A lot of people may not understand the difference between vitalistic chiropractic and the mainstream medical paradigm. I am here to clear that up with a simple analogy that I learned from Dr. James Chestnut, a fellow chiropractor. Basically, as a vitalistic chiropractor, I look at the whole body and try to nurture that entire body as a unit. I try to teach you how to eat the right kind of food, get the right kind of exercise and learn how to de-stress, while giving you regular chiropractic adjustments that enhance your nervous system. This is called wellness, or wholeness, or holistic care. 
What the Medical paradigm does best is help keep people alive, through high tech amazing medical interventions. This is called crisis care. In fact, when it comes to keeping people alive in situations where they would have most likely died, America is one of the best. If I get my leg chopped off in an accident, I will definitely go to the hospital so that I won’t die. There would be no reason to call a Chiropractor in this case. However, if I have a lifestyle disease such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol, I don’t want to go to the same people who work well in a crisis because they will treat high blood pressure as a crisis. “Your blood pressure is high, you could have a heart attack tomorrow (even though you have probably had high blood pressure for 10 years already) we need a pill that will lower your blood pressure today regardless of the side effects.” However, the chances of you having a heart attack the day after you find out you have high blood pressure is very small, this is not a crisis. This is a job for a doctor who is going to work with you on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis, to help you change your lifestyle, figure out what is causing the high blood pressure, help your nervous system run better, and help your body function at a higher level so that your blood pressure will decrease gradually and your risk for heart disease will decrease as well.
Now back to the analogy I was speaking of earlier. It is an analogy of firemen and carpenters. If your house is on fire and everything you own is burning into nothing, you aren’t going to want to call a carpenter; he has the wrong tools to help you. You are going to call a fireman. The firemen are going to break down your door, smash in your windows and douse your entire house in water. But if they get there fast enough and if they work hard enough, the integrity of your house might be salvaged! The crisis that occurred might be taken care of and your house might live! Who cares about the small things like your door and windows and carpet, your house is saved!!! Now, when it comes time to repair your broken down house, are you going to call the same firemen or are you going to call the profession that works on slowly rebuilding your house piece by piece? Of course you would call the carpenter because you are no longer in a crisis and it would be absurd to call the profession who specializes in crisis care.
If you haven’t already guessed it, the firemen are like the medical doctors and the carpenters are like the chiropractors. America may be ranked very highly for crisis care, but it is ranked 17th for overall health care. Maybe it is because we are confusing what type of profession does what. Both professions have their own specialty and when we work together, we can make people’s lives better, but it is important for you as the consumer to understand and differentiate what those specialties are.
-Laine Morales D.C., C.M.T.
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