What Is Chiropractic Anyway?

The typical mid life crisis usually requires only slight modifications to lifestyle and behaviour, such as trading in the old car for a new car. Or if one is inclined to peaking early, a quarter life crisis may mean dropping out of university and packing the bags for a foreign destination. Slight modifications to behaviour are continuous, i.e. you're still driving a car, it's just new, or you're still confused as to what to do with your life, you're just in a different country now. A discontinuous behaviour means adapting lifestyle and behaviour to a completely new modal of thinking. Adopting a behaviour that has not existed in one's life before. Only a small percentage usually has the courage to take on the challenge of new thought and behaviour; to change their lives for the better. While the group behind them does likewise purely because it seems like a good idea, however not done of their own volition. And then there are the traditionalists who will never change for love nor money.

The question is often raised: If my body, and each cell therein, is completely renewed every year, then how is it that I still experience the same conditions over and over again? It's because behaviour never changes. And behaviour is an energy pattern - the lines along which cellular reconstruction takes place. Thoughts become actions through habitual patterns and as a traditionalist these will never change. A new energy pattern requires a quantum leap of new thought. "Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, and the pleasant from the unpleasant. It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit" [1].

The spine is not covered under warranty and the consumer must take responsibility for the service he or she purchases: caveat emptor (Latin. "Let the buyer beware"). The irony is that it's not the traditionalist who seeks chiropractic for front line health care, but it's the traditionalist they meet. Herzog [2] wrote that reflex changes in the nervous system which accompany a high-velocity, low amplitude thrust are not dependent on the audible "pop", nor are they dependent on the magnitude of the force applied [3]. A paper by Bakker and Miller [4] states that possibly the greatest therapeutic benefit of the audible release may not be physiological in nature but rather psychological. The joint crack may have a powerful placebo effect on both the patient and practitioner. Both patient and doctor have come to expect an audible release and when the expectations, especially of the patient, are not fulfilled, this may have a negative affect on the clinical outcome. If an audible release is achieved, especially with reinforcement from the practitioner, then a powerful placebo effect may be expected.

The audible pop of a joint is usually hailed as the hallmark of a successful adjustment, even though the desired reflex changes are not dependent on them, and the accuracy of where an adjustment is aimed, and where the "cavitation" actually occurs, is only fifty percent true [5]. So state your purpose then, because adjusting a joint again after it has cavitated without an audible release can be damaging [4]. Shifting from this mindset of what supposed clinical success is may present the mid life or - in the student's case - quarter life crisis. Making the quantum leap in understanding the autonomic nervous system's subtle control of the body may pose an issue for the traditionalist transfixed on simply buying a new car, instead of considering a different vehicle of consciousness altogether. The second irony is: That for the traditional reader of these concepts, not a single behaviour will change. And neither will the position of chiropractic in today's health care market.