I haven't had to go to a chiropractor since I had back surgery four years ago. For twenty years prior to that, I routinely went to a chiropractor for chronic back pain as well as so-called maintenance visits because my chiropractor had convicned me that he could actually cure the cause of my back pain. (If he was curing me, then why did I need twenty years of treatment?)
On one of my last visit to the chiropractor prior to seeking treatment from a real doctor, I was in incredible pain and asked the chiropractor if perhaps I had a ruptured disk or something, he just shrugged my question off by telling me that if I had a ruptured disk I would not have been able to drive to his office. Two days later, I no longer had back pain, but I did have numbness in my feet. Over the next few weeks the numbness progressed to the point where I fell up the stairs. The chiropractor told me that my body was reacting to the adjustments. A few days later I experienced incontinence. I then went to a real doctor, who sent me ASAP to see a neurosurgeon, who ordered an MRI, which showed that my disk had literally broken into fragments that were now pressing against the nerves running down my spine, which not only numbed my feet, but also numbed the pain that I had been experiencing in my back.
The surgery took almost four hours. The doctor removed literally dozens of disk fragments that were dangerously close to causing total paralysis from the waist down. My surgeon summed up the situation best when he said there is a not a chiropractor in the world who can remove disk fragments that are pressing against the nerves. He also said that the adjustments could have contributed to the degeneration of the disk (bone and disk and bone crunching and grinding together during dozens and dozens of adjustments I received over years and years) and may have been the cause in whole or in part for manipulating the disk fragments against the nerves.
The surgery is not perfect. But I haven't had the constant pain that sent me to the chiropractor every few weeks and I am a lot more active and athletic now than when I was going to the bonequacker.
Not to be nitpicky, but how does a person fall "up" stairs?