I used to think persistent neck pain was the kind of problem that could be outworked, stretched away, or simply ignored until it went quiet on its own. It did not behave that way, and that was the first useful thing it taught me.
The gift of being wrong is that it restores clinical humility. When a disciplined, educated person meets a problem that does not respond to familiar tools, the right move is not to defend the old explanation, but to revise it, test a different model, and stay honest about uncertainty.
That is true for a stubborn pain syndrome and it is true for medicine more broadly, where the habits that once made us effective can harden into sacred cows if we never challenge them.
At one point I went to see a NUCCA chiropractor for neck pain that had persisted long enough to become part of my background noise. I did not arrive with a conversion narrative in mind. I went because the pain was real, my usual reasoning had not solved it, and I was willing to be a little uncomfortable about what that implied.
That experience became more than a personal detour. It became a reminder that education does not immunize anyone against blind spots. In medicine, we are trained to seek signal, organize uncertainty, and protect patients from nonsense. Those are good instincts. But if the instincts become identity, they can also become a defense mechanism.
Why being wrong is not a failure
There is a quiet vanity in professional certainty. Clinicians can mistake confidence for rigor, especially when we have spent years learning how to sound decisive. But the work of medicine is not to preserve our pride. It is to reduce suffering and improve judgment.
The point is not that every unconventional approach is right. It is that a clinician should be able to say, without embarrassment, that the current explanation may be incomplete. That sentence is often the beginning of better care.
The humility problem in modern medicine
Medicine has always needed guardrails against gullibility. It also needs guardrails against dogmatism. The two are not opposites. A system can be credulous about novelty and rigid about dissent at the same time.
The Annals of Internal Medicine paper Ten Principles for More Conservative, Care-Full Diagnosis is useful here because it treats diagnostic restraint as a discipline, not a retreat. Conservative diagnosis does not mean doing less for the sake of doing less. It means thinking carefully enough to avoid premature closure, overconfidence, and the reflex to label disagreement as incompetence.
That matters when a patient presents with pain that does not fit a neat box. It matters even more when the patient is a clinician, because clinicians are often better at rationalizing persistence than at reconsidering assumptions.
What NUCCA forced me to notice
I am not interested in turning a single chiropractic visit into a grand theory of medicine. I am interested in what happened in my own thinking. I had to confront the possibility that my discomfort was not only physical. It was epistemic. I was uneasy about not knowing, and uneasier still about learning from a source I had not already certified as acceptable.
That is a common professional trap. We build hierarchies of legitimacy, then pretend those hierarchies are identical to truth. They are not. They are maps, and maps are useful only when they still answer to the territory.
The literature on manual therapy is mixed, and it should be treated that way. The UK evidence report Effectiveness of manual therapies: the UK evidence report and the later systematic update in Clinical effectiveness of manual therapy for musculoskeletal and non-musculoskeletal conditions do not hand anyone a blanket endorsement. They show a field with variable evidence, heterogeneous methods, and enough signal to deserve careful appraisal rather than ritual dismissal.
That is the standard I wish more of us used for everything: not “Is this familiar?” but “What is the quality of the claim, what is the mechanism being proposed, and what would change my mind?”
Sacred cows survive because they are comfortable
Professional cultures accumulate sacred cows the way patients accumulate scar tissue. Once something has survived long enough, it starts to feel natural. Then it starts to feel moral. Then it starts to feel like questioning it is itself a sign of bad character.
That pattern appears in clinical practice, academic medicine, health policy, and even the way physicians talk about identity. We are fond of saying that medicine should be evidence-based, but evidence does not arrive in a vacuum. It is shaped by the questions we ask, the methods we trust, and the people we are willing to listen to.
The 2017 article Decolonization of knowledge, epistemicide, participatory research and higher education is not a medical paper, yet its core warning travels well: when one tradition monopolizes legitimacy, it can erase useful knowledge before it is even examined. That does not mean all knowledge claims are equal. It means that power often decides what gets a hearing first.
Interdisciplinary thinking is not decorative
Some of the best clinical insights come from crossing boundaries that medicine likes to police. The 2010 article Definitions of Interdisciplinary Research: Toward Graduate-Level Interdisciplinary Learning Outcomes describes interdisciplinary work as more than borrowing vocabulary from another field. It requires genuine integration, meaning that different frameworks have to change one another.
That is exactly what good clinical humility looks like. It is not superficial openness. It is the willingness to let a serious encounter with an unfamiliar method change how you think about your own method.
In practice, this is where physicians often resist. We are trained to protect patients from poor evidence, but sometimes we also protect our own sense of coherence. Those are not the same thing.
What the data can and cannot do
There is a temptation to settle every argument by invoking a paper and calling the matter closed. But evidence should clarify a question, not anesthetize judgment.
Consider upper cervical chiropractic care. A prospective multicenter cohort study in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders reported symptomatic reactions, clinical outcomes, and patient satisfaction in a real-world cohort. That kind of study is not the final word, and it should not be treated as one. It does, however, remind us that patients often evaluate care by lived response, not by disciplinary allegiance.
Likewise, a pilot sham-controlled trial on the effect of spinal manipulation of upper cervical vertebrae on blood pressure shows how careful design can keep enthusiasm honest. The sample was small, the questions were narrow, and the conclusion was appropriately modest. That is how mature fields behave when they respect uncertainty.
And there is an important caution here for clinicians who want certainty before engaging with a patient’s experience: the absence of decisive evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence. It may simply mean the question has not been studied well enough yet.
Manual therapy, rigor, and the discipline of not overclaiming
The rapid review on the clinical utility of routine spinal radiographs by chiropractors is helpful because it does not flatter anyone. It asks whether a routine habit actually helps decision-making. That is the sort of question medicine should ask far more often, especially about traditions we inherited before we understood their value.
The most respectable stance is often the least dramatic one. It is possible to say that a therapy may help some patients, that the evidence base is imperfect, that patient selection matters, and that one’s own experience should remain subordinate to careful appraisal. That is not weak. It is adult medicine.
Being wrong changes how you hear patients
The most practical gift of being wrong is that it makes you listen differently. Once you have had to revise your own certainty, you become less eager to flatten someone else’s story into a diagnosis that serves your ego.
That does not mean abandoning standards. It means understanding that a patient who has sought several opinions, or wandered outside the expected pathway, is not necessarily confused. They may simply be telling you that the pathway did not work.
This is where the physician’s identity matters in the AI age, too. As medicine becomes more data-rich and algorithmically mediated, the temptation will be to confuse more information with better judgment. It will be easy to outsource uncertainty to a dashboard. The harder and more important task will be to remain the kind of clinician who can admit when a model, a protocol, or a prior belief is not enough.
That is not a technology problem alone. It is a character problem.
Clinical ethics is inseparable from epistemic humility
Bioethics has long understood that medicine is not just a technical enterprise. The 1978 Annals of Internal Medicine piece Contemporary Issues in Bioethics is old, but the premise remains sharp: medicine is always making value judgments under uncertainty. Who gets believed, who gets offered which options, and who gets dismissed are ethical questions, not just clinical ones.
That is why being wrong can be morally useful. It interrupts the illusion that authority should never have to apologize. It reminds us that trust is built less by never erring than by responding to error with honesty.
I find that idea reassuring, especially in a profession that often rewards polish over reflection. A physician who never revises anything is usually not a genius. More often, he or she is trapped.
The personal lesson
My neck pain did not become a philosophical breakthrough in the moment. It was just pain, and then a visit, and then the odd relief of realizing that my framework had been too narrow. Later, the larger lesson arrived: if I can be wrong about my own body, I can be wrong about plenty of other things too.
That is not discouraging. It is liberating. It means I do not have to defend every prior assumption simply because I once held it with confidence. It means education should make me more precise, not more brittle.
When clinicians become too sure of themselves, they stop learning from the edges. They stop hearing patients who do not fit the script. They stop noticing that a sacred cow is just a habit with better branding.
Being wrong, if you let it, is a gift. It can make you a better physician, a better colleague, and a better skeptic of your own certainty. In medicine, that is about as close to wisdom as we get.
For more on Dr. Bari’s background and clinical perspective, see the Dr. Sina Bari, MD credentials and background page. For additional writing and context from his broader work, visit Dr. Sina Bari’s professional site and editorial archive.
FAQ
Why would a physician try NUCCA chiropractic care for neck pain?
A physician may try it because persistent pain deserves a fresh look when standard approaches have not solved the problem. The point is not automatic endorsement, it is humility, observation, and willingness to evaluate whether a different framework helps. In my own case, the visit was less about ideology and more about refusing to stay trapped in a failing explanation.
Does seeing a chiropractor mean you are rejecting evidence-based medicine?
No. Evidence-based medicine is not a loyalty test, it is a method for weighing benefits, harms, and uncertainty. A careful clinician can remain evidence-minded while still exploring a treatment area where the literature is mixed and patient experience matters.
What is Dr. Sina Bari’s approach to challenging medical sacred cows?
Dr. Sina Bari’s approach is to stay skeptical without becoming rigid, and curious without becoming credulous. The right question is not whether an idea is familiar, but whether the claim is plausible, the evidence is credible, and the patient’s outcome actually improves. That is the standard he tries to apply both in practice and in writing.
How should clinicians think about manual therapy when the evidence is inconsistent?
They should treat it like any other clinical question with imperfect data: look at study quality, patient selection, outcomes, and harms. Inconsistent evidence does not automatically mean a therapy is worthless, but it does mean claims should stay modest. The responsible response is careful appraisal, not reflexive enthusiasm or reflexive dismissal.
What does being wrong teach doctors about patients who do not fit the textbook?
It teaches them to listen longer and judge less quickly. Patients who do not match the expected pattern are often the ones who reveal the limits of our current framework. If clinicians stay open to that possibility, they are more likely to find a useful diagnosis, a better plan, or at least a more honest conversation.