PT 1
You see their “practices” in strip malls. You hear about them at dinner parties. They are featured in cool Hollywood movies. Your friends go for “adjustments”. You yourself may have attended, on the advice of a friend, or worse, a misguided physician. Chiropractors, after a century of mostly skepticism and scorn from the medical community, little by little have become main stream and acceptable. Some of their treatments are even covered by health insurers today.
But some chiropractors, whether knowingly or unknowingly, at best are practicing the same art as the snake-oil salesman. At worst, they are practicing under the same banner as the palm-reader and the psychic. We’ll get to that in part II of this subject.
Very few people know the history of the chiropractic art, or the names behind it. The credulous masses today accept chiropractors as healers and treaters of ailments by virtue of their “scientific” credential. Thus, few know that chiropractic was founded by a man who practiced magnetism and hypnosis and believed in something called ‘Innate Intelligence’ – a controlling exterior force that accesses the human body through the spinal chord.
The following paragraph by B.J. Palmer, the son of the founder, Daniel David Palmer, describes his relationship to the concept of Innate Intelligence (all emphasis original):
IT WAS HERE IN THIS ONE ROOM, the Great Teacher and Master of ALL people of ALL times, was Innate. IT WAS HERE with these retired personalities, with their every-day personal products, I learned the basic truths of Chiropractic and how to become a Chiropractor.
Up till THIS period of MY life, I was INVOLVING MY thots, words, and acts much like so many have done and were doing. The “I” was egotistic as well as egoistic.
After THIS period of OUR life, WE began EVOLVING like few people do or have done. From then on, WE thot, spoke, and acted. From then on, “I” was humble in the presence of Innate within as WE lived together.IT WAS THERE, plus time, IN THIS ONE ROOM, I found MYself. WE found OURselves—INNATE AND I—until EACH lost his or her singular and single identity and became a plural duality, to eventually walk down the byways and highways together the rest of OUR lives (1961, p. 163).
That should be enough to weird you out of the chiro office forever. But there’s more.
In public, Palmer, the aforementioned 19th century hypnotist and practitioner of animal magnetism, related that he ‘discovered’ chiropractic while doing a treatment on a partially deaf janitor. Palmer said he perfectly manipulated or adjusted the man’s spine, and that this adjustment was the most perfect adjustment ever made. Palmer was a bit of an ego-maniac, apparently.
According to Palmer Senior’s daughter, however, she saw her father hit the fellow in the spine with a book he was holding during the telling of a joke. Some days afterward, the patient remarked that he thought his hearing was better after being hit in the spine. Palmer called it chiropractic because he had “healed” his patient with his hands.
In private, however, Palmer revealed the source of chiropractic as something else entirely – messages received during seances from a dead doctor named Jim Atkinson. Palmer was a practicing spiritist. (Spiritism is a doctrine founded upon the existence, manifestations and teachings of the spirits, or in other words, the dead.) The Bible expressly forbids forbids attempting to communicate with the dead (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), says that the dead are asleep, without any conscious thought (Ecclesiastes 9:5), and that God alone has immortality (1 Tim 6:16). Those who speak with the dead are speaking with demons, Satan’s fallen angels, who are well able to impersonate the dead and so pass a multitude of deceptions to humanity.
The vast majority of chiropractors today still believe in Innate Intelligence, and that the misalignment of the spine is the cause of 95% of all diseases because I.I. can’t flow through your nerves properly. Which of course also means they believe they can cure just about everything from the flu to cancer with a spinal adjustment. Palmer attributed the ‘cure’ of the janitor to his perfect adjustment to the spinal chord so that the Innate Intelligence could flow uninterrupted.
Education wise, the average chiropractor (DC) graduates with over $100,000 in student loan debt, yet can usually make only around $30,000 as an associate doctor. This figure often includes no health insurance, retirement, vacation, or other benefits.
As an associate doctor, their main job is to recruit patients, which basically means to indoctrinate them into the idea that they need to come to your office three times a week for the rest of their lives.
This is accomplished by scaring patients and telling them they have a fake lesion called a chiropractic subluxation (which they say is different than an orthopedic subluxation). This is, of course, pure quackery. Only chiropractors believe that chiropractic subluxations exist. No other doctor or scientist has ever found one. Of course, the Livestrong Foundation says they are real, which just goes to prove they’re fake.
Here is a list of all the websites started by people who have suffered from some fool trying to do a neck manipulation: http://chiropracticstudent.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/is-chiropractic-safe-ask-an-injured-patient/
Neck manipulations, the mainstay of all chiropractors, can cause stroke, paralysis, torn neck arteries, and a host of other less severe ailments, including a progressive loosening of spinal ligaments (and not to mention the funds in your wallet).
It’s worse than quackery. It’s potentially dangerous.
Stay Tuned for PT 2.
eliaswittenberg 