I've argued this matter for years, misophist, and I'm tired of it. My point is that if someone is in it for the money, chiropractic is not a great way to go. I don't know any rich chiropractors. I do know a number of rich MDs.
Just because a person doesn't have a string of letters behind his name doesn't necessarily mean he or she is not thoroughly knowledgeable Within my experience, I have found that just having a sheepskin to hang on the wall is not a particularly reliable indication of one's "qualifications." Nor, often, is the lack of one. D. D. Palmer was interested in physiology and had studied the subject extensively. He was into "magnetic healing," which is something critics of chiropractic love to point out with a sneer, but so were many people at that time, including a lot of medical doctors. It was something of a fad, and it was being investigated by a lot people.
Okay, here's how Palmer discovered the principle that led to chiropractic:—
The first spinal adjustment was performed by D.D. Palmer on Sept. 18, 1895, and resulted in an immediate improvement in a man's hearing. This well-documented event involved Harvey Lillard, an African American entrepreneur. Dr. Palmer reasoned that a misaligned vertebra was causing pressure on Lillard's spinal cord. He convinced Lillard to let him try to move the vertebra with a specific, gentle thrust. This he did, and Lillard's hearing improved immediately. Within a few months he fully regained his hearing.
Have you ever had the experience of leaning on your elbow and having your little finger and half of your ring finger go numb? This is the effect of nerve pressure. If you apply pressure anyplace along the length of a nerve, the muscles and organs that the nerve go to can malfunction. It's similar to interrupting or short-circuiting the flow of electricity. If you "throw your back out," you usually feel pain or discomfort at that point, but there is also the possibility (likelihood) that the misaligned vertebra is pinching the nerve or nerves that branch off from the spinal cord at that point and go through the foramena between the misaligned (subluxated) vertebra and the one directly above or below. Whatever organ, muscle, or other bodily part that nerve goes to can malfunction in the same way that your fingers malfunction when you inadvertently pinch your ulnar nerve. The principle is ridiculously simple. The chiropractor adjusts the vertebra, restoring it to its proper alignment, and the back pain and whatever malfunction, or potential malfunction, caused by pressure on the nerve are alleviated.
If you care to further educate yourself on the subject, I excerpted the above quote from THIS web site. Is it slanted in favor of chiropractic? Of course. But how better to learn about chiropractic than from a chiropractor? You're not going to learn much about it from a medical doctor (would you go to a plumber to learn about electrical systems?). Read the material and then make up your own mind.
Scientific? At least as scientific as medicine. Granted, chiropractic got it's start by trial-and-error. But remember: so did medicine.
But then the "scientific" can often something of a buzzword in this kind of discussion. What is your criterion for whether or not something is scientific? If it's "clinically proven," then chiropractic has been clinically proven again and again. It's just that there are those whose minds are so made up that they don't even want to look at the data, much less see if they can duplicate it.