With the coalition of different chiropractic organizations, practice management consultants trying to appeal to different approaches to chiropractic, and the desire for tolerance, we are reaching an era where everyone is allowed to define chiropractic for themselves and we are expected to accept everyone’s model of chiropractic as being not only legitimate but equally valid. In observing this trend I am reminded of the statement of C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite writers. Lewis apparently had discussions with many people about the Person of Jesus Christ and had received comments to the effect that from Biblical accounts, people concluded that Jesus was a great teacher, a role model, a good man, or a religious leader. Even B.J. describes Jesus in some of those terms in the Green Books. Lewis rejects those ideas. He says in Mere Christianity that even a cursory reading of Jesus’ own words indicates that He is either the Son of God as He claimed or He is a liar or a lunatic on the scale of a man who claims to be a poached egg. Lewis says the other options are not open to us. In case someone would argue that Jesus’ words have been misconstrued over the centuries, the historical facts according to Josephus, a Roman historian, bear out Jesus’ statements in the Bible. Being a great teacher or a good man was not a capital offense. Claiming to be God was blasphemy and what got Jesus crucified. Jesus was either the Son of God, or a liar, a lunatic, or something worse.
As I think about the different “kinds” of chiropractic, I come to a similar conclusion. Different options are not open to us. We are not free to choose chiropractic as a cure-all, as a means to get sick people well, as a treatment for musculoskeletal conditions, as a complement to medicine, as an alternative or substitute to medicine, or as a therapy. Even a cursory examination of the philosophy excludes those options. The only claim that chiropractic can accurately and truthfully make is that it corrects vertebral subluxations which are interferences to the transmission of messages from the innate intelligence of the body to the tissue of the body. Claiming chiropractic to be anything else is either lunacy, a lie or both. Either it is outrageous and lunacy (the correction of the cause of all disease), or it is the practice of medicine in which case we are lying by calling it something other than medicine). We have chiropractors using physical therapy and calling it chiropractic who then get angry when the physical therapists adjust the spine and call it physical therapy. Embracing a model of chiropractic other than that which begins and ends with The Chiropractic Claim does not make it chiropractic anymore than thinking Jesus was a good man and a good teacher makes you a Christian. Chiropractic is one thing only. Other options are not open to us. V19n3