No Human Bones in AP News Photos

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

There was a photographer from the Associated Press (AP) at my Los Angeles chiropractic office earlier today who was taking photos for an article that is going to appear somewhere in the news in the next couple of weeks. I had to get to the office early and move some items around because yesterday I spoke to a photo representative from AP and he said they didn’t want to see any human bones in photographs.

I hadn’t noticed how many bones there were in the office until after I heard that statement. I was looking around the adjusting rooms last night and all I could see was bones, nerves, tissues, and organs. Of course everything is made of plastic so there’s no real human bones lying around my office. I am guessing that some people find bones downright creepy but most people that come to visit us are rather fascinated by them, especially kids.

I scanned through some photographs from previous photo shoots with other photographers and noticed this one which shows quite a bit of bones in the background.

Can you spot the bones? Well there is a full spinal column with part of the skull and pelvic bones hanging in the right hand corner. I use this plastic model to show people the relationship between spinal vertebrae, nerves, discs, and some arteries. Just to the side of my left arm is a spinal degeneration model which shows four different phases of spinal health. I removed both the hanging plastic spine and plastic spinal degeneration bones before today’s photo shoot took place.

But there’s more bones. The poster to the right of my head shows four different positions of the cervical spine (commonly known as the neck) along with some terminology about spinal subluxation, spinal cord compression, and misalignment of vertebrae. I wasn’t sure if the photographer would consider those bones but it turns out the posters were fine to be in the photographs.

The really large poster to the left of me is a poster of the autonomic nervous system (it’s the newer generation of posters from Parker seminars, wish I had one of the old ones). There is a full spine showing in this poster is well plus there’s lots of information about the heart, lungs, kidneys, eyeballs, glands, and all sorts of other stuff that’s affected by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. It never ceases to amaze me how many times I’ve had an individual in my chiropractic office for the first time that looks at that poster and says something like “who would’ve thought there were nerves in your spine that went to your heart?”

You can see two other posters on the far left blue wall and there is actually about seven posters on that wall, all of them including pictures of bones, at least spinal bones. What you can’t see is the wall to my right which is much higher than the wall on the left. There’s a few more posters on that wall, and a few of them include bones as well. It’s a good thing I did not have to take down any posters, I would have been working all day.