What my experience of being a chiropractor was really like . . .

A patient is bringing his daughter to my office next week with the intent to gently encourage her toward the chiropractic profession.  To say that I have mixed feelings about this would be putting it lightly, but I will certainly present my profession like the Sherman Warrior I was trained to be, and we’ll let the cards lie where they fall.

Kitty and Carfungal

For those who don’t know much about my profession, let me present an overview.  I’d like to say it will be brief, but there is much to understand.  In short, I am a chiropractic girl living in a medical world.  “Aha!” you say.  “So you lean more towards natural medicine?!”  “No!” I say back exasperatedly.  “I help your body work better by removing interferences to your nervous system so that you won’t need medicine in the first place!”  You nod, get adjusted, and then ask, “Now if I’m sore should I take ibuprofin or alleve?”

There must be about seventeen chiropractic schools in the country.  Depending on how you look at it, about three to six of these schools make philosophy a strong part of the curriculum.  The school I went to made it the central theme.  Why this is important: Focusing on philosophy gives us the “why” behind what we do.  I dedicated myself to a profession that was founded on a principle; well, 33 principles to be exact.  To sum it up, you have an inborn wisdom within you, which is an expression of the wisdom of the universe and nature.  This wisdom exists in your nervous system, and it is constantly controlling every function of your body 24/7 without you even having to think about it.  Isn’t it amazing?!  There is a big nasty word called: SUBLUXATION. A subluxation is a misalignment of your vertebrae, which puts pressure on your nervous system, causing an INTERFERENCE to the signals being sent from the brain to the body and the body to the brain.  A chiropractor’s sole purpose is to locate, analyze, and correct vertebral subluxations so that you can live to your maximum life potential.  Now try telling this to the construction worker who can’t afford to miss work, who just hobbled in and can barely move.  Fun stuff!

The reason why I called my blog, “From Here to There and the Subluxations Between” is because a subluxation is an interference in a message.  We can liken it to static on a phone line.  It could also be compared to the dimmer switch being set to low.  “When you are subluxated,” I tell my four year olds, “you don’t shine as bright”.  So while I will be documenting my experience in adjusting people from America to Asia, I am without a doubt that I will encounter daily “Subluxations” in my attempt to live in a country where I know none of their language and they know little of mine.  And I will present this to you on my blog for your information, delight, disgust, curiosity and/or pleasure.

If you go to the school that I went to, it will be deeply engrained in your psyche that we must educate the public on a way of life to which they are not privvy.  We know this big amazing secret, and this is a secret that the early chiropractors had to go to jail over!  Because, you see, when the early chiropractors began to see that everyone was getting better from their ailments, it just became apparent that chiropractic cured everything!  This is about the time that the medical profession got angry and sent chiropractors to jail for practicing medicine without a license.  And that was followed up by a smear campaign that I think is only now beginning to let up a bit.  But I still have patients who come in and say that their orthopedist told them never to go see a chiropractor.

At my school, we had a lot of assemblies that we would have to attend to build morale for us being the tiny group of Chiropractic Warriors of our profession.  It is important to know that there is a whole other aspect of our profession who focuses solely on musculoskeletal joint disfunction and PAIN.  These chiropractors make it hard for us warriors to sprinkle our fairy dust notions of health and wellness.

So there was this one particular day that Dr. Gelardi, the school president, was reading aloud letters from the old jail days between a chiropractic couple who at this point I can only remember their names as being Kitty and Garfunkel.  Someone more knowledgeable can correct me in the comments section, if need be.  Anyways, I listened to this speech with my dear russian friend at the time.  At this point, we may or may not have already been housemates with a fellow Italian-American student, but we were definitely well acquainted with each others every day expressions.  The Italian especially liked to express himself with the word, “Vafoncculo.”  You can look up the meaning yourself, but it’s not nice.  Okay, no offense to anyone, it means, “Go F yourself.”  So we’re sitting and listening to these letters back and forth from jail, building up camaraderie amongst our profession.  When Dr. Gelardi is finished speaking, the Russian looks at me and says, “Coss, I done know what de hell GeRALDi is saying about kitty and carfungal (which to him sounded the same as Vafonccul) but it sounds like somebody is getting f---ed.”

Yes, that would be us, dear friend, entering into a profession where the collective state of mind of society goes against the very ideas that we are trying to preach.

So to sum it up, this results in frustration.  I am frustrated when medical doctors can sit in their offices and have a non stop never ending flow of patients coming through their door, focusing on death and disease, while chiropractors have to spend their weekends doing spinal screenings and knocking on doors, telling about life and living.  I’m tired of telling the same story over and over to people who can’t afford it or don’t care.  And I cringe to know what they are really thinking when we tell them, “You can’t just stop coming when you feel better!  You could still have subluxations that need correcting!”  By no means will I ever stop trying though.  The seeds I plant may take hold after being watered by another source.  And I do appreciate and respect all the patients who have gotten “The Big Idea.”  Also appreciated are my chiropractor friends who support and encourage me.  They are the best most awesome people.

The professors in school told us, “The days of hanging out your shingle and expecting the office to fill up are over.  You just can’t do it anymore.”  In the spirit of Cass, I’m saying “Yes I can.”  I don’t know exactly how its going to happen, but I am going to a job that I get to go to, do my adjusting, and go home.  Though I’ll work 40 hrs a week instead of 20, having the extra energy not used up by constantly worrying about keeping a steady patient load feels like a gift.  When someone else hangs out a shingle in a brand new country with no other chiropractors and does all the marketing and advertising and pays me a salary, it takes away all the things I didn’t like about being a chiropractor.  And here’s the kicker - I saw that the bosses put another ad out for one more chiropractor to top off the four already on their way, and it also listed the number of local staff for the clinic.  Brace yourself.  It’s 50.  After a year of doing everything on my own, a staff of 50 will be like walking on air.  

While I would love to have my own private ferry business and drive a boat around my beautiful San Juan Islands all day and tie sailors’ knots and such, chiropractic is the profession I have chosen.  It is made up of lovely people who care.  For those who have chosen like I have, I have seen it take some people down and I have seen people thrive off of it.  But here I stand, never expecting it to take me half way around the world.  I don’t know what I will tell a teen age girl next week, but I will do my best to represent.

Leaving Home

When my dad was 17, he boarded a plane to Saigon, Vietnam to procure a job.  He touched down on June 22, 1967.  He fully expected his father to be waiting for him at the airport, but as he came to find out, Gramps had no intention of picking Mike up.  It was just that type of “tough-love” family relationship.  Too scared to leave the airport, Mike waited.  After a few hours he spotted a man from the plane ride from Hawaii to Guam, and begged him to take him to the tanker company.  The man obliged and guided Mike in a taxi to the front doors of the company and even took care of the cab ride.  Mike went into that building and announced that he was reporting for work.  They told him to take a hike.  There was no way Mike was going back out there.  At this time, the war was in full swing and the streets were a scene the likes of which he had never experienced.  He planted himself in a seat and he waited all day.  After much discussion, the office came to realize that they had sent Mike a letter of intent to hire him, and they would have to relent.  Had he left on demand, his life may have taken a completely different path, and I would not be here to write this account today.  They sent him to a hotel to wait for his call to duty, and he did not leave that room for three days and three nights.  On his fourth day in Vietnam, he went to work on the tugboats.

My dad worked in Vietnam for five years.  About two years in, he went back to San Diego.  He knew he was supposed to sign up for the draft and he figured he’d better look into it.  The court ordered him to appear, and, representing himself, he answered a very pressing question put forth by the elderly female judge: “Where have you been hiding for the past two years?”

His response: “Vietnam.”

It was an answer that stumped a judge who had heard it all until then.  He was duly entered into the draft, but his number was never called.  Though my dad was a bystander on the streets of Saigon, he never took part in what they are now calling over there, “The American War.”  He met my mom when the boat pulled into Singapore, and the rest is history.

I am 28 years old, and I intend to live an unordinary life.  In about a month, I will be moving to Hanoi, Vietnam.  This is in answer to an ad I saw in the chiropractic classifieds.  The ad had been catching my eye for about three weeks before I yelled across the house, “Mom, what do you know about Hanoi, Vietnam!?”  You see, my initial mental response to this ad was, “Who would ever want to go live in Vietnam?”  She called back, “Ohhh, its Verrrrry nice.”  Really?  Well let me just google it a bit and find out.  Hmmmm, Froder’s is calling it one of the top ten destinations of 2010.  Next month will mark its one thousandth anniversary.  It’s one of the top cities to shop in Asia.  Good food.  Good coffee.  Hmmmmm.  Let me just send in my resume and see what happens.  And they asked for a picture.  I’ll let that one ride as the asian persuasion.  Can’t hurt.

Besides a major birthday for Hanoi, next month also marks a big day for me.  It is the one year anniversary of my very own chiropractic office.   It’s also my last day in the office for a while.  This is the office I built up from scratch in a town where I knew practically no one.  It took exactly two months from the day I made the decision to open my practice to the day I opened my doors for business.    It was the scariest two months of my life and I lost about fifteen pounds in the process from stress.  At the time it was my hope that I would be able to cover the costs of doing business.  I took a one year lease on my space, and prayed that I would be able to cover the rent.  I set a modest goal for what I hoped to make in the first year.  I reached that goal after month 8.  (note to self: set higher goals.)  (Note to other chiros: Phyllis Frase, practice coach.)  On October 19th, I will gently wrap my practice up, and place it in my proverbial pocket for later.  Did I just compare my practice to a throat lozenge?  Well it did get me through some tough times and it did make me feel better in certain respects.  In the future I will look back on it as that year after chiropractic school that I lived with my parents and had my own doctor’s office.  Weird combo, I know.  More about that later.

This is a shout out to my friends and the other young professionals who might be reading this!  I have a lot of chiropractor friends, and for some reason I have an oddly lot of lawyer friends as well.  Wasn’t there some type of general consensus growing up that if we got “Dr.” on our degree, that things would be peachy?  It may just be my crowd, but the economic state of affairs is pitiful.  After procuring the mountain of debt in student loans, which cannot be gotten rid of with a simple declaration of bankruptcy, we are sent  off into the workforce with a heavy burden to carry.  It can be down right depressing!  My overhead just to get by in business and personally each month tops six thousand dollars.  And I live with my parents!  Is it any wonder that I dream of the days of being a coffee barista with no student loans to pay off?

What is the American Dream?  And who is really living it?  Who is this “Jones Family?”  And why do we have to keep up with them?  Somewhere along the way we all get brainwashed, and there is no escaping it.  We are born naked, and then we take on layers and layers of ideas until they culminate in the grand product of “us.”  It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it is important to recognize the different hats, mittens, scarves, t-shirts, etc, that we wear . . .  Also that we do not wear them blindly, but question the purpose for why they got put upon.  

So what am I wearing right now?  Wouldn’t some people like to know.  I see myself coming up in a society that lives by the following: the more you make, the more you spend.  I see four year olds that have their own Wii and iTouch.  I know plenty of people, myself included, for whom its okay to spend ten dollars a day at a certain five pointed ‘bucks, and never think to bring in their own coffee mug.  It's really not okay the amount of coffee cups I go through in a year.  I’d like to take off the “over-contributing to pollution” hat, and replace it with the “bring-my-own-cup” cap.  And then there is the overall: grow up, go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, and retire.  And then when it doesn’t go that way, we feel like we aren’t doing “it” right.  My point is, there are things we do every day without question, and I’d like to start waking up to being a total american zombie.

Personally, I know I am spoiled.  I have been given and taken every opportunity.  The american way is that we give our children the freedom of choice.  I love to watch parents negotiate with their kids in a toy store.  “Honey, do you want this one, or this one, or this one, or this one, honey which one do you want?”  As a friend just pointed out to me, she had kids in Cambodia bowing and thanking her for a toothbrush on Christmas.  If all I got on Christmas was a toothbrush, I would cry.  As I sit back and analyze my life, having every choice open has led to a deep feeling of dissatisfaction.  How can I be satisfied with the life that I am living when I know there is a more interesting parallel reality of which I can be living instead, right now?  This is a problem, because it does put a damper on my actual reality.  So I am again taking another choice, but this time forcing myself to stick to it.  And you are my witness.  I am going to place myself into the most bizarre parallel reality that I can come up with at this point, and not allow myself to change my mind.  I hope this settles it. 

This summer I went swimming with a friend.  I am not a very good swimmer.  There is a definite limit of how far I am willing to go.  My friend suggested that we swim across the lake to the cliffs.  I said there was no way.  Then I hesitated.  Wanting to impress, I said that I would give it a shot, but he had to do lifeguard duty just in case.  Overall, I probably swam nearly half a mile.  I don’t usually swim more than two lengths of a pool.  And something profound happened.  I realized that the only thing stopping me are the mental boundaries that I have in place for myself.  Remove them, and there’s no telling how far I can go. 

So I’m taking a job in Vietnam.  I don’t know more than three words in Vietnamese: “hello, goodbye, and very much.”  Thanks Oanh Hong Le, for telling your family you loved them very much at every break in chiropractic school : )  I don’t know anyone in Vietnam.  And I am in anticipation just as much as you are to see how it all turns out.

Thanks to the people who inspired me to do this by making their own plunge.  Your waves have rocked my boat.

A De Rouchey Van Praag

C Carter

T Cartwright


The adventure starts in a month.  Stay tuned!