Contemporary profiles and professional activities of French chiropractors: a national survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background A comprehensive description of the profile of chiropractic practices and services provided can help guide curriculum design, inform quality improvement and guideline initiatives, and facilitate workforce planning. This cross-sectional study aimed to describe the sociodemographic characteristics, professional activities, work organization, clinical practice patterns, and interprofessional referrals of chiropractors in France. Methods A 37-item online questionnaire was administered between February and April 2023 to all registered chiropractors practicing or having a chiropractic-related professional activity in France, for whom an email address was available (n = 1067). We computed means and standard deviations for continuous variables and percentages for categorical variables. Representativeness of the results was estimated by comparing survey participants’ demographic information with members of the Association Française de Chiropraxie (AFC). Results The response rate was 46.4% (67.7% females; mean age = 34.9 ± 9.7 years), a sample comparable to AFC members. Most participants graduated in the past 15 years (81%) from the Institut Franco-Européen de Chiropraxie (IFEC) (94.5%). Just over one fifth of respondents had an additional university degree, and a similar proportion were involved in at least one chiropractic-related professional activity, mainly as lecturers in the IFEC or supervising clinicians in its outpatient clinics. Over half of the respondents (53.5%) had their main practice location in one of the four most populated regions in France, with 27.4% working in a multidisciplinary setting. Chiropractors reported regularly referring patients to general practitioners and physiotherapists, but less commonly received referrals. Middle-aged adults most commonly sought care, and spinal pain was the primary complaint reported by chiropractors. Chiropractors generally provided advice and education, manual therapy, and exercises. Two-thirds of respondents reported feeling moderate (30.6%) to intense or very intense (31.7%) competition with other manual therapy practitioners. Conclusion The French chiropractic workforce appears predominantly composed of female practitioners who graduated in the past 15 years. Practice patterns and continuing education choices suggest that evidence-based information is part of their practice. While chiropractors commonly reported referring patients to other care providers, fewer reported receiving referrals. Patients seeking chiropractic care were similar to those described in other countries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".