Technic and Practice of Chiropractic

by Joy Maxwell Loban

The pathogenic germs are many. They enter the body by various routes, in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink; sometimes they are communicated by direct contact with other persons or with objects infected with them. The term “contagious” is applied to those diseases whose germs may be carried through the air from one to another; “infectious” refers to those communicable only by contact.

In every healthy individual are found multitudes of germs of both the pathogenic and harmless varieties. We are constantly exposed to the influence of the former yet by no means all bodies into which pathogenic germs find entrance contract disease. This fact has caused much study and among pathologists and bacteriologists generally the conclusion has been reached that the development of colonies of micro-organisms sufficiently to produce disease depends upon what is known as “susceptibility” of the organism. There must be a latent weakness of which the micro-organisms take advantage.

This amounts to the admission that the body contains the inherent property of successfully resisting all germ action. Indeed, the fundamental proposition of Serum-Therapy is that under stress of the presence of dilute germ infusions the body does develop special chemicals which neutralize the germ poisons and kill the germs and which remain after the inoculation to guard against any further entrance of germs of the same kind and vulnerable to the same protective chemicals.

This theory is sufficiently correct to have served as an unassailable basis for a most illogical procedure. The truth is that the auto-protective power of the body must be lower than normal and the germs must find a weakened area for development and multiplication before they can develop sufficiently to produce disease. Once they gain a foothold they tend to multiply with great rapidity and to develop alarming symptoms often leading to death.

Only in a few instances does modern science believe that a pathogenic germ can successfully attack a healthy body, but is claimed that there are a few germs, such as the Klebs-Loeffler bacillus (diphtheria producer) and the bacillus of anthrax, which may find lodgment in any organism, healthy or unhealthy, to produce disease.

Now, the susceptibility of the body to germ invasion requires explanation. Merely to say that one is susceptible and another is not leaves too wide a field of possibility for error. It is easy to reason from the fact that all persons are at some time exposed to contagious or infectious diseases while comparatively few contract them that some persons are vulnerable to certain diseases while others are not. It is plain that while a person may be susceptible to typhoid fever because he has a weakness in the intestines, he may be quite immune from pneumonia or tuberculosis or any other infectious or contagious disease. But why this difference? Let us look at the problem from another angle.

Chiropractors find with every contagious or infectious disease certain subluxations whose location with relation to the disease is constant and demonstrable. Thus all cases of pulmonary tuberculosis show a third Dorsal subluxation with only enough exceptions to prove the rule; tonsilitis is invariably accompanied by subluxation of the second, third or fourth Cervical. Correction of the subluxation is, in all except the most fully and virulently developed cases, followed by a radical cure. Indeed, in many of the germ diseases it is possible to abort the fever with improvement of all symptoms in from five minutes to twelve hours. We are so accustomed to checking germ diseases at once that failure to do so leads us to immediate investigation of our palpation and adjustment to discover some technical error in the application of the principles of Chiropractic to the case in question.

It is manifestly impossible by vertebral adjustment to raise the body beyond normal power. Nothing is added to the body; no energy is utilized other than the energy of the body itself which is provided by Nature and released through restoration of the normal carrying capacity of nerves. The highest goal attainable is normality, and it is observed that no matter whether the impingement be in the nature of an excitation or an inhibition of nerve action the effect of a correct adjustment is always in that direction—toward normality. It may be as well to digress here long enough to remark that abnormal change is never the result of adjustment but always of maladjustment, and those who claim to be able to produce stimulation by moving a given vertebra one way and inhibition by moving it another are entirely wrong.

It is evident from the results of adjustment in germ disease that the normal body is entirely capable of throwing off the poisons and exterminating the germs, which conclusion quite agrees with science. The fact, not known by other branches of science, and asserted by Chiropractic is simply that the subluxation is the factor which determines susceptibility.