What Is Chiropractic Anyway?

The world is broken and we're fixing it the wrong way. Put your hand up and be proud to be a part of the sixth major extinction. The Earth is losing about three species per hour, which equates to around 30,000 species per annum [1]. Put your hand up and order another Sports Utility Vehicle to help tweak the mean global temperature up another balmy five degrees to drown every major coastal metropolitan city by 2050, even though only 5% of you will ever take that SUV off road [2]. Rationalism doesn't override aesthetics when explaining that an SUV, being top heavy, is three times more likely to roll than smaller car, which can usually seat the same number of passengers, and six times more likely to cause a fatality when chasing the amber.

Bolide: Fire from the sky. A brilliant meteoric fireball collides with Earth 245 million years ago and extinguishes 90% of the world's species. 65 million years ago it happens again and finishes up the dinosaurs for good. Consensus has emerged in the past decade that the fifth major extinction was actually caused by multiple bogies, probably even cometary. And here I was only a few weeks ago, gazing at a quaint shooting star dazzle past my doorway, sighing a quiet wish for peace over Nazareth and Santa to bring me a big, shiny, fuel efficient truck.

Of course the problem is always outside in. With the mentality that Earth can be saved by sending an interstellar war machine to intercept a potentially cataclysmic meteor, it's little wonder our generation is so sick, diseased, depressed and genetically challenged, since wars are being launched against everything. Every micro organism we come in contact with; the war on obesity; the war on attention deficiency; the war on ugliness. Hail to the Fourth Reich of perfectly engineered homo sapiens. War begets war - and nobody's getting any better. Our landscape changes. Species are exploited. The world is polluted. The population expands and doesn't meet its own needs appropriately as the cost of health exceeds the rate of sickness. Was life meant to be this difficult?

Well, sir, the results have come back from the lab and it turns out you have rheumatoid arthritis. Oh thank God for that. Um, let's leave God out of this for a minute, we've got enough hypothetical constructs to deal with. So now you know. Now that you've attached a medical term to the condition we can all carry on with our day and everyone you meet can learn how "rheumatoid arthritis" limits your quality of life. It's what you have and there's nothing you can do because you were genetically predisposed, right? The doctor said so, and Lord knows we all need something to talk about round the water cooler. It must have come from somewhere and thus the mind externalises the entity and consequentially searches for the external fix.

Health from the inside out is a completely contrary paradigm, requiring a major shift to look at a different picture through a new frame of mind. Often this shift demands too much energy to dismantle one's belief system about health and how it is achieved, so it's discarded and nothing changes. For instance, if one believes the body has the ability to heal itself through a tempered balance of nervous system and environment, why take decongestants when feeling congested? Even though it makes sense to rational intelligence, our actions are limited by the hypothetical constructs the mind creates to refute a different approach to becoming healthy. One cannot expect a different result by constantly performing the same action. So the next step is motivation. What is the motivation needed to deconstruct belief and assume responsibility for one's health?

If things don't change, they stay the same.