The history of chiropractic dates from 1895, when Daniel David Palmer of Iowa performed the first chiropractic adjustment on a partially deaf janitor, Harvey Lillard, who then mentioned a few days later to Palmer that his hearing seemed better. This led to Palmer opening a school of chiropractic two years later. The word "chiropractic" was coined from Greek root words by Reverend Samel Weed.

Early chiropractic bore similarities to osteopathy and was criticized as practicing medicine without a license. Those similarities resulted in many chiropractors, including D.D. Palmer, being jailed on such charges.

In 1906, D.D.'s son B. J. Palmer took control of the Palmer School of Chiropractic. B.J. began to accept the use of technology such as X-rays within chiropractic care. Dr. Solon Langworthy was the first to use the word "subluxation", and published the first book on chiropractic, called "Modernized Chiropractic" — "Special Philosophy — A Distinct System", in 1906.

Over the years, the profession has been intensely divided; one group, called "mixers", combining spinal adjustments with other treatments; the other, called "straights", relying solely on spinal adjustments. A conference sponsored by the National Institutes of Health in 1975 spurred the development of chiropractic research.

For most of its existence, chiropractic has battled with mainstream medicine, sustained by what was once labelled antiscientific and pseudoscientific ideas such as subluxation. The American Medical Association called chiropractic an "unscientific cult" and boycotted it until losing a 1987 antitrust case. By the mid 1990s there was a growing scholarly interest in chiropractic, which helped efforts to improve service quality and establish clinical guidelines such as recommending manual therapies for acute low back pain.