Chance “Sodapoppin” Morris was seconds away from a neck “adjustment” on stream when his phone rang.
The OTK co-owner had been dealing with an ongoing neck problem and ended up in a small treatment room inside a gym he was visiting with other streamers. Fellow streamer Knut reportedly spoke to the practitioner first and brought Morris in.
Morris seemingly thought he was getting a massage. The person in the room was a chiropractor. That is when Veibae, his partner, called.
The call started audible on stream, with Veibae asking pointed questions about who exactly Morris was seeing and what they planned to do to his neck. She pushed him hard not to go through with it.
Morris quickly clocked the tone, took the call off speaker, and kept the rest of the conversation private.
When he hung up, he told the practitioner he didn’t want the adjustment. The response, roughly: “I can’t adjust you if you don’t want to.”
Why she panicked
Cervical spinal manipulation means moving the neck quickly past its normal passive range, often with that famous popping sound. Serious problems are uncommon, but the one doctors keep flagging is cervical artery dissection, a tear in the wall of an artery in the neck that can lead to a clot and, in rare cases, a stroke.
The American Heart Association and American Stroke Association have advised that patients be told about the statistical link between neck manipulation and artery dissection before agreeing to it. Precise risk numbers are messy, because neck pain can itself be an early symptom of a dissection that was already happening.
Chiropractors in the US do complete accredited programs, earn a Doctor of Chiropractic degree, and hold state licenses. They aren’t medical doctors. Techniques and claims vary a lot from practice to practice.
