You are in the year 1895. Grover Cleveland is president. The Spanish-American War is still three years in the future in which Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders will gain fame. Wilhelm Roentgen is in the process of discovering the x-ray. Tchaikovsky has just written Swan Lake. And you are the proverbial fly on the wall in a small magnetic healer’s office in the mid-west town of Davenport, Iowa. The healer, named Daniel David Palmer is known to his friends simply as D.D. The furnishings are sparse, a desk and lamp, an examination table, a chair, and a copy of the local newspaper to read between patients. There in the room you see D.D. and his patient Harvey Lillard. Harvey is a partially deaf black man, a local janitor by trade. You hear him tell his story of losing his hearing 17 years prior. “I heard a sound in my neck and then my hearing suddenly faded. I could no longer hear the ticking of my watch or the sounds of the street cars outside.” As you watch, D.D., a curious self-taught man, feels around Harvey’s neck to find the source of this sound that Harvey heard, just before he stopped hearing at all. He finds a lump of some sort. You hear him talk under his breath. “If a bone displaced and caused this man’s hearing to fade, then perhaps I can replace that bone and restore it.” You see the thrust of the first chiropractic adjustment. You here the loud crack. Harvey gets up and leaves only to return the next day, and the day after that. On each of those days D.D. goes through the same procedure, makes the same adjustment, and then magic seems to happen. Harvey’s hearing returns. A miracle? For Harvey yes, but for D.D. it is the beginning of an idea that will grow into the second largest primary health care profession in the world. .
A friend of D.D.’s, Reverend Samuel Weed, will go on to coin the name “chiropractic” from the Greek meaning “to do or to make by hand.” But it was D.D. himself who introduced the world to the spinal lesion he called subluxation. And let the confusion begin.
In Dorland’s Medical Dictionary a subluxation is a joint that is out of position, but less than a luxation (or less than a dislocation). So a subluxation is an incomplete dislocation. That fit with the early ideas of D.D. and his students and colleagues, but not with later scientific discoveries. In the 70’s we began to understand that in the vast majority of cases, the chiropractic subluxation was not a bone out of place pressing on a nerve. It was something much more complex. In fact, only in a very few cases is the alignment of the bone important.
In the vast majority of cases the spinal and extraspinal lesions that we chiropractors adjust is a joint or joints that have lost their mobility. They have been damaged by injury, by repetitive trauma, by posture, and by gravity. They are in perfectly good alignment but the damage has resulted in inflammation which has resulted in scar tissue, which has glued and tied up the joints so they can’t do their job any longer. And this leads to three consequences.
1) Pain – When the dysfunction is high enough it hurts, sometimes unbearably. More health care dollars are spent chasing this down than any other medical condition, by far.
2) Degeneration – A joint that has lost its mobility will begin to wear out in just 2 weeks, at the microscopic level. Left unfixed, the cartilage will eventually wear out. This is the single largest cause of disability in the world.
3) Disease – Your entire health is determined by how well your nervous system communicates with all your parts. If you damage this system, parts will begin to break down because they cannot keep up with metabolic demands. Any and every disease can have a spinal cause or partial component.
So perhaps D.D. got the name wrong, but when it comes to the cause of pain, disability, and disease, he was exactly correct. Subluxation is absolutely the single largest cause of pain and disability, and a large component of disease. My profession discusses changing the name all the time, but as incorrect as subluxation is, we just can’t think of a better one. Got any ideas?
A friend of D.D.’s, Reverend Samuel Weed, will go on to coin the name “chiropractic” from the Greek meaning “to do or to make by hand.” But it was D.D. himself who introduced the world to the spinal lesion he called subluxation. And let the confusion begin.
In Dorland’s Medical Dictionary a subluxation is a joint that is out of position, but less than a luxation (or less than a dislocation). So a subluxation is an incomplete dislocation. That fit with the early ideas of D.D. and his students and colleagues, but not with later scientific discoveries. In the 70’s we began to understand that in the vast majority of cases, the chiropractic subluxation was not a bone out of place pressing on a nerve. It was something much more complex. In fact, only in a very few cases is the alignment of the bone important.
In the vast majority of cases the spinal and extraspinal lesions that we chiropractors adjust is a joint or joints that have lost their mobility. They have been damaged by injury, by repetitive trauma, by posture, and by gravity. They are in perfectly good alignment but the damage has resulted in inflammation which has resulted in scar tissue, which has glued and tied up the joints so they can’t do their job any longer. And this leads to three consequences.
1) Pain – When the dysfunction is high enough it hurts, sometimes unbearably. More health care dollars are spent chasing this down than any other medical condition, by far.
2) Degeneration – A joint that has lost its mobility will begin to wear out in just 2 weeks, at the microscopic level. Left unfixed, the cartilage will eventually wear out. This is the single largest cause of disability in the world.
3) Disease – Your entire health is determined by how well your nervous system communicates with all your parts. If you damage this system, parts will begin to break down because they cannot keep up with metabolic demands. Any and every disease can have a spinal cause or partial component.
So perhaps D.D. got the name wrong, but when it comes to the cause of pain, disability, and disease, he was exactly correct. Subluxation is absolutely the single largest cause of pain and disability, and a large component of disease. My profession discusses changing the name all the time, but as incorrect as subluxation is, we just can’t think of a better one. Got any ideas?