What Is Chiropractic Anyway?

How informed is your choice? It's assumed today that anything scientific is true. We want evidence to support the decisions we make, because all the mice, rabbits and select impoverished university students have done their stint for humanity and now it's time to reap the benefits: To live longer, run faster, jump higher, swallow silver bullets, and be disease free forever by doing nothing. Of course your health care decision should be supported. But barring how information is usually delivered to you - by hearsay, Google, or broken telephone between sales representative, general practitioner, and vendor behind the counter at your local pharmacy - consider the average randomized controlled trial (RCT) through which most interventions are assessed first before they become available to you.

An RCT is an experiment in which investigators randomly allocate eligible people into treatment and control groups to receive or not to receive one or more interventions that are being compared. Sometimes they are double blinded, meaning neither the individuals nor the researchers know who belongs to the control group and the treatment group, but this is not always done. The experiment is randomised, meaning actual treatment - not placebo, say - is determined by a chance process and cannot be predicted. Only 32% of reports published in specialty journals [1] and 48% of reports published in general medical journals [2] specified an adequate method for generating random numbers. A review of one dermatology journal over 22 years found that adequate generation was reported in only 1 of 68 trials [3]. The experiment should be controlled. Standard methods of analysis assume that the data is 'independent'. For controlled trials, this usually means that there is one observation per participant. Treating multiple observations from one participant as independent data is a serious error. Trials involving non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs (such as aspirin or ibuprofen) showed incorrect analysis of multiple observations in 123 (63%) of 196 trials in rheumatoid arthritis [4]. Lastly, the 'trial' bit of RCT means nothing more than, well, let's give it a whirl. Another intriguing definition I found in a medical dictionary described trial as exposure to suffering that tests strength, patience and faith. And I sincerely hope that faith does not imply a bevy of white cloaked individuals huddled around a recumbent patient with fingers crossed repeatedly chanting, "Please don't die... please don't die... please don't die..."

The inability to perform a well randomised, controlled trial leads to biased results, and your capacity to make an appropriate decision is compounded exponentially when considering not only the bias of the results of some study, but the bias of the individual offering the advice, and your own bias when interpreting the information. Bias is influence. So how reliable is it to make a decision, influencing a mind that is unreliable itself? A mind that forgets where it put the keys or forgets names and places? When considering that all the mind reveals is an endless stream of options disguised as memories, fantasies, fears, and concepts, which one simply chooses to pay attention to from moment to moment, how reliable is your health care choice? How reliable is one's gut feel when using a mind that is contaminated with emotions, feelings, prejudices, anxiety, guilt, worry, regret, and fears of sickness, death, loss and rejection? In addition, using a mind that has been surreptitiously and erroneously programmed by endless propaganda, religious, educational and social dogmas, and a continual distortion of facts and misinformation.

Where does truth lie in all this chaos? When neither fact nor feeling offer a dependable course of action, how is one supposed decide? Primum non nocere might be a good place to start. The Latin phrase some attribute to Galen, the Roman physician, meaning first do no harm, widely misperceived to be part of the Greek Hippocratic Oath. Start there. Do what is natural. Explore the healer within in as many ways as possible. No one way is the Truth and Light. I didn't even know what chiropractic was when I inadvertently decided to dedicate my life to it, a very atypical procedure for an engineering student. Yet I came to that crossroad because I had already begun to experience a shift in consciousness. Raising the level of consciousness didn't end there either, because chiropractic, as powerful as it is, is not merely about the adjustment, it symbolises the progression of an entirely new paradigm of thought about life, function and the models we choose to accept and live by every single day.