History of Chiropractic
While working in a stooped position, Harvey Lillard felt something "pop"
in his neck. A few days later his hearing was gone. Seventeen
years passed in silence. Then on September 18, 1895, Harvey Lillard
related his story to Daniel David Palmer, a magnetic healer who
practiced in Davenport, Iowa, where Lillard was a janitor. Palmer
examined the janitor’s spine and discovered a bump in the area where
Lillard said he had felt the pop. Reasoning that this bump was the
result of one of the spinal column’s 26 vertebrae being out of line,
Palmer persuaded Lillard to let him try to restore it to its normal
position. He applied a force to the bump. There was another pop,
and the bump was gone. In a few days Lillard’s hearing was restored. In
the process, chiropractic was born.
Chiropractic is a relatively
new health care profession - just over 100 years old. Although the
profession is young, many of its vitalistic principles date back
thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, while possessing
little knowledge of the internal structure of the human body, were aware
of the body’s continual striving to heal itself. During the
Renaissance, men of learning proposed theories that spoke of “vital
forces” within the body that organised its resistance to disease. The
“vital force” they spoke of is what chiropractors refer to as the body’s
innate intelligence.
It was Daniel David Palmer who in 1895
realised the relationship among the vital forces, the nerve system,
the vertebrae and the expression of health. He reasoned that an innate
intelligence continuously strives to maintain the body’s organisation.
He also realised that this innate intelligence utilises the nerve system
to assemble and transmit the information necessary to ensure the proper
function of the various parts of the human body. Palmer further
reasoned that a vertebra that is even slightly misaligned could cause
pressure on the spinal cord or small spinal nerves. This misalignment
and interference, called a vertebral subluxation, modifies the impulses
carried by the nerves and this, in turn, modifies bodily function. In
such a subluxated state, the body is less able to function, maintain its own
health, and ultimately to express life. After adjusting a
subluxated vertebra for the first time, Palmer witnessed the restoration
of spinal integrity, a dramatic change in his patient's health and gave birth to a profession.
Chiropractic grew rapidly under the
guidance of Palmer’s son, B.J., who transformed the profession into an
advanced science and a well-developed art. His goal was to be able to
objectively locate and analyse vertebral subluxation and to verify the
changes that occurred both when vertebrae became subluxated and when the
vertebral subluxation was corrected.
Today, chiropractic has
evolved into a highly developed science and art which deals with
vertebral subluxation and its effect on the body’s natural tendency
towards health. Chiropractic, as a primary health care profession,
recognises and respects the body’s innate ability to maintain its own
health and has developed more than 300 sophisticated techniques for
correcting vertebral subluxation. Chiropractic views health as the optimum expression of life on every level.
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