There is no doubt that the greatest task of the objective straight chiropractic movement is educating the public to what chiropractic truly is. This task has been made more difficult by the stupidity (idiocy, imbecility, witlessness) of our profession in positioning itself as a treatment for bad backs. It is perhaps the ultimate example of “shooting yourself in the foot.” As a profession, we had the opportunity to create chiropractic in any model we wanted. It could have been anything from a cure-all to a treatment for minor musculoskeletal conditions. We chose the least attractive, the least desirable, the least beneficial to humanity, and probably the least lucrative approach, treating bad backs. I am not suggesting that we should have gone with the cure-all approach. In fact, modern-day straight chiropractic is all about repositioning ourselves to a place where we can be attractive to the public, serve as many people as possible and make a decent living. That re-positioning process is not easy. It is downright hard. Recently, a young chiropractor wrote saying that he found it impossible to change peoples’ thinking and as a result he was abandoning the objective straight chiropractic approach and was going to practice somewhere between the cure-all approach and the bad back approach. My heart goes out to this young chiropractor and those like him. They have paid a great price to get into a profession that has positioned itself in a place that cannot support them.
We need to change peoples’ thinking. Before we do that we must realize that peoples’ thinking has changed over the years. Unfortunately, in many ways, that move has been further and further away from the world and life viewpoint that we call ADIO. I believe that is the obstacle this young chiropractor could not overcome. We must understand these megashifts in peoples’ thinking and then combat them by demonstrating the incorrectness of those ideas. Part of the problem is that there are also microshifts in peoples’ thinking that get chiropractors all excited. However, these are just microshifts and in focusing on them we fail to recognize the megashifts. “Natural healing” is a microshift. A desire by people to get well without drugs or surgery is a minor change in thinking. We think that is opening a whole new vista for us. Yet natural or unnatural is not the issue. When people stop thinking in terms of healing disease no matter what the method, that will be a megashift and that is when true chiropractic will start to have an impact. When people start thinking about addressing health rather than fighting, curing or preventing disease, that will begin a megashift. Meanwhile, the microshift of “natural healing” will bring us a few people who we can share with the other groups that make up the natural healing profession, a movement that seems to grow larger and more crowded every day. With that brief introduction let us look at some of the megashifts in thinking that affect us as chiropractors.
1. A shift from theocentric to anthropocentric thinking. This shift at first glance would appear to be more of a concern for the religious community than the chiropractic profession. We must realize, however, that this shift in thinking means that people are considering less the wisdom, power and nature of Someone greater than their own finite educated mind. As it relates to chiropractic, people are less focused on an innate intelligence in their body, a universal principle, and more focused on their own abilities. Unfortunately, people like Deepak Chopra support this shift. On cursory examination, it would appear they are talking about individuals taking control of their own health rather than letting allopathic medicine do it. What they are really talking about is substituting your own educated intelligence for the educated intelligence of the physician. That is a microshift and not necessarily in the right direction. Only when we begin to put our confidence in the inborn wisdom of the body and allow it to run our body rather than running it ourselves, will a positive megashift occur.
2. A shift from objectivism to relativism. This change in thinking says there is no objective reality, everything is relative. While the traditional approach to chiropractic as a cure-all does not reflect true chiropractic, it does have a positive side to it. It maintains that everyone needs chiropractic care. Chiropractic actually grew in that model despite the fact that it was unscientific and it went against what most people thought. It was radical, yet chiropractic grew. Even today, traditional straight chiropractors who claim chiropractic corrects the cause of all disease have the largest practices. Today we face the task of changing the thinking of a society that believes that there is nothing that everyone needs, that no care, no procedure, no therapy benefits everyone. We are all different which of course, is true. Therefore we have different needs, again, true to a point. The fact that everyone needs chiropractic care and it is not relative to your state of health or the condition you have or do not have is a difficult concept to get across in this shifting mindset.
3. A shift from objectivity to pragmatism. This change in thinking goes along with the one above. It presents the idea that not only are peoples’ needs relative to their problems but their needs should be met on a pragmatic level. The motto today is if it feels good, do it. People take drugs, knowing they are harmful because they make them feel good. Society is like the small child who hates the taste of broccoli. Though he is told to eat it “because it is good for you,” he dreams of the day when he grows up and is in charge of his own life, when he will not eat broccoli no matter how good for you it is. Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. The point is that we do not place emphasis on what is good for us, but what feels good to us. That is pragmatism. We must get across the need for chiropractic care in people despite the fact that many will probably not feel any different under care. Some will feel no different because they have passed limitations of matter and some because they feel good from the start. However, they all need chiropractic care. Pragmatism and chiropractic are in antithetical camps. There are people who are willing to use chiropractic pragmatically. They go to a chiropractor because for some reason, unbeknownst to them, they feel better afterward. Those people frustrate me because if for some reason they stop feeling better afterward, they quit care. That is hardly the model we want to perpetuate.
4. A shift from truth to opinion. Society is moving away from the idea of truths and toward the idea that everything is opinion. One of the frustrating things that I have found in recent years is that people do not accept our presentation as truth, only as our opinion. In the age of political correctness, everyone is entitled to an opinion. Our “truth” is just one opinion. This is born out by the fact that people do not accept what we do. We tell them what straight chiropractic is all about, they seem to understand it inasmuch as they do not challenge or question it (I often wish they would), but they do not follow through with care. This can only be because they see the idea of regular care enabling the body to work at full potential as our opinion, not as a truth. They see it as our truth not their truth. Their truth is that chiropractic helps their headache or backache or whatever. If we want to believe it does more, that is okay with them but that is not their truth. They will respect our truth but not embrace it. The fact is there is only one truth. There are many opinions about chiropractic but only one truth. Either it is what we say it is or we are mistaken, deluded or lying. It cannot be right for us and wrong for someone else. We sometimes even fall prey to this thinking ourselves. We acknowledge other approaches to chiropractic by calling them mixing chiropractic, traditional chiropractic, etc. We say we do not judge other approaches, but we should. Correcting vertebral subluxation to allow for the fullest expression of the innate intelligence of the body is truly chiropractic. Everything else is not chiropractic. These other approaches are not wrong necessarily, they simply are not chiropractic. We should not present them or acknowledge them as an alternative approaches to chiropractic anymore than we should present chiropractic as an alternative to medicine. That does not mean we should deny other members of our profession the freedom and right to practice in a wrong manner, but neither does it mean we should condone or recognize what they do as truth or even as an opinion as to the practice of chiropractic. The shift in thinking says, “You are entitled to your truth as I am entitled to mine.” Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but we are not entitled to our own truth. If we are, then there is no such thing as truth, principles, laws or absolutes. Eventually an organization, a profession, a society or a country will crumble with this type of thinking. In the case of a country, at this point an authoritarian leader would arise, establish his opinion or truth and a totalitarian government would be formed. Nazi Germany, Russia and China are examples of this situation. We need to accept the fact that there is such a thing as absolute truth and that chiropractic philosophy represents it. We must go about the task of promoting that idea.
We have a philosophy that can go far toward shifting people’s world and life viewpoint. We need to understand these shifts away from ADIO and work toward showing their weakness and error. Then and only then can we shift societies’ thinking.v17n3