By Dr. Robert Crystal
A big concern from many students and new DC’s is whether our philosophy is practical. Please allow me to share my feelings on that. I was raised in chiropractic. It is something I do not take for granted, and appreciate so very much. Not that I was taught the words to express our philosophy, but that our lifestyle was a living example of it. I was always confident that the body would heal itself from the injuries, and illnesses encountered while growing up. I knew that being adjusted would assist my body to work its best. Although chiropractic, in my opinion, should not be anti-medicine, I can count on one hand the number of medical visits I had growing up. These were to attend to broken bones. I never had an issue with vaccination, we just didn’t do it. I never took antibiotics, or pain killers, or any other medicines. I got to see my body deal with all of its challenges on its own, and nobody can tell me it can’t do it.
When I went to so called chiropractic college, I was actually taught a medical way of thinking. It was very foreign to the way that I was raised. There were students taking antibiotics (self prescribed) for sore throats. As convinced as I was that a body can recover from a sore throat on its own, that is how convinced they were that it could never get better without the drug. It seemed that the school was more in line with their way of thinking than with mine. The teachers were not chiropractors, and if they were they were not recognizable as such. They were MD wanna be’s with white lab coats and stethoscopes around their necks.
Our philosophy is practical. For those not raised in the chiropractic lifestyle, where will they learn about it? Where will they see that it is not just castle in the sky stuff, it is for real. Philosophical meetings are so important. They are a place where students and DC’s can go to get immersed in the ideas of chiropractic. Of course, if those ideas ring true in their hearts, they can then go out and live the chiropractic lifestyle. Keep yourself aligned structurally, and keep yourself aligned with the principles of chiropractic. The word practical means able to be put into practice. I can tell you from personal experience that chiropractic is practical.
Talking to many young children, I will ask questions to draw out an understanding in them. When asked if they have ever gotten a boo-boo they all respond by showing me them. When asked how the boo-boos go away, all too often I hear that it was the band-aid, or the medicine that made it go away. That is the superstition that DD Palmer referred to when he said in his 1910 book: “it is the entering wedge destined to split the therapeutical log of superstition wide open, revealing its irrational and ignorant construction.” Yet, in 2003 our public still holds to that superstition as true. When my son was 4 his preschool teacher called us in a panic. Why, because when my boy got a scrape from a toy that some other kid threw, he wouldn’t let the teacher put anything on it. Like me, he was and is being raised by example to understand that the body heals itself. In fact, that is what he told the teacher, that “the body heals itself.” Wouldn’t it be a better world if we all knew this? What great respect we would have for ourselves and for others. It is our philosophy that sets us apart, it is a simple truth and yes it is practical.
planetc1.com-news @ 9:57 am | Article ID: 1071683846
Comments are closed for this article!