Yep, I used the word ‘cracking’ in the title of a chiropractic blog. How does that make you feel?
Psychologically speaking, oversensitivity in our profession leads to overreaction and shrill responses.
We seem to want to run away from the things that make us unique, different, and maybe even quirky. The most highly charged things become diffused when one adopts a sense of humor (and purpose for that matter) around such things.
A perfect example of this is the way many chiropractors recoil when the patient refers to an adjustment as, “getting their back cracked”. For the most part we despise this association. We want to redirect their choice of words as we feel this characterization belittles the true power of the chiropractic adjustment. We get sensitive, defensive, and maybe even angry. I know for many years I did.
What if we took a different approach? What if we got 100% comfortable in our own skin and never felt threatened or shaken, but rather amused when laypeople use such terms without malice? What if we actually connected with them, maybe even bonded with them and in doing so actually deepened their understanding and respect for chiropractic?
We behave as a minority that has been put-upon for years… and that’s understandable because we are minority that has been put-upon for years. It’s time for us to start behaving with the confidence of mainstream innovators that are speaking to solving some of the most critical challenges that exist in the arena of healthcare today.
When I first suggested the theme of ‘Cracking the Code to Breakthrough Health’ to some colleagues, there was a pause of disturbance. Then a cocking of the head. Then a slow, but expanding smile. And then sheer enthusiasm.
Here’s what I know… the people of our culture are getting sicker as they consume an ever-expanding list of drugs while the cost of so-called healthcare is rising to unsustainable levels. And this issue has reached such a fever pitch, that in 2013 the United States federal government was shut down over it! With so much brain-power, money, and political firepower behind ‘fixing’ this, why has no one ‘cracked the code’? Because, to paraphrase Einstein, “you cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.” The philosopher Ayn Rand asserted that contradictions lead to destruction. And the amount of destruction will be relative to the level of contradiction. Well folks, I contend that the biggest contradiction in our culture today is calling medicine ‘healthcare’. Medicine is not healthcare, it is ‘sick-care’. And when you give sick-care to culture and call it healthcare, you end up with a sick society with unsustainable costs and poor results. The chiropractic ‘code’ is indeed a breakthrough relative to all this.
Laying out the full chiropractic premise, with the logic, science and applications that go along with it is the subject for another post. More accurately, this would be broken down into several posts. But in summary, here it is in headlined fashion:
Lifestyle stress has 3 dimensions, physical (how you use your body), biochemical (what you put into your body) and psychological (the mind/body connection). When this stress in its negative form aggregates beyond what your body can adapt to, it adversely affects your nervous system and general health. This state can be observed and assessed by identifying tension patterns around the spine and their related neurological implications. In Chiropractic, we call this state, vertebral subluxation.
[quote_box_center]So what’s a subluxation? It is a sign that an individual is stressed beyond their general adaptive potential, not to the point of death, but enough that they cannot fully function. This leads to changes in neural function (defense physiology), which leads to changes in postural muscle tone, which causes alteration of normal spinal alignment. [/quote_box_center]
As I said, there are many details and implications here that can be developed in subsequent blogs. And I know that the impulse will be to challenge some or all of this. Great. Post a comment and engage in the conversation. If you’d like a deeper dive into some of this, here is a link to an article by Dr. Christopher Kent on the, “Four-Dimensional Model of Subluxation”
What is the code chiropractic has cracked? It starts with the first of Chiropractic’s 33 Principles-There is a Universal Intelligence in all matter continually giving to it its properties and actions, thus maintaining it in existence.” We live in a universe of immutable laws. And these laws are discoverable. One of them is entropy. In part, entropy is the concept that nature tends toward disorder, disintegration, disassociation, and if you will, dis-ease. With this, chiropractic also observes and identifies that biological systems possess an innate intelligence, which is an organization intelligence that resists the forces of entropy. The nature of innate intelligence is to create order, integration, and association. This process is modulated through the nervous system. And as described above, when stress adversely affects the nervous system, it then negatively impacts the ability of the body to heal, regulate and express live in general.
Further distinctions lie in understanding vitalism versus mechanism and therapeutic versus transformative (breakthrough) health models.
In the end, I assert that chiropractic has indeed cracked the code to breakthrough health and that our time to hesitate in fully expressing this, within the four walls of our practices or in the public domain, are through. The world is in trouble. We have a solution. Let’s thrive in getting it into the world.
-Dr. Patrick Gentempo