Should Chiropractic Be Your Last Option Or Your First Choice?
“I’ve tried everything else, why not try Chiropractic?”
Many new patients come to me after they have exhausted every other medical option. Weeks, months or even years will go by on the medical merry-go-round of opinions, treatments and surgeries without significant improvements. As a last-ditch effort, they decide to try Chiropractic. To their surprise, the health condition once deemed “a lost cause” starts to improve while under care. I hear it all the time, phrases such as “If I only knew sooner…” or “Why didn’t I come here first?”
Why do people try Chiropractic after they’ve tried everything else? I can only provide a few educated guesses...
One reason might be due to the design of the current healthcare system. The system has decided to focus more on a model of “sick care” rather than healthcare. And that “sick care” model is called pathogenesis.
Pathogenesis means “that which gives birth to disease.” Pathogenesis is the foundational perspective for the conventional medical model. For example, when you are sick, medicine talks about the pathology of disease X, Y or Z. Or that a pathogen (germ agent) caused a disease. There are specialists within medicine, called pathologists, who study the process of disease. The concept of disease is so ingrained in medicine, that it is also known as allopathy.
Pathogenesis emphasizes the treatment of symptoms and sickness. Treatment aims to try and regulate and control the patient’s condition. It does this by isolating the condition and ignoring other aspects of the patient’s health profile. Treatment plans mainly involve trying to suppress symptoms.
For example, let’s say you go to your primary care physician for migraine headaches. Since healthcare in America focuses on disease rather than health, the majority of people enter the system through the medical pathogenic model.
Following this protocol, a medical doctor will likely try and isolate the symptoms of the migraine through a process of diagnosis. Next, they will prescribe a medicine to treat it. If you simply Google “medical treatment of migraine headaches” the initial result states “migraines can be treated with a variety of medications, including…”
And it is with this “variety of medications” that a medical doctor will try and find the right one for the right type of migraine to help alleviate the right symptoms.
This approach to treating the symptoms though doesn't focus on the cause or reasons why someone gets migraines in the first place. With this approach, you will chase the effects of a cause. Maintaining the status quo on this pathogenic train, Chiropractic will rarely present itself to you as another route. You only search for a different path when you reach a dead end or run out of track.
That other route is where you will find Chiropractic. That is because Chiropractic follows more of what is called a salutogenic model. It is the inverse of pathogenesis.
Salutogenesis is a term that first showed up in Dr. Aaron Antonovsky’s 1979 book Health, Stress, and Coping: New Perspectives on Mental and Physical Well-Being. Salutogenesis means “that which gives birth to health.” The salutogenesis theory developed from 20 years of studying how people managed stress and how it effected their overall health outcomes.
His observations noted that even though stress is unavoidable, how an individual manages stress is unique to the person. The better a person manages and resists stress, the healthier the individual is. Dr. Antonovsky began to criticize modern medicine’s traditional concepts of health and the origin of illness. This caused him to reject a pathogenic or “disease-based” model of medicine. Once he realized that health could be seen through a different lens, a different paradigm was warranted.
While salutogenesis is a fairly new term, its application is not. Chiropractic predates salutogenesis as a term but has always embraced the “health first” mentality. Quoting Dr. Lyle Sherman, clinical director at The B.J. Palmer Research Clinic: “All down through the ages, man has been looking for the cause of disease. Have you stopped to think that maybe there is no cause for disease; that perhaps what we are looking for or should look for is the cause of health...because we know that disease is not due to the presence of something but rather the absence of something.”
There is nothing wrong with using the medical model of pathogenesis, it is just not utilized by Chiropractic. And since Chiropractic doesn’t use the pathogenic model, it is not often used as an entry into the healthcare system.
But what if you utilize Chiropractic sooner rather than later? Could there be any benefit of seeing a Chiropractor first? The research says ‘yes.’
In 2007, the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapy published a 7-year study that showed that patients whose primary doctor was a Chiropractor experienced 60% fewer hospital admissions, 59% fewer days in the hospital, 62% fewer outpatient surgeries and 85% less in pharmaceutical cost.
In a country where only about 10% of the population sees a Chiropractor, imagine if the statistics from the above study were on a larger scale. What would healthcare look like in America if more people saw a Chiropractor first or at least in conjunction with their medical doctor?
Of the developed countries, the United States is one of the sickest. For example, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality and one of the highest suicide rates. The United States also has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the average of other developed countries.
In a country whose health seems to be degrading, a paradigm shift is merited. Chiropractic needs to be a frontline member of that shift. We need to focus more on adjusting causes instead of treating effects.
With that being said, Chiropractic doesn’t aim to usurp medicine. It shouldn’t be looked at as a “cure-all” as well. Chiropractic wants to help balance the scales between salutogenesis and pathogenesis. They might be on opposite sides of the scale but the main pivot point and the attainable goal needs to be health.
What if my medical doctor doesn’t recommend or refer me to a Chiropractor?
Chiropractors are Portal of Entry doctors. This means you can see a Chiropractor without any preauthorization or referral from another healthcare professional. Chiropractors are educated and trained to refer out as necessary if they encounter a problem that they determine is outside their scope of practice or requires some other type of intervention. You don’t need “the OK” from a medical doctor to seek out Chiropractic care.
Chiropractic is not an alternative option to medicine nor is medicine an alternative option to Chiropractic. They are separate and distinct professions that provide separate and distinct services. That doesn’t mean you need to choose one or the other. What you should and need to choose is health. Chiropractic wants to be a part of that choice.
- Jarek Esarco, DC, CACCP
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