Chiropractic Legacy

Birthdays come and birthdays go. Some hold more significance than others. Today I am 47 and it feels like one of those big ones.

Seven years ago on this day, I taught a 12-hour keynote at the K.R. Jones Philosophy Symposium. I hired a videographer and turned it into an 8-hour online program for chiropractors to earn their Continuing Education credits. Those talks summed up a new approach I developed to understand the chiropractic profession from eight parallel perspectives. It was the start of my online education program for chiropractors.

Today I launch TIC 2.0. I am calling it that because this new website is totally redesigned. I have integrated most of my other sites and developed dozens of new pages. I’ve been working on the launch of this updated site for several months it just happens to be ready today. Welcome to The Institute Chiropractic!

Also today we go live with the first TIC Masterclass. This is a sixteen-week online program to teach chiropractors a core set of fundamental facts about the history of ideas in chiropractic. The pioneer class consists of more than 50 chiropractors from Australia. The course will be amazing.

The Institute Chiropractic may achieve our next goal of 200 members this week. (Maybe today!)

So, it feels like a big birthday. Especially when we think in terms of chiropractic history.

TIC History

Last year I started posting a series of infographics on Facebook called This Day in TIC History. Each TIC History covers a different fact gleaned from my archives of historical data. Many of the histories celebrate pivotal events including birthdays and memorial days to chiropractors who shaped the profession. The plan was to develop a simple format to share the fascinating moments from chiropractic’s past.

The TIC History gallery is now live. New TIC Histories will be posted as time allows. These are great introductions to chiropractic.

Some Background

I could have done anything with my life. So many chiropractors gave so much to me and my family. I chose to become a chiropractor so that I could give back.

I went to chiropractic college soon after I completed a Bachelors degree in history and a Masters degree in philosophy. I realized that my academic skills could be used to help the profession. That was after I fell in love with the history of ideas in chiropractic.

I had to teach myself the history of ideas in chiropractic because there is no systematic way to learn it. The curriculum in most colleges follows a standard model. A limited view of the history of ideas is taught based on each school’s perspective and guided by what students will need to know on National Board exams. The irony is the Board questions are crafted by the faculty at the schools. This circular approach to teaching a profession is short-sighted.

And so I read everything I could get my hands on for about twenty years.

The Crucibles of Teaching and Writing

I graduated in 1999 and immediately started publishing and teaching. I forced myself to continually refine and develop my ideas by submitting papers to peer-review and teaching in the classroom and in post-graduate programs. This allowed me to develop several new approaches to understanding the history of ideas in chiropractic.

First I focused on establishing a context for the development of the profession. Where did the ideas come from in history? How could we use Integral Frameworks to best explore this territory? Most of those approaches were included in that twelve hour class I taught seven years ago.

I came to realize how alone I was in my knowledge of the profession. So few chiropractors have a comprehensive grasp of how we got to where we are today. This is why I developed the Gen/Wave model, which is the central organizing principle of TIC, this site, and the lectures offered for Members and for CE credits.

TIC 2.0

This website is a developing hub. It will continue to evolve as I learn more and as I have time to add content. It is the place to learn and to develop certainty about chiropractic. The pages are introductions to the many ideas taught to TIC Members. Here are a few of the new highlights:

Gens: Since D.D. Palmer’s death in 1913, there have been three full generations of chiropractors (33 years = 1 generation). The first generation (1913-1946) was the foundation of the profession. Every core principle, theory, and practice in today’s profession could be traced to this generation. The second generation (1947-1980) paved the way for integrating the chiropractic paradigm with more current models of neurophysiology and philosophy. The third generation (1981-2014) continues to develop and refine the profession. This generational approach is one way to start getting a grip on the complexity that is chiropractic’s history of ideas.

Waves: The waves of ideas in chiropractic are a more nuanced way to understand and explore the chiropractic theories and practices. Eight distinct waves can be defined based on the publications during each era. Waves are basically defined by the ways in which the literature from one wave references the previous wave. These dates are arbitrary but do provide a powerful way to learn how the profession’s ideas developed.

The new site includes all previous blog posts from the old site (philosophyofchiropractic.com) including some further descriptions of the Gen/Wave model, the TIC VLOG series, as well as critiques of the literature.

One of the highlights of the site is D.D. Palmer Studies. This is a new approach to understanding how the chiropractic paradigm developed by D.D. Palmer more than a hundred years ago, is still impacting the profession today.

A Call for Archives

The Institute Chiropractic has a central mission to preserve chiropractic’s history of ideas and forward the profession. There are several ways in which this is happening such as dialogues and interviews, the publication of classic texts and posters, new books, articles, blog posts and the lecture series.

If you have suggestions for updates please send them. Also if you have audio, video, or documents and memorabilia that should be preserved please contact me today and we will do whatever we can to make it happen.