Their (BJ and DD’s) greatest problem was not finding the middle ground and staying there. See http://chiropracticoutsidethebox.com/2016/05/16/lost-in-the-woods/ I would like to explore a little more the concept of being “lost in the woods.” I have never been lost in the woods but I have been lost while driving the car. For a man, the response while driving is to keep driving usually at a little faster speed. I imagine it is the same as being lost in the woods. There are a few things that can happen:
- You can keep going often around in circles ending up where you were or where you started. I believe that is what happened to D.D. and to a lessor degree B.J. D.D. went around in circles retracing already explored territory, explored by the practice of medicine and already staked out as their territory. This is what incurred the wrath and the opposition of organized medicine in the early days. From curing deafness to addressing other medical problems it was still the area claimed by the medical profession. B.J. explored a little further. In my opinion, he found the middle of the woods, but like his father, failed to stay there and began to wander in circles, back to the territory of medicine, trying to use chiropractic to “get sick people well.” Others followed him, either duplicating his effort or striking out in a new direction, people like Thurman Fleet and Bill Bahan, great men , but ending up getting back to already covered and claimed territory. Reggie found the middle, what we now call OSC or what he and the Palmers called “straight chiropractic” but as much as he wanted to stay there, it was already taken by those who were derisively identified as the “super straights”(SCSC, ADIO,FSCO). He wandered into an area occupied by the human potential movement and called what he did Spinology. (The fact that he eventually left Spinology and came back to “straight/OSC chiropractic” is indicative of the fact that he knew where he should be. It takes a wise and humble man to realize that he is off the path before he is hopelessly lost and unable to get back.) I think BJ, had he lived long enough, would have come back to center. He was always trying to and while he got off the path often, he gave every indication, especially in some of his later writings, that he was trying to find his way back to the middle.
- Keep moving, examples: CCE, KST and most of the TSC profession today.
- Stay there settle down and investigate that area, develop it, don’t wander off, clearly mark off the parameters preventing the encroachment of the woods into the area and your area into others and get the most you can out of it. I believe that this is the best approach. I am not so vain to believe that no one will ever find a better location that is consistent with the objective and the philosophy but my examination of the philosophy has indicated to me that this is the center.