Recently a major chiropractic college came out with the statement that they held to a “centrist view of chiropractic.” The dictionary defines centrist as “one adhering to the political center, a moderate.” The comment was offered regarding discussion on the inclusion of “physiotherapy as part of the core curriculum due to its potential benefits to chiropractic patients.” Now I can appreciate the need to be moderate in politics. It is done to supposedly reach the masses with your message. The assumption is that the majority are in the middle or at least would be sympathetic to someone in the middle. Yet, as we can see from previous elections and in our profession, the “centrist” position is disappearing. Our country (and I would suggest the entire world) is becoming more and more polarized.
With regard to our profession, the idea of polarization is also becoming more obvious. The idea of a “tiered profession” is nothing more than polarization. Where do the moderates go in a two-tiered profession? Where do the semi-straights belong in a straight/mixing profession? Centrists sit on the fence, and that can be a pretty uncomfortable place to be. The reason it is uncomfortable is because it is a place of no strongly held convictions, a place where you are willing to compromise. It is truly a lukewarm position, not cool enough to be refreshing, not warm enough to bathe in. Who wants to be lukewarm about anything, especially chiropractic? Further, especially within the chiropractic profession, it is a position that makes no sense unless you want to present the profession in a totally unnatural light, one that defeats the basis for its very existence.
Chiropractic was intended to be a profession that provided an alternative to the treatment of diseases. Notice not an alternative treatment for disease. We have many alternative disease treatments. Chiropractic, however, is based upon restoring life to the body, restoring the expression of the innate intelligence of the body through the material of the body. What does physical therapy or any other therapy have to do with that? If chiropractic is used as an alternative treatment for disease, then it makes sense that other therapy, including physiotherapy, is helpful. If chiropractic is to advance, it should advance away from the therapeutic model. Non-therapeutic, objective straight chiropractic has gone from the historical position of an alternative to the treatment of disease to one that recognizes that vertebral subluxations, in and of themselves, are a detriment to the well-being of the human organism in the absence or presence of a disease process. Therefore, disease really is not an issue in this type of chiropractic care.
There are a number of procedures, treatments and therapies that are a “potential benefit to chiropractic patients” if you present chiropractic as a treatment for a medical condition. Whether you call it a “chiropractic” condition or not does not make it any less a medical condition. The only true chiropractic condition is one that medicine does not address. That is the vertebral subluxation that interferes with the transmission of mental impulses between brain and tissue. Once you accept physiotherapy as a legitimate “part of the core curriculum,” you have admitted that chiropractic is nothing more than another therapeutic approach to the treatment of disease conditions. That is not a centrist position. This is the position of the therapeutic extreme within the profession. There is no longer a discussion of philosophy. It is now just a matter of determining which conditions chiropractic can expect to effectively treat and which ones it cannot.v20n3