Well, I guess you've heard "Enuf" from me for awhile in the pages of Dynamic Chiropractic. To keep things alive and fresh, a columnist is often asked to leave the scene from time to time and allow readers the privilege of hearing another person's opinion. This is the case with the editorial policies of Dynamic Chiropractic. I have been asked to step down for a period of time to allow someone else to express the conservatives' viewpoint.
I have enjoyed my two years as a featured columnist in "DC" and my chance to bring forth to you my sometimes fervent opinions and hopes and dreams for the future of this fine profession. It is my earnest wish that the young doctors of today will see the folly of seeking short-term medical acceptance in exchange for long-term significance. Chiropractic can only achieve a significant role as an alternative health care system by working to dismantle the false medical dogma of the germ theory of disease and providing alternative care to their therapeutic regimes of drugs and surgery. Our stand against immunization, vaccination, fluoridation, excessive antibiotic usage and needless surgery, certainly does not make us popular today, but soon the light of scientific investigation will prove the medical doctrine wrong; we as the only significant dissenters to this defunct doctrine will be there to provide our unique health care paradigm. We have the alternative model to medicine's germ theory of disease, one that proclaims it is the "soil not the seed" that determines who will and will not get sick. D.D. Palmer posed this question:
"One question was always uppermost in my mind in my search for the cause of disease. I desired to know why one person was ailing and his associate, eating at the same table, working in the same shop at the same bench, was not. Why? What difference was there in the two persons that caused one to have pneumonia, catarrh, typhoid, or rheumatism, while his partner similarly situated, escaped? Why? This question had worried thousands for centuries and was answered in September, 1895."Yes, this question was answered in 1895. We have only to continue to provide the proof clinically and scientifically that disease starts first as malfunction. Center stage in the cause of malfunction in the human body is the vertebral subluxation complex. Edison's prophesy can and will come true, if we continue to hold the fort for conservative subluxation based chiropractic. We must not cave in and "exchange tomorrow for cheers today." (Hoover)
We must condemn the ACA for its acquiescence to medicine's regimes of immunization and antibiotic therapy for our children. We should firmly oppose efforts of organized medicine (or chiropractic organizations) to include us as subordinates on the medical team. We should fight firmly against the ACA's "states' rights" stance that condones proprietary drug therapy and minor surgery as common domain in the healing arts and thus part of chiropractic practice. We must establish our difference from orthodox medicine, define our profession and not proclaim our assumed (by some) similarity.
My father's generation of chiropractors fought valiantly just to become licensed; not as part of medicine but as a separate and distinct healing art. My generation fought to see that our separate and distinct healing art had equal rights with the medical giant. This generation must continue the fight to see that we are not swallowed up as part of the medical team such as the osteopath was. The public seeks a true alternative to medical care and subluxation-based chiropractic is just that. Today, we could be grudgingly accepted for our "therapy" in the aches, pains, krinks, and strains domain of relief therapeutics. This would be a travesty and leave us locked in the battle of just who is the best manipulator. Our real future lies in the establishment of our own distinct paradigm in the care of human ills and health maintenance. A nontherapeutic healing art making no claims to treat, heal, or cure any disease. With this model we can "accept all cases regardless of their condition or their ability to pay" (S.E.W.), if a patient has a subluxation we can be of help.
So on that note, I leave you with my final "thots" in this my last column in my two year series. Oh yes, you'll still hear from me, my column "THOTS" is syndicated in eight state chiropractic journals and I will continue to have featured columns in other chiropractic periodicals. I've got two new books in the hopper and my fertile pen moves on.
It has been my pleasure writing "Viewpoints from Involvement" for Dynamic Chiropractic and its many readers. Rest assured my involvement will continue and my viewpoints will still be heard.
"Enuf said."
Fred H. Barge, DC, PhC
La Crosse, Wisconsin
When I graduated from chiropractic college in 1981 and started practice, I heard it all, and very little was positive. “You are a quack; you do not know what a subluxation is; you couldn’t get into a real health care program, so you chose the one that is slightly above a mail-order degree; you have no proof that chiropractic works; Are you really licensed?”, and so much more.
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