January 2002

Practicing From a Position of Defensive Fear

By Charles N. Cooper, DC

     When I entered chiropractic practice in 1952, I treated a major spinal scoliosis and kyphosis with abandoned impunity. My results were miraculous, and I achieved rewarding satisfaction. Today, after reading all the exotic, eclectic causes of major scoliosis and kyphosis, I would not commence treatments prior to extensive investigation to be unequivocally certain that the chiropractic adjustments were not contraindicated.

            By the time you complete insurance required requisites and their weekly progress documentation, satisfy the Medicare requirement and documentary debacle, and survive the “medically unnecessary” and “over-utilization of treatment’ statements, read the government’s intimidating injunctions, penalties, and fines for inadvertent, unintentional, innocent errors, your state board’s rules, regulations and directives, and now the new absurd HIPAA complicated and complex directives to protect patient confidentiality, as though no previous laws protected confidentiality and privilege communications; you would wonder why you became a doctor of chiropractic.

            I can now see why today’s chiropractor has assumed a defensive posture of fear in his/her daily practice of chiropractic.

            When I became a chiropractor and treated tens of thousands of patients, I did so because of compassion, devotion, and altruism to the care of the suffering and the desire to prevent illness and maintain health.

            Today’s legal requirements, constant documentary upgrading, improvements, and changes and scientific discoveries all have made the simple, orthodox, fundamental, and traditional principles and protocols of chiropractic a complicated complex paradigm and protocol.

            As a semi-retired chiropractor that commenced in 1985, I look back at the “Good ol’ days” of chiropractic with fond memories rewarded with the satisfaction of serving multitudes of patients. Today, I look at chiropractic practice as an investigative, documentary nightmare in order to simply provide a chiropractic adjustment.

            Dr. Charles Cooper graduated from National Chiropractic College in 1955 and has been in practice for 40 years in Baltimore, MD. He has written hundreds of chiropractic articles, essays and opuses. Dr. Cooper has traveled the entire world and is presently writing his seventh volume of a ten volume series, I Cast My Shadow on the Earth, Memoirs of the World Travels of a Man of His Own Dimension.