Yes, rich people get scammed too.

none of us is as dumb as all of us...

Athletes are often highly superstitious and ritualistic, (and young and dumb), its not surprising they would engage in something like chiropractic.

Sports science is mostly just guesswork.

I'm not talking about athletes.

I'm talking about the people who own the teams, they invest in chiropractors.

People who are thinking about the ultimate economic benefit of an investment into a human body, not the athletes themselves.

People who realize that if their athlete believes it'll make them better, and it doesn't actually hurt them most of the time, there's value in indulging them.

I suppose you can find conspiracies and scams everywhere if you want to not look very hard

We're talking about a field that is well documented to have been started by an absolute charlatan who believed in magical "subluxations" causing basically all diseases.

We know by all objective measures that the entire idea is a level of nonsense that's almost religious in scale, which is a great analogy because it similarly demonstrates how "lots of people believe in it" is an absolutely meaningless argument.

Sports doctors were never immune to misguided treatments. The regular ice baths after an injury have already been thoroughly proven to slow down recovery. You need ice only after the initial trauma, afterwards ice just hinders the healing process. But million dollar bodies were subjected to it for years and still are.

And a lot of treatments are known by the doctor to be fake but are still performed so the player benefits from the placebo effect.

In the sports where the team doctor would routinely administer PEDs to the players under the guise of “vitamins” or whatever, after the practice became harder to pull off some doctors kept administering sugar pills to avoid the nocebo effect. They just follow the ritual that doesn’t harm the player but gives them peace of mind.