THE ONE ABOUT BENT SPINES

A lifestyle story that's not all it's cracked up to be.

When all is said and done and life on the planet has mostly melted into a giant puddle of goo, I think the survivors will point to the “lifestyle” sections in newspapers and say “this is what did it, guys — this is what killed science journalism.”¹

This week, we’re looking at a story about chiropractors and working from home risks based on some extremely dubious “studies.” These “studies” were widely published across the Australian press thanks to a clever bit of marketing that led to a newswire hit and a couple of TV spots.

Unravelling the way this nonsense spread felt a bit like spinal manipulation therapy: Kind of painful and not really good for my health.

Here’s what happened.

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This story begins, as it usually does, on the internet.

I saw a few people getting aggravated about an SBS News broadcast on Sunday night which seemed to include chiropractors discussing “working from home” as a risk to health. I missed the broadcast, so I went to Google and punched “SBS chiropractors” in and this was the first headline Google spat out², from the broadcaster:

Working from home? You could be putting your health and wellbeing at risk

I was intrigued.

The article on the SBS website was written by the Australian Associated Press, a newswire service that most mainstream news outlets source stories from. The SBS story included quotes from David Cahill, the president of the Australian Chiropractors Association (ACA). It also claims a “new study reveals” Australians could be at increased risk of injury by working from the kitchen table.

Further intrigue.

Because this is an AAP story, though, it was everywhere.

9news had it under “increased health warning for Australians working from home,” whereas the papers associated with Australian Community Media ran with the headline “increased health risks working from home” and 10’s The Project went with “increased health risk for people embracing work from home.”

We could go deep into the science of chiropractic right now but let’s just go surface level. Chiropractic’s ability to help and heal has been, under intense scientific scrutiny, shown to be a load of nonsense. Of course, the guy who founded the whole pseudoscience chiropractic shebang, D. D. Palmer, was a bit of a loose unit. He believed the art of chiropractic came to him from some sort of spiritual experience. Wild.

Some modern chiropractors have turned to talking about “ergonomic workspaces” and not sitting at a suitable workstation to get ahead of the fact most studies show very little benefit to anything — maybe, potentially, slightly chiropractic helps back pain. Don’t just take it from me though: Liam Mannix, science reporter at The Age, has done some pretty extensive work on ergonomics in 2018 and sitting down all day back in 2019. Most of the experts interviewed across his pieces — professors of musculoskeletal research and back pain — are pretty unanimous in calling it a bunch of baloney.³

But back to the news: The “study” being spruiked by Cahill in the news pieces is not a study but a survey the ACA conducted. I went searching for the data because it’s not linked in any of the pieces online which brings up my first and most belaboured point:

Please, journalists, I am begging you. Always. Link. To. The. Study (Survey… in this case).

So I went looking for it. It’s not on the Australian Chiropractors Association (ACA) website, from what I could tell, but lurking in the pages of “Mirage News,” a news aggregator, is this little ditty:

New Data Reveals Health Warning For Australians Working From Home

— Australian Chiropractors Association

There it is! The press release! This is where the AAP story came from for sure.

And its first lines:

Today, the Australian Chiropractors Association (ACA) launched Workspace Week (22-28 August) with the release of alarming statistics prompting a health warning urging Australians to correct their poorly set up home workspaces to avoid any physical injuries that may be caused by unsafe workspace practices.

Incredible! So it’s a media blast for the ACA and it’s been… sent across the web with basically zero interrogation of the results. I have to say: That’s genius stuff from the Association. Well done. Bravo.

The press release states the ACA conducted TWO surveys.

The first asked 1,003 adults about working from home. First: A survey is not enough to conclude anything of value, especially in this case. Second: It noted 1/3 had been working from home… so 2/3 of the surveyed hadn’t… and I’m not sure the ACA then went and followed up on the back and neck problems with them? Not great.

Despite this, the 1/3 figure prompted the ACA to conduct a survey of their own chiropractors (jesus) and 153 responded. A whopping 86% said existing patients were presenting with workplace-related spinal health issues. 78% said that new patients were presenting with spinal health problems as a result of working from home. There’s absolutely nothing empirical that backs this up.

Again: It’s a survey. You can hardly take anything out of this and it’s a huge flaming conflict of interest to have the chiropractors themselves reporting this. The other thing is that saying this is a “work from home” phenomenon is really stretching things.

Even more interesting though? Both the 9news piece and the SBS piece were tied to reports in TV bulletins on Sunday. They both feature the same shots of David Cahill speaking on camera — and all include the same talent. This is clearly a media call situation and Cahill gets even MORE free press with unchallenged views about ergonomics and workspaces.

Compare the pair! (They’re basically the same shot)

The major problem here is, well, chiropractic is nonsense but tying this “survey” — not a study — to a marketing run for the ACA and getting the press involved like this is truly remarkable.

And it’s absolutely a marketing run. Take a look at the video for Workspace Week on the ACA YouTube:

Handy that the video gives you some tips for an ergonomic workspace and — Oh! What’s that! My local ACA chiro can give me some tips on how to set things up? I can just walk into a clinic for advice? Who’d have known!

So while the ACA press release translated to an AAP story which spread across the web, this seems to be a case of really effective marketing dressed up in a hint of science (using “surveys”) and the journalists and editors seemingly hoodwinked into extending this marketing to the evening news.

Stay ergonomic, friends.

WHAT ELSE? If you didn’t catch last week’s newsletter, it was all about PFAS, a “forever chemical” that is difficult to destroy and potentially harmful to health. A flurry of articles were written about how PFAS had infested our rainwater and it was no longer safe to drink anywhere on Earth… It was overblown but PFAS are hanging around and we do want to destroy them.

The good news? This week is a study in Science showed there is a pretty simple, effective way to break down PFAS and remove them! Hell yeah. Now we’ve just got to see how we can make this work in the environment.

And lastly, shameless little plug: I was going to write about the thylacine resurrection stuff this week, but I covered most of what I wanted to say in this piece. Long live the thylacine (maybe)

1. This week’s header image is generated by Midjourney AI. The prompt was “highly detailed skeleton's spine, cracked and broken, dramatic lighting, hyper realistic.”

2. You can access the article here.

3. Getting up and moving around regularly, though, is still recommended for people who work a desk job. Senescence is bad.