What has come to be called by some as objective straight chiropractic presents a paradox to the rest of the chiropractic world that has caused a considerable amount of disdain and animosity. In the last fifteen years, the opposition to our approach has prevented thousands of students from going to the school of their choice (i.e., a straight school) for fear that they would be unable to obtain a license in certain states. Hundreds more who went to straight schools were not able to return to their home state to practice. This opposition has caused the demise of two straight schools and forced the remaining school to make compromises it clearly did not want to make. The paradox of straight chiropractic may very well be the basis for this overt animosity from the rest of the chiropractic world. Perhaps we can illuminate the paradoxical objections and hatreds that precipitate such violent attacks and draw a very important conclusion. Some charge us as being too metaphysical and have even suggested that chiropractic will never reach acceptance until the “innatists” give up their spiritual concepts. On the other hand, we are attacked as mere technicians asserting that there is nothing more to our practice than the mindless redundant pounding of spines. Being a technician and a metaphysician are two opposing actions. Which are we?
A second area that raises the ire of our opponents is that we believe we can cure everything. While this is a direct distortion of our philosophy, it has received enough attention that in lay person’s articles in national periodicals, the idea of chiropractic adjustments being a cure-all is invariably associated with straight chiropractic. This information has been given to lay writers and medical writers by some in our profession. Other opponents of straight chiropractic charge that we are a threat to society not because we claim to cure everything but because we do not take the responsibility for treating anything. Since we have no interest in disease and accompanying procedures (like diagnosis) they determine that our care is unacceptable.
We are accused of being too esoteric by many who reject our metaphysical concepts. Conversely, there are those who assert that our approach is too simplistic. We are deemed arrogant because we hold to this elitist philosophy and we are denigrated because we oversimplify the practice of chiropractic to correcting vertebral subluxations.
Other apparent paradoxes abound. We appear to be “New Agers” to the mechanists and mechanists to the “New Agers.” We seem to be cold and uncaring about our patients’ symptoms, complaints or problems. Yes, we appear to be passionate about seeing the entire world under chiropractic care. As objective straight chiropractors, we do not want the family doctor title, yet we want to see the entire family every week. Further, we give the impression to some that we are specialists because we remove nerve interference at the vertebral level only while to others we are general practitioners because we take care of everyone. We do not treat any condition yet we do not refer anyone out. We call ourselves doctors yet do not act like doctors in any way. The list of seeming contradictions goes on and on. If a group of straight chiropractic antagonists were to get together and describe what they hate about straight chiropractic, an impartial observer would be hard pressed to believe that they were talking about the same group of people!
Why does straight chiropractic appear so paradoxical? Why can one chiropractor hate us for a certain reason and another for quite the opposite reason? I would like to suggest that the rightness of the straight chiropractic approach makes it seem wrong to the extremes and that the positions other than straight chiropractic are extreme. If one has a reasonable outlook on life, he appears to be a pessimist to the optimist and an optimist to the pessimist. A person may be of perfectly normal height but appear small to the giant and tall to the dwarf. By most of the world’s standard, my standard of living is high but by some of the world’s standard it borders on poverty. Here is the point. Perhaps chiropractic seems extreme by so many in our profession because it is an extreme departure from their thinking. But perhaps the fact that we seem to be opposite the extremes in our profession says something about the perfection of our philosophy. We are like the legislator who continually votes based upon his sound mind and rational thought. The conservatives will think him too liberal and the liberals will say he is too conservative. The objective straight chiropractic philosophy is balanced. It balances the art, philosophy and science. It is a balanced viewpoint of life, of health and of the chiropractor’s role in society. As such, it appears to be at both ends of the profession depending upon the individual’s vantage point. What appears to be a paradox is simply a truth centered upon itself, a philosophy that is comfortable with its position and presents not an extreme but a simple, logical principle for any truly inquiring person. Straight chiropractic is the truth. It is so because it is balanced between curing everything and curing nothing, between esoteric and simplistic, between a philosophy and an art, and between wanting chiropractic for the world but not compromising our principle to achieve that objective. This is what makes straight chiropractic so beautiful in its philosophy and at the same time so paradoxical to the casual observer.v13n4