CAN TWO WALK TOGETHER UNLESS THEY BE AGREED? (Amos 3:3)
The discussion of an ICA and ACA merger has raised some serious concerns among many members of the ICA about the future of that organization. While many in the straight movement are watching the situation with distant curiosity, the entire issue raises questions of importance to us. Merger did not happen overnight. It began many years ago with the two organizations working together on issues of mutual concern. It then progressed to other common interests like the accrediting agency and AMA lawsuit. In not too long a time, it became a viable option to a significant number of the membership to merge. The question arises as to whether this possibility is remote with regard to the straight movement. It would seem as if the ICA is an historical example, it is not. At the recent FSCO conference in Chicago a member of the FSCO Board of Directors pointed to the success of an organization bringing together mixers and straights. He said "In our state group...we specifically decided not to work for straight bills or mixer bills. We work for chiropractic bills...." That attitude is a little frightening to some people. Perhaps we need to step back and look closely at our objectives. The mixer objective is the treatment of disease. The means or technique for accomplishing that objective may vary from adjustment by hand only to drugs and surgery. But the objective is the same. The straight objective is different-the correction of vertebral subluxation to allow the innate intelligence of the body to better express itself. With that difference pray tell what can we work together on? In reality, there are no "straight bills, mixer bills, or chiropractic bills." There is only legislation which enhances the identity of straight chiropractic and works against the mixer identity and vice versa. We have no more in common with the mixer chiropractor than we do with the medical profession. There is no legislation, public relations program, or activity that is mutually beneficial to both. I am not saying we need to be at odds with the mixer but we also need to realize we cannot work with them and it would not be ethical for us to use them to foster our own objective. It has been suggested that the straights in Arizona are doing that very thing (DC-Jan. issue). Historically, the mixers have done that to the straights over the years (formation of ACA by merging the UCA and NCA to name one, the approval of CCE and the demise of the ACC to name another). But their lack of ethics does not justify our doing it. Nobody likes fighting and it should stop but working together is not the answer. Some years ago an effort by well meaning straights to have insurance inclusion was undertaken with the help of the mixers. It was supposedly "chiropractic legislation" not straight or mixer. Yet straights were already as busy as could be seeing as many patients as they wanted to and providing the care for every person "regardless of ability to pay." Fifteen years later this so-called non-straight or mixing legislation has appeared to benefit only mixing chiropractic. The lure of insurance dollars has enticed straights into mixing and enabled mixers who would have never survived in practice to be successful financially. So much for "chiropractic legislation." The straight movement is in a better position than it has been in many years. It is time for us to move ahead with our objectives. It is time for us to be gracious and friendly toward the mixer chiropractor but we must realize that we are heading in two separate directions. There is no common ground when you are moving in different directions only greater distance between you. We cannot afford at this time to expend the effort, energy, time, or money to work toward common goals with the mixers, simply because there are none. Our direction for chiropractic is based on truth and principle. Their direction is based upon medical acceptance at the expense of that principle. Time and time again we naive, loving, trusting chiropractors have believed that despite our different objectives we could work together. Every time we have come out the worse for it. Any attempts whether on a state, local, or national level to work with the mixers can only meet with the same fate and destroy the great strides we have made in the last five years.
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
The question of terminology, semantics, and definitions constantly creates discussion, dissension, and division within our profession. (How's that for alliteration?) An article recently appeared in a chiropractic publication in response to a "guest editorial" by a student decrying the straights' preoccupation with semantics. I will not waste time and space duplicating the editor's response, which was quite good, but address a few other points in the guest editorial by quoting a nineteenth century British Historian Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle's quote "Be not a slave of words" set the theme of the editorial. This same Carlyle once said, concerning the American War Between the States, "There they are cutting each other's throats, because one half of them prefer hiring their servants for life, and the other by the hour." I would like to have seen Mr. Carlyle explain to a black man that the difference between slave and servant is only a matter of semantics! Words are important. Every one of us practices chiropractic by a law which defines in words what we do. I am forever amazed how the same people who say we are quibbling over words such as diagnosis and analysis, treatment and adjustment, misalignment and subluxation can be so interested in changing the wording of our state laws. We all realize that wording is important. The writer says that we practice a wide spectrum of chiropractic and he is "suspicious of anyone who tries to reduce that spectrum to black and white." Even if we agree that there are areas of gray, we must agree that they are not white and they are not black. If you choose to practice in the gray that does not ignore the existence of other areas. We may not agree where the shading is no longer black or no longer white but we all recognize there is a point. In our profession almost everyone agrees that administrating drugs and surgery are not chiropractic. Even the most ardent mixers agree that we should not do those things. So they are drawing lines of demarcation. Everyone draws lines. Words just allow us to more clearly draw those lines. The more discriminating the words, the more clear the lines. I believe it was Ayn Rand who said that "principled people use words to clarify and unprincipled people use them to confuse." It seems that those who are attacking or belittling the efforts of those who would try to use words to clarify are suspect in their motives. One final principle of language. A word's meaning is determined by its usage. If we are ever to have an impact upon society, to get them to understand what chiropractic is (and I believe every chiropractor, whatever he thinks it is, would want that) then we must be concerned with how we use words and what words we use. We may not be slaves to words but we are what we think and we think with words. If we think in medical terminology then our actions will follow our thinking. That will be destructive to our future.
