I often wonder about trends.
Sometimes they Cartel Health frighten me. Recently I have felt that to be more true than at other times in my life. As I watch the news, read, listen to and view my surroundings, I am concerned that we are tampering with the world's gyroscope. I see growing movements that feel to me as if we are moving further away from our humanity as a culture and more towards dangerous precipices.
In an arena very close to my heart, and within my profession,
I have seen one of these courses unfolding. While following the news within the chiropractic community, I have noticed a movement develop by several state chiropractic associations, including New Mexico and Alabama, to put forth potential legislation allowing chiropractors to prescribe and inject substances with nutritional and pharmaceutical components to their patients. First came over the counter pain relievers (NSADS) like Advil at stronger doses, then B12 injections and other homeopathic injectable substances. And this seems to be a growing trend nationally. My initial reaction is to say that there is no way that at a chiropractor should be offering medications to a patient, even with additional training. The use of vitamins, food supplements and herbal substances is one thing, but to cross over the line into pharmaceutical drugs is another. For me, I have always been proud of the fact that Chiropractic as a profession, for over 115 years, has been the largest drugless health care profession, so why change now?.
Progress, some may say.
Why not be able to offer patients adjustments and a Vicodin? Maybe I am just being stubborn and holding a position that I have become comfortable with for the past 20 years. So when I find myself with a knee jerk response like that, it helps me to step back and take a moment to look at my fears, the ones that are behind that strong reaction. I admit that I am scared that chiropractors that had to rely on their skills as hands on healers will choose to instead use their hands to write prescriptions instead. After all, its easier and its faster. I am concerned about adding financial power and influence to one of the world's largest cartels, the pharmaceutical industry. I worry that the profession will become indistinct and lose powerful independence and perspective, just as happened to the osteopathic profession.
On the flip side, chiropractors would have more
tools to help their patients with relieve pain. There would surely be an infusion of needed dollars into the profession for research donated by companies who profited by the new paradigm. Perhaps the divide between MDs and DCs would grow smaller. However, even as I explore the benefits of such a change, they do not outweigh the potential risks that come with traveling down the road of seeing healing as something that comes from outside the body and can be taken to fix an injury. Healing needs to be expansive and not expensive. I expect that would be the way these things would become.
In the end, we all have to look to our inner compass. Although people say that the planets have shifted, the astrology signs have been altered and true north has changed, we still have to look for it inside ourselves. We must quiet our minds, listen to our hearts and feel it in our guts. Sometimes change is good. In fact, sometimes change can be excellent. I know this personally. Sometimes we have to appreciate that things are the way they are for a good reason. Sometimes we just need to re-connect with their gifts on a deeper level.