Alternative Medicine

 

Here’s a term that we are hearing quite a bit of lately.  The President actually formed a commission to study alternative medicine.  That has happened because of its popularity.  More people visit the alternatives every year than they do the allopaths (medical doctors, M.D.s).  Alternative medicine is a large umbrella that covers just about everything that is not part of orthodox medicine (drug and surgery) so you can see it is a pretty broad area.  It covers such therapies as acupuncture, naturopathy, and nutritional therapy to name a few.  Unfortunately chiropractic has been lumped in there with these therapies.  When you understand chiropractic, you realize clearly that it is not alternative medicine.  An alternative is a different way of reaching the same objective.  Alternate Route 1 is a different road which eventually joins up with Business Route 1.  Tylenol is alternative medicine, an alternative to aspirin.  Aleve is an alternative to both of these.  All have the same objective, treating a symptom.  Acupuncture is an alternative to drugs or surgery as is naturopathy.  They are all attempting to accomplish the same objective, treating a disease, a condition or the symptoms of one.  Like Tylenol, Aleve and aspirin, different therapies work better for different people and for the same people under different circumstances.  Everyone is different, that is why there is a market for all these alternatives in the treatment of disease.

So, what makes chiropractic not truly an alternative to medicine?  It’s the objective.  The objective of chiropractic is not to treat or to cure any disease.  It is to allow the body’s own inborn healing ability to be expressed more fully by removing interference in the nerve system due to vertebral subluxation.  But even that is a small part of chiropractic.  This same innate healing ability is the intelligent activity that normalizes body chemistry, allows one to think, sleep, work and generally function at a higher level.  That is important to people whether they have a disease or not, even when they feel good.

When it comes down to it, chiropractic is not an alternative to anything.  No one else corrects vertebral subluxations, at least not intentionally as their objective. The only real alternative to chiropractic is the same alternative to eating…not doing it!  Neither of which is beneficial to your life or health.

It is a shame that chiropractic has been lumped in the category of alternative medicine.  The fact that 37% of people who use alternatives are going to a chiropractor helps to give these therapies some credibility by having chiropractic associated with them.  But it also gives people an incorrect perception of chiropractic, that it is for the treatment of some condition.  And in doing that, it causes all the people who have no diseases as well as people who are satisfied with medicine or one of its alternatives to miss out on the great benefit that chiropractic has to offer to the entire population.  Get your spine checked regularly regardless of what else you do. The alternative is a dead end.

The objective of chiropractic is not to treat  cure any disease. It is to allow the body’s own inborn healing ability to be expressed more fully by removing interference in the nerve system due to vertebral subluxation.