History of Chiropractic
Chiropractic began with the profession’s inception in 1895, during an era when everyone, and not just the first chiropractor, was looking for Panacea’s secret, the “magic bullet,” the one thing that would solve every problem and cure every ailment. The medical profession, with its newly discovered awareness of the existence of microbes and their sometimes association with some “diseases,” thought they had found it with Salvarsan, the arsenic compound that Ehrlich discovered in 1909 would kill the syphilis spirochete without actually killing the patient as well. Then, after Fleming discovered the bactericidal toxins excreted by Penicillum mold in 1928, it was antibiotics, the new “miracle cure” for everything. Graham and Kellogg, nutritionists at the turn of the 20 century, thought that whole grains from the American heartland would fix what was ailing you, and so Graham Crackers and Kellogg’s cereals were touted as dietary panaceas.
Certainly, as a man of his times, D.D. Palmer’s first thoughts about his new approach to treating his patients’ problems, by “using the spinous and transverse processes to wrack the vertebrae back into place,” tended toward the idea that he had discovered the one cure, the panacea for all human suffering. And this would have been a reasonable hope to entertain, considering the types of responses D.D. started to see in his patients; hearing “restored” by one adjustment, a heart condition “cured” by another. It would be easy to imagine, and might seem almost inevitable, that D.D. would take chiropractic all the way down that path of reasoning and come up with the one adjustment that was specific for each and every disease in need of curing, for each and every pain and ache that a patient might present with.
But it was at this point that D.D. Palmer actually had an even bigger epiphany than his discovery of the amazing power of the chiropractic adjustment itself! He simply realized that it was not the adjustment that held the power to cure; rather, it was the patient’s own body that possessed the capacity to heal. This was the true insight that provided the foundation for chiropractic to develop into what it is today. This was D.D. Palmer’s true flash of genius—to combine a healthy sense of awe at the sheer power and wisdom of nature and the personal humility necessary to acknowledge the limitations of his own understanding of that power into a profound recognition of the true source of healing and health that transcended his own desire to be “the healer.”
What a paradigm shift in thinking this must have been for a man such as D.D. Palmer! Remember that he started out as a hugely successful magnetic healer, treating patients based on the belief that it was his own personal “animal magnetism,” flowing from his hands through the patient’s body, that was doing the healing. D.D. pursued the power of the adjustment to unleash the greater power of the patient’s own inborn wisdom (innate intelligence).
D.D. laid the conceptual groundwork necessary to shift our thinking from the question of whether chiropractic adjustments were the cure for everything or not (and if not, what conditions could chiropractic adjustments cure), to an understanding that chiropractic adjustments weren’t then, and aren’t now, a “cure” for anything! He began truly to appreciate that it was the body that “cured” itself. To distinguish and clarify this insight, he preferred to say that it was the body’s innate intelligence that was the “healer,” from the first meaning of the term “cure” (cure, v.t.; 1. to heal; to restore to health; to make well.2), rather than that chiropractic was a “cure,” in reference to the second meaning of the term (cure, v.t.; 2. to get rid of or provide a remedy for (an ailment, evil, etc.3) This even provided the ultimate basis for establishing chiropractic as a separate and distinct profession from medicine. Chiropractic had to be a new profession, not because D.D. had discovered a new cure for the same old ailments and diseases, but because he had discovered a whole new approach to the question of how to help people heal themselves—by adjusting their subluxations to allow the body to better express its own innate intelligence, which even then was also known as "vis medicatrix naturae", the healing power of nature.
Chiropractic shifted paradigms, from curing conditions to facilitating the expression of the body’s own self-healing power, over a century ago. But has our society been able to catch up with this new approach yet? Consider one of the most oft-quoted sayings of B.J. Palmer, “Chiropractic gets sick people well … .” Although B.J. Palmer spent his entire professional life making the argument that it was the body’s own innate intelligence that can get “sick people well,” and all the chiropractor can and should do to help is to adjust the vertebral subluxation to remove the nerve interference
A chiropractor can’t heal anyone’s body but his/her own, and chiropractic care is not a “cure” for anything, be it a hangnail or headache.The body itself has an unlimited capacity to create, maintain and restore its own natural, normal function (health), that vertebral subluxations can interfere with the expression of this inborn capacity, that chiropractic adjustments can help reduce or eliminate vertebral subluxations, and that without vertebral subluxations, any person, at any age, and in any condition of health, is better able to express the capacity to create, maintain and restore his/her own natural, normal function in any and all areas of life.