Why 96% of People Trust Chiropractic Care Once They Try It — And What’s Stopping the Other 56% From Ever Finding Out

A national survey released this month by Synchrony/CareCredit put a number on something I see in this office almost every week: people don’t distrust chiropractic care because they’ve tried it and it didn’t work. They distrust it — or just never think about it — because they haven’t tried it yet.

The numbers are worth sitting with. Ninety-two percent of Americans say preventive care matters as much as treating illness once you’re sick. But only 44% actually include chiropractic care in their long-term health routine. Before treatment, 73% of people hold a positive view of chiropractic. After treatment, that number jumps to 96%. Ninety-one percent of patients say they trust their chiropractor. Ninety-three percent say they consider the treatment safe.

That’s not a small gap. That’s a credibility problem that only resolves itself once, and only after someone is already sitting on the table.

I wanted to unpack why that gap exists, because two of the specific findings in the survey line up almost exactly with the two questions I get most often from new patients — and I’d rather answer them here than let someone guess.

“Is this actually backed by anything, or is it just ‘alternative medicine’?”

Only 26% of people surveyed knew that clinical guidelines recommend non-drug approaches — including chiropractic care — before opioids for back pain. When people were told that fact, their favorability toward chiropractic care rose by 54%.

That’s not a marketing claim. It’s been standard guidance from the American College of Physicians for years: try non-drug, non-invasive care first for acute and chronic low back pain, because it works for most people and carries none of the risk of long-term opioid use. Chiropractic care sits squarely inside that first line of treatment, alongside physical therapy and exercise-based rehab — not as a last resort after drugs fail, and not as a substitute for real medicine, but as the actual first recommended step for the most common reason people end up in pain in the first place.

I track our own outcomes closely enough to know what that looks like in practice, not just in a guideline. Across more than 4,400 patient outcome reports pulled through ChiroUp, our patients report an average 80.8% improvement, and 97.3% say they’d refer a friend or family member. That’s not “alternative medicine.” That’s a clinic getting graded, repeatedly, by the people who walked in hurting.

“How many visits is this going to turn into?”

This is the real hesitation, even when people don’t say it directly. Chiropractic care has an image problem built on a specific, valid complaint: somewhere out there, someone was told to come in three times a week for a year regardless of how they were doing.

I know that clinic exists because I used to work there. Early in my career, a practice consultant told me to put every new patient on a 3x/week, 4-week plan — not based on their condition, based on the schedule. I left. Ashworth was built, deliberately, as the opposite of that model.

Here’s what that looks like in numbers instead of promises: across those same 4,400+ outcome reports, our average patient resolves in 6.3 visits. Not 6.3 visits before we suggest a maintenance plan — 6.3 visits to resolution. The conditions we see most often — SI joint dysfunction, thoracic and lumbar restriction, cervicogenic headache, piriformis syndrome — have a visit range I can tell you on day one, because we’ve treated hundreds of each. If a plan is running long, that’s a conversation about whether chiropractic is even still the right tool, not a reason to add more visits and hope.

We built our tagline around this on purpose: we celebrate discharging patients. A shorter plan of care isn’t a clinic leaving money on the table. It’s the point.

The cost question the survey also flagged

Twenty-eight percent of people said they’re genuinely unsure what chiropractic care typically costs, and 56% of consumers said flexible payment options matter to their decision to start care at all — a number that climbs to 63% among people who’ve already been patients somewhere, when asked if they’d use a discounted prepaid visit package.

I’d rather over-explain this than let it sit as a mystery. If cost or coverage is part of what’s holding you back from booking a first visit, ask us directly — before you start, not after three visits in. It’s a five-minute conversation, and it’s one I’d rather have on the phone than have you avoid the whole thing because you assumed the worst.

What this actually means if you’ve been on the fence

If you’ve never been to a chiropractor, or you tried one years ago and it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere, the CareCredit survey is describing you specifically. You’re not wrong to be skeptical of an industry that’s earned some of that skepticism. You’re just missing the data that the 96% of people who’ve actually sat in the chair already have.

The honest version of my pitch isn’t “trust me.” It’s: here’s what I track, here’s what it typically takes, here’s when I’ll tell you this isn’t the right place for you — and here’s the door, whenever you’re ready to use it.