The philosophy of chiropractic stands alone and apart from everything else. Not above, or better and surely not less or worse, just different. The successs of the profession has and will continue to be, based upon maintaining that separation and clearly defining the uniqueness of its practice and its objective. It is not the practice of medicine although some are trying to drag it into that model. It is not religion although a smaller but just as vocal a group are pushing it in that direction. Both groups would vehemently deny that is their intention. They may not even be fully aware that is what they are doing. There is another group that appears to be appropriating the chiropractic philosophy, or parts of it and making it synonomous with their philosophy. In that sense they are even more of a threat to chiropractic’s unique position, simply because they are linked so closely to chiropractic and because their philosophy so clearly embraces much of chiropractic and its foundation, more so than do religion and medicine. They talk about subluxation, and nerve interference, but the subluxation and interference they are trying to correct involves more than that located at the vertebral level and that is the real danger. Making chiropractic something other than correcting vertebral subluxation to enable the innate intelligence of the body to be more fully expressed may be more in some people’s mind, or less in some peoples mind but either way it is not chiropractic and only serves to confuse the public.
What do you mean by this? “…but the subluxation and interference they are trying to correct involves more than that located at the vertebral level…”
Janell, there is a particular technique, which claims to remove interferences, to organs of the body, that are not in the vertebral column. Some of the “adjustments” do not involve physically touching the person. The developer of this technique claims that his technique is correcting “subluxations” that are in other parts of the body beside the spine.