I will say, having scribed for a Chiropractor full time for almost 6 months and pretty much seeing everything they do, while there may be a lot of overlap in the actual training, Chiros actual set of "tools" they'll use in practice is much more limited than a DO. I believe this has to do more with insurance limitations affecting their practice than their actual capabilities. They rely heavily on HVLA (Bone cracky pop technique) and really focus this as their base, because this is what they're going to bill for. Furthermore, they'll do this down the whole back no matter what, often without truly assessing a patient. This will allow them to bill for 3 regions (Cervical, Thoracic, Lumbar) rather than just focusing on the problem area. Plus, since their whole market scheme relies heavily on people actually coming back, HVLA is a very quick way to get people in and out the door to see as many patients as possible. It would not be uncommon for in a single day we had 80 patients. Crack crack crack, next. Sometimes they would put a patient on a table and have the table stretch them out, or will have an assistant give them heating pads before the crack crack crack, but it was always just a crack crack crack. When you do HVLA down the whole back, inevitably something will move...
This guy did do a lot of TMJ as well though. That was my first exposure to anyone outside of a dentist playing around in someone's mouth with their gloves on.
At least in training, and I can't say for an actual DO in practice because tbh I haven't seen one in real life outside of the OMM Lab, we tend to be a bit more focused on the area of dysfunction, and I believe we can even bill for soft-tissue techniques. Furthermore, if a DO does in fact incorporate OMT into their practice, they simply wouldn't have time to do OMT on every single patient on top of juggling their actual medical needs, so this is also probably why if they do incorporate it, it is going to be much more directed. You have pneumonia? Do Rib technique, prescribe Antibiotic, and schedule a follow-up for next week to see if it cleared or to see if they need to go for a Chest X-ray. The chiro would tell you to come back Monday, Wednesday, Friday for the next 8 weeks and do the same manipulations each time.
They also don't use the same EMR as Physicians. Their EMR is a mess - They use "ChiroTouch" which has absolutely no way of actually tracking anything and you have to do it all by hand - Which may seem like not a problem but remember that you can have a patient in a Chiro office for only 6 months and have already seen them upwards of 50 times just because of how much they insist you come back. I would have to manually go through each and every note and look for nothing more than subjective statements "Patient feels better" "It got worse again" "It's better again" "Oh no its soo bad today", there was so much subjectivity to all of it.
TLDR: The training is the same, the actual culture/practice is different based on reasons stated above
