Dr. Jeff Langmaid breaks down chiropractor visit frequency by stage: acute pain care starts with multiple visits per week, with most patients seeing improvement within the first few visits but needing roughly 3 to 24 visits for substantial relief. After that, care shifts to rehab and optional maintenance focused on lifestyle and movement.
How often should you go to the chiropractor? I'm Dr. Jeff Langman with the evidence based chiropractor. I'm going to take a few moments and try to answer that question, at least help provide some clarity around a very common question in and around chiropractic, which is how often should you go? And the answer is. Drumroll it depends, but it does depend upon a number of factors. Two things. Primarily it's going to depend upon what are your health goals. The second is what is the doctor finding. During your evaluation, you could present to the chiropractor with severe headaches, perhaps neck pain, perhaps chronic low back pain, disc issues, or you're just looking for performance benefits. All of those things are going to impact the decision of how often you should go. Now, for many chiropractors, beginning at two to three times per week makes a lot of sense. We've seen this in the physical therapy realm and a lot of it applies in the chiropractic realm. If you are struggling and or in pain, one of the top priorities is to reduce or alleviate that pain. And that does not happen with one treatment. Now sometimes that does, but quite often it takes at least a few treatments to understand what are the progress that you can make towards finding relief. When a chiropractor delivers their care, and specifically when they deliver a spinal adjustment, many things happen. That spinal adjustment can impact that joint itself. They certainly can impact biochemical markers in the brain. They can impact the peripheral and the central nervous system. But if you have for days, weeks, months or years been struggling through pain, which many people have, it takes a little while to change that habit. Your body has become sensitized, as we would say in the medical world. So going through a few different treatment sessions is often necessary to determine what is your response going to be to the care provided. That's the initial response. Now, to find relief in many chiropractic practices, to find relief could take anywhere from 3, 4, 5, up to 12 or 18 visits. That's finding relief. Those first few visits are gonna determine whether or not you're on the right course. The subsequent visits are really to, to alleviate as much of that pain as possible, to change the habits that are going on inside your body so that you can begin to move again, you can begin to experience better quality of life and you can be more functionally active. Now beyond that, then it's about changing daily lifestyle habits. We know a majority of people that present to chiropractic offices in pain, it's due to their habits Each and every day. That could be sitting long hours at a computer. Potentially it's a traumatic event. It might be lifestyle, not getting out there, moving enough, not having the right diet. All of these things can contribute to pain patterns that could start as acute and eventually transition into chronic pain. So when we think about visits beyond 6, 12, 18 visits, quite often those visits are focused on movement, they're focused on rehab and exercise. They're focused on changing or influencing the lifestyle factors that are causing the issue in the first place. So. So the common question of how often do I need to go to a chiropractor? It can vary depending upon how you're presenting and what your health goals are. But for many people, they experience some relief very early on in the first few visits. Then you're looking at 6 to 18, 6 to 24 visits to really find relief. And from there you might get into what we call maintenance wellness or proactive care, which is about influencing those lifestyle. Now, depending upon your specific case, things could vary wildly beyond what I'm describing. So it depends really holds true here. But if you're curious, how often do you need to go? How often you should go, number one, you need to talk to your chiropractor, answer that question for your specific case. But hopefully this video gave you a little bit of a framework and a little bit of insight into what that might look like for you. Thank you so much for watching this video on the evidence based Chiropractor channel. If you don't want to miss a single thing, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribe so you can get notifications of every video we put out. And we put out new content each and every week, so be sure to subscribe today.
