Kennedy's chiropractor cash grab

While explosive diarrhea ravages the nation and measles cases surpass 2025 totals (threatening America’s elimination status), RFK Jr is focusing on what matters most in health care: chiropractic.

In early June, MAHA Action (Kennedy’s advocacy organization and lobbying arm) launched the MAHA Chiropractor Hub in order to unite “national associations, state organizations, practitioners, educators, researchers, and patient advocates to advance federal policy, expand patient access, and build broad public support for chiropractic care across America — for children, military personnel, veterans, seniors, and all families seeking non-drug, non-surgical healthcare options.”

Kennedy’s friends have been leaning heavily on the “non-drug” interventionism of chiropractic during their rhetoric, as evidenced by many speakers on the MAHA Action call on June 4:

This webinar makes it clear MAHA is using this pseudoscience “ghost religion” as a Trojan Horse for its anti-vaccine, pro-“natural” medicine agenda.

Let’s look at 3 intertwined phenomena:

• A (very) brief history of chiropractic

• What Kennedy’s fandom signals for the profession

• How Kennedy is likely to funnel money earmarked for actual scientific research into backcracking

Chiropractic was founded by Daniel David Palmer, a Canadian-born magnetic healer who ran a wellness clinic in Davenport, Iowa in the 1880s. The first back crack occurred on September 18, 1895, when Palmer treated a partially deaf janitor named Harvey Lillard, applying pressure to a vertebra he believed was out of place. Lillard reported that his hearing improved after the pressure, which Palmer took as proof that spinal misalignments could cause disease throughout the body. A very sciencey deduction.

Palmer loved spiritualism and séances, claiming he “received” the concept of spinal adjustment from the spirit of a doctor who had died decades earlier. This is why chiropractic is sometimes rightfully referred to as a “ghost religion” rooted in metaphysical claims about invisible healing forces rather than anatomy. No matter how much the MAHA folk are trying to dress it up as science, the practice still honors its metaphysical origins.

Palmer combined the Greek words for “hand” and “action” to create “chiropractic.” His son, BJ, wanted to professionalize chiropractic, moving it away from the ghosts. This is known in the lore as the rift between “straights” and “mixers.”

• Straights believe all disease stems from spinal subluxations interfering with nerve flow, and that spinal adjustment alone is the legitimate treatment

• Mixers began incorporating heat, massage, exercise, and nutrition into the practice in order to make it seem more credible

BJ might have taken a more holistic approach, but he was also an opportunist. In 1910 the Flexner Report set rigorous, science-based accreditation standards for medical schools. Homeopathy, eclectic medicine, and chiropractic didn’t make the cut. That’s why MAHA fans deride the Flexner report to this day. Calley Means, RFK Jr’s senior advisor and supplements salesman, continually misrepresents what Abraham Flexner said and did, but suffice to say, the report is why the US became a leader in medical education and care, despite MAHA’s insistence on returning us to 19th-century faith healing.

Chiropractic’s popularity tanked but the practice never disappeared. In the 1960s, the AMA formed a Committee on Quackery with the stated mission of containment and eventual elimination of chiropractic. Chiropractic’s path to mainstream acceptance came through licensure, litigation, and insurance inclusion rather than scientific validation. By 1974 chiropractic was licensed in all 50 states. Congress authorized Medicare payments for chiropractic services in 1972.

The decisive legal turning point was Wilk v. AMA, filed by chiropractor Chester Wilk and others, in which a federal judge ruled in 1987 that the AMA had engaged in an illegal conspiracy to destroy chiropractic; the ruling was upheld on final appeal in 1990. That case opened the door to broader cooperation between medical doctors and chiropractors and cleared the way for private insurers to cover chiropractic care more widely in the 1990s. This cemented its place as a licensed, reimbursed part of our healthcare system even though the subluxation theory has never been validated, and that’s the absurd part of this story.

The modern claim (as presented in a clip below) is that chiropractic “resets the nervous system,” the plank the MAHA Chiropractic Hub is building its foundation on. This is just a modern rebrand of the older subluxation theory: the idea that spinal misalignments, or subluxations, interfere with nerve flow, and that spinal adjustments correct this interference, and improve communication between brain and body, immune function, and stress response.

Some small studies support a nervous-system effect. For example, upper cervical adjustments modestly increase heart rate variability or lower cortisol shortly after treatment. This brief intervention reveals nothing about “resetting the nervous system” as being a mechanism that treats disease or restores general health, however.

The core subluxation has never been objectively demonstrated. It isn’t visible on X-ray, MRI, or CT. There’s also no agreed physical definition of what it even is. Yet you’ll hear chiropractors claim that adjustments help cure asthma, immune dysfunction, and digestive issues, as well as treat pain, a common one you’ll hear in MAHA—for a reason.

Some evidence supports spinal manipulation for one thing: mechanical low back pain and some neck pain, where it performs comparably to other conservative treatments like physical therapy. This is where I concur: as someone who broke numerous bones, I had a lot of physical problems as a teenager and college student. I had hundreds of chiropractic sessions, and the adjustment (along with STIM and massage) briefly alleviated my symptoms. But I also had chiropractors tell me that I’d be a patient for life, which proved untrue once I worked with physical therapists to strengthen underdeveloped muscles in my back and legs.

That’s Leigh Merinoff, senior vice president of The MAHA Center and a triple-board certified medical doctor and expert…no wait, I’m sorry, she trained as a sculptor and now runs a raw milk dairy in Vermont.

She’s also a proud longtime member of the Weston A Price Foundation and sits on the board of Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr’s anti-vax organization. Her language, “supporting the body rather than immediately medicating,” is the Trojan horse for the anti-vax agenda.

She goes on to explain the goal of the Hub.

I’ll translate this clip: they’re trying to force the healthcare system to elevate chiropractic as a legitimate medical practice despite the lack of scientific evidence and offer more people chiropractic services so the industry can make more money. It’s really that simple.

A recent Office of Budget and Management policy proposal calls for shifting oversight of more than $1 trillion of federal grants across 42 different agencies to politicians instead of medical and science experts. Instead of that money going toward research into health disparities in different socioeconomic regions or vaccine research, Kennedy will have the power to redirect that cash into chiropractic offices for their “research.”

Next up is Brandon Hoffman, MAHA Chiropractic Hub’s Executive Director. His day job is as market development executive for ChiroSecure, where he has a specialty in risk management and managing complex coverage relationships (i.e. gimme the loot). He works on billing coding with the WHO, so he’s a seasoned bureaucrat. That’s why he lays out the Hub’s four goals for 2026:

You hear it all there: expanding Medicare to include more chiropractic care for seniors, and the “choice” of chiropractic for veterans, which of course follows in the wake of MAHA’s rage that the US military had to get those damn Covid jabs.

The “more robust research and grant” opportunities part made my ears perk up, considering I recently covered the administration’s move to deny scientific researchers billions of dollars in grant funding this fall, which in part will go to pseudoscientific allies of Kennedy so they can, in his words, “make the proof” of their practice.

Remember those “scientific journals” Kennedy’s friends spun up at the beginning of his tenure as HHS Secretary? They’re going to come in quite handy for the chiropractors.

Finally, Tony Ebel, an actual chiropractor who specializes in pediatric chiropractic and “nervous system reset,” which I flagged earlier. Like chiropractor to the ancient god, Ramtha, Joe Dispenza, who cosplays as a neuroscientist, Ebel likes to fashion himself as a nervous system expert. Leading into this clip he tells a long anecdote about how his son almost died after being born, and, to his credit, says medical care saved his son’s life. Then the opportunism: he talks about how he was adjusting his infant son 2-3x per day while his in the NICU, claiming that helped his son survive. Then he touts the MAHA rhetoric of “Western medicine is great for critical care, but we’re providing a practice so you don’t ultimately need those doctors.” He continues:

A whole lot of words for a back crack.

While these clips were pulled from the June 4 webinar above, the Hub is about much more. They gathered in DC on July 20 to discuss those four pillars Hoffman mentioned. Here’s the wrap-up from the MAHA Report article:

The Chiropractic Medicare Coverage Modernization Act (H.R. 539 in the House and S. 106 in the Senate) has become one of the profession’s top legislative priorities. The bill seeks to expand Medicare coverage for chiropractic services, and supporters argue that seniors should have access to the same level of chiropractic care already available through other federal programs, including the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense.

They want in on that cash, and not only through Medicare: their Chiropractoc Hub page launched last week, and they’re asking for supporters to fund “the advocacy, education, and coalition work that advances the profession.”

While we’ve all become too accustomed to tipping screens on apps for every service, even this is impossibly ludicrous: there’s $50/$100/$500 donation levels for “advocate, practitioner circle, or founder circle.”

Here’s the thing: that’s PER MONTH. For $5,000 per year, you get a lapel pin, newsletter, quarterly Zoom calls, and recognition on the web page. The last one jumped out: an invitation to the annual in-person dinner in DC. It’s like the Trump crypto coin scandal at a smaller level: pay us and you get access. Which I thought Kennedy was going to stop.

The revisionist history of the article announcing the Hub is astounding though not surprising:

The roots of chiropractic care stretch back to 1895, when Daniel David Palmer developed a system of care based on the idea that spinal health plays an important role in overall wellness. In its earliest years, chiropractic faced significant opposition and spent much of the 20th century fighting for legal recognition and professional legitimacy.

Nothing about ghost religions or metaphysics even if the subluxation theory remains the root of this profession. While mixers use physical therapy, massage, and other modalities in a sports chiropractic manner, it’s clear MAHA is filled with straights who want jabs and pills out of healthcare in exchange for back cracks.

They might have dressed up the language to pretend the practice is evidence-based, but their system is as magical as it ever was.

With Kennedy’s support, they’re about to get a whole lot richer.