PERSPECTIVES An Open Letter Encouraging Change, Innovation, and Opportunity
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 op- portunity for North Carolina State, my alma mater, and encour- age 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 Chiro-
practic’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 phy- sicians 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 commu- nity whose leadership (namely the American Medical Asso- ciation) 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 es-
say 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 Chiroprac- tic, return to school for medical doctorates or leave the health care field altogether. It is, in some ways, a constant uphill
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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 profes-
sion would greatly benefit from an association with a school like NC State and that, in turn, NC State would greatly ben- efit 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 Chiroprac- tors than any other school in the country which, combined with the early year novelty of attending the first public Chiro- practic 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 unscien- tific; 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 consis- tently 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 con- sequent 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 op- portunity 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)
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