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.