It’s good every once in a while for us to evaluate what we are doing and make sure we are being perceived correctly. Recently, one of my associates gave me an ad of a chiropractor in New Jersey. The ad was in a magazine he had picked up at a local bagel shop. Ordinarily, I am very tolerant of non-straight ads. I may not like mixing but I respect a person’s right to practice under the law and to allow the market place to determine who succeeds and who does not. In this case, however, I was so outraged my reaction was “I should send this to the state board.” Then I realized that it was not my state and really none of my business. The ad was a case history of a patient named “John” who was in severe pain in the cervical region. “His head and neck were bent to the left…” The man developed the problem suddenly when leaving his hotel in Seattle for a business meeting. Visiting a chiropractor in the city for “several treatments” did not help. Upon returning home the man visited this New Jersey chiropractor who did muscle testing and found “no physical adjustment was indicated.” Lest someone think I am making up this story the following is the remainder of the ad:
“Further muscle testing determined that one of the colleagues John had met triggered the neck pain, surfacing judgments of anger and fear. Going back to the earliest time these judgments were locked in, it appeared to be from a past life where one of the men had been his master/owner and he had been a slave. In this memory, the master was angry that his slave had once again run away, so he manacled the slaved around the neck and dragged him behind horses. The slave died cursing his master, his situation, and God.
I started talking John through the forgiveness of the judgments of all that had happened and as we did this, his head and neck slowly moved back into normal position. John turned his head from side to side and said, “It’s all better.”
None of John’s symptoms has ever returned.”
After my first, second, and third reaction (laughter, anger and disgust) I began to wonder whether we straights are perceived by those who practice a different form of chiropractic as weird kooks, who do not belong in the chiropractic profession. Do they see us with our philosophy of innate intelligence as I do this chiropractor? It made me realize that we need to be crystal clear in our presentation of chiropractic. Sure, we have a philosophy that seems out of place in the mechanistic, naturalistic, outside-in world of therapeutic health care. It is based on some ascientific concepts. But it is reasonable. It is logical. It is not some strange New Age philosophy. The challenge is for us to elucidate that philosophy in such a way that the logic of it is so irrefutable that those who oppose us, while not agreeing with our approach, will not view us as weirdos and will respect our right to practice as we do. V18n3