Where traditional healthcare focuses on pathology, whole-being care recognizes that the natural human tendency is toward balance and vitality.
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For 130 years, the world wasn’t ready. In 1906, D.D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, was jailed for practicing medicine without a license. The disparaging continued for decades, with hundreds more chiropractors sent behind bars, their voices silenced by a medical establishment that couldn’t comprehend what they were communicating. But those years of struggle have given way to something extraordinary—the advent of whole-being care as a global movement.
For the first time, audiences worldwide are ready to embrace a deeper reality: they are responsible for their health and need someone who will walk life’s journey with them. This is a place of optimizing, preventing, and alleviating challenges as we navigate an adventure with peaks, valleys, and inevitable stumbles. Whole-being care embraces this full spectrum of human experience, embodied by what Aristotle called “entelechy”—a vital force directing growth in life. Where traditional healthcare focuses on pathology, whole-being care recognizes that the natural human tendency is toward balance and vitality.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said, “Let’s be bold in what we hypothesize, but cautious and humble in what we claim.” Chiropractic has been humble for over a century; now we must be bold in our hypothesis: you deserve a provider who supports your whole-being with solutions that extend beyond medication, a partner who brings a full spectrum of solutions for healing, and an optimized healthspan. Success in health equals the courage to take control of your choices, combined with confidence in a care provider willing to walk with you.
While we once focused on bones, we now understand they move in response to their environment—a sophisticated evolution reflecting decades of experience and research. This isn’t happening in isolation. At a recent “Adjusted Reality” panel, Mark Siegel, Senior Medical Analyst for Fox News and clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, delivered a keynote on the whole-being perspective. Dr. Harry Van Loveren, Chair of Neurosurgery at the University of South Florida, followed. Why would such prominent medical figures engage with chiropractic? Because they understand the current trend in healthcare and where it needs to go versus where it is. To wit, a chiropractor in Dr. Van Loveren’s traumatic brain injury center has won eight consecutive Press Ganey Awards—100 percent patient satisfaction and the only provider at their institution to achieve this.
Sometimes profound truths emerge from simple observations. What if you stepped away from your endless to-do list and adopted a “to-be” list that encouraged whole-being care? As you become more aware of your surroundings and open your mind and heart to an adjusted reality, something shifts from frenetic symptom management to thoughtful wellness.
You can’t have hope and be unable to cope, and you can’t cope without the light of hope. They’re inseparable, just as a person’s best friend takes their hand and says, “I am here for you. We are better than one.”
A New Whole-Being Narrative
The essence of chiropractic narrative lives in the backstory—a historical unveiling that sets the stage for a compelling future around the Foundational Seven pillars of whole-being: Investment, Replenishment, Nourishment, Movement, Adjustment, Contentment, and Revitalizement:
The Foundational Seven
- Investment: What you put in—whether time, resources, or effort—is directly tied to the quality and longevity of the outcomes you achieve.
- Replenishment: The body’s ability to perform vital restorative functions.
- Nourishment: Ability to provide necessary nutrients and substances required for growth, maintenance of health, and whole-body function.
- Movement: Physical activity that involves intentional exercise or everyday motion to promote full-body awareness and growth.
- Adjustment: Defining the force applied to your body to create and improve alignment, function, and range of motion that prepares the body’s natural ability to optimize neuroplasticity, the body’s ability to easily move through particular circumstances with structure, function, and speed.
- Contentment: Fostering balance, stress reduction, and support for your whole-being.
- Revitalizement: An encompassing process to energize, invigorate, and maximize the vitality for you, the individual, as well as your family and friends, and the community you serve.
From this bedrock, chiropractic recognizes and adopts the philosophy that the body’s innate intelligence can heal itself if given the right environment, through a comprehensive whole-being perspective that creates a pathway to a thriving, holistic lifestyle.
From nowhere to Now Here.
