Energy Medicine and The Emperor's New Clothes

The Emperor’s New Clothes is a famous fable. We all know the story of how con men convinced the emperor that they could make him a beautiful set of clothes that only really intelligent people could see. It worked well until a little boy, not expected to be brilliant, said what everyone else was thinking…the “clothes” were in fact no clothes at all!

Perhaps I have the mentality of a little boy but it seems to me that energy medicine (body/mind medicine, wholistic medicine, or the various names it goes by) may be in that category (locating, analyzing, and correcting something that’s really not there). We chiropractors should avoid any association with this practice. The real danger of energy medicine is that it has the same objective as allopathic medicine but with different trappings. When you look at allopathic medicine at least you can see its faults clearly – taking a manmade substance from the outside and expecting it to restore health on the inside. But energy medicine is insidious. It attempts to treat/cure a disease or its cause by some esoteric means and covers that attempt with a thin veneer of ADIO philosophy. That is even more dangerous than allopathy.
By its very description, it is medicine but somehow many chiropractors have adopted the practice. Why is that? It’s probably because chiropractic is focused on an immaterial principle which we call the “innate intelligence” of the body and an immaterial/material force called the “mental impulse.” So we have the focus on the immaterial as common ground with the energy medicine people. But that does not mean that we are on the same page.

Those involved with energy medicine believe, for example, that because we are developing more powerful microscopes and are able to see smaller and smaller forms of matter, that one day we will be able to see, or at least measure, the energy, force or the chi or whatever term the particular branch of mind/body healing chooses to call it. Just because we can perceive or demonstrate smaller and smaller bits of matter does not mean that we will one day be able to measure non-matter.

We accept the fact that we cannot see, or in any empirical way measure, the innate intelligence of the body. Nor can we measure the mental impulse (despite B.J’s attempts). The best that we can do is measure the nerve conduction that carries the mental impulse but that does not give us the message that the impulse carries any more than an untrained ear hearing the sound of a telegrapher’s keys tells you what it is saying.

Energy medicine is a mechanistic approach. Using the telegraph analogy, it is like assuming because you can strike the keys to produce the dots and dashes, you can send an intelligent message. A small child striking the keys on a computer keyboard may inadvertently spell a word now and then but there is no way that child will send a cogent message over the Internet. The energy medicine practitioner has no more expertise in restoring proper mental impulses than a child has writing Shakespeare. The chiropractor is not restoring the flow of energy. He is restoring the flow of information or more correctly removing an interference to the innate intelligence of the body restoring that flow at the vertebral level.

The energy medicine people point to the inability to see microbes (until relatively recent centuries) and those who erroneously concluded that since they couldn’t be seen, they didn’t exist. They maintain that one day we will be able to see or measure energy forces. The problem is that the mental impulse is not something that will one day be measured any more than we will one day be able to read peoples’ thoughts. That is what the mental impulse is…a thought of the innate intelligence of the body. For the sake of argument, even if we could one day identify the mental impulse, we are not doing it yet. It is foolish to treat a specific microbe before it is even identified. Of course, that is what medicine does even today, treating viruses with antibiotics. That is not what chiropractic is. Chiropractic is specific or it is nothing – B.J. Palmer.

Our philosophy is based upon deduction. We do not need empirical information when we have deduction, in those areas where deduction is applicable. But in the area where you need empirical linformation, like technique, you must have it. Otherwise you merely have unproven and unprovable theories.

That’s a difference between energy medicine and allopathic medicine. But more important is the difference between energy medicine and chiropractic. We can establish the physical misalignment of the bone… we can palpate the working muscle or the fixation. We have analyses that are empirical and we can see other physical changes in our criteria for the correction of vertebral subluxations-criteria that are not esoteric.

Chiropractic is based upon metaphysical assumptions but it is also based on tangible, material, scientific facts. It is the combination of that which can be discerned by deduction on the part of everyone and that which is empirical (physical) but can be seen and felt by anyone with the training. Energy medicine moves away from that mindset and supposedly can only be understood by those with special knowledge and special skills or those who have paid for and taken the course.
There is too much confusion and misunderstanding about chiropractic in the world today. We surely do not need to add another layer of mystery about the profession.