Original intent-the U.S. Constitution and Chiropractic

When it comes to politics, original intent is an issue that tends to separate liberals and conservatives. The conservative viewpoint is that the original intent of the U.S. Constitution should be respected and the liberal approach is that it is a document that needs to be flexible to bend to the changing wishes of the majority. The “originalists” believe that the majority is not the issue, that the framers of the Constitution wanted not what the majority at a given time said, but that there would be steps,safeguards and enough to insure that 51% would not change the direction of the country arbitrarily. To change the Constitution with amendments was not impossible but it was not something that could not be done at the whim of the majority. Even if they and the congress wanted to change the law of the land, it had to be done within a certain period of time by a vote of ¾ of the states and there were restrictions on who could be involved in the voting process.
The Amendment that made of slaves, citizens with the right to vote passed rather easily. The Equal Rights Amendment, on the other hand, never got the necessary votes for passage and died as a result of time limitations. That’s the difference between a democracy and a republic which is what the United States was created to be. I believe that is what prompted Ben Franklin, when asked what kind of a government we had said “a republic if you can keep it.” Republics tend to degenerate into a democracy and a democracy opens up the voting process to get a majority into the election process and then inappropriately techniques like “executive orders” are used to get around the original intent.
It is not so simple, so cut and dried, when it comes to chiropractic. What was the original intent of chiropractic? The original intent of DD Palmer was to cure deafness or its cause. I don’t think that “original intent” lasted very long (it was, and still is being “amended” by, among others, OSC and CCE) for a number of reasons:
1. It was the original intent/objective of the practice of medicine.Granted the medics did not do it very well and at best they were only successful at addressing the symptoms not the cause. That caused the creation of many other approaches to address the cause of disease, during that period, beside chiropractic, approaches that fell by the wayside as medicine got more effective at treating the symptoms.
2. There are multiple “causes” for a disease, not just a single cause. Actually we should consider them to be “influencing factors”. We maintain in chiropractic that vertebral subluxation is a major influencing or contributing factor and that no one corrects them or has that sole objective but a chiropractor.