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What a Bunch of Bunk!
By David Koch, Chiropractic Sciences at Life University

Debunking some of the common “myths” about chiropractic

I have been a chiropractic patient since I was 2 years old, a chiropractor since I was 28 and a professor of chiropractic philosophy and science since I was 41. (Prior to that, I was an instructor, assistant professor and associate professor of chiropractic.) I was in active practice for 16 years and have held one or more active licenses to practice chiropractic for the last twenty seven years. In other words, I have had a lifetime of experience in chiropractic. This lifelong “total immersion” in chiropractic has given me the unenviable opportunity to hear, over and over again, all of the “myths” (read “bunk”) I will address in this and subsequent articles, and more besides. While the “Honor Roll of Chiropractic Misconceptions” could go on for pages (I have heard a lot of baloney in my lifetime about what chiropractic is and isn’t and what chiropractors can and can’t do, much of it from chiropractors themselves!), a list of just a few of the most common, persistent and, well, baloney-ful1 chiropractic myths might look something like this: This one often includes the insinuation that the motive behind this insidious conspiracy is to allow us to continue to make our yacht payments! (Personally, I’m still waiting for my yacht to show up.) Luckily for me, that same lifelong chiropractic involvement has also given me a broad knowledge and deep understanding of what chiropractic truly is that allows me to debunk the bunk for my students, my patients and most importantly, for myself. In an interesting aside, it was actually quite difficult for me to even compile the list above. It concentrated so much of the anti-chiropractic negativity I have had to deal with my entire life that it made me feel a little creepy, like I was in some weird chiropractic “myth meth lab,” and as you might imagine, “Breaking Bad” is not my favorite TV offering. I think I’ll go take a shower before I continue working on this article!

Okay, I’m back and I feel refreshed. Now, my only question is, “Where to begin?” Perhaps I should start with the granddaddy of all chiropractic myths.

Chiropractic Myth No. 1:
Chiropractors think that they, or that chiropractic care, can cure anything and everything.

This myth is probably the most important one to understand and dispel if we are to even begin to address and debunk many of the other, more recently popularized chiropractic misconceptions, simply because the reality that this myth misrepresents and distorts lies at the heart of what chiropractic is and what chiropractors do. And as a misrepresentation of chiropractic’s message, it has been around for a very long time.

Like many myths that evolve from prior realities (I am reminded of the story of the fellow who wondered why his newly wed wife cut the ends off a roast before putting it in the oven), this one has its origins in chiropractic’s early years. It began with the profession’s inception in 1895, during an era when everyone, and not just the first chiropractor, was looking for Panacea’s secret, the “magic bullet,” the one thing that would solve every problem and cure every ailment. The medical profession, with its newly discovered awareness of the existence of microbes and their sometimes association with some “diseases,” thought they had found it with Salvarsan, the arsenic compound that Ehrlich discovered in 1909 would kill the syphilis spirochete without actually killing the patient as well. Then, after Fleming discovered the bactericidal toxins excreted by Penicillum mold in 1928, it was antibiotics, the new “miracle cure” for everything. Graham and Kellogg, nutritionists at the turn of the 20 century, thought that whole grains from the American heartland would fix what was ailing you, and so Graham Crackers and Kellogg’s cereals were touted as dietary panaceas.

Certainly, as a man of his times, D.D. Palmer’s first thoughts about his new approach to treating his patients’ problems, by “using the spinous and transverse processes to wrack the vertebrae back into place,” tended toward the idea that he had discovered the one cure, the panacea for all human suffering. And this would have been a reasonable hope to entertain, considering the types of responses D.D. started to see in his patients; hearing “restored” by one adjustment, a heart condition “cured” by another. It would be easy to imagine, and might seem almost inevitable, that D.D. would take chiropractic all the way down that path of reasoning and come up with the one adjustment that was specific for each and every disease in need of curing, for each and every pain and ache that a patient might present with. Just think of it; a headache adjustment, a cancer adjustment, a diabetes adjustment, a broken toe adjustment, even a tendency toward criminal behavior adjustment! An adjustment for every disease and a disease for every adjustment!

But it was at this point that D.D. Palmer actually had an even bigger epiphany than his discovery of the amazing power of the chiropractic adjustment itself! He simply realized that it was not the adjustment that held the power to cure; rather, it was the patient’s own body that possessed the capacity to heal. This was the true insight that provided the foundation for chiropractic to develop into what it is today. This was D.D. Palmer’s true flash of genius—to combine a healthy sense of awe at the sheer power and wisdom of nature and the personal humility necessary to acknowledge the limitations of his own understanding of that power into a profound recognition of the true source of healing and health that transcended his own desire to be “the healer.”

What a paradigm shift in thinking this must have been for a man such as D.D. Palmer! Remember that he started out as a hugely successful magnetic healer, treating patients based on the belief that it was his own personal “animal magnetism,” flowing from his hands through the patient’s body, that was doing the healing. D.D. himself said that he had to give up his magnetic healing and even his wildly successful “tooth charm” for toothaches, in order to pursue the power of the adjustment to unleash the greater power of the patient’s own inborn wisdom (innate intelligence).

In one fell swoop, D.D. laid the conceptual groundwork necessary to shift our thinking from the question of whether chiropractic adjustments were the cure for everything or not (and if not, what conditions could chiropractic adjustments cure), to an understanding that chiropractic adjustments weren’t then, and aren’t now, a “cure” for anything! He began truly to appreciate that it was the body that “cured” itself. To distinguish and clarify this insight, he preferred to say that it was the body’s innate intelligence that was the “healer,” from the first meaning of the term “cure” (cure, v.t.; 1. to heal; to restore to health; to make well.2), rather than that chiropractic was a “cure,” in reference to the second meaning of the term (cure, v.t.; 2. to get rid of or provide a remedy for (an ailment, evil, etc.3) This even provided the ultimate basis for establishing chiropractic as a separate and distinct profession from medicine. Chiropractic had to be a new profession, not because D.D. had discovered a new cure for the same old ailments and diseases, but because he had discovered a whole new approach to the question of how to help people heal themselves—by adjusting their subluxations to allow the body to better express its own innate intelligence, which even then was also known as vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature.

So how, you might ask, are we still saddled with this, the biggest, oldest and most misunderstood chiropractic myth—that somehow chiropractors think that chiropractic care, or that they themselves, by delivering chiropractic care, can cure one thing or another, or can cure some things better than other approaches can (Chiropractic care or Compound W® for warts? Sounds like a researchable hypothesis to me!), or that we can cure anything, and therefore everything? It is actually quite simple. Chiropractic shifted paradigms, from curing conditions to facilitating the expression of the body’s own self-healing power, over a century ago. But has our society been able to catch up with this new approach yet? Have we chiropractors all been able to make the same leap forward? Sadly, the answer is no on both counts. Consider one of the most oft-quoted sayings of B.J. Palmer, “Chiropractic gets sick people well … .” Although B.J. Palmer spent his entire professional life making the argument that it was the body’s own innate intelligence that can get “sick people well,” and all the chiropractor can and should do to help is to adjust the vertebral subluxation to remove the nerve interference, and then get out of the way, unless we take the time to understand and explain the context of that claim, we ourselves perpetuate this myth every time we use it.

A chiropractor can’t heal anyone’s body but his/her own, and chiropractic care is not a “cure” for anything, be it a hangnail or a hanging. So let’s bust this myth, and every time we hear it, let’s commit ourselves to correct it by reminding ourselves, our patients, our students and our critics that what chiropractors truly believe is that: The body itself has an unlimited capacity to create, maintain and restore its own natural, normal function (health), that vertebral subluxations can interfere with the expression of this inborn capacity, that chiropractic adjustments can help reduce or eliminate vertebral subluxations, and that without vertebral subluxations, any person, at any age, and in any condition of health, is better able to express the capacity to create, maintain and restore his/her own natural, normal function in any and all areas of life.

Starting from an accurate understanding of what chiropractic actually is, in future issues of Today’s Chiropractic LifeStyle we will be able to take a closer look at the other myths listed above. We will find that many of them stem directly from this fundamental disconnect between chiropractic’s approach to enhancing the expression of the body’s innate intelligence, and the perception that chiropractic is just another cure or treatment approach to sickness and disease. So be on the lookout for your favorite bunk, while we bust some chiropractic myths!

1 baloney-ful, adj.; 1. full of baloney, Dr. Koch’s Immaterial Dictionary of Made Up Words, 1st Edition (of course), Off the Top of My Head Publishers, 2008

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