Sharon Gorman and the League of Chiropractic Women: Building the Community You Need
By Michael Dorausch, D.C.
Years before the League of Chiropractic Women began, Sharon Gorman was writing about a question many chiropractors still face: what keeps you connected to the purpose of your work when the everyday demands of practice begin to crowd it out?
In a 2003 Planet Chiropractic article, “Are you forcing your practice?”, Gorman reflected on organizing the Pocono Focus weekends. At first, she wrote, she had concentrated on attendance: getting on the phone, promoting the weekend and trying to bring more people through the door. Over time, her reason changed. The gathering mattered because she, her family and the people around her needed the connection.
“I need to feel how I feel being around the other chiropractors,” she wrote.
That is a more useful starting point than a membership pitch. What kind of professional community do you need—and what would it take to help create it?
One of the women who founded the League
Gorman was a founding member of the League of Chiropractic Women, not its sole founder. The LCW's own founding history describes a group of women meeting on March 31, 2012, with the purpose of empowering, educating and supporting women in chiropractic. Gorman is named among that founding group.
This was a collective undertaking, and its history deserves to be told that way.
Planet Chiropractic was covering it from the beginning. In Michael Dorausch's June 21, 2012 announcement of the inaugural event, Gorman was listed to speak on “Why we ALL need the LCW!” The July gathering in Atlanta was designed around roundtables, workshops, coaching and opportunities to develop relationships beyond the weekend. The audience included assistants, spouses, students, administrators and teachers as well as doctors.
Those details matter. The League's founding was not simply the addition of another speaking platform. Its stated purpose was to make a place for women across the profession's different roles.
The earlier Focus connection
Our archive documents Gorman's community-building work before the League existed. In 2009, Michael reported that Sharon and Ron Gorman created Focus Chiropractic in 1989 because they wanted to meet regularly with other chiropractors to share chiropractic principles and their application.
A year earlier, his “Doctor Gorman Wants You Focused on Chiropractic” had already drawn together several of her contributions to Planet Chiropractic, addressing purpose, service, practice vision and personal responsibility.
Focus and the LCW are distinct organizations; the archive does not establish a formal organizational succession between them. What the archive does establish is that Gorman was helping create opportunities for professional fellowship well before she joined the League's founding group.
Her 2003 essay also makes the connection useful to readers today. She asked whether a practitioner was operating from fear or concentrating on volume while losing sight of the people nearby. These were her reflections on purpose and practice, not research findings or a guaranteed business formula. Still, the question is worth taking home: are the things you measure helping you do the work you actually want to do?
History that still has a place in the room
The League's current leadership page continues to include Gorman, while its Legacy Award record names her as the March 17, 2023 recipient in Clearwater Beach. Her founding role is historical; the current leadership listing is a separate, present-day fact. Neither makes her the sole founder or establishes that she is today's president.
Michael's more recent photographs from New Beginnings in New Jersey show another LCW group gathered beneath its banner. Alongside his 2013 reporting from the Ladies' Lunch on the Lawn at Sherman, they give this story a human continuity: women making time to gather, not just an organization adding dates to a calendar.
A practical question for your own week
You do not have to organize a conference to act on that idea. Ask a colleague for a conversation about one challenge you are facing. Include the assistant or administrator whose perspective you seldom hear. If you attend a professional gathering, decide what relationship you want to nurture rather than how many business cards you want to collect.
ChiropracticEvents also maintains individual LCW event records, including the November 6–7, 2026 Spizz & Spa Retreat in Scottsdale. The retreat runs November 6–7, 2026; this link provides context for the League's activities, not advance registration for a future session.
The LCW today describes mentoring, networking, chapters, online learning and gatherings among its offerings. Its mission explicitly advances a vitalistic, subluxation-focused and drugless philosophy; that is the organization's stated position, not a clinical claim established by this article.
For women considering the League, the useful question is whether its community and philosophy fit the support they are seeking. For the rest of us, Gorman's earlier writing offers a broader reminder: professional connection is something people deliberately make. The League's founding is one chapter of that work, and our archive helps show the years of thought and effort around it.