The editor of The Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research has recently written a very interesting article concerning the status of our profession with regard to public acceptance of chiropractic titled “What Paradigm Shift?” He says that most of the speakers at a “chiropractic pep rally” are telling us “the public wants what we have to offer” and “there has never been a better time to be a chiropractor” and that “the public is flocking to us.” His conclusion is that these speakers, and those of us who would listen to them, and believe them are totally divorced from reality. He cites the government, supposedly against nationalized medicine, giving billions of dollars for drug care and vaccines despite the fact that health care premiums average $9,068 for a family in 2003. He goes on to quote other statistics and facts to support his position, that the American public is just as addicted to the medical model of disease care as it always was, despite the impact of health maintenance measures. We are a medicine-therapeutic-oriented society and we are generally becoming more so each year. Children are starting earlier with medications and we are becoming more and more obese every year. The average American is 25 lbs heavier today than he was in 1966 indicating that we are really not health conscious.
Another well-known chiropractic columnist has recently noted in a national publication that enrollments are down considerably in chiropractic colleges, the failure rate of chiropractors in practice may be as high as 50%, and if the trend continues, there will be more chiropractors retiring from practice than entering practice, meaning our numbers will be decreasing. Why the decrease in enrollments? The JVSR author says, “Gone are the days when the majority are there because of a personal life-changing event that followed a chiropractic adjustment.” A good percentage of chiropractic students have never been to a chiropractor before enrolling in chiropractic college.
Here’s the problem. Most young people going into chiropractic are doing so strictly as a career decision and chiropractic, as a career, is looking less and less every day like a good career move, especially in light of the ever-increasing time and money it takes to get through the education program. Further, with few exceptions, the days of chiropractic as a second career are gone, especially knowing what the average income is. If prospective students knew what the failure rate in practice was, I believe enrollment would drop 50%. With just a bachelors degree many in the pharmaceutical industry can start at $30-40,000 a year more than the average chiropractor after building a practice!
As I read, I was really appreciating this editor’s insight, his honesty in telling it like it is, and his willingness to criticize the “chiropractic pep rally” types who are describing chiropractic through “rose-colored glasses.” I started thinking “this guy is too good to be true”-and he was. How could this man be so attuned to the reality of the situation yet be so divorced from reality with his solution? His answer to the problem: Research. Now I know that right away I am going to be branded as one of those “anti-research, faith-based philosophers.” Well, let me make it clear that I am not against research. But I am also not so divorced from the reality of the present chiropractic plight to think that research is the answer.
There is nothing we are doing now that will be improved by research. The one thing that we have researched over the years and the one thing we can say research has shown is that we are more effective and more cost efficient in “treating” back pain than is orthodox medicine. The allopaths have just taken over that area and they have the technology and the use of drugs to make them even more efficient than us. The author suggests our research needs to be in proving that vertebral subluxations cause all kinds of “negative health outcomes.” He is writing for a traditional chiropractic publication so he uses a euphemism for disease and says we need to prove that “the positive health outcomes (another euphemism for “getting sick people well”) we associate with (subluxations) reduction actually exist.” In other words, we need to keep going in the traditional reductionist, Palmer model of one-cause and one-cure for disease.
Yes, we need to do research, but researching and proving that chiropractic adjustments will more effectively cure XYZ disease than will medicine is not the answer. It will take us another 100 years to prove we can cure a few diseases and we will be gone as a profession long before that. Even if we were successful, the allopaths, osteopaths, physical therapists and who knows who else, would just start competing as they do now with back pain.
Research is great but it is not the answer to the problems in this profession. While we are discussing research, the idea of researching better, more effective ways to locate, analyze and correct vertebral subluxation is also not the answer to growing our profession or its acceptance. Every chiropractor has had hundreds, perhaps thousands of practice members who have had their subluxations corrected and never returned for regular care and never referred in another person. Yes, we should be researching better methods to accomplish our objective of correcting vertebral subluxations but that is not the answer to universal acceptance. The answer is to find a niche, find an area which is not being addressed by any other profession, preferably one that all other professions by their very nature cannot address. I believe that niche is correcting vertebral subluxation, not to treat, cure, or prevent disease but to enable the unresearchable innate intelligence of the body to be expressed more fully. Will that put us outside the scientific/research/medical model fraternity? Probably. Is that important? Does it matter? Well, if you are looking to impress the scientific/research/medical model community, it matters. But if you are interested in providing a non-duplicative and non-duplicable service to humanity and you are interested in seeing the profession survive and thrive, then it may be the very last thing we should worry about doing.