Somewhere in the course of your education you learned of seemingly incongruous concepts cloaked in uncommonly used terminology such as tone or innate; terms whose informational base was quite limited. The first instinct of the educated mind was to reject these as unsubstantiated and archaic relics; then came the first touch, the first sensory communication with your patients, and you knew that terms such as homeostasis, muscle tension, strength, laboratory values, and the like were inadequate to describe the physical makeup of your patient. The more you allowed yourself to extend sensory abilities to gather information, the closer you came to sensing that there was much more to this body human than will ever be written in scientific journals.
A comparison comes to mind of the astronaut and the scuba diver. The astronaut views the planet as a whole, a statistical unattached view of continents and oceans. While there is no doubt that his view is exceptional and his information-gathering abilities are prodigious, there is an obvious chasm that separates him from that which he studies. In contrast, the scuba diver is intimately in contact with the planet and so views the planet from within. The physician whose view is solely through the eyes of science is much like the astronaut -- statistical, unattached, and objective -- to the point of blinding him to the presenting intricacies. The physician who accepts only the sensory data from the patient is much like the scuba diver -- empirical, intimate, and subjective -- to the point of obscuring statistical patterns. Neither the astronaut nor the scuba diver have attained the optimum view until their views are integrated.
The integration of the chiropractor comes after the educated mind is formatted with the existing scientific (objective) information. Next comes practical experience with innate intelligence which validates that which is known, or requires further study for future verification.
In the example above, the astronaut has the option of rejecting any phenomenon that is beyond his statistical viewpoint. This would be similar to selecting the purely scientific route of learning. In this event he might suspect the liquidity of the oceans below but will never scientifically recognize the sense of being in the water and thus, how to swim.
He uses his body as a tool only after the environmental information is filtered by a machine. Consequently, the scientific astronaut never completely senses his environment.
This lack, of course, is self-imposed since the human body is well-suited for collecting sensory data from the environment, which includes the bodies of patients.
To the educated mind we present a simple chiropractic equation to represent that infinitely complex gathering of information via innate intelligence:
Normal tone -- health; abnormal tone -- disease.
Innate knowledge cannot come from books because there are no words to adequately describe it. It goes beyond the boundaries of the metaphor we call language. It is not spiritualism, it is not a chiropractic technique, and it will never be fully scientific. It is not a cure-all.
To use innate intelligence in your practice you must trust the information your body gives you. The educated mind must not intrude into this part of your examination of the patient. Use your body as a tool. This means to use palpation, vision, and hearing to gather information. This is the most reliable data your examination will reveal.
Your examination must also include proper differential diagnosis, but the purpose of this step is not to provide a basis for care. Care is based upon innate. Care based upon innate leads to improved wellness by assisting the body in its adaptive response to the environment. When an adaptive response leads to morbidity or mortality, patients must be informed and left to choose a path consistent with their beliefs.
In short, to use innate intelligence, the chiropractor uses the body as a sensory tool and then reviews the result using the knowledge stored in the educated mind; then a course of action is selected. The best adjustment is formulated in the educated mind, and delivered with the sensory guidance of innate intelligence. Other supportive measures such as nutritional supplementation, physiotherapy, behavior modification, casts and supports, and rest are essential to the healing process; only a fool would ignore them.
For example, you find that a patient's innate intelligence has reacted by making a spinal segment and its autonomic distribution hypertonic. You feel also an overall tension throughout the spine that is atypical. Since every atypical patient must be investigated as to the cause, you order a lab test. In this particular case you find the patient is diabetic, confirming your suspicion. Now the patient's dry skin, thinning hair, fatigue, and headaches start to form an educated pattern that can be classified within your experience. This directs you to adjust the diabetic, yet it also indicates that the entire digestive system is hypertonic and needs better nourishment, that the tissue is dehydrated and poor metabolism is coupled with the patient's inactivity. You teach and coach the patient to begin a diet and exercise program to support the efforts of innate intelligence and you monitor their progress with your own innate sensory skills and verify your findings with laboratory and physical tests.
To simply adjust the patient and expect a medical doctor to take care of the rest is irresponsible and borders on abandonment. On the other hand, certain persons are beyond the ability of innate to adapt.
For the chiropractor, using innate intelligence means caring for patients, not their spinal subluxations. It means employing known public health measures such as diet and exercise to prevent and treat cardiovascular illness; ecological protection to prevent toxicity; nutritional supplementation to prevent or treat deficiency or toxicity; counseling to prevent or treat behavioral problems such as drug abuse; and spinal adjustment to prevent or treat stress overload. Certainly there are more areas within the health care arena where chiropractors can apply their specialty.
A Chiropractor's Responsibility
A chiropractor who practices strictly within the scientific medical paradigm is basically a physical therapist. A chiropractor who practices completely outside of science is a faith healer. A chiropractor who bases care upon science with a smattering of sensory input of innate intelligence underestimates innate. To build from here requires experience. Chiropractors who have that experience need to be allowed to learn from it and share it with others. Chiropractors and their families should rely upon other chiropractors for primary health care beyond spinal adjusting. When was the last time you had a chiropractor give a complete physical?
Chiropractic organizations should shift their focus more upon the human needs of the profession and the patients than the political and financial needs of practice management. Policies governing the care of diabetics, hypertensives, public health measures, hospice care, childbirth, and other health issues should dominate our professional agenda. Instead it is Medicare, workers' compensation, ERISA, overutilization, and other issues that are as far away from the mission set forth in the chiropractic oath as medicine could place us.
Seriously ill chiropractors and their families should never be relegated to medically dominated care. Yet, our professional insurance backed by the American Chiropractic Association (ACA) or the International Chiropractors Association (ICA) denies malpractice coverage for chiropractic care during normal childbirth, care of the newborn, and would shudder at care of the severely ill. This is a serious shortcoming and the sad truth is that we have done this to ourselves. We cannot blame the American Medical Association (AMA), the ACA, the ICA, the Federation of Straight Chiropractic Organization (FSCO), or the United States, because chiropractors have done this voluntarily, without a whimper. Great men like Dr. Sid Williams have aligned themselves with limited practice rights attempting to deny chiropractors even the title of physician. All I can say is we don't deserve to be called doctors if we practice within the narrow guidelines our forebearers have left us. They have taken the great chiropractic physician and relegated him to be a bonesetter. What, I ask, are they doing when their families are truly sick in the state of Washington? They have no diagnostic privileges and so must rely upon medicine. How pitiful.
These type of dead-end policies may be politically safe, but they cut at the very roots of our profession. They represent cowardice, avarice, and a lack of understanding of the big idea. B.J Palmer may have promoted chiropractic, but did not understand it. He looked within science for direction of how and when to adjust and found the HIO specific. What a different profession we would be today if he would have looked and saw innate intelligence as his father tried to tell him. But he got this grand idea that he could unequivocally prove chiropractic to the world and that was his biggest mistake. Innate cannot be measured on a neurocalimeter.
Only by basing chiropractic care upon the sensory input of innate intelligence and then verifying that which can be quantified with scientific information stored in the educated mind can a chiropractor practice the original art, science, and philosophy of D.D. Palmer -- next to Innate.
Willard Bertrand, D.C.
Union, Oregon
Many relevant diagnostic signs are not performed deliberately by the examiner or by the patient at the examiner’s direction. They are observed as the patient reacts to their condition. Fortin’s finger sign, Minor’s sign, and Vanzetti’s sign are three examples of this principle.
Spearheaded by burgeoning scientific and clinical research literature, psychedelics have reached a level of media coverage and popular interest that has not been seen for over half a century. By “psychedelics,” we are referring to the unique class of substances that includes psilocybin (the active compound found in so-called “magic mushrooms”), LSD, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, and mescaline – each of which occurs in the natural world (except for LSD, which is a semi-synthetic compound).
While working at the Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque, N.M., one of the primary care physicians stated that imaging every patient prior to receiving chiropractic was not medically necessary. It was at that point I reconsidered the need for the imaging of every patient to avoid malpractice.
