Charles,


I like what you're trying to do here and share your desire to see more

cohesion between the science of chiropractic technique and the art. I like

Bill Meeker's quote at the end, too.


When I first got into research back in the early 80's there seemed to be a

lot of animosity between researchers and traditional chiropractors. I teach

in my research class that there was a drive to legitimize chiropractic

through development of the science. The researchers at that time were

generally not trained as chiropractors and were highly skeptical of any

technique that had been around for a while. The best way to legitimize

chiropractic seemed to be to clean out all the mumbo-jumbo and pretty much

reject all of the traditional techniques. (There's a kind of autism, where,

if a group is stigmatized from the outside, they will try to identify those

members of the group that bring on the most criticism, and kick them out of

their group. "If thine own eye causes thee to sin, pluck it out.")


I hope we've gotten over that attitude, but you still see it occasionally. I

don't know if there's any way to get around the competitive aspect of

research when you apply it to a technique.


Perhaps one way is to change our thinking about the role of research in

technique development. If we had started from ground zero, using research to

develop a technique, then each step of the method would be validated as it

was developed. (Consider Meeker's statement) Instead, now fully developed

techniques are evaluated as a whole. There are two ways to do that

evaluation, you can split out the component concepts and look at each one

separately, or you can just take the technique for what it is, and evaluate

its effectiveness when applied. Personally, I think the latter approach is

probably better. We'd know how effective a given technique was at achieving

its aims. Then we could apply a research method to look at how the elements

of the technique work together to achieve that goal. The focus is not really

on 'proving' the technique, but IMproving it.

Keep it rolling,

Ed Owens, DC

Sherman College of Chiropractic