Are You Just Thinking Inside a Bigger Box?

No matter how much we think we are expanding our vision of chiropractic, it seems we are always putting limits on it.  Unfortunately, we convey those limits to those around us and even more unfortunate is the fact that we often convey them to those who come after us.

D.D’s Little Box

 D.D. Palmer gave us the first vision of chiropractic.  It was about the smallest vision one could possibly have.  They say that good things come in small packages. The cure for deafness that D.D. believed he had discovered was indeed “small.”  Can you imagine if our vision was never any greater?  Where would chiropractic be today as a cure for deafness? In all likelihood, chiropractic would not even be!

B.J.’s Bigger Box

 Fortunately, D.D. did not stay within his “deafness” box.  He had a greater vision of chiropractic, a cure for every disease. Setting aside for a moment the fact that the idea was not philosophically sound, it merely confined chiropractic to a bigger box.  The greatest thing he gave us was a genius son, Bartlett Joshua Palmer.  B.J. had a bigger vision of chiropractic.  He saw chiropractic not as a cure for disease but a means by which a chiropractic adjustment could release the expression of the innate intelligence of the body in sick people.  In doing that, B.J. thought outside the box of curing deafness and curing all diseases but inside the box of releasing the expression of the innate intelligence in sick people, thus creating the bigger box of addressing sick people.  His efforts were almost entirely directed at people with diagnosed medical conditions.  That created a limitation on our profession.  No matter how large your box, it has limitations.  In fact, limiting chiropractic to sick people is responsible for the confusion that limits the vision and the practice of most chiropractors today.  The logical deduction of the Joe Janses of the profession was that if we were going to address disease and its cause, we needed to know which disease or diseases we could effectively address and which we could not, regardless of the technique or tool we were going to use. We needed to be medical diagnosticians.

Bigger Boxes

We have had a few great thinkers who have come after B.J., sadly too few.  While they have expanded our vision, it has always seemed to be with a limitation upon it.  I could name them and their contributions but I would inadvertently leave someone off and offend them or offend them just by including them.  None of these great thinkers would consider themselves just creating a bigger box.  We have had the technique developers who have created the box of analysis and adjusting techniques, as if the philosophy of chiropractic could be limited by the means by which you locate, analyze and correct subluxations.  These men have surely expanded the art of chiropractic but I fear in doing so they have often limited the vision.  Some years back the “performance” box became popular. The idea of removing nerve interference to improve performance truly expanded our vision, but only to a new limit. We just were given a bigger box.  This is not a criticism of these men. Even D.D.’s cure for deafness made us realize that we could not exist in such a little box and if it restored the hearing of a deaf janitor, perhaps it had  potential for so much more.  That is the one redeeming value of bigger boxes.

So where do we go from here?  Shall we create a bigger box or think outside the box? Is our thinking outside the box merely creating a bigger box??  I’m sure B.J.s idea of getting sick people well by removing interference to innate expression was outside the box thinking in his day.  Today we would consider his idea limiting.  As a profession we have moved to prevention, health maintenance, wellness care and more.  But each of these is merely a bigger (or smaller!) box than the previous one.

Perhaps going back a step is really getting outside the box.  We say that we correct vertebral subluxations (or assist the body in correcting them) so that the innate intelligence of the body can better express itself.  But it seems to me that we always want to do that for a reason.  Those reasons  are not necessarily bad.  After all, getting sick people well is a noble endeavor, as is preventing disease, curing deafness, encouraging wellness (whatever that might be), improving performance,  health maintenance and any other reason we can think of to correct vertebral subluxations. Enabling the innate intelligence of the body to be better expressed never seems to be sufficient in and of itself.  So we try to create a bigger box, one that will hold all of our personal desires for us and for our profession as a whole.

Perhaps the answer, or at least part of the answer, lies in getting people to understand just what this innate intelligence within the human body is, what an interference to its expression is, what the removal of that interference  is, and leave them to determine what that means to them and for them.  Sure, for some of them it might mean getting rid of their back pain but at least we won’t be putting them in that box.  For others it will mean more. Perhaps for some it will mean what it means to us, that is, having the greatest expression of this wonderful principle of life that we can possibly have.  Will that cause people to think outside the box?  I don’t know.  But even if it doesn’t, when it comes to understanding the principle of life, they will be thinking inside the biggest box the world has ever seen.