does medicare pay for the activator method used by chiropractors

Today, only a small fraction of chiropractors believe that their treatments can substitute for traditional medicine to care for all illness and disease. According to Palmer, correcting these misalignments reestablishes normal nerve and brain function and allows the body to heal itself. Such misalignments are called subluxations. Based on this and other cases he treated with spinal manipulation (also called spinal adjustment), Palmer advanced his theory that most disease is caused by misaligned vertebrae that impinge on spinal nerves. Palmer attributed the hearing loss to a displaced vertebra and treated it by adjusting the man's spine. Palmer reported curing deafness in a man who had lost his hearing after straining doing heavy work. This federal agency issues such guidelines to help the medical community improve the quality of health care in the United States.Ĭhiropractic, a term used both as a noun and adjective, comes from the Greek and means 'done by hand.' The practice originated in the late 1890s with Daniel David Palmer, a self-taught healer in Iowa who sought a cure for illness and disease that did not rely on drugs or surgery. This study directly influenced the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to include positive recommendations on spinal manipulation in its 1994 clinical practice guidelines on low-back pain. RAND's 1992 groundbreaking analysis of spinal manipulation that showed this intervention does benefit some people with acute low-back pain.Recognition by the established medical community that most medical therapies for back pain are ineffective.Supreme Court decision on a lawsuit, known as the Wilks case, that found the AMA and others guilty of illegal conspiracy against the chiropractic profession. What led to the change in attitude toward chiropractic? Major events included: He played a key role in RAND's landmark investigations of chiropractic that stimulated a national reappraisal of this and other nontraditional health care approaches.

and director of RAND's Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Center.

'In the last decade of the 20th century, chiropractic has begun to shed its status as a marginal or deviant approach to care and is becoming more mainstream,' said Paul Shekelle, M.D. AMA policy now states that it is ethical for physicians not only to associate professionally with chiropractors but also to refer patients to them for diagnostic or therapeutic services. Today, chiropractors are the third largest group of health care providers, after physicians and dentists, who treat patients directly. Chiropractors were regarded as the modern-day equivalent of snake-oil salesmen. For half a century, the American Medical Association waged war against chiropractic, an intervention that relies on spinal adjustments to treat health problems.

Does medicare pay for the activator method used by chiropractors