An article appeared recently in the JCCA (no, I do not read that journal, someone sent me the article over the internet). In criticizing the philosophical chiropractors, a chiropractic DABCO made the following statement: “Today, Innate Intelligence remains an untestable enigma that isolates chiropractic and impedes its acceptance as a legitimate health science.” I find this type of thinking to be very perplexing. How can people become a member of a profession ostensibly because they think it is a superior method of optimizing health and then later want to destroy that which makes it superior? Of course, I do not mean superior in accomplishing the medical objective but in offering a service that can have more benefit and a far more widespread effect on mankind than the practice of medicine. I guess I should not be surprised. We have people in this country who want to destroy our republic form of government which is the very thing that made this country great. If we give up the concept of innate intelligence, we might well be accepted as a “legitimate health science.” Without innate intelligence, chiropractic is nothing more than the practice of medicine and that is the most legitimate health science. Without innate intelligence, there would be no chiropractic profession for the author of that journal article to be a member of or to provide the opportunity to call for innate intelligence’s expulsion. Similarly, those people who want to change our form of government would not have the freedom to call for that change if it was not for our form of government. There is no such thing as freedom of speech in a totalitarian government. Would chiropractic be around today if all it entailed was pushing on backs to relieve musculoskeletal problems? Would a person like B.J. Palmer have dedicated his life to that? Would chiropractors have gone to jail and fought for licensure to practice manipulative medicine? Would the thousands upon thousands of chiropractors, who created the environment we now enjoy and who gave us the freedom we now have, done so if chiropractic was for bad backs and stiff necks? Without men and women committed to perpetuating the principle of innate intelligence, we would not have a profession today for its members to talk about abandoning its most basic principles.
It is probably true that the concept of innate intelligence keeps us from being truly welcomed into the medical community. It probably also keeps us from being accepted into the scientific community because innate intelligence is not a scientifically demonstrable fact. Perhaps we need to start realizing we occupy a paradigm that is not medical, not scientific and not religious. While it keeps us out of the medical fraternity, it is also the concept of innate intelligence that enables us to do something no one in the medical community can do and to give to humanity what no one in the medical community can give. Medical doctors can move bones and today many of them do. Physical therapists can manipulate joints and they do. But when you add innate intelligence to the equation, moving the bone takes on a totally different purpose. Without innate intelligence we lose what makes us, not just a great profession, but what makes us a profession. I suppose if we cease to exist, then we would truly be accepted and embraced by the “scientific” community. And I understand that we all want acceptance. But frankly, I think that professional suicide is too high a price to pay for it.v14n4