No, I am not starting another organization. However, it is past time that this profession evolves and stops working against each other. Currently, there are two national organizations that compete for your support based on ideology. That is counterproductive and does not move the profession forward.
First, I cannot believe that everyone in our profession is not shouting for the two organizations to put the profession first and stop bickering over nonsense. It also appears that “splinters” in each organization get to push their agenda forward at the expense of the profession at large.
An example would be the “Choose Wisely Program,” whereby a few members of a committee with strong ties to the insurance industry got to set a policy that has been hurting the profession since the inception of that ill-advised proclamation. A single unified organization would have never allowed that based upon checks and balances with representation from the entire profession, rather than an all-too-powerful splinter.
Theoretically, what would be in the best interest of our profession is one national organization with 50 chapters, one for each state. This is the model used by the medical, dental and physical therapy professions with the American Medical Association, American Dental Association, and American Physical Therapy Association, respectively. Each profession has state chapters, and although all are not linked to the national organization, they should be.
I am guilty of splintering New York when, in 1989, we found evidence of corruption in the New York organization and started a new organization. In retrospect, it was a grievous error and we should have infiltrated the organization and “righted the ship.” Since then, the profession in New York, in my opinion, has suffered from the creation of competing organizations.
In the early 1990s, when I was an executive board director for my organization in New York, we sent a representative to a newly formed organization called the Congress of Chiropractic State Associations. This organization is now colloquially known as “ChiroCongress.” I have watched this organization from afar, and it has the structure already representing all 50 states to accomplish creating an umbrella organization and combining the two national organizations.
Based upon the inability of the ACA and ICA to come to any meaningful terms of joining together, perhaps it would be best to abolish those two organizations and combine their resources into the United States Chiropractic Association. Although this would be challenging based upon “religious-type fervor in ideological beliefs,” this is what most of the profession wants.
I know I am oversimplifying the process; however, with an infrastructure already in place with the Congress of Chiropractic State Associations, the framework is in place to help move our profession forward as one. This would also require the 15 or 20 states that have multiple organizations to agree to abolish them and create one state organization under the Congress of Chiropractic State Associations.
The amount of money that can be saved and used to advance our profession to help serve more people is not only powerful in concept, but also will accomplish more than anything our current structure can deliver both at the state and national levels. It is time for those smarter than me to take the lead and make this happen.
Many relevant diagnostic signs are not performed deliberately by the examiner or by the patient at the examiner’s direction. They are observed as the patient reacts to their condition. Fortin’s finger sign, Minor’s sign, and Vanzetti’s sign are three examples of this principle.
Spearheaded by burgeoning scientific and clinical research literature, psychedelics have reached a level of media coverage and popular interest that has not been seen for over half a century. By “psychedelics,” we are referring to the unique class of substances that includes psilocybin (the active compound found in so-called “magic mushrooms”), LSD, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, and mescaline – each of which occurs in the natural world (except for LSD, which is a semi-synthetic compound).
While working at the Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque, N.M., one of the primary care physicians stated that imaging every patient prior to receiving chiropractic was not medically necessary. It was at that point I reconsidered the need for the imaging of every patient to avoid malpractice.
