It is important to continually clarify the objective of chiropractic. The tremendous growth of the profession in the last 75 years has created considerable confusion on the part of the public. That is not difficult to understand. As technics change, people become confused about the objectives of a profession. Medicine, as recently as 200 years ago, was putting leaches on people to draw out the “bad blood.” It was considered a ridiculous waste of time 150 years ago for a physician to wash his hands before examining a pregnant woman even if he had just come from doing an autopsy! These are just two examples of how medical procedures have changed and medicine is thousands of years old! It is understandable then that the chiropractic profession will go through changes as it establishes its identity.
The chiropractic objective has remained essentially unchanged for the past 91 years. It is very simple. In chiropractic we care for 31 pairs of nerves and 27 bony segments. The human organism is the most complex structure on the face of the earth, more complex than any computer or anything man has been able to construct. If it were not more complex, man would have been building human beings long ago. No one has built one yet! The complexity of the human organism has necessitated that doctors of all kinds confine their expertise to very limited areas. Hence the age of specialty that we live in today. We have all kinds of specialists…heart, eye, ear, nose, throat, kidney, etc., etc. We even have disease specialists that concern themselves with one particular disease such as arthritis and cancer. The chiropractor is a specialist. He has a single objective: the correction of vertebral subluxation. He has determined that vertebral subluxation is a detriment to the proper function of the human organism. A subluxation de creases the entire potential for health. Chiropractors are specialists in correcting subluxations, they are not physicians nor do they wish to intrude upon any of the specialties of medicine. v3n1
