The Truth About Chiropractic: A Closer Look At A Misunderstood Philosophy

I am a chiropractor. When I tell people what I do for a living, the most frequent response is that the person I’m speaking to grabs his back and says, “Oh, Doc, I need ya!” As a society, we misunderstand chiropractic. But with your permission, I would like to tell you the truth about it, and what a true gift it is.

A great philosopher named Hippocrates once stated, “We are either growing or dying.” Not to be outdone, Confucius stated, “Our lives are like that of an egg, we are either growing or decaying.” Every day, our environment bombards us with chemical, physical and mental stressors. It is the job of our nerve system to detect these stressors, interpret them, and either adapt to them and continue our growth, or shrink from them and stop growing while in a survival or protective mode.

As the philosophers said, we are both growing and dying each day—but one process will predominate over the other. One is an upward spiral of growth, leading to fulfillment and ease; the other is a downward spiral of decay, leading to death.

Our Bodies’ Innate Intelligence

Our bodies have an inborn intelligence, often called innate intelligence. This intelligence runs, regulates, heals and grows the body to its fullest potential, allowing us to reach our God-given purpose in life. There are many things you have to accept in order to understand the full breadth of chiropractic: Either we are on this earth due to the grace of a higher consciousness, or we are simply a random assimilation of organic substance that has evolved over many years, making us nothing more than a higher order of mud.

If you have a live person and a dead person side by side, what is the difference? They both have all the same stuff, the same potential for life. In chiropractic understanding, the difference is that the live one possesses an innate intelligence, or life force. Most people think the body is run and regulated by the brain, but let me ask you: What runs the brain? There are those who think genes dictate life, but we know that they turn off and on regularly, even mutating and adapting. So I ask: What turns genes on or off?

For a hundred years, chiropractors have been saying that there is a perfect, inborn intelligence inside us that continually gives 100 percent of the information we need to run, regulate, grow, heal and flourish. Ill health, disease and lack of potential arise only from a lack of expression of this intelligence.

The Expression of Light or Darkness

This lack of expression leads to dis-coordination of the body, or a lack of a body’s ability to comprehend itself in its own environment. That leads to an inability of the body to adapt to outside stressors, which causes a loss of function and a breakdown of tissue—a downward spiral of decay and, ultimately, death.

If we look at the full expression of this innate intelligence as being the fullest expression of life as light, we can look at the lack of this expression—decay or disease—as darkness. How do you remedy darkness? You can study darkness, examine it, qualify it, be aware of it and focus on it. But there’s only one way to remove darkness: Add light.

Chiropractic understands this premise. It doesn’t look to cure disease, address disease or diagnose disease. We understand disease for what it truly is—a lack state, one that arises only in the absence of the fullest expression of life.