Chiropractic and Spinal Manipulation Therapy on Twitter: Case Study Examining the Presence of Critiques and Debates.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Spinal manipulation therapy (SMT) is a popular though controversial practice. The debates surrounding efficacy and risk of SMT are only partially evident in popular discourse.

Objective

This study aims to investigate the presence of critiques and debates surrounding efficacy and risk of SMT on the social media platform Twitter. The study examines whether there is presence of debate and whether critical information is being widely disseminated.

Methods

An initial corpus of 31,339 tweets was compiled through Twitter's Search Application Programming Interface using the query terms "chiropractic," "chiropractor," and "spinal manipulation therapy." Tweets were collected for the month of December 2015. Post removal of tweets made by bots and spam, the corpus tota

SUBMITTER: Marcon AR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5045521 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature