By a process of logic it can be seen that the desire of the straight chiropractic community and our founding father is not to provide an alternative to drugs and surgery, although I am sure that in the treatment of disease some alternatives to medicine should be sought, ones that are effective. Treating disease with surgery is life threatening, treating disease with drugs is dangerous, treating disease druglessly is largely ineffective especially by the time the symptomatic stage has been reached. but be that as it may that was clearly not the intention of those who began our profession. The treatment of disease approach ordinarily utilizes multiple modalities or procedures, whichever is most effective for the particular disease. For our forefathers to use chiropractic as a treatment for disease would have necessitated incorporating many modalities and procedures, much more than just the adjustment. The fact that Palmers and their followers have always condemned the use of modalities means that they rejected chiropractic as a disease treatment although many tried to use chiropractic for that purpose and consequently utilized modalities. Apparently being close t the founders did not prevent chiropractors from making chiropractic into a modality for the treatment off disease, for we had mixers even before 1910. The other possibility to be considered is that he adjustment was a cure-all, for all disease, hence no need for any other modalities. While there is some indication from earlier writings of the profession that this was a position held by a few, it is clear that before very long that idea was abandoned as irrational, unworkable and inconsistent with scientific knowledge.
Straight chiropractic, then, has come to be not an alternative treatment for disease but an alternative to the treatment of disease. Rather than wait for disease to occur and decide which treatment alternative is best, the alternative approach is to take an active role in promoting and maintaining health. To do that necessitates abandoning the disease treating model. While the disease treating model may be valuable in certain cases of limitations of time and matter, for the chiropractor to embrace that model gives credibility and endorsement to it, for all patients, because no one can truly know which people have passed the point of limitations. That is the real danger of mixing objectives. v9n5