Edward F. Owens, Jr. MS, DC

INTRODUCTION

Increased utilization of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the marketplace has been a major force driving acceptance and investigation of unconventional health care models in scientific circles. In part, health care professionals need to understand what benefits lead their patients to seek care outside of the usual channels. It is also vital to determine if there are risks involved with unorthodox health methods about which patients need to be informed.

The increased recognition of the value of different views of health care will perhaps open the door for the chiropractic profession to be accepted as a mainstream health care specialty. In preparation, chiropractic research agenda conferences sponsored by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) have focused particularly on interdisciplinary projects and mentorship. The goal has been to raise the quality of chiropractic research to a level that would allow it to compete more successfully for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and hence bolster the science underlying chiropractic.

Still, there are barriers to the acceptance of chiropractic. One barrier is an internal conflict over how the profession defines itself. On one hand, many practitioners and some schools consider the concept of the vertebral subluxation to be the central focus of practice. There is, on the other hand, a perception within the profession that chiropractic might be better accepted as a mainstream health care model if it would get rid of the "subluxation mumbo jumbo." By all means, we should get rid of the mumbo jumbo, but we should keep the vertebral subluxation model as the central focus of chiropractic.

This article will delve into some of the advantages and challenges facing the profession depending on whether we choose to adhere to or reject the vertebral subluxation model as an essential part of chiropractic.

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