What does it mean to get well from a chiropractic standpoint? Does it relate at all to how you feel? For most people it definitely does. People even verbalize it on occasions with a statement like, “I don’t feel well today.” Yet we know that “well” does not relate to the presence or absence of symptoms. There are many people who feel fine today who may be dead we are all dying I guess, or told they have a terminal disease tomorrow. If we look to B.J., we do not find much help. He seems to relate “wellness” to results and whether it is an acute case or a chronic one. He relates it to the person’s medical condition. However we can say that people are “well from a chiropractic standpoint,” that is they are adjusted there is not nerve interference, their body has a full complement of mental impulses between brain and tissue cell and working as close to 100% as possible. But face it, people often do not understand our “well” from everyone else’s “well.”
The term well is generally associated with the absence of medical conditions. For that reason it would seem to me that it is term that should not be used in day-to-day chiropractic conversations. When a word has a universal meaning and that meaning is medical in nature, we would do well to avoid it especially if we are using it in a different context or with a different meaning than the accepted medical one. I guess one could use the term chiropractic “well” like many use the term “chiropractic diagnosis” to show the difference between analysis and diagnosis. Although since we have the word analysis, I cannot understand why people feel it necessary to attach the word chiropractic to the medical term diagnosis. Terms should educate and they should clarify what we do. To mix them with medical terms only causes confusion, it has just the opposite effect. Perhaps for some that is the whole point, to mix chiropractic and dilute it to the point of making it totally unrecognizable as anything but a medical specialty. I seriously doubt whether that is the intention of the people who read this publication. However, whether it is intentional or inadvertent, the results are the same. We need to realize that “well” and “wellness” in any sense are not part of the chiropractic objective. We want people to have chiropractic for a lifetime, whether someone deems them “well” or not. We believe everyone needs a good nerve supply regardless of the presence or absence of wellness. There is no relation to wellness and chiropractic. A person who has no hope of being well (if that situation truly exists) still needs chiropractic. Every time we associate chiropractic with being well, or wellness programs, we dilute its real value. When we dilute its true value, the profession suffers because the public knows less about chiropractic. Our practices’ suffer because there is another criteria placed on whether a person needs chiropractic or not. But most of all, people suffer because they think they are well or think they cannot get well or that chiropractic failed to get them well (when that is not its purpose). We are doing a disservice to mankind. Let’s be clear in our terminology. v18n2