The newly elected president of the Israel Chiropractic Society (for a three-year term) is Yael Weiss,DC, of Moshav Avihail, Israel. "My first priority is chiropractic legislation," he notes. The ICS seeks to legislate chiropractic as a "primary-contact health care profession." To do so, explains Dr. Weiss, the "ICS must educate the public and health care policy makers on the principles and definition of chiropractic."
Dr. Weiss stresses the importance of a consensus among Israeli DCs on chiropractic standards of care, and to "create guidelines which we can present to government officials."
The ICS is a member of the World Federation of Chiropractic. For more information, contact Dr. Weiss: 8 Hapalmah St., Moshav Avihail, 42910 Israel; tel: 972-9-8824396; fax: 972-9-8845780; email: yael_weiss@hot mail.co.il.
Rep. Portwood,DC, Meets with Missouri Governor Missouri state Representative Charles Portwood,DC (R-92 District), arranged a meeting with Missouri Governor Bob Holden on February 13 to discuss the role of chiropractors in the Missouri Department of Health.
"Governor Holden is open to helping break down the many barriers we face in the Missouri Department of Health and has (for the first time in recent memory) agreed to set up a meeting between the director of the department and the Missouri Chiropractors Association," explained Rep. Portwood in an e-mail to DC.
Accompanying Rep. Portwood to the meeting with the governor were DCs Mark Howell, Duane Marquart, Sam Licklider, and Brian Kelling.
After the meeting, Rep. Portwood addressed a letter to the governor to document his recommendations for chiropractic's role in the Missouri Department of Health:
´ integration of chiropractic physicians in the committees on aging; nutritional health services; healthy people; Missouri primary care; and the division of chronic disease and health promotion;
´ appointment of a chiropractic physician to the board of directors; and
´ development of strategies to insure chiropractic physicians on behalf of citizens of Missouri play an active role in the development of health care policies in the state.
In Rep. Portwood's letter to the governor, he also enclosed a letter with documented literature from Dr. Norman Kettner, chairman of the department of radiology at Logan College of Chiropractic, which described the barriers chiropractors face in the Missouri Department of Health.
Film Protagonist Is a Chiropractor Edward Bliss Jr. is a beleaguered chiropractor who adjusts by day and wrestles by night in director J. Todd Anderson's The Naked Man. Not since Danny Aiello's portrayed a DC in Adrian Lyne's 1990 film Jacob's Ladder has a chiropractor been the protagonist of a film.
The movie, produced by Ethan Coen (he and brother Joel produced such movies as Raising Arizona, Fargo, and most recently, O' Brother, Where Art Thou?), features Michael Rapaport as Edward, an associate chiropractor. Realizing he is the best of the staff doctors, yet poorly compensated, he quits and decides to move back to his hometown to open his own practice. Meanwhile, Edward's wife goads him into quitting the wrestling circuit and his popular persona as the "Naked Man"(his wrestling attire was a body suit that pictured the musculoskeletal framework of the human body).
Back home, Edward has to confront his father, a pharmacist, who still hasn't forgiven him for not following in his professional footsteps. In one sequence, the father yells repeatedly, "Don't you see, Edward? Drugs are the answer." Clearly, Edward is a nondrug prescribing innate kind of guy.
According to one reviewer (we haven't yet seen this "straight to video" production), the movie features "some of the most bone-jarring sequences of someone adjusting the spine that I've ever seen." (Not exactly the kind of exaggerated image the profession needs!)
While the film has received significantly less fanfare than most of the productions associated with the Coen brothers, it has received positive reviews and an apparent word-of-mouth following.
