From time to time this question comes up in discussions, especially on the FACE message board. We are not treating diseases, we are enabling the innate intelligence of the body to be better expressed by correcting vertebral subluxations. However, when that happens, people’s bodies work better and conditions disappear. People do get well under chiropractic care. So what is wrong with talking about symptoms? Why should the chiropractor not be interested in whether practice members’ medical conditions are improving under chiropractic care?
We must establish a few principles before we can answer these questions. First, symptoms are not directly related to vertebral subluxations. If they were, then the absence of a symptom would indicate no subluxation and we would be wasting people’s time and money pretending to be adjusting vertebral subluxations in asymptomatic people. The fact is, subluxations occur in asymptomatic people. That is part of our philosophical assumptions, at least by most of the chiropractic community.
The second issue is that symptoms do not enable us to locate subluxations more effectively. If we were dependent upon subjective symptoms to locate subluxations, we would be at a decided disadvantage because most of the time there are no symptoms and even if there are symptoms, they may be totally unrelated to the subluxated segment or segments which is why we abandoned the non-specific meric system of analysis.
So why would a practice member share their symptoms with us? There is only one reason. They clearly do not understand the unique objective of straight chiropractic. That is more serious than just saying, “I hurt here doc!” If they do not understand our objective they will never follow through with lifetime care and they will miss the real benefits of chiropractic. Neither will they refer their asymptomatic friends and loved ones. Further, the symptoms most people come in with are of musculoskeletal problems. So those types of practice members are perpetuated. When someone shares their symptoms with you, it indicates that you have done an inadequate job in educating them. Perhaps that is why we want to rationalize their focus on symptoms. We do not want to admit that they really do not have the big idea. We do not want to admit it because it reflects upon our inadequacy in explaining chiropractic to them. So we somehow rationalize their wrong action (sharing symptoms) to get ourselves off the hook for doing a poor job of practice member education.
Do any of my practice members ever try to share their symptoms with me? Sure. More than I want to (even one is more than I want to). But I do not try to rationalize away their reasoning. I recognize it as a failure to communicate the simple clear objective of chiropractic.
That can be very frustrating. Still, we must make the effort to correct their misconception of chiropractic. Otherwise we have failed the practice member and continued to perpetuate their misunderstanding.v21n2
V21n2