“Why Can’t You Guys Just Get Along?” I hear this comment from people all the time. They try to see why the good done by medicine and the good done by chiropractic can’t be married into something unified or at least cordial. It’s a great question. Understandably, it is often asked from an exhausted sense of frustration. When two well-educated, competent, and trustworthy advisers (your doctors) make reasoned and logical suggestions that are in direct opposition, it is natural to experience confusion while trying to sort out the solution that is best for you. The problem is not your advisers or their suggestions; the problem is perspective.
There are two competing perspectives in the healthcare landscape today. The reigning champion, modern medicine with its focus on interventions intended to treat the effects of declining health and the next largest discipline, chiropractic, with its traditional focus on allowing the normal and natural processes of the body to be expressed without interference. It’s a simple case of intervention (outside-in) vs. facilitation (inside-out).
Doctors on both sides genuinely want to maximize quality of life in their patients within the scope of their methods. So even though their approaches are diametrically opposed, the goal is the same: to kindly and professionally help people. There are characteristics of each approach that define their effectiveness. In the end, it comes down to individuals making the decision to utilize each of these approaches when they will confer the most benefit with the least risk. It’s a big job, and to do it well will require an understanding of your priorities and where you put your trust.
In the middle of the last century, the definitive medical prescription for urgent, but non-emergency care was, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” It was a wait and see approach with a little bit of “doing” to help make the waiting seem less like waiting. The aspirin was included almost as a placebo because it was cheap, commonly found in medicine cabinets, and seemed relatively harmless compared to other options. Thus, people would take the “magic” aspirin, and a large portion of them would be feeling much better by dawn. Was it the aspirin? Or was the doctor relying on something much more powerful, giving it the time and the peace it needed to work?
Now, we have a pill for every ill. Prime time TV ads seem limited to cars and medicine and an occasional furniture offering. You can browse your local drug store for the cold medicine tailored for your symptoms and just your symptoms. How very me-centered. Every condition or flavor of inconvenience, seemingly, has a medicine to resolve it. Ask your doctor if self-medicating is right for you. Perhaps he or she will remind you that a fearful or reactionary act is likely to result in an over-response. This would be reflected in the fact that 5% of the world population living in the US consumes more than 50% of the world’s drugs and ranks below nearly 40 other countries in health measures.
Through the same time, the guiding principles of chiropractic have urged people to rely on their innate ability to heal. The purpose and focus of chiropractic methods have always been to facilitate the natural healing potential of the body, to address the cause of disharmony and simply put, to re-establish integrity within the body.
Far from “doing nothing”, this approach demands a more solid understanding of the nature of the body. Reactionary or fearful responses to symptoms must fall away leaving rational, measured responses. In order to truly facilitate healing in the body, we must learn to understand the language of our body.
Each of us is unique. I submit to you that no one truly feels everything the same as you do. We all feel love and jealousy, heart-break and triumph. But we assimilate these through a unique nuance of structure and the filters of emotion and perspective. If individuals have differing tolerances to pain or to tickling, is it so illogical to assume that each of us has a unique sensory experience of and through our own bodies? We benefit when we listen to and learn to heed those en vivo whispers, avoiding their towering surge into the roar of debilitation we so commonly call sickness.
Fearful responses to symptoms commonly include premature and indiscriminate toxic intervention, something, anything to “make it go away”. If you need to pass through a doorway each day, and each day you bump your head because the door is too short, does it make more sense to address the pain of the bump or the cause of the collision? Yet, you know people, perhaps yourself, who have a similar decision to make and instead choose to dull the pain. Or better yet, they address the pain through a prophylactic or therapeutic approach so it doesn’t hurt when they bump their head.
Chiropractic is not anti-drug so much as we understand that drugs are toxic, and that toxins do not facilitate healing. Instead they very often hamper the healing process. In rare, emergency situations, they can be instrumental in maintaining the vital life functions, providing precious time to our healing processes, but it is our own innate healing ability which must eventually take over.
When we come to the point of having to choose an approach without preparation, the decision has already been made. Reacting will win over responding almost every time. Even if people blindly follow my good advice and get exactly the result they want, it’s still a reaction, not a measured response. Only by diligently investigating the options and educating yourself will you be able to make a choice based on your short-term and long-term priorities. It is only by purposeful preparation that you can change your perspective.
Trust is another facet. We think of ourselves as surrounded by technology. We trust our cars to function and not leave us stranded. We trust our cell-phones to reconnect us in the rare instance our car should fail. We trust our banks to track, transition and turn over our money as we direct, all with nearly impeccable reliability. But cars and cellphones and banks, on occasion, do fail to work as intended. We go back to trusting them because their track record is so reliable.
If we used the same criteria with regards to the animated vehicle we call our body, how much trust would it earn? We expect 85,000 heartbeats every day, a constant, yet responsive body temperature, a formidable immune system, a digestive system that will handle any and every random offering, high-definition sensory access in real-time and the benefit of all of it being operated and maintained automatically. Can you put your trust in that? After all, the failure rate for the animating force of our body is precise and predictable. Only one failure ever.