Jeff LangmaidFounder, The Evidence Based Chiropractor

What Happens to Arteries?🫀

6 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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In this video, Jeff Langmaid addresses common safety concerns about cervical spinal adjustments by examining a systematic review that investigated whether such adjustments cause arterial damage. Because direct human testing is impractical, researchers employed animal models and measured four critical outcomes: artery structure, blood flow, inflammation, and mortality. The experimental results showed no evidence of arterial harm, contradicting fear‑based headlines that suggest cervical adjustments damage arteries. The speaker emphasizes that both personal clinical experience (adjusting thousands of patients) and the scientific literature support the safety of these procedures.

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Chances are in your daily life, conversations around safety pop up every now and again, and you probably are really aware that the risk is incredibly small based upon your own experience adjusting thousands of people probably over the course of your career. But also, that's what the research has shown over time. But these questions still come up, so we're going to look at the systematic review that asked the following question: if cervical adjustments were actually harming arteries, would we see measurable damage in the controlled experiments? Really great question. And since it's really difficult to test the answer to that question on humans, researchers used animal models to measure. And what did they measure? They measured some things that are really critically important. 1, artery structure. 2, blood flow. 3, inflammation. 4, even mortality. And the results, they are not what the fear-based headlines would have you believe.