An update

EDIT: Refer to the comment made on this post for the proper context. I could not answer this simply in one comment.

Somewhere in the past week and a half, I received a great challenge from an old acquaintance -- the kind of challenge I was sorely lacking when I had come to think about going the chiropractic way. After all, I have had practically no experience with chiropractic before coming to Parker, and the word was never mentioned among my family members. (I can attribute this fact to our own ignorance about its benefits—even my mom, who has inherited some of her mother’s fear of chiropractic, is slowly beginning to open up to it.) I honestly didn’t think I would have needed an adjustment since I was staying fit while running on the cross country team in high school. Like many teenagers going through and coming out of puberty, I thought I was invincible: in a way, that very mentality kept me from seriously considering chiropractic.

This challenge came from a recent commenter on this blog, when the commenter assumed superiority in video gaming over me and my own abilities. In that first post, I had only meant to provide a humorous twist on the aspect of making my ultimate career choice. The real issue, moreover, lay in the commenter’s premise that I had chosen chiropractic without doing enough research on my own. I was given a link to a page of a 3/30/2000 article by a Ph. D who reportedly has been watching the profession for three decades and had much to say about it, including how “chiropractic encourages self-delusion.” The following establishes the author’s bias, with my emphases and comments:

“My doctoral dissertation, completed during the early 1970s [when the AMA was in a tizzy over the chiropractic profession, prohibiting MDs from associating with “unscientific practitioners”, lobbying for the exclusion of chiropractic from Medicare, and ultimately plotting to “destroy chiropractic” as a whole (see the case Wilk et al. v. AMA)], was based on a study assisted by nineteen chiropractors. My close association with these practitioners persuaded me that they were basically honest, hard-working, well-meaning individuals who believed that their treatment was effective even though no scientific studies had tested this belief. One of the chiropractors even acknowledged that the trouble with chiropractic was that it had never been proven scientifically [True, but only in the early 1970s; research on chiropractic’s theories soon followed, but are still under attack today by those who haven’t moved on from that period or are otherwise skeptical for other reasons].”

The “trouble” with the author is that he seemed to be stuck in the early 1970s. It is apparent that he carried his bias with him throughout the three decades, never giving much heed or credence to any research that followed up afterward. What’s more, he only gives one reference in his entire article: a list of Health Education Assistance Loan defaults by chiropractors. There was no substantiation to any of his other claims, other than the word of a few individuals. In my opinion, Ph. Ds should know better than to assert something without backing it up with authoritative evidence, even if it falls under an overarching opinion against chiropractic in general. In short, he has not given me a good reason not to pursue chiropractic.

In my first two posts, I have talked about my personal inhibitions and reasons for walking down the road of chiropractic, knowing that any path I walk will be arduous. There is no one single profession in this world that can claim to carry only pros and no cons. Every path has its ups and downs. Even so, I feel that the greatest good that I can do for humanity and for the common good lies in the practice of the science, philosophy and art (SPA) of chiropractic. I wouldn’t be saying this with such certainty if I weren’t able to offer this, this, and this as evidence of my conviction. This challenge has only pushed me further toward life-improving health care. I will not look back. And when I come to treat the honorable servicemen and women who fight to protect our country from evils domestic and foreign, I will thank my challenger first.

You have seen why I wanted to do this. Now you will come to learn how it can be done. After all: if I love my job, I won’t have worked a day in my life.