The use of specific adjustment demands of the Chiropractor an accurate diagnosis and compels him to get his mind into direct contact with the exact condition of the patient in order to select the proper vertebrae. Sometimes the less prominent subluxation causes a more acute or dangerous disease than the more pronounced. Specific adjusting tends to develop more discriminating and accurate palpation.
Specific adjusting weakens and shocks the weak or nervous patient less than general adjusting. It also concentrates the recuperative or reparatory power of the patient on the parts which most need repair. The body possesses only a certain limited capacity for combating disease or building weakened tissue. To scatter this force widely is to weaken its effect in any particular locality.
The habit of specific adjustment and of selecting proper vertebrae enables the Chiropractor to explain definitely at any time just what he is doing and why he is doing it. We assert that in adjusting a vertebra we are removing the primary cause of disease. It is sometimes awkward to be asked if the patient has nine diseases or if it takes nine subluxations to cause one case of acute coryza. A correct answer to either question leaves an embarrassing discrepancy between theory and practice.
In favor of the practice of general adjusting it has been said that errors in diagnosis become unimportant if all subluxations be adjusted; that if the spine be straightened the patient must recover. Against the first statement, which is forceful because diagnosticians are so notably liable to err, it may be said that errors in palpation are almost, if not quite, as frequent as errors in other branches of diagnosis and that one’s tendency to err is less if all possible methods be checked against each other than if one only is used. The second statement is quite true; but it is based upon the assumption that in ordinary practice the spine may be straightened completely. As a matter of fact this rarely, if ever, occurs. It is practically impossible ever to thoroughly “line up” a spine. The best that has been done as yet except in acute subluxations is to so modify subluxations that disease disappears.
We may interject here the statement that no greater or more conclusive betrayal of incompetency can be offered by a Chiropractor than the declaration that he has completely “lined up” a spinal column in one, six, or a dozen adjustments, as some have declared. If one be honest in such statements it is proof positive that he is not capable of accuracy in palpation or else lamentably liable to auto-suggestion. Clinicians of proven ability, who have examined more than five thousand spines each, agree that no perfectly normal spine has been discovered, whether the spine has been adjusted or not.
But the chiefest argument against general adjusting is that it scatters the reparatory forces of the body throughout many segments, some of which are not really in need of attention, while the one or two segments which need all possible concentration of energy receive only a diluted share.
If my patient suffers from an acute pneumonia and nothing else and if I require that he submit to a general adjustment including some eight subluxations, two of which are Lumbars, I am unscientific and unwise. What that case demands is an immediate localized improvement.
It is highly probable that the efficient Chiropractor of the future will be a specific adjuster; that every recognized body condition will suggest a definite and scientifically determined corrective measure; and that guesswork will be largely eliminated.