As the us banking system is unveiling the shaky grounds smothering its foundation, I am pondering about the reality of these seemingly fragile times. I don’t palpate a generalized sense of panick in my patients, In fact it almost feels as though patients were eager for the positive changes ahead.

A few days after the Bail-Out plan failed to pass, Jenny McCarthy aired on CNN and declared that her son was injured by vaccines. Listen carefully to the words she uses as she talks about thousands of parents treating their own kids and recovering from autism. Listen to the term “Vaccine Injury”, listen to the certainty as this mother is talking in her open war against the CDC and Merk Frost.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/10/01/intv.mccarthy.cnn

Reflecting back on my first decade of patient education, it is easy to see how far off I was using the education tools that were and still are currently available. It was so easy to start explaining the spine with analogies to electrical circuitry breakers. The paradigm that tries to be illustrated by the Merrick chart now appears to me as being far from what actually needs to be conveyed to patients today.

I don’t recall ever seeing the ultimate representation of what patients need to understand in order to let go of the agonizing allopathic principle: the sensory and motor homunculi.

The homunculus is the perfect illustration of where symptoms are actually taking place in the brain. The image is easy for patients to relate to and its cartoon appearance is striking enough to catch their attention. From that point on, it is easy to transition from a peripheral concern for symptoms to an understanding of the cerebral events they might represent. 

 Try to imagine how your fullfilling your practice would be if people were readily understanding the neural nature of their health. What if people shifted and understood that nothing is possible without brain.

What if we shrunk life down  to its basic elementary expression and imagined that there are elemental truths there that still exist at this stage of our living experience. What if the evolutionary principles that genes abide to, were also found at the foundation of ideas, language, fashion, social trends, economics and whatever other categories of human output you could find. What if this chaotic universe of knowledge was nothing more than just another more “evolved” expression of the principles of genetics?

I might be toying with silly ideas here, but aren’t you holding a cell phone, ipod or displaying any other behavioral signs that you are in fact copying from ideas around you? In a world where ideas are now broadcasted faster than in any other times in history, can we envision that we are entering a new age of ideological changes no longer driven by the human social network alone, but also accelerated by a vast new generation of technological mediums that speed up the replication process? Am I not writing this from a small Canadian town to reach your mind wherever it may be at this very moment?

Just as cancer genes replicate themselves regardless of the survival of the host, can we count on the “veracity” of an idea as an evolutionary edge or can ideas survive regardless of how true they are? What if truth had nothing to do with it? Would that make you wonder where your profession is going? Can you look back at the last decade of your professional life and witness that this chiropractic idea is replicating itself as fast as any other competing ideas?

Lets push these questions even further into the genetics of things. If the environment can be responsible for whether or not genes express themselves, can the social environment be responsible for the expression or non-expression of ideas? Do we live in an environment that supresses the “genetics” of the chiropractic principles? Are we going extinct here?

Don’t we wish there had been any large scale clinical trials that would have been compiling data for the last decades to help the media machine eat that information up and substantiate then replicate the ideas we hold so dear to our hearts as chiropractors?

I’ve spent nearly a decade developing such a research environment. Is the idea that the truth compiled by monitoring tens of thousands of patients irrelevant? Are we weaving a social/scientific/political environment that cares anymore?

As I write these disturbing lines, I cannot help but consider the replication mechanisms and rise from the midst of my mind the hope that we will have the wisdom to start using the new media as a solution to propagate our idea to a new height, new magnitude, new omnipresent truth to help establish the nesting environment of a myriad of new generations of ideas.

Here is a very powerful conference that was sent to me by a good friend of mine Dr David Gawain. I always struggled in my practice to get the average patient to recognise the principles that are touched here in this video. It is sometimes very hard to get patients to snap out of the reductionist perspective they often view their health with. Its hard to spoon feed this to patients droplets of information at a time to babystep them through a paradigm shift that seems so foreign to their concept of health.

If any of them started to hold in their minds that the very concept of health that they walk around with is also a consequence of brain function, what a great practice we would have. Imagine no longer having to bring people to understand that their body functions as a whole and that the pain that they walk around in, is only an insignificant indicator of their entire health status.

In this video Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor describes as a neuroanatomist her experience as a stroke victim. She describes her experience with such vivid details and emotional notes that I was snapped right into my own experience of the moment and how I too can be completely off when judging my own “projection” of reality.

As I witness this massive stroke victim unfold from her experience an inspirational lesson of that magnitude, I can’t help but wonder what my life in practice could be like If I let it sink in enough to start infusing my patient dialogs with the powerfull simplicity of her message.

Sometimes we make things so complicated.

I often get caught up in the growth pains and dwindle in them for a moment as I subconsciously look for the inspiration to face the demon and stare at it for what it really stands for. Most issues we face in our every day clinical life often thread their way back to an inability to see them through a solution paradigm. Perhaps we should stop thinking that we “suffer” because of the world, and rather be faithful to our inside-out philosophy and realise that we simply suck sometimes. After all shouldn’t we find merit in the realization that we are getting wiser here?

So many times I have caught myself loosing focus on what had promised to keep me going (and still does most of the time today). The hardest of all habits is the one that keeps us from taking our feelings too seriously and regarding them as one regards a child freaking out for ice cream. Because you cannot see a solution to a particular problem in any aspects of your clinic, does not mean there isn’t one.

Learn to listen

The most brilliant ideas I ever had for e-nate often came form paying attention to customer’s pain. Fortunately I always prioritized listening to clients and patients. Although I may have seemed distracted at times as I am often looking for the answer at the same time as listening to the problem. I always fear the next million similar issues that any problems promises to lead right back here if unsolved right now.

A new vision for the patient flow has just emerged from trying to solve the issue for a very valuable customer. I am only sorry that it took so long to really listen. Sometimes it is so simple to fix I laugh about it. All it takes is the wisdom to choose to stop indulging in the “self pity” customer complaints tend to corner us in.

Promise yourself right now that you will always know that they too are looking for a solution. Then take it with a grain of salt. We all have the right to just be monkeys sometimes.

Today, if this fledgling Natural Health Products industry does not speak-up in one loud and reverberating voice, her fate will be left in the hands of seasoned ‘behind the scenes’ bureaucrats and their army of well meaning but often miss-guided minions, together doing the well-paid dirty work of the shadow neo-con industrialists looking for ‘yet another’ profitable hostile take-over of an industry not willing to genuflect to their paradigm.

Bills C-51 and C-52, both introduced to ‘modernize’ already very powerful acts.  The Food & Drug and the Consumer Product Acts, are legislative instruments designed and created, not by politicians but rather by committees of back-room bureaucrats and their lawyers who take their marching orders from ‘God only knows who’ and cannot be held accountable for any harm which may come from their conspiracies.  (‘Conspiracies’, in the true sense of the word, not the ‘boogie-man’ derogatory sense)

‘Modernize’, the government term, is such a crass word when in effect this will force ordinary men and women to surrender some their already dwindling “rights” in the name of safety.  Their rights to not having some authority enter private premises without a judicial warrant, their rights of not having personal property seized without judicial oversight, their rights to earning a living without harassment,  their rights to not being forced into bankruptcy by their government, to name but a few.

 
The powers they seek to increase, under the guise of ‘greater good’ are all too familiar and will only contribute to the already increasing distrust and disgust that the people have with their governments.  I am reminded that “History is sure to repeat itself when we fail to learn from it…”

 Bill C-51; read it here… 

Then stop it here…