Integrated Health Care and Chiropractic

I never imagined that, when I first started volunteer-working @ Chiro.Org back in 1996, that I would be here 30 years later, connecting-the-dots, to detail chiropractic’s progress. When I graduated Palmer in 1993, our Profession was self-considered as an ‘Alternative” to ‘Conventional Medicine’. I still think of it that way.

In 1993, few medical Journals would publish articles penned by a chiropractor. This was a hold-over from the insidious plot the AMA and related medical societies created in the 1960s (when I was only 12) to isolate and destroy the Profession of Chiropractic, as detailed in our Wilk, et. al. vs. the AMA, et. al. section.

So, there I was, at the age of 45 in my last 2 trimesters @ PCC, walking through the David D. Palmer Health Sciences Library, when I noticed the new copy of the New England Journal of Medicine. Although I don’t recall the particulars of what drew my attention, that issue contained the first unconventional (?) article by David M. Eisenberg, MD titled Unconventional Medicine in the United States [NEJM 1993 (Jan 28); 328 (4): 246–252].

I started reading it, and before long I was standing at the copy machine, so I could add it to my collection of favored articles. And like Alice, I found myself looking at the ‘rabbit hole’, and deciding to take the plunge. This article was also WHY I decided to name my practice Alternative Care Chiropractic.

After retiring as a ‘Field Doc’ in late 2020, I started remodeling the Chiro.Org website. My first assignment had been to flesh out our non-existent LINKS Section. At that time it was just a long collection of links TO materials on the web. It wasn’t long before I noticed that materials I had linked to had already disappeared (thanks to a link-checking software called Xenu’s Link Sleuth).

In the late 90s, as the WWW expanded exponentially, it was also very expensive to maintain a website, especially if you didn’t know HOW to write your own HTML (the language of the web) and had to hire a ‘webmaster’ to render your materials for you. So many budding websites that contained interesting materials disappeared every month, under that crushing expense.

So, whenever I found cool materials, I would LINK to them, BUT I would also make a copy of them, in the event that website evaporated. In fact, Chiro.Org is now the largest Archive of chiropractic materials on the web, outside of PubMed. That’s because we are archival in nature. It’s very rare that any materials are removed.

As I continued to collect materials, many of them seemed focused on Low Back Pain. Not the most interesting topic for a DC, but LBP is the most common complaint that presents to our offices, so our researchers were wise to focus on that topic, and Low Back Pain and Chiropractic became one of my first break-out pages in the LINKS. I refer to the pages in the LINKS as ‘topical’, and to date there are 86 of them, covering all the various topics I was interested in (from A-Z) from Acupuncture to Chiropractic and Workers’ Compensation.

If you check our Home Page it details all of our ‘active’ topical pages, which are regularly updated (as new materials are published) and the “Archival Sections” that are occasionally updated.

Those topical pages are the easiest way to find the materials that YOU may be interested in. The LINKS Section and our Chiropractic Research Section both display the spectrum of topics that might interest either a patient or a doctor, but all the other Active sections mentioned on our Home Page also contain numerous other mini-topical-sections that may also interest you.

I encourage you to snoop about the site, because after 31 years online, we have collected a spectrum of materials way beyond what you’ll find on any other chiropractic-related website.