As chiropractors adopt more and more procedures that have historically been the purview of medical doctors or other members of the therapeutic professions, it becomes less clear what chiropractic is and what it is not. Is that mere coincidence? I think not. Perhaps some chiropractors really believe that they can give some temporary help (relief) to people with their therapeutic ministrations. Some perhaps do not understand the difference between non-therapeutic, objective, straight chiropractic and medical therapeutics. If that is the case, I would submit that it is ignorance by choice. Enough has been said and written about objective (non-therapeutic), straight chiropractic in the last 20 years that no one should be ignorant of its tenants unless they choose not to investigate it. Every chiropractor has heard the word “straight.” I think that there is also a small group who really desires to destroy the line that delineates chiropractic from medicine. It truly desires to destroy chiropractic or our founders and developers saw it and as most chiropractors see it today. That is a small but very powerful group of people who are doing all the things they need to do to accomplish their objective, and most of our profession has no clue as to their intent.
Perhaps we need to identify their modus operendi. It seems to me that their primary focus is and must be to destroy the major line of demarcation. It is not a technique issue. Efforts to make it that are merely a smokescreen, an attempt to obscure their real intention. (See “I’m Confused.”) Another straw man argument is the idea that by adding more medical procedures to our schools curriculum we can improve our educational program. One rarely hears the cry for more philosophy or more vitalistic technique.
So what is it that defines us, what separates us from medicine? It is the recognition of an innate intelligence, the idea that chiropractic relates to the expression of the immaterial (the innate intelligence) through the matter. While it is true that most chiropractors do not verbalize this objective and will usually attempt to explain it in more mechanistic terms, when push comes to shove, most admit they address the interference to the expression of the vitalistic phenomena as it relates to the vertebral column. Unfortunately, that is hardly what they convey to their practice members and that only adds to the drift from our metaphysical underpinnings.
So how do we stop this movement away from real chiropractic, chiropractic as a separate and distinct profession? Well, I am not sure there is really enough interest in doing that, but one way that we can help to check our slipping is to realize that you cannot accomplish that chiropractic objective by addressing a medical problem or by using medical methodology. This is where the great masses without philosophical grounding need to begin.
The medical objective is to use some physical or chemical means to change the matter of the body because the doctor has determined that the matter is in an abnormal state and he or she knows what state the matter of the body should be in. The chiropractic objective is to introduce a force into the body (the spine to be exact) because the matter indicates that a vertebral subluxation is interfering with sufficient force being expressed. The two objectives are different. You cannot accomplish the chiropractic objective by medical means. At least you cannot do it intentionally or with any degree of consistency. The more we attempt to accomplish a chiropractic objective with medical methodology, the less effective we become, e.g., massaging muscles is not an effective way of correcting vertebral subluxation nor is giving drugs. But even worse, by using medical procedures to accomplish what should be a uniquely chiropractic objective, we further blur the lines of chiropractic and once they are indiscernible our place in society will be lost. V24n3