Too many people in this world, in all walks of life appear not to have the slightest idea what they are doing in their work. Even sadder is the fact that many professionals are in the same situation, incompetent to do their job. We, as a profession, tend to be very critical of the medical community because they often appear to not know what they are doing. When we say they do not know what they are doing, it is not that they are not familiar with the procedure they are performing but that they cannot accurately predict the outcome of that procedure. The patient may get well, stay the same, get worse or even die. The same procedure on two different people can have vastly different results. The reason is that while the physician may understand his procedure, he is dealing with a largely unknown or little understood entity, the human body. Consequently, the results cannot be predicted on an individual patient with any degree of certainty.
Lest we be too critical of the medical profession, we need to realize that many in our profession are no better off. In this age of political correctness, we shall refer to them as “philosophically challenged” rather than “mixers.” These chiropractors, who are interested in making a change in bodily function or treating a condition, will meet with the same frustration as the medical physician. Although people rarely die under their care and the number of iatrogenic diseases is decreased because of their conservativeness, the philosophically challenged practitioner still can not know what the outcome of a treatment will be.
The philosophical chiropractor does not labor under the same handicap. First, he recognizes the frustration of practicing in a manner that cannot assess outcome, having had the opportunity to observe medical therapy. Second and most important, he has come to an awareness that perhaps it is really not necessary to always measure outcomes. For him, the knowledge that a positive outcome will occur on every person more than makes up for the inability to quantify that outcome on anybody. The philosophical chiropractor knows that when an adjustment is given, the innate intelligence of the body is better expressed and consequently the individual is always better off. For many of us, that precludes the need to know whether the pain went away, the blood pressure came down or the uric acid level was normalized. We do not feel like we have to take the credit for some “medical miracle” or make a claim for chiropractic that science has yet to prove. We know deductively that a little more life is being expressed in each person that is adjusted, whether it is an apparently healthy newborn or an 80-year old in the so called terminal stages of a disease. The fact that no one else can perform the service that we provide and that everyone needs that service is sufficient to set aside desires and conjecture concerning measurable results of that service. For the philosophically challenged however, that is not enough.
Like the medical doctor, the philosophically challenged chiropractor wants to measure outcomes. Of course this means that they will also experience the emotional highs and lows associated with those outcomes. Like the physician, they will also experience the ultimate frustration because fighting disease is a battle that every doctor ultimately loses (disease always wins in the end). The philosophical chiropractor does not place himself in a position for that ultimate letdown. Instead, he daily increases the innate expression of the patient from birth to death, in sickness and in health, making that continual contribution to enhancing their life experience. I guess the type of chiropractor you choose to become depends upon whether you want to experience the temporary “thrill of victory” (because all life on this earth is temporary) and the ultimate “agony of defeat” (because you ultimately lose all your patients either to the physician or the grave) by competing against disease, or whether you want to experience the day-to-day knowledge that you are making a difference in the life of every person who goes through your office. There is a difference between hoping what you do is beneficial (in getting rid of a patient’s problem) and knowing what you do is beneficial (increasing an individual’s innate expression). WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO HOPE WHEN YOU CAN KNOW? v13n3