I recently read the above book by Diana West. I highly recommend it. West discusses the idea that we have raised a generation of people who have not grown up. People are not taking the responsibility that an adult should take. The term adolescent refers to an age group between childhood and full maturity where you are recognized as an adult but allowed to act as a child. The author suggests that many today are in a sort of suspended adolescence in as much as they are adults but they still act as children.
The book made me think about a philosophical conflict that we have in chiropractic that is part of the basic difference between traditional chiropractic and objective straight chiropractic. The traditional chiropractor takes a greater role in the life of the practice member than does the objective straight chiropractor. Specifically, traditional chiropractors are still involved in presenting the dangers of medical practice and drugs. They want to warn people of the dangers of vaccination, fluoridation, and a host of other medical procedures and use their authority to discourage people from utilizing those procedures. They want to make recommendations concerning rest, exercise, nutrition, etc. The objective straight chiropractor confines his/her efforts to the location, analysis, and correction of vertebral subluxations and teaching an ADIO philosophy. If we educate practice members in our philosophy, they will have the knowledge and the ability to make intelligent decisions relative to their health and well being without our “advice.” Sure, we are frustrated when long-term practice members come in the office for their weekly family visit and say, “Little Johnny may be out of sorts today because he got his shots this morning,” but we press on without saying anything even though we would never take our own children for vaccinations.
Then I read this book which essentially says people do not have the ability to make decisions for themselves. They do not have the wherewithal to take responsibility for their lives. They have never grown up. It makes a pretty good argument for telling people how to live their lives. Perhaps they need to be treated like small children and told what to do. Of course that is not what West concludes. She suggests that we make them grow up. Today’s news is filled with CEOs of the auto industry who have not grown up enough to run their businesses and need the federal government to tell them how to make cars. Wall Street financers are like small children who have no ability to act responsibly with money. We need a government to bail us all out from poor decisions on everything from credit card debt to taking out mortgages that we have no ability to pay back. With all that irresponsibility, how can we expect people to be knowledgeable enough to make decisions about what exercises they should do or whether their kids are better off with or without a measles shot.
At first thought, this makes a good argument for the traditional approach of taking responsibility for people who can not or will not do it for themselves. Telling people who can not or will not make decisions about their health and life what they should do seems to be better than nothing. But is it? If we have no grownups, then who is there to tell us what to do? Are we going to let the federal government, that has a totally irresponsible attitude toward living within a budget, make decisions for the car industry, bail out the banks or those people who should not be buying a house, or tell us when and if we need a vaccination? There was once a generation of grownups that believed you did not buy something until you had the money for it in your hand. Today, we put it on a credit card and they give credit cards to adolescents. They tell us that each household’s part of the National Debt is over $455,000. So why not put $10-20,000 more on your credit card. If the government does not seem to care about cutting back on spending, why should we?
You do not nurture responsible actions by encouraging irresponsibility. Will the automakers, the Wall Street investors, and the bankers become more responsible if the government bails them out with the irresponsibility of creating trillions of dollars more debt? Will our practice members become more responsible in their actions if we choose to take on the responsibility of telling them how to live their lives, an irresponsible act on our part because we do not know what is best for them, their children or their health and well-being? We need to teach them how to be responsible for their own lives. So it really comes back to the old “feed them a fish or teach them to fish” principle. It does not matter whether it is buying a house, building an automobile, investing your retirement, or making decisions about your health. You are always better off becoming knowledgeable on the subject and then taking the responsibility for your decision. As chiropractors, we need to enable people to be knowledgeable by teaching them the ADIO philosophy. That is being part of the solution. We should not be making decisions for them. That is being part of the problem. V24n2