Say the word "chiropractor" out loud and watch what happens. Someone pictures a spine getting cranked until it pops. Someone else pictures a person who's been "getting adjusted" every week for the last five years and still can't explain why. Almost none of what comes to mind is what sports chiropractic care actually looks like.
Dr. Emily Kreifels, the chiropractor on the Performx team, hears that baggage every week. So instead of fighting it one patient at a time, she's busting the four biggest chiropractic myths in one place, the ones she wishes every active person understood before they ever sat down in a treatment room.
Your ankle, elbow, shoulder, wrist, and jaw can all be adjusted. That's not a gimmick, it's a core part of the training, and it matters because the missing piece in your back pain often lives nowhere near your back.
A back that hurts is usually a back trying to do too much, because something above it or below it isn't moving the way it should. That's why extremity adjusting exists as its own discipline within chiropractic care. A randomized controlled trial on manipulative therapy for recurrent ankle sprains found that patients who received joint manipulation alongside rehab saw significantly better short-term outcomes than rehab alone. The spine gets the headlines, but it's rarely working alone.
That popping sound is called a cavitation, and it's just gas releasing inside the joint capsule as the surfaces separate. Researchers actually captured this happening in real time using MRI, confirming that the sound comes from a bubble forming, not collapsing, inside the joint (Kawchuk et al., PLOS One). File that away for trivia night.
Here's the part that matters clinically: movement doesn't have to happen with sound. If your chiropractor is cranking on you until something pops so you feel like you got your money's worth, that's a signal to find a new chiropractor. The goal is restored function, not volume.
This one is unpopular, but it needs saying: if you have one spot you pop four or five times a day and it never gives lasting relief, that spot is not the problem.
It usually means the joints above and below it aren't moving well, and your body is asking for help in the only way it knows how. Sort out the neighbors, and that spot stops calling. Self-cracking treats a symptom on a loop instead of addressing why the area became hypermobile and irritated in the first place.
If a plan of care addresses the actual root cause, the original problem goes away. Full stop.
Coming back to stay ahead of life is great: your kid body-slams you, you slip on a Magna-Tile, you land funny out of a handstand push-up. Coming back every week for five years for the same low back, the same neck, the same shoulder is a different story. Something is being missed, and you deserve better than a maintenance plan for a problem that was never actually solved.
At Performx, care starts with the real question: what's actually causing this? From there, Dr. Emily builds a plan to fix it and get you back to whatever you're chasing, whether that's running pain-free, picking up your kid without bracing, or getting back under a barbell.
Adjustments are one tool in that plan alongside soft tissue work, mobility work, targeted exercise, and education the whole way through, so you understand what's happening, why, and how to keep it from coming back. Sessions run 60 minutes, with Dr. Emily the entire time. If mobility work between sessions is your thing, Performx also runs yoga classes that pair well with an active plan of care.
"I found myself unable to walk in a straight line. I was corkscrewing to the left. It was the first I've seen an approach to chiropractic that involved so much body work before and after, mixed with physical therapy exercises to make sure the healing and improvements stuck." (Dylan, Google review)
The myths above don't disappear just because someone is pregnant, they often get worse. Dr. Emily specializes in prenatal and postpartum chiropractic and built a free trimester-by-trimester playbook for active women who don't want to spend nine months on the sidelines. It covers the movements every pregnant athlete should keep doing, what "coning" is and what to do about it, and the research behind staying active through pregnancy. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis published in PLOS One pooling 16 randomized controlled trials found that exercise during pregnancy was associated with a 34% lower rate of cesarean delivery. For more on what that looks like week to week, read Prenatal Chiropractic: How It Helps Women Training Through Pregnancy.
If you've got questions about your own back, neck, foot, or the joint you've been self-adjusting on autopilot, that's exactly what a discovery call is for.
Every day you wait is another day you're not running, lifting, or playing with your kids pain-free. Book your free discovery call today, or go straight to booking a Sports Chiropractic session with Dr. Emily. You can also read more about her background on the Performx team page.