chiropractic Flashcards
(8 cards)
what is bonesetting?
as with the other healing crafts (midwifery, tooth-pulling, and barbersurger) bonesetting was often part-time work and served clients who had problems that were regarded by academically trained physicians as inconsequential or beneath their dignity.
Bonesetters did much more than help mend bones:
they often treated painful conditions caused by “subluxations,” which meant a joint ‘put out’; and the one method of cure was the rough movement by which it is said that the joint is ‘put in’ again.
how did Palmer create chiropractic care?
the upgrade of bonesetting extended to nomenclature; with help from a minister conversant with Greek, “bonesetting” became “chiropractic,” a phrase that means “hand work.”
although the bonesetting tradition gave chiropractic its method, “magnetic healing” provided the theory.
—– derived from investigations into the supposed curative effects of animal magnetism, practitioners of magnetic healing identified the unimpeded flow of energy with health and defined illness as obstruction.
neither bonesetting nor magnetic healing could be persuasively described as science. the former was clearly a folk tradition, and the latter could not shed its occult status
chiropractic, however, could and did describe itself as science, and in the 19th century, such a label was indispensable if a medical movement hoped to emerge from a host of contending traditions.
what is spinal irritation?
An early 19th-century fascination with the spinal cord spurred mainstream speculation, leading orthodox physicians by 1828 to warn of “spinal irritation” as a threat to bodily organs.
Spinal irritation became a 19th-century catchall diagnosis for various complaints before mainstream medicine discarded it in favor of terms like “neurasthenia” and later “depression.”
what concepts helped legitimize chiropractic practices? what concepts delegitamized?
chiropractic adopted the concept of SPINAL IRRITATION through subluxation terminology from bonesetters, with Palmer expanding spinal irritation’s scope beyond unexplained ailments to a universal explanation for sickness. This adoption of the widely accepted spinal irritation concept helped legitimize chiropractic practices.
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the notion of the INNATE INTELLIGENCE serves only to maintain chiropractic as a fringe profession and to delay its “transition into legitimate professional education, with serious scholarship, research, and service.
SOME want to abandon the term of SUBLUXATION altogether because it “threatens to strangle the discipline.”
describe “regulars” vs “irregulars”
Palmer cured the Davenport janitor of his deafness.
————- this restoration of hearing might have been regarded as a freak occurrence were it not for a medical environment in which news of such occurrences was eagerly awaited
a well-publicized tug-of-war between “regulars” (physicians) and “irregulars” (alternative medicine practitioners) already had been sweeping the country
what is subluxation referred to as today?
Subluxation is defined less in theory than in practice
subluxation is what a chiropractor corrects
today, it refers to an assortment of disturbances.
what is a “straight” practitioner?
“Straights” tend to rely exclusively on spinal adjustments, to emphasize innate intelligence, and to subscribe to the notion that subluxation “is the leading cause of disease in the world today.”
since the 1930s, straights have been a very distinct minority in the profession.
what is a “mixer” practitioner?
“Mixers” tend to be more open to conventional medicine and to mainstream scientific tenets
paradoxically, mixers, despite their wide range of therapeutics, tend to have a narrower and more modest claim for chiropractic’s scope of practice.
some mixers see themselves less as traditional chiropractors and more as practitioners of a generic complementary medicine.
a second, larger group of mixers seeks to situate themselves in the broader mainstream health care system as specialists in musculoskeletal disorders.
