Skip to content

Congress of ChiropracTIC’s Enemies

By Harvey Fish, D.C.

“It should be the highest ambition of every [Chiropractor] to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.” — George Washington

Of course, George wasn’t speaking of chiropractic when he made the statement above; he was speaking of Americans. When I read the quote substituting chiropractor, I was struck by how it fit with the current crisis we face in chiropractic today. I’ll elaborate.

In the early 1980’s Chiropractic won the famous and frequently referred to “Wilk” trial. It was heralded as the watershed moment in our profession where we finally beat back the Goliath of organized medicine (OM) that had been threatening our existence. That seminal event was to have been the springboard where from the profession was to grow to even greater standards of acceptance, research and rewards.

Ever heard of the saying, “he won the battle but lost the war”? I believe it appropriate in this instance.

Since those “landmark” days, certain chiropractic leaders have referred to those overt attempts by OM to eliminate us as history and the start of a new era in our profession. We’ve acted as if the judgment against the MDs and their cronies in the drug industry was enough to stifle their urges to contain and eliminate us. That case was nothing more than a slap on the wrist for them and those of you around since then know it. Little has changed other than their methods of containment. Their motive for elimination remains the same.

It was the dawn of an age in which DC’s were going to live in harmony with his fellow health care deliverers. Working side by side to rid the world of human suffering and accepted as an equal (like the osteopath, I’m sure). Hospital privileges, prescription drugs, insurance parity, and on and on. It was, according to some DCs, a wake up call to join the rest of the healing arts and upgrade our educational standards and refrain from our “religious” dogma of subluxation and nerve interference. “What will the neighbors think if you keep spouting off about vertebral subluxation?!”

So what happened? Well, many schools and DCs bought into the idea that we were substandard. The accrediting body for the profession, a surely ill-gotten post of power and purported responsibility, made for increasing the standards for school entrance and for teaching requirements. I suppose that they never heard of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” concept of life. Courses in philosophy – the reasons for why we do what we do – were delegitimized in favor of more classes in science and diagnosis. Students were taught a paradigm of chiropractic that lowered the correction of a subluxation to the level of a therapy for pain relief and nothing more. Rather than an all inclusive approach that determined the appropriateness of care based solely on the presence of nerve interference, students were taught to diagnose, in a medical model, so as to determine whether or not the person under consideration, (maybe I should say the condition under review), had a disease/problem amenable to, egads, manipulation. The term Spinal Manipulative Therapy or SMT became common in the discourse between DC and insurance companies as it became more present in our schools. It was, to many, a more palatable mouthful than adjustment and, of course, separated it from those still clinging to that dogma to make them appear more “scientific” and “modern”?

Schools began to teach what they said was what the population wanted: pain relief for the lower back. Certain self appointed leaders in our profession assumed a slave mentality to provide without protest. Stay in our limited specialty of treating low backs and we won’t get whipped. So instead of having the entire planet as our patient base, we would be relegated to just those folks with an approved problem.

What was perhaps even more telling of having lost the war was the increasing presence of MDs and Phd’s on our campuses. They were brought there to “increase” our scholastic credentials and to raise our educational standards. So if OM couldn’t beat us overtly, they could sure do so covertly. Having bought the premise put forth by OM that if you wanted to play with the “big boys” you had to teach like them, the CCE (Congress of ChiropracTIC’s Enemies), mandated minimum education requirements for teachers. Called for were masters degrees, doctorate degrees and MD degrees. Oh, and if you had a few DC degreed folks teaching, just be sure there weren’t too many from one school. You didn’t want to overly influence the education in favor of one school of thought, did you? Somehow a DC degree wasn’t worth the paper it was granted on. Whereas up until about ten years ago, the majority of instructors were DC’s, nowadays, the majority are non DC papered. So just what, then, are our students taught? And from what perspective? MD or DC? Mechanistic or Vitalistic? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that what was at stake in eliminating chiropractic wasn’t just to get rid of it’s practitioners. No. It was to get rid of our philosophy. That’s what separates us from the chimps. We have a different approach and it threatened their status quo. Medicine got rid of osteopathy by accepting them into the fold of OM but only if they left that nonsense from Andrew Still out of their curriculums except as an anecdotal story. Will DD and BJ become just a footnote in our history?

Isn’t it more likely that a DC graduating from most schools today, pines for the day he’ll be able to prescribe pain pills? Is there a problem having the fox teach the farmer security of his hen house? I think so.

So we got to this crisis in our profession due in large part to the actions of a very few men. Probably less than a dozen or so. While I can’t prove it, I suspect that there’s drug money involved. While I can’t expose it, there’s conspiracy afoot. Regardless, what’s at stake is our philosophy. Do you think that Part V of the National Boards, suggested to be given every 5 years to practicing chiropractors as a condition of continual licensure is going to make us “better” or to maintain our abilities? I don’t suspect that there will be a lot of questions regarding philosophy on that board. Blood values… yes. Philosophical ideas… not a chance. It’s just another act to suppress our philosophy and return us to the drug pushing, disease treating OM fold.

Those DCs who choose to follow the money and whose self and professional esteem are so low as to cause them to seek acceptance from OM, will destroy our profession. But only if we let them.

The recent assault on Life College is occurring along these lines. Can you imagine how powerful these folks in power are if they were emboldened to take on the largest school as their first attempt at suppression? I’m not about to go into whether there were problems that Life failed to correct or not, this just feels like a time when the actions of a small cell of men have intentionally affected the world for the worst. In their actions you can see a case where the means justifies the ends; an end to chiropracTIC.

So I could ramble on as I’ve been reminded I sometimes do. Rant is actually how I’ve come to think of it. I’m worried, though. What else will Life and other schools have to compromise to be able to survive? Their students have become their hostages. They may “fix” things so as to survive as an institution but at what cost to the profession?

Our profession is at stake and as a result the world is in grave danger of losing the largest group of healers who had as their purpose to set men free. In hindsight lies nearly all answers. I hope we don’t look back from the vantage point of a few years hence and see our end but instead see the moment when we all took a stand for the principle and moved forward.

For the Principle, Dr. H

planetc1.com-news @ 7:14 am | Article ID: 1026742489

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest

Comments are closed for this article!