If you have a bump, trauma, or stress, then the muscles of your back can tighten up. When the muscles tighten up, it jams the bones together. Once the bones are stuck, they sometimes become unstuck through normal motion. If they don't become unstuck on their own, then the bones may pinch a nerve, preventing your brain from talking to your body. Then parts of your body begin to malfunction. Leave the bones stuck long enough, and they start to break down. This is what's called arthritis.

A good chiropractor can gently move the bones and get them moving, safely, and painlessly. The muscles get used to the bones being out of alignment, so it takes some repetition to make the change permanent.

Every statement above can be found in either extremely valid research studies, or an anatomy textbook.

Chiropractic is so safe in fact, that I challenge you or anyone else to search the medical literature to find even one death due to chiropractic. When I was invited to be on staff and get my hospital privileges at U.C.S.D. school of medicine, the doctor who was handling the entire process of getting me on board, was asked to verify the safety of chiropractic, before they let me in. As far as I know, this was the second time a chiropractor was allowed on staff at a medical school (Dr. Terry Yokum I believe was the first). Well the doctor/researcher who was inviting me and facilitating my entrance into their school, did a survey of all of the literature he could find on the dangers of chiropractic. I can not reveal this guys name, but he is considered to be "The leading expert on Pain treatment research" in the world and is flown in to speak to parliaments and congresses of different countries around the world to advise them on their health care laws etc.

Now I know that not all research is true, and I know that there are some dark forces that influence which research articles get published or buried, so I fully expected him to come back with some research showing some risk of danger from chiropractic. You would expect at least something right? A hundred years of chiropractors moving billions of bones around, you would expect SOMETHING!! You know what he found? NOTHING!! His conclusion based on the research that followed standard valid methods, that there was no risk demonstrated in the scientific literature with chiropractic. NOTHING - ZERO - NADA!! I am sure that some crazy chiropractor could figure out a way to hurt someone, but the bottom line is simply that taking Tylenol or aspirin is at least a million times more dangerous than a chiropractic adjustment.

Each year there around 7,600 deaths and 76,000 hospitalizations due to NSAID's. These are Non Steroidal Antiinflammatory drugs. The most common of which are aspirin and ibuprofen. Man, if chiropractors killed even a hundredth that many people, they would shut us down fast!

In my 14 years of experience, and 800,000 plus adjustments, the worst thing I have ever seen is someone who got sore for a few days.