The following is written specifically to the
Chancellor, Provost, and Board of Trustees at North Carolina State University,
in hopes of breaking new ground in health care through the opening of the first
public Chiropractic school in the United States.
Dear Dr. Woodson, Dr. Arden, and Others To Whom It May
Concern,
I write to you today thinking about innovation and
opportunity for North Carolina State, my alma mater, and encourage NCSU to consider
advancing the cause of the first public university school of Chiropractic in
the United States.
In the winter of 2005, I was in the midst of completing
my undergraduate degree in psychology and had been accepted to the two most
prestigious Chiropractic colleges in the United States. I went onto receive a merit scholarship, for
which one of the requirements was a written essay about the future of the
Chiropractic profession.
At that time, I was just beginning to learn about
Chiropractic’s place in American society.
I knew of it previously only through a patient’s perspective. I was thirteen years old when I experienced
my first debilitating bout of pain.
Medical physicians knew not what to do with a case like mine other than
to prescribe pain medication, but a family friend, who was a Doctor of
Chiropractic, got me back to functioning and feeling relatively normal
again. It was not until years later,
when I began to consider becoming a Doctor of Chiropractic myself, that I first
learned that seeing a Chiropractor was uncommon or that it was considered
“unscientific” by a medical community whose leadership (namely the American
Medical Association) had been found guilty of violating the Sherman Act with an
unlawful conspiracy against Chiropractic by the United States District Court
(1), a decision affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals in February 1990
(2).
With the above in mind, I wrote my merit scholarship
essay about the advancement of Chiropractic in the mainstream through a new
Chiropractic college set to be opened by Florida State University. There are presently only fifteen schools in
the United States which offer the Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) degree; FSU
would have been the first public school to house a Chiropractic college on its
campus. Unfortunately, Florida State
rejected the project, citing protests primarily by its medical school staff,
but the subject of my essay has stuck with me and I have long thought my own
alma mater to be the perfect site of the nation’s first public Chiropractic
school. Since receiving my Doctorate in
Chiropractic, I have seen firsthand the perception that my profession faces; I
have seen the public resistance in my own clinic; I have seen graduating
classmates, frustrated by the lack of acceptance for Chiropractic, return to
school for medical doctorates or leave the health care field altogether. It is, in some ways, a constant uphill
battle. However, change does not happen
without forward-thinking innovators, the types that we produce regularly at
North Carolina State. I like to think
that graduates of NCSU are the more logical sorts who, in a world where so many
see a problem and circle around it endlessly, instead draw a straight line
toward getting to the root of the issue and solve it.
It is a very logical assertion that Chiropractic as a
profession would greatly benefit from an association with a school like NC
State and that, in turn, NC State would greatly benefit from its
forward-thinking status as the home of the first public Chiropractic school in
America.
From a business standpoint, the front-end costs (such as
facilities and staff) would be quickly off-set by the popularity of the
program. If NCSU were to adopt a similar
tuition-structure as the Veterinary School (roughly $80,000 total over four
years), for example, the 10-trimester or 14-quarter D.C. program would be more
cost-effective for aspiring Chiropractors than any other school in the country
which, combined with the early year novelty of attending the first public
Chiropractic college and the eventual reputation for an unmatched standard of
excellence that I can only assume NCSU would produce, would make for a very
profitable venture.
In addition to tuition fees and the added influx of what
realistically could reach as high as 150 students per graduating class, NC
State could expect to be a harbinger for federal grants related to researching
alternatives to medicine. The results
when Chiropractic has been properly studied have disproven the dated,
unjustified notion of it being unscientific; for example, a 2008 randomized,
double blind, placebo-controlled study through the University of Chicago showed
a highly specific correction in the
upper neck (down to the nearest millimeter and degree) was more effective at
consistently lowering blood pressure than two antihypertensive medications (3);
and an on-going study by a team of medical scientists in Italy of an upper neck
misalignment’s direct link to the disruption of cerebral spinal fluid flow (4)
and its consequent causative relationship with the onset of conditions such as
Migraines and Multiple Sclerosis has offered powerful evidence to support the
outcomes that millions have achieved through specific chiropractic
procedures.
So, again, I return to my thoughts of innovation and
opportunity for NC State. We need change
in American health care. A report of the
Commonwealth Fund stated in October 2015 that the U.S. spent 17% of its GDP on
health care – more than 50% greater than any of the other countries studied (5)
– yet according to the World Health Organization, we rank 37th in
health statistics (6) despite our consumption of 80% of all the pharmaceutics
produced in the entire world (7).
Americans collectively suffer from a lack of education and understanding
about the basic necessities for healthy living (8).
We have to shift health care’s priorities in the United
States. A grassroots movement to broaden
the philosophic scope of health care research has been underway for years, with
people becoming increasingly sick and tired of being sick and tired, and
chiropractic has been a leader in that movement. It would be of great benefit, though, if the
process happened faster and I believe that the nation’s first public chiropractic
school could further stimulate the necessary adjustments. A mutually beneficial relationship between
North Carolina State University and the chiropractic profession is just waiting
to be cultivated. Will you accept the
invitation to help us lead American health care out of the doldrums and into
the future?
Yours in Health,
Dr. M.
Chad McIntyre
Sources
1- Wilk v. American Medical
Ass’n, 671 F. Supp 1465, N.D. III. 1987
2- Wilk v. American Medial
Ass’n, 895 F.2d 352, 7th Cir. 1990
3- Journal of Human Hypertension (2007)
21, 347–352
4- Mandolesi S, et al. Ann Ital Chir. 2015 May-Jun.
