chiropractic offices that display patient testimonials attributing cancer remission, tumor reduction, or similar outcomes to spinal adjustment are causing direct harm — not just to the profession's reputation, but to sick people who deserve accurate information about what does and does not have an evidence base. This is not a quirk. It is an ethical failure that the profession has been too slow and too quiet to address.

Spinal Screenings at the Mall

The posture analysis at a folding table in a shopping mall is so deeply embedded in chiropractic culture that it has become invisible to practitioners who grew up with it. To the public, it reads as what it is: a fishing expedition. A lead generation tool dressed in clinical clothes. The people who stop at that table are not patients seeking care — they're potential customers being told they have a problem so they'll become patients. The fact that the "problem" is always there is the tell.

---

What the Two Lists Have in Common

Read both lists side by side and something becomes obvious: a lot of the patient behavior that frustrates chiropractors is a direct response to the chiropractor behavior that frustrates patients.

"I just need a quick crack" exists because high-volume chiropractic trained an entire generation of patients to think the adjustment was the product. If all you ever saw was someone walking down the line and popping spines for ninety seconds each, of course you'd think that's what chiropractic is.

Expecting lifelong problems to resolve in one visit is partly magical thinking, but it's also a response to marketing. When chiropractic clinics advertise rapid, dramatic recoveries and use testimonials about miraculous turnarounds, they're setting an expectation that the adjustment visit cannot deliver. The disappointment patients show after a first visit is, in part, the profession's fault.

The bracing, the breath-holding, the defensive energy patients bring into the room — all of that is fear, and fear is almost always learned. Someone, somewhere in their history, treated an adjustment like something you needed to survive rather than something designed to help. That memory lives in the body.

"My last chiropractor did my whole body in two minutes" is not a patient bragging about efficiency. It's a patient reporting the only model of chiropractic they've ever experienced. We don't get to be frustrated by low expectations we helped create.

The root problem, in both lists, is the same: a profession that never fully resolved what it is, who it's for, and what it's willing to be. That ambiguity created space for the worst versions of chiropractic to establish themselves, and the rest of us have been doing reputation management ever since.

---

What a Different Model Actually Looks Like

This is the part where I'm obligated to tell you that not all chiropractic is like this. Which is true, but also a little convenient coming from a chiropractor who just spent several paragraphs describing his own profession's worst habits. So let me try to be specific instead.

A different model looks like transparent pricing before you ever book an appointment. Not "call for details" — actual numbers, listed publicly, because the practice is confident in the value it delivers and doesn't need to get you in the chair before revealing the cost.

It looks like a new patient exam that actually informs the treatment plan, rather than a treatment plan that exists before the new patient exam. It looks like a chiropractor who can tell you what they're treating, how they'll know when it's working, and what "done" looks like — even if "done" means ongoing maintenance by choice, not by coercion.

It looks like not selling supplements, not claiming to cure systemic disease, and not describing the nervous system in ways that sound more like a religion than a clinical framework.

It looks like treating patients like adults who can handle honest information about what chiropractic can and cannot do — because it can do quite a lot, and that's actually enough.

The ick, on both sides, is mostly a symptom of misaligned incentives and a profession that has historically prioritized volume over relationship. The fix is not complicated. It just requires being willing to be a different kind of practice in an industry that has normalized the wrong things for a very long time.

The Ick Is Data

Every item on both of these lists is information. The patient who braces is telling you about their history. The patient who self-diagnosed is telling you the healthcare system failed them before they got to you. The practice that hard-sells packages is telling you it doesn't trust the value of its own service. The chiropractor who makes vague claims about innate intelligence is telling you they stopped engaging with evidence somewhere along the way.

The ick is not just a list of pet peeves. It's a map of where the trust broke down and why. And if you're a patient who recognizes something from the second list in your own experience, that recognition is valid — and it means you're entitled to look for a different kind of practice, because they exist.

If you're a chiropractor who winced at a few items in the first list — same. We're all working on it.

The profession is worth defending. It just has to earn that defense by actually being what it claims to be: a legitimate, evidence-informed, patient-first clinical practice. Everything on both lists is what happens when it isn't.

TL;DR — The Full Ick List

Things that give chiropractors the ick:

• "I just need a quick crack" like it's a drive-thru menu

• "My last chiropractor did my whole body in 2 minutes" (cool, so did a car crash)

• Patients who brace harder than a plank mid-adjustment

• "I Googled it and I think it's a slipped disc"

• The self-diagnosed pelvis out guy

• No-showing after saying "I'm in so much pain I can barely move"

• "Can you just do my neck?" (as everything else is on fire)

• People who hold their breath like they're about to deadlift 500 lbs

• "Do you take insurance?" followed immediately by ghosting

• Expecting lifelong problems to disappear in one visit… then being mad when they don't

• The post-adjustment test: "Hmm… still feel it a little" (yeah, you walked in folded in half 10 minutes ago)

Things that give the public the ick about chiropractors:

• The $29 "exam + X-rays" that somehow becomes a 36-visit life commitment

• Getting handed a treatment plan before anyone has touched you

• "Come 3x/week forever" energy with no defined endpoint

• The fear you'll never be allowed to stop

• Feeling like a number on an assembly line

• Vague explanations: "your spine is just… off"

• Clinics that smell like sales, not healthcare

• Not knowing the price until you're already halfway adjusted

• Being told everything in your life traces back to one adjustment

• Walking in with back pain, leaving with a lecture on your entire existence

• Supplement walls, cold lasers, essential oils — all in the same room

• "Your nervous system controls everything" as a clinical explanation for everything

• Chiropractors who use "Dr." in contexts designed to imply MD

• Claims that adjustments fix allergies, ADHD, and financial anxiety

• Testimonials about cancer

• Spinal screenings at the mall

If any of this sounds familiar — from either list — you're in the right place to ask questions.