We all slip from time to time in what we say or write, and as a result, give people an incorrect perception. None of us are perfect communicators. Our words are not divinely inspired and the English language may be one of the worst languages with which to communicate cogent thought. However, there comes a time when we must look at people’s messages and ask ourselves if it is semantics or are they really being less than honest in their communication, especially when that communication involves the written word. It is easy to misspeak if our brain is not in sync with our mouth but when someone writes something down, we expect that he or she has reread it at least once and that it truly reflects his or her thinking. Three examples come to mind, two of which involve comments on what I have written.
The first one involves an article by the president of a chiropractic college who says that we should adopt the term “chiropractic medicine” to describe what we do since people often refer to our practice as chiropractic medicine. Actually, people rarely call it that. In fact, I almost never hear that term. Of course, I associate more often than not with people who are not trying to mix chiropractic with medicine. Thirty-five years ago when I started my practice, a few people came into my office to have bunions removed because they thought I was a chiropodist. I imagine some chiropodists had people come into their office with back problems. However, they have since changed their name to podiatrists which has pretty much cleared up that confusion and more accurately describes what they do.
This president notes that, “We are left with inadequate explanations when members of the public say ‘but how would you treat medical conditions?’ Medical conditions? What exactly are those anyway? Well, apparently they are things that occur which are somehow only treatable by allopaths–at least that is what we are lead (sic) to believe.” The easy answer to the question is the one I use, “We do not treat medical conditions.” That is surely simple enough. In fact, there really is no other answer to that question. If there is no such thing as a medical condition, as he seems to be saying, then all conditions are treatable by a chiropractor. It may be that he is inferring that chiropractors are qualified to treat all conditions, even highly contagious or life-threatening ones. However, I am inclined to think that he would be the first to say that there are conditions a chiropractor cannot treat that necessitate the care of a medical doctor. What then would we call allopathic conditions? Any alternative he would suggest would make things more confusing than they already are. However his objective is not to help people better understand the role of the chiropractor and that is where the issue of honesty comes in. His goal is to merge or blend the role of the chiropractor with that of the allopathic medical doctor. (We would have to refer to them as allopathic medical doctors because we would be chiropractic medical doctors if we practiced chiropractic medicine.) The resulting confusion tends to obliterate the lines of demarcation between the two professions.
The second example involves a chiropractor who is a known critic of straight chiropractic and sees himself as a specialist in backache care. He attacked one of the articles in The Pivot Review saying it was out of the “mainstream” of chiropractic. Of course it is. The Pivot Review is not written for the mainstream backache specialists. This particular article was for straight chiropractors who wander accidentally into the backache field. The one striking example of his less than honest analysis is his interpretation of a thought in the April issue. I said, “We need to confront people’s desires for chiropractic care gently and kindly but honestly and directly.” Both the person coming into the office and the chiropractor need to be on the same page. I think any chiropractor would agree with this regardless of how he or she practices. There has to be agreement regarding objectives. I guess if you confine your efforts to backaches, that is pretty well understood. However, if people come to a chiropractor expecting something other than backache care or if the chiropractor is offering something other than backache care, there needs to be an understanding between them. The chiropractor follows my quote with the following statement: “In other words, if a patient wants to talk about their pain and suffering, tell them to stuff it…” Now tell me, does telling someone to “stuff it” qualify as “gently and kindly” confronting someone’s desire “to talk about their pain and suffering.” The remainder of his article is full of similar attacks and misrepresentations which are very inflammatory and full of “hyperbolic rhetoric.” Oddly enough, he says at the outset that he respects me more than other “straight” writers because I “write in a logical non-inflammatory way.” Unfortunately, he does not respond in kind.
Much of the remainder of his article is akin to what the third writer does, lumping my writings with those of B.J., traditional straights, and what he calls “the quasi-religious writers.” This last author, writing for a National publication, calls chiropractic philosophy an attempt at presenting a religious doctrine. I agree that some of the writings of our predecessors could lead one to think that but surely mine do not. I think we have made that abundantly clear by this point in time. In the third example, the chiropractor takes the following statement from Chiropractic Philosophy out of context, “God is omnipresent, unswerving, without solicitude, immutable, all of which are characteristic of Universal Intelligence.” He in turn writes, “This again supports the idea that Universal Intelligence is God and that Universal Intelligence is the theological construct.” What he fails to quote is the next sentence in which I write, “God is love, justice and has personality, none of which Universal Intelligence has.”
We need dialogue and we need constructive criticism of our chiropractic ideas. However, it seems that our opponents like to take what we say out of context, build straw men, lump us with discarded chiropractic ideas when convenient, align the objective straights with the traditional chiropractors, and then attack their ideas. We need honesty, not emotional attacks, distortions and subterfuges. Surely our philosophy is not such a threat that it requires such questionable. v17n1
