Joe Rogan and Author Alan Levinovitz on Chiropractic Pseudoscience

Let me tell you a story about a terrible person. There's... Looks like we should cue up some spooky music. Yeah, right. So there's this guy, I hope I don't get sued by this guy. Well, you don't say his name. Yeah. Well, I'm about to say the place that he runs. This is a guy who tells people that he can cure their cancer. Oh. Yeah, yeah. You know, cure their cancer naturally, right? He's got the whole... Oh. He gives them wheatgrass smoothies, right? And he tells them that if they just think positively and that big pharma is corrupt and chemotherapy is a sham, and if they just come to his place, which I went to in Florida. Did you go to interview him or? I did. I went to interview him because... And he looks like... I mean, he just looks like... He's like a caricature of a snake oil salesman. He's got this artificially tanned skin and a pointy goatee. And so I think you're totally right. It's on this guy, this fucked up guy who is getting people's hope up, right? It's not, right? Because it's also he gets to the people and they could have sought out real treatment. He could be cured and live. People die because they go there. And the people that were there, this was the crazy thing. And this again gets back to how the ultra-processed information is happening. These were not idiots, man. These were people who... I mean, I don't know what it's like because I've never had... I've never had... Knock on wood. I've never had cancer. A person very close to me has never had cancer. But these are people who... When that happens, you're looking for anyone. You're looking for anyone to tell you a story that gives you a sense that things are actually not chaotic, right? That things are simple, that there's an answer, that there's a community. That they can help you. And so they go, right? And he taps into that and he gives them what they want, right? In a sense, he gives them what they want, which is a feeling of certainty and belonging and hope. He's a terrible, terrible human being. But it ends up being really bad for these people. And it ends up being bad for society in certain ways. And so I struggle, right? And the problem is, if you attack that guy... I don't know if you've run into this at all, but if you attack the charlatans, they've been turned into saints by the people that look up to them. So when you attack them, you also end up attacking all of the people... That believe them. That believe them. Yeah. I've been there before with chiropractors. Yeah. Wait, say a little more? Well, I don't know if you know the history of chiropractors. I do. I have to figure out where you come down on this before I... I think it's nonsense. Yeah, okay. So it's 100% nonsense. It's this. Ready? Me cracking my fingers? That's what they're doing to your back. It's not fixing anything. Chiropractic medicine was created by a guy who was a magnetic healer who came about it through a seance, the idea that he was going to manipulate people's spines and cure them of tuberculosis and blindness. He was murdered by his son who drove over him with a fucking car and then took over the practice. And then how I know that this has been grandfathered in. Like, I told this to a friend of mine the other day who was talking to me about chiropractors. I go, do you know how much time a chiropractor spends in medical school? They go, how much? I go, zero. Zero time. They're a doctor of chiropractic medicine, but they're not a doctor. There's people flipping out right now though who have been to their chiropractor who feel like they've gotten relief, who respect their... Yeah, well, there's some relief in someone manipulating your body, folks. You should get a deep tissue massage and you should get an MRI and find out what's really wrong. I came through this because I used to go to a doctor, chiropractor, excuse me, and I had a bulging disc and it was fucking me up for a long time. It was really bothering me. And this chiropractor was assuring me. It definitely was not a bulging disc and there's probably a muscle tear and we're going to fix it by manipulating this. I'm going to change that and crack and see, oh, I got it there. Let me adjust this, boom, and your hip, this. It was all horseshit. But he was a saint compared to another one that I went to. I'll tell you a story about a guy who was ripping people off. This guy was really ripping people off. He was doing this thing that he called zone healing. Are you ready for this? I'm not bullshitting. He would touch your head and he would press your head here and press your head here, press your head here, and then press it really hard here. And he goes, oh, you feel that? And I go, yeah. And he'd be like, yeah, that's, that's, L4 is off. And then somebody, no, you squeezed hard on my fucking head. I'm not stupid. And then he would adjust you and tell you that this is going to fix, you know, whatever autoimmune disease you have, whatever this. And so I was going to him because all these other jujitsu people were going to him and they were all telling me, oh, this guy's great at cracking backs and he's, he's amazing. He fixed my neck. He fixed my this because people want someone to fix their thing, right? If you have a neck injury and you just spend time off and it gets better and you get some treatment from a chiropractor, well, heal things, heal your body knows how to heal. And he goes, oh, he fixed my neck. No, your fucking neck healed. Okay. Things do heal. But this person touching your back saying he's fixing your gallbladder is a scam artist. Right. So I had this guy and I'm talking to him. And so I said, well, how does this work? And he's explaining to me, he's got a chart. This is zone. He is how we're fixing this and that and that and this. And I said, but all you're doing is pushing down on my back. How are you fixing all these things? And so he tries to give me this shenanigans and a little song and dance. Hey, hey. And I keep going and I say, how are you fixing this? You tell me what is going on here. And so it goes down to the placebo method. He literally tells me, oh, he said, if you believe, if you believe in these things, I go, so you're telling me I have to be so fucking dumb to think that if you push on my back, it's going to fix my liver and that it will fix my liver. Well, he goes, well, you do know the placebo method does work. I go, so you're taking money from people to lie to them. So we have this tense conversation in his office and I'm looking at him and I know this guy's got a nice house and he's got a nice car and he's just fucking stealing money from people by giving them these false hopes. It's creepy shit, man. It's really creepy shit when you're alone with the guy and you're talking to him about it and you get him to say it's the placebo method. And meanwhile, other than that, nice guy, which is even more fucked up. Like I knew him. Like he seemed like a nice guy. I didn't, I didn't know. I didn't even know chiropractor stuff was bullshit. I mean, the history of it. Like you said, if you look into it, it's sort of hard to believe that people, it's still a thing. It's hard to believe that insurance covers it. Yeah. And this goes back to the religion stuff too. I got into all of this stuff. My actual area of academic expertise is classical Chinese philosophy. So that's what I did as an, do, did, do as an academic. And I read all these ancient Taoist texts and stuff like that. And there's all these promises in there about if you take my mercury mixed at night, I'm going to go to the night with this and you eat in this way. And I'm looking at this stuff and I was like, you know, this seems very familiar, right? There's a lot of that going on today. And then you look at the history of chiropractic and it's, there are these vital forces, right? Homeopathy is a similar thing. There's vital forces that are actually what's causing illness. And if you look at the history of that, it's quasi-religious Reiki, which is like the energy healing, right? And it's like, they didn't even touch you, right? Right. And it's these words. Eusting these words, energy is one of these words that can easily slide from explicitly religious to seemingly secular, right? It's like, oh yeah, energy, that's in physics. They have energy, right? But it's like, no, this is a thing. They're not manipulating your energy. There's not something scientific happening here. This is a, this is a religious ritual, a healing ritual disguised as some kind of science. Right. And, and, and yet, as you know, and this is what I discovered with my first book, I used to joke with people like I got out of religion because I didn't want to talk about touchy stuff. And then I started talking about food and medicine. And that was when people really got pissed. Like when you, when you start to talk about what they eat. So you got out of religion just because you didn't want these uncomfortable conversations. I'm joking. I actually got, I got, I stopped doing religion, like, or not stopped doing, because I still do scholarship stuff. But I wanted to talk about it in a way that was relevant to modern society. So I didn't just want to do classical Chinese thought. I wanted to look at how the stuff I learned about how religion works or about the history of religion and apply it to, you know, how are people choosing the foods they eat? How are people choosing the medicines like with Chinese medicine, right? People would say crazy stuff to me. They'd say things like, you know, acupuncture is natural, right? Whatever. And that's, and that's part of why it works. Like acupuncture, they got stainless steel, filiform needles. You think those who are around when the yellow emperor was writing his classic? Like, no, they don't. And when people talk about Chinese medicine, they don't talk about, you know, exorcism. I think it was very popular back in the day, but that's not something people embrace. And so I saw these weird uncritical embraces of dietary regimens and healing rituals that to me were just obviously right out of, you know, ancient China or, you know, any ancient context where people would never believe them. And yet today, you know, you're going in and you're having your, your back cracked. It's so weird that it's so prevalent. But push back on it and oh, I've experienced it. I'm experienced it now. Oh, no. It's not what's going to happen. 100 percent. Well, I don't read social media, luckily, so I'm not going to hear from it. But and let me do say this. There's a bunch of people that are chiropractors that do use some valid methods for rehabilitation. Right. There's a lot of them that use deep tissue massage, cold laser therapy, actual real methods. A lot of them use Rolfing. There's a lot of them that use a bunch of different methods of stretching that are very beneficial. But the practice of cracking backs to cure disease is fucking nonsense. Right. Right. And that's a problem. And the practice of calling yourself a doctor of that is also nonsense. It really is. Yeah. And it's a problem. People always say doctor of chiropractic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It's but at the same time, again, and I don't know, you, I keep saying you know this, but like it's it's it must be difficult when people are in pain, right? Or when people when people are in pain, when you're in pain, either. You know, psychic pain or physical pain, you really need someone to tell you they have an answer for you and to explain it and fit it into a system. They can say to you, I know why you're sad. I know why you feel empty. I know why your fucking back hurts. It's because of this simple thing. And I have the answer. I'm going to fix it. I'm going to fix it. And actually just hearing that itself is therapeutic. It really is. And that's the problem with going to a healer, because there's many people that have gone to people that have claimed to be a healer. And just this process of embracing this new new situation that's like, I am here, I'm getting healed. Oh, my God, it's happening. And you're a lot of what makes people ill is anxiety, is stress and the placebo effect of having some sort of a in your mind perceived solution does have tangible physical benefits for some strange reason, which is really weird. Like what goes on in the human mind.