Donald M. Petersen Jr., BS, HCD(hc), FICC(h), Publisher
When I was a boy, my father (who was a chiropractor as was my grandfather) had a very simple solution for the usual problems of colds and flu. It wasn't aspirin or any other over-the-counter drug. It didn't involve visiting an MD or staying home for days on end. It was a strict regime of chiropractic adjustments and vitamin C.
While chiropractic care and intensive vitamin therapy wasn't anything that any of my friends did (or had even heard of), it was very effective. Seldom would I miss more than two or three days, if any, from the school year.
This same remedy is still in effect in my home today. My entire family has frequent chiropractic adjustments and takes vitamin C to keep healthy without side effects or significant time lost to recovery. I still use this method for my rare bouts of cold or flu without having to lose time away from Dynamic Chiropractic: kind of a "recover while you uncover" approach.
Chiropractic has recently received an unusually large amount of attention from the media. Time magazine not only featured the article on chiropractic, but also published an article "The New Scoop on Vitamins." While it didn't tell me a lot that I didn't already believe to be true, it did confirm what I had experienced in my personal life, and allowed me to see where science had caught up.
Please notice the particular use of the term "believe to be true." It is very important to separate what we strongly believe to be true and what we know.
Yes, I have spent my entire life proving that chiropractic adjustments and vitamin C have substantial healing effects for colds and flu. BUT, I am only one case study. My life is not enough to prove it, but I still believe it's true.
This is the way it is with most of chiropractic. We believe the truth that we see every day in practice. But as of yet, we can't prove it and don't know it in a scientific sense.
Now you are going to say: "But medicine hasn't done the research to prove most of what they do, why should we?"
In the past, that was a good question. But it has been answered.
Medicine DOES have to prove what it does; so do we.
Our mission is to bring healing to every person in the world through chiropractic care. So far we have reached a great many people. But the majority are still waiting.
They are waiting for what society requires of all health care professions: They are waiting for research.
Research is the bridge we must cross if we want to treat the world. If we really believe we have the answers to much of man's health care ills, we must conduct the research that will allow us to present ourselves to society on its terms. There is no other alternative.
Yes, we can be satisfied for the 5% - 12% that we currently treat. Yes, we can hope that some day science will discover that chiropractic accomplishes most of what we say it does. But why should science care about chiropractic?
We aren't on anyone's research agenda but our own. The few inroads and research accomplishments of the past decade have been by our own sweat and blood (most of that by our college faculty). Every other form of health care would probably like to eliminate us, not eliminate chiropractic manipulation, just eliminate chiropractors.
Let's face it, there is a certain amount of "labor union mentality" occurring. Corporate medicine likes its monopoly position, and isn't going to let us break up that monopoly without a fight. That doesn't mean that the average MD has a bad attitude towards chiropractic or chiropractors, but be realistic. For every patient that sees a DC, that's one less patient for an MD. Eventually, it comes down to economics.
It's almost like "Health Care Arena Olympics," with society, third- party payers, and government agencies as the judges. And, while chiropractic has received excellent scores for artistic ability (healing people), we have scored rather poorly on technical merit (research). It will take both scores to win the gold in these games.
Someone once said, "When health care science reaches the summit of healing knowledge, it will find chiropractic there waiting for it."
This will be true only if we blaze a path to the top: a path for chiropractic and health science to follow. If not, we may discover ourselves left on a foothill, bypassed by the world.
DMP Jr., B.S., H.C.D(hc)
