Techniques, Techniques, Techniques

It is amazing the number of technique packages and seminars that are around today. Everybody and his brother within this profession seems to be selling a technique that is guaranteed to give you better results or improve your practice and increase your income. There is nothing inherently wrong with many different techniques, in fact, it is healthy for the profession. But the fact that there is such a great market out there, that is, great numbers of young and not so young practitioners interested in different techniques, indicates an under lying problem. It appears that a good percentage of chiropractic college graduates are not satisfied with the techniques that they were taught in chiropractic school. That can only lead to two conclusions. Either the techniques taught in chiropractic colleges are inferior or the graduates do not feel proficient and therefore confident in utilizing them. I hardly feel that we can indict the instructors in chiropractic colleges by accusing them of teaching archaic, outmoded techniques. For the most part they are competent teachers utilizing modern techniques. In fact they themselves are teaching these techniques at seminars to graduates of other colleges! The latter conclusion remains, that the graduate is not confident in the technique he has been taught as a student. I believe a good deal of the problem is that the student has not really learned the technique he was taught in college. He has taken the course and gotten a passing grade but really not learned the technique. You do not learn a technique only by knowing the position, the contact, the line of drive, etc. You learn by one means only repetition. Any art form is learned by repetition. In fact any thing is best learned by repetition. Contrary to the old saying, experience is not the best teacher, repetition is. Doing something hour after hour, day after day, week after week is the only way you become proficient. Van Cliburn became a great pianist and Willie Mays a great ballplayer because of one thing practice, practice, practice. They had natural abilities and good teachers but there are probably thousands of men and women with the same natural ability who have not developed that ability and become skilled. To be a skilled adjustor, adjusting must become as normal and natural an activity as breathing. The hands of a competent chiropractor should be able to accomplish their objective of locating, analyzing, and correcting subluxations as easily as Van Cliburn’s fingers move over the keys of a Steinway. That does not occur by having five hours of technique class per week and adjusting five patients a week in clinical experience. It occurs by spending five hours a day in class learning and practicing the technique and seeing fifty patients a day in clinical experience. Adjusting five patients per week in a clinical experience constitutes at best 30 minutes a week of practice. How good would Van Cliburn have been had he practiced the piano 30 minutes a week? Obviously, if this is the problem then the solution can only come from an evaluation and subsequent change in the curriculum of chiropractic colleges in order to allow for the increased amount of time needed to turn out competent chiropractors with the necessary technical skills to correct vertebral subluxations.  V1n2