The History of Chiropractic

Chiropractic is a health care profession that emphasizes diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mechanical disorders of the musculoskeletal system, especially the spine, under the hypothesis that these disorders affect general health via the nervous system. Chiropractic is generally considered to be complementary and alternative medicine, a characterization many chiropractors reject. Chiropractic treatment focuses on manual therapy including spinal manipulation and other joint and soft tissue manipulation, and includes exercises and health and lifestyle counseling. Traditionally, it assumes that a vertebral subluxation or spinal joint dysfunction can interfere with the body's function and its innate ability to heal itself.

D.D. Palmer founded chiropractic in the 1890s and his son B.J. Palmer helped to expand it in the early 20th century. It has two main groups: "straights", now the minority, emphasize vitalism, innate intelligence and spinal adjustments, and consider subluxations to be the leading cause of all disease; "mixers" are more open to mainstream and alternative medical techniques such as exercise, massage, nutritional supplements, and acupuncture. Chiropractic is well established in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Personally I have been recognized as a "mixer", because I believe in combining chiropractic techniques with acpoint therpy can give patients the optimal relieve through their healing.

For most of its existence, chiropractic has battled with mainstream medicine, sustained by ideas such as subluxation. that are not based on solid science. Vaccination remains controversial among chiropractors. The American Medical Association called chiropractic an "unscientific cult", and boycotted it until losing a 1987 antitrust case. Chiropractic has had a strong political base and sustained demand for services; in recent decades, it has gained more legitimacy and greater acceptance among medical physicians and health plans, and evidence-based medicine has been used to review research studies and generate practice guidelines. Since every generation of my family are either medical doctors or Christian missionary, it fluences me in looking at chiropractic from more scientific point of view. In my belief, medication and sugery are the options in some cases that chiropractic cannot cover even though they are side effect towards those therapies. I believe that exercises and healthy life style recommandation to my patients are the real solution towards a lot of cases in addition to chiropractic therapies. Consistant of treatments are needed, so that the patients' complaints will not become chronic problem later on in their lives.