Cost of chiropractic versus medical management of adults with spine-related musculoskeletal pain: a systematic review.

"Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participateNot applicable. Consent for publicationNot applicable. Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests."

"Funding This project was supported in part by the Clinical Compass and the NCMIC Foundation."

"Our team followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol to conduct the review and registered it with PROSPERO in December 2022 prior to data abstraction (CRD42022383145). We elected a priori not to pursue meta-analysis due to heterogeneity of the included studies. Most of the included studies are cohort studies which by their nature can only show associations, cannot prove causation, and are of a lower level of evidence than RCTs, which are the study design usually included in meta-analyses. We conducted the searches and quality assessments from July through December 2022 and data abstraction from January through March 2023. The primary aim of our systematic review was to address the research question: Is chiropractic management of spine-related musculoskeletal pain in U.S. adults associated with lower overall healthcare costs as compared to medical care?"