(but it seems to be into a blind alley!) Twenty-five years ago we could boast that 15% of the American public had visited a chiropractor. We thought we were really making progress. The promise of third-party pay and the trend toward natural health care gave us hope of really increasing that percentage. Our schools were going full tilt to meet that need. So what happened? Enrollments are down and of the 87,237 chiropractors in the country (ACA 2002 study); I would venture to say a good number are not in practice. The same study tells us that “only about 7%” of the public have visited a chiropractor. I’m not going to draw some major conclusions about those statistics because statistics can pretty much be made to say anything you want. However, one conclusion we can draw is that we are not growing in our service to society. We are not having a greater impact upon the American public than we were in the 80’s. In fact, we are having less. Perhaps the two major national organizations should stop wondering why the majority of the profession does not have any desire to join their organization and start wondering what the profession is doing wrong to cause us to go backwards, seeing less people today than 25 years ago. There are many factors involved and not all are the fault of the national organizations, but it seems that our leaders are taking us in the wrong direction. We need to begin to change our approach to this thing we call chiropractic. We need to promote it in a different way if we want it to go anywhere. Of course, some of us have been saying and doing that for years. Until the profession as a whole begins to do that, we will likely continue to dwindle in our service to mankind. V23n4