Why I chose chiropractic

Before I begin with my reasons, I would like to make one thing clear. I wish to thank the doctors and surgeons that personally gave their services to me, in all of my times of need. There is no feasible way for me to express completely my appreciation for their presence. Without them, I would probably be crippled and deaf. For them, I am thankful.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was immediately attracted to the chiropractic profession partly because it offered me a sense of security and would prevent me from doing, in my mind, the impossible. As a member of the most vulnerable generation of humanity in recent times, that protection from the unwilling violation of my own conscience was (and still is) significant to me.

Moreover, my experience with some of my more recent treatments for ordinary diseases left many other kinds of treatments to be desired. Knowing that the vast majority of drugs employ a mechanism involving a chemical modification of some microscopic body part to repress symptoms, I would have to risk a permanent alteration to my chemical makeup just to see whether the symptom disappears. More often than not, this kind of alteration introduces some new complications that the body tries to compensate for, potentially setting off a chain reaction of anomaly after anomaly.

The same principle applies to surgeries: once something is removed or modified, there’s no turning back. In the seventh grade, I attempted to pull off an “ollie” on a skateboard, and I literally paid the price with an arm (specifically my left elbow). Seven years later, I began to feel the effects of those foreign nails as they dug into the surrounding muscles: my pushups weren’t as explosive or smooth (even now I hear cracks almost every time), and local numbness of tissue persisted there. One might see this as a frivolous complaint about something so necessary, but the nature of surgeries cannot be ignored -- especially when there is often another way.

While I have a high regard for doctors and specialists and for what they do, they are best suited for emergencies—no other healthcare professional can handle emergency cases better. For everything else, chiropractors can fill in the gaps: they regularly provide nutritional advice, teach health and witness principles, and bring a mildly (or severely) encumbered body back to the path of healing itself, all without pressure from the pharmaceutical companies to sell and prescribe for profit. (It is true that there are MDs who advise their patients on matters of health and wellness, but this advice is limited at best, and unfortunately often overshadowed by the prescription itself.) Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of chiropractors do recognize the limits of their modus operandi, and don’t believe that the adjustment is a panacea. They just believe that adjustments can fix many neuromusculoskeletal abnormalities, which give rise to many other abnormalities in turn. This is very much akin to a distrust of the entire Roman Catholic hierarchy based on the actions of a few disturbed priests—such distrust is as unjustly deserved on their parts as well as on chiropractic in general.

This is even more important to me because, before my future intern lucidly explained chiropractic to me, I had never received an adjustment up to that point. That’s right—not even one moment of exposure to a chiropractor. Many of my classmates at Parker run the gamut from avid adjustment junkies to children of current practitioners, while I’m just a lowly neophyte in the world of chiropractic. Yet, from what I continue to learn every day, I find myself wondering how I haven’t come to find this sooner. There’s nothing like feeling the energy rush (not from adrenaline) and the endorphins flowing through after an adjustment. It’s something you have to experience for yourself in order to understand it truly.