American Originals

Next week is our country’s annual 4th of July celebration. More than just recognizing Independence Day, it provides a good moment for reflection and a chance to think about and appreciate what the United States stands for. It shouldn’t be a time to promote blind nationalism, which was flatly rejected by our founding fathers. Instead they devoted themselves to certain principles that were so fundamental that they described them as self-evident truths. Indeed, our country was created to express the idea of basic equality of all people.
Of course we’re not perfect and we haven’t always expressed our values well. Even as this article is being written a debate rages nationally over whether the presence of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina State House flies in the face of this basic American core value. We could also easily find other inconsistencies between our values and reality. Yet achieving perfection isn’t what makes the country great, nearly as much as our constant striving to live up to the ideals. Holocaust survivor (Buchenwald), and Nobel Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel said it best in his Independence Day column published on July 4, 2004,“America understands that a nation is great not because its economy is flourishing or its army is invincible but because its ideals are loftier” (Parade Magazine, “The America I Love,” Wiesel, Elie, July 4, 2004)
Striving to reach our ideals and setting our sights higher is perhaps the most important characteristic of the American spirit. This spirit can be seen and felt in the many ways like when a decade of deep commitment led to the first steps on the moon. That same spirit has spawned countless great inventions and innovations and my own profession was one of those great American discoveries.
In 1895 the United States of America gave birth to the chiropractic profession in Davenport, Iowa when Harvey Lillard, a deaf man regained his hearing. Throughout 17 years of suffering the best of medical care continuously failed to help him. Then he visited a different kind of doctor. D.D. Palmer examined him and performed the first chiropractic adjustment in history on Harvey Lillard’s neck. His almost miraculous recovery shed light on an entirely different way of understanding where health comes from in the human body.
What followed was a colorful history of trials and tribulations as chiropractic gradually became a profession despite vicious opposition from the American Medical Association and allied groups who saw chiropractic as a competitive threat. Nevertheless, the public demanded what chiropractic provides and gradually it became recognized for what it brings to people’s lives. Finally in 1991 the United States Supreme Court upheld the U.S. Court of Appeals that found the American Medical Association guilty of an illegal conspiracy to eliminate chiropractic as a competitive art. Today more and more enlightened physicians are referring patients to chiropractors and of course availing themselves of the benefits of specific chiropractic adjustments.
Now chiropractic, an American Original, is at the forefront of an imminent transformation in how we view life and health.