I'm leaving Las Vegas

by Mark R. Filippi, D.C.

Picture chiropractic philosophy as split milk. A horse out of the barn. A cat out of the bag. What if everyone already had the "Big Idea" and they just didn't tell us?

I've watched people way smarter than me argue about the systematic dilution of chiropractic's deductive science (read Mercy!) and art (say SMT everybody), but we've always come back to philosophy like typical prodigals. What if when we came home, chiropractic was "gone with the wind," too? Would it be separate but extinct then?

I've spent most of the last six years peeking over the fence and I'm going AWOL real soon. I'm leaving Las Vegas and becoming an accidental tourist in a very vitalistic world, as it turns out. Consider it all a permanent vacation. A radical sabbatical.

What if they get it and we're just tomorrow's osteopaths, outsiders in our day in the sun? Where's the orchestra, Billy Joel?

Welcome to the incredible shrinking world of chiropractic.

Sorry to be the first bear out of the cave, but the world at large already knows about us here in "whoville." No need to shout, they hear you. But they've changed the words around a little and madlibbed their own lingo and kept right on pedaling.

While they won't call it Universal Intelligence, they will speak of an implicate order, Gaia and string theory. They won't say innate intelligence either, but they will speak about autopoiesis, non-linear stochastic resonance and neural solitons.

Who are they anyway, and who are we?

This is a world filled with fractal screen-savers and millions of 15-year-olds with websites, consulting with moguls of e-commerce on the best way to firewall their databases. Meantime, we still hold plastic spines and mime the eight danger signs.

Didya know there's a magazine called "Nerve" now? A magazine that started as an e-zine sums up its existence thusly: "The complexity of life is to be savored; little is more complex (and worthy of savoring) than the human experience of sexuality." What's next? Sex and the single subluxation? Can we dare to enter the brave new world with our unresolved 19th-century baggage and embrace reality untamed?

The unguarded battle line within chiropractic is its ever-widening synapse with the emerging culture it serves. In order to reconnect, we need to reboot ourselves -- not our PCs. It doesn't serve us to retreat into a chiropractic Shangri-la, only to return to a Prozac nation armed with just a plug-n-play cosmic rationale.

D.D. Palmer equated life with action. B.J. Palmer told us adjustments replace subluxations. It's OK to go. Follow the yellow brick road. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Chiropractic's adolescence is ending and the whole profession gets to go through a rite of passage collectively.

Grab a physicist and discuss the normal complete cycle! Take a homeopath to lunch instead of another attorney. Really listen to Mozart. Check out a biofeedback dot.com or two and see what they've done with the safety pin cycle.