Published: 2010-09-03 02:34:55
Author: Christopher Kent | Dynamic Chiropractic | May 6, 2010
Like many of my contemporaries, I chose chiropractic as a career because I wanted to make the world a better place. Helping people to achieve their potential as human beings was the vision.
Today's crisis in health care speaks more eloquently than words of the timeliness of this opportunity.
Medical physicians Wayne Jonas and David Rakel wrote, "Leadership is crucial. We need the innovators who will reach out and grab the concepts of health and caring that are now sitting out in the periphery and bring them into the mainstream ...We need the industry - producing the tools and technologies for a wellness system as powerful and as vast as the disease treatment system we currently have. Imagine a system that has expertise in the creation of health. What would it look like, and what kind of professionals would be needed for it to succeed?"1
Promoting the Right Lifestyle Choices
I propose that the chiropractic profession is perfectly poised to provide this leadership. From its inception, the chiropractic profession has noted the significance of lifestyle choices. D.D. Palmer acknowledged the role of physical, chemical, and emotional stress in the dynamics of health and disease when he wrote, "[T]he determining cause of disease are traumatism, poison, and autosuggestion."2 Chiropractors have acknowledged these factors as causes of vertebral subluxations, as well as contributors to disease in their own right. Consider the impact that lifestyle factors have on health care costs and health-related quality of life:
- "Determinants of well-being transcend health care ... since health care contributes only about 10% toward reducing
premature death ... Lifestyle choices, not medical and surgical
treatments, are the determinants of longevity over which we have
control."3
- In a study of 84,941 nurses with 16-year follow-up,
the authors concluded that a total of 91 percent of the cases of type 2
diabetes in this cohort could be attributed to habits and forms of
behavior that did not conform to the low-risk pattern.4
- Daily use of a multivitamin by older adults could lead to more than $1.6 billion in Medicare savings over the next five years.5
- Health care costs could be cut by $24 billion if Americans took just four supplements over the next five years.6
- Hyman, Ornish, and Roizen reported results of the EPIC study7 involving 23,000 subjects, which examined how adherence to four simple
behaviors (diet, exercise, BMI less than or equal to 30, and not
smoking) affected health. "In those adhering to these behaviors, 93% of diabetes, 81% of heart attacks, 50% of strokes, and 36% of all cancers were prevented."8
- Chiropractic patients ages 65 and older who were under chiropractic
care for five or more years experienced 50 percent fewer medical
provider visits than their comparable peers and spent only 31 percent of
the national average for health care services. The health habits of patients receiving maintenance care were better overall than the general population, including decreased use of cigarettes and decreased use of nonprescription drugs.9
- In an independent practice association (IPA) that permitted patients to select a doctor of chiropractic as their primary care physician, clinical and cost utilization based on 70,274 member-months over a seven-year period demonstrated decreases of 60.2 percent in hospital admissions, 59 percent hospital days, 62 percent outpatient surgeries and procedures. There was an astounding 85 percent decrease in pharmaceutical costs when compared with conventional medicine.10