Every time you pick up a chiropractic tabloid you read about someone advocating chiropractic plus something (that is if you read them at all). Chiropractors give seminars to teach how to have medical/chiropractic practices and how to hire a medical doctor for your office. Now some of these practices may be just for the purpose of facilitating insurance payments, but the inference is that the extra “service” by a medical doctor will make a visit to the chiropractor more valuable. A few years back Greg Stanley, who probably has his finger on the pulse of the profession’s needs from an economic standpoint better than anyone, suggested that chiropractors develop a joint chiropractic and massage therapy practice. Newspaper and yellow pages advertisements suggest that many doctors are taking that advice. Apparently, Stanley feels that we need an enticement to get people into the office. When B.J. talked about the “adjustment with something extra,” I don’t think he meant a massage! Recently, a well-known practice management consultant wrote that we need to “provide clinic programs for wellness to include nutrition, exercise, and emotional stress.” (I assume he means to manage the latter, not provide it!) His reasoning was that “If they don’t get it from you, they’ll get it elsewhere.” My first reaction is: “So, let them get it elsewhere!” “There is no way they are going to get a life-enhancing chiropractic adjustment elsewhere. This chiropractic consultant would be aghast if someone suggested he also give drugs and perform surgery, but he thinks it is okay to incorporate other areas of health care to “recession-proof your practice.” (the thrust of the whole article.)
For over 100 years, chiropractors have been able to build and run successful practices by only adjusting subluxations. Granted, many choose to do other things, i.e., to mix, but that is not because one cannot make a good living by adjusting only. While it is true that many of these chiropractors who were only adjusting were doing so to treat conditions, particularly musculoskeletal conditions, they were only adjusting. There are still many chiropractors today who are building and running practices based upon adjusting and nothing more, and even doing it for the right reason. It can and is being done. We hear people talk about the fact that the world is more amenable to chiropractic care than ever before and that people are looking for a way to regain and maintain their health in a natural way. We hear that people are more health conscious than ever. Either these people are feeding us a lot of baloney or there is something else going on. I think there are less chiropractors making a living only adjusting spines than any time in our history. We can rationalize away the idea that we are providing more service(s) to people than ever before but the average dentist is not working on feet and the cardiologist has not incorporated checking for cavities into his practice. That may be the heart of the problem.
When we incorporate other procedures into our practice, even if they are health-oriented, we step into the area of expertise of other professionals. This changes the emphasis. While it should give us a broader range of people to take care of, it also puts us in competition with many more health care professionals. More important, it lessens the importance of the one procedure that is uniquely ours which cannot be duplicated by any health care professional. Others can be involved in nutritional counseling, stress management and even manipulation, but no one is adjusting vertebral subluxations to allow the body’s innate intelligence to be more fully expressed. No one is even involved in talking about what that is and what it means to a person. Here we have a separate and distinct service, a unique contribution that we make to the well-being of mankind, and instead of emphasizing it, instead of telling the world about its benefits, we do not even mention it. The crazy part is we do not talk about it because no one else is. You would think that we would want to shout it from the rooftops. “Hey world, we correct vertebral subluxations! They interfere with the wisdom of the universe being fully expressed in your body and no one is correcting these vertebral subluxations except us.” Our whole idea is simple, logical and makes sense to people when we explain it. Instead, we ignore our unique contribution to mankind and dwell on doing what everyone else is doing. How smart is that? The only other conclusion that can be drawn is that what we do is not important, or not important enough to be made available to the public without incorporating a lot of other things to “increase the value” of a visit to the chiropractor and justify our existence as a profession.
I think that the correction of vertebral subluxations is an important enough service that it can stand alone, that it does not have to be a part of a “one stop shopping” experience. What do you think? v24n3