TNR Happenings August 17, 2020

After being at it for a few years, you gain a perspective you didn’t have when you were a student or newly graduated doc. It’s a vantage point or wisdom that applies to seeing things differently from above the battlefield instead of being consumed by the collective consciousness of your time. A newly graduated doctor may think to themselves that we are all the same: unified in our vision, abilities, and willingness to be in service to others.  This means we have the same amount of humanitarian spirit, we get similar clinical results, and we earn equal pay based on our sameness. REALLY? It certainly seems so at graduation. But over the years we realize there is a Grand Canyon of difference between philosophies, ideologies, commitment levels, ability levels, ambition levels, and the amount of conformity you’re willing to accept to receive a meager paycheck. The bubble of studenthood has been burst: you’ve grown up to realize it’s not all about technique.

I was flipping through various Chiropractic magazines (online and offline) and noticed that there were articles from the irrelevant to the bizarre and impotent, all kneeling down in worship of the current medically driven crisis. An evident common theme in the pages was Chiropractors trying to look like an MD, pretending to be an MD, and completely giving up any semblance of believing in anything other than something made up in a lab. Innate Intelligence or anything not yet proven by science was nowhere to be found. One article raved about a student clinician who actually showed up at the clinic during the pandemic to help patients, while the rest of his classmates hid out in their apartments, concerned only about their own well being. He gushes and exclaims how the experience taught him leadership skills and a lot about running a clinic. Dr. X recently graduated and has taken those lessons with him as he begins his career as an associate. What happened to the leadership skills and running a clinic? Where would those be applied as an associate? What level is your depth of belief in Chiropractic or even in yourself?

 I also saw an ad launching telehealth digital tools to ask questions to patients about how they are feeling and how much pain they are in. Sure sounds like a nurse’s job or an administration duty to me. There were other articles and ads for stem cell injections, imaging of all types (MRI, PET, etc.), research, types of masks to wear, the best instruments for taking non-human touch temperature, limiting patients to only those in acute low back pain, doctors in private practice voluntarily decreasing their practices to observe social distancing, deans of distance learning, partnering with academic hospitals and real doctors, and doing important collaborative work to receive the real goal of lots of federal funding! One snippet was about a Chiropractor who presented at a large virtual gathering and told Chiropractors to be prepared in 2025 to be able to assist with autism and neurological disorders in children. How about now?  Is this akin to waiting for the miracle vaccine? Technology will not answer humanity’s suffering. From war to terrorism, violence, crime, and oppression, technology is opportunistic, business and profit-driven, and gives the illusion of solving something only to find out later it created more problems. Why are all of these strange, different, and confusing activities featured in Chiropractic magazines? Shouldn't they instead be about caring for people who live Chiropractic lives and want the opportunity for a higher quality of life? The same rhetoric was said in 1918, "We will find the cure", then with AIDS, diabetes, PSTD, concussions, homelessness, mental illness, and now in 2020 about the manmade boogieman originally created to be a tool of mass destruction. Doing more of what doesn’t work is not staying in our lane (even though we can get paid for it people are misled about its effectiveness.) Do what we are capable of and prepared to do TODAY!   

When you have low resonation and low awareness, you just don’t give a damn. These magazines seem like good reading when you look at them, especially with all of those nice pictures of Chiropractors at work.  They look like they're doing important academic work, like computer work and research studies; anything except the care and education of lots and lots of people. I didn’t see any articles about alumni seeing hundreds of people each week. I didn’t see any articles about caring for difficult cases instead of referring them out. The word children was conspicuously absent while other more important issues were being discussed. It occurred to me just how radically different you have to be to thrive in a world that is always on the lookout for simple solutions to complex problems. They want someone to tell them how to think and how to behave just like Mommy and Daddy used to.

Since when is it not exciting enough to have the ability to help people of all ages with benign and crippling conditions of all types? To introduce people to true wellness? To be paid inside or outside any limiting, biased, discriminatory disease insurance? The whole world can think of you as non-essential, a joke or back cracker, but it’s truly only what you think of yourself that matters. Are you a world-class, once-in-a-lifetime doctor who accepts people not in the hope to see what happens, but with an absolute conviction that health is everybody’s birthright, no exceptions? No governments, institutions, drug companies, or insurance companies can corner health, no matter how many trillions of dollars have been made doing just that. Remember that. One of the few remaining freedoms left to people in our society is the ability to seek help for health-related issues.  

Vagal Stimulation is here!