ADJUNCTS
In this connection the author cannot forbear a reference to the use of other methods to relieve disease in combination with the Chiropractic adjustment. From the foregoing study of the laws governing the cause and cure of disease it will be seen that therapeutical methods have little direct bearing upon the removal of disease. The logical method of effecting the cure is the removal of the cause. The subluxation being always the primary cause, its correction is always the logical method of effecting a cure. Not sometimes but always.
We know that when the subluxation is corrected the body naturally heals itself. Can we accelerate and aid that healing with stimulant or narcotic? Logic says no; experience says no: the use of any method which strikes at the disease beyond its primary cause and operates upon some of the effects of that cause without touching the cause itself is inconsistent with belief in Chiropractic.
Administration of poisonous drugs to the well body is considered poisoning; their administration to the sick body is also poisoning, whose symptoms combine with the disease to produce different outward signs. Fasting is starvation. Massage is stimulation or inhibition. Spondylotherapy means exhaustion of the spinal nerve centers in riotous expenditure of their stored-up energy.
It would require a wisdom beyond the human to improve upon the natural healing processes with which the body has been provided. It should be our entire business to remove the obstructions which hinder the full exercise of that healing power—the subluxations—to remove them dexterously and decisively and to interfere in no other way.
Other methods may and do serve to scatter or modify disease but not to cure it—unless they affect subluxations, as they sometimes do without intent. This accidental adjustment factor is valueless in the presence of a scientific and intelligent adjustment.
Let Medicine, Osteopathy, Spondylotherapy, Christian Science, Massage, and Electricity have their field. It is not ours. Nor can any of these methods be rationally combined with Chiropractic. Their basic principles contradict ours; their application interferes with the results of adjustment. If you claim to remove the cause of disease, do so, and do not mar your work by treatment of effects.
SPINO-ORGANIC CONNECTION
It has been said in a previous section that when subluxation and disease are associated the subluxation always precedes the disease and that the former is the cause, the latter the effect. So clearly do we understand this law that we are able to say what subluxation would cause a certain disease and err by only so many cases per centum as there are variations from the usual structure of the spinal column and the nervous system.
But merely to state that a second Dorsal subluxation causes heart disease is not enough. We must know why and how it causes heart disease and whether, perchance, some other subluxation may sometimes have a like effect. We must map out the sphere of malign influence of each possible subluxation so that when our fingers encounter it it at once and inevitably suggests its possible effects, from which, by diagnostic methods, we may choose the one toward which most symptoms point. And we must know the relation of every nerve in the body to peripheral organs and their functions so that when we encounter indubitable evidence of some functional or organic disease we may know exactly where, in the spinal column, to seek for its cause.
We have learned how to discover a subluxation, how to adjust it, and how that adjustment permits a natural cure of its abnormal effects. We must now learn exactly where to apply adjustment for any given organ in the body or for any disease. It must be understood in interpreting this statement and all those which follow in this section that it is never proper to adjust a vertebra merely because it is stated to be the cause of a disease believed to exist in a patient. No vertebra should be moved unless palpation determines it to be subluxated. Rather let it be known that as a rule the statements of spino-organic connection here made will prove to be verifiable by palpation. There is no rule in Chiropractic without some exceptions, and mere diagnosis of disease is too notoriously unreliable to serve as a guide to adjustment without the verification of the trained touch.