What If We Let It All Go?

There’s a fight inside chiropractic that’s been running for decades. We know the sides. The players largely have remained unchanged.

On one side: the profession can’t survive without the philosophy. Innate intelligence. Our connection to God, the Universe, Source. The 33 principles. Without them, we’re not chiropractors — we’re a profession with no real understanding of what it is we do.

On the other side: the philosophy is the reason no one takes us seriously. It’s the thing keeping us out of the conversations and policies where healthcare decisions get made. Drop it, modernize, expand our scope to be more like western medicine and maybe — finally — we’ll get to sit at the table.

Both sides are certain. Both sides pit against each other constantly. Those of us who engage in talking about it feel we’re a hopeless, lost cause and don’t know where to start in changing anything.

Meanwhile our educational system has been overrun by an aptly named cartel fueled by greed, in a profession that oddly holds a lot of servant attitude and love for the people we serve on both sides of the battle.

The Blind Spot Neither Side Can See

I’ve been studying organizational change as part of my PhD work, and there’s a concept from Otto Scharmer’s Theory U that recently stood out to me in relation to this ongoing stuckness we experience as a divided profession.

Scharmer talks about blind spots — not the things we disagree about, but the place we’re standing when we have the disagreement. The lens we don’t know we’re looking through.

Here’s what I think the blind spot is for both sides of this debate: each side has organized its entire identity around being right about the other side.

The “straight chiropractors” need the “legitimacy-seekers” to be wrong, because if they’re not wrong, the philosophy might actually be negotiable — and then what holds the profession together?

The “legitimacy-seekers” need the “straight chiropractors” to be wrong, because if they’re not wrong, then maybe the thing keeping us small and marginalized in healthcare isn’t the philosophy. Maybe it’s something else.

Neither side can afford for the other to have a point. So neither side really listens to the other. And for those of us caught in the middle, we’re left trying to make sense of a befuddled professional identity with conflicting values and a publicly accepted image of being “neck and back pain doctors” that very few of us actually relate to, but is the only thing a non chiropractic public has been able to make sense of in the confusion.

It’s Time For Something Different

When I shared an early version of these thoughts with my one of my non chiropractic PhD professors, he commented that he understood the internal conflict the chiropractic profession has (and that I keep referencing in our course) clearly for the first time. He also asked me a question that sparked this article: what if we changed our focus from the surface level symptoms and looked deeper (sound familiar)? Not toward vitalism, philosophy, superior techniques, modalities, what is and isn’t chiropractic or even what makes us “legitimate”--but rather to something we can all agree is important: The contribution we make to the people we serve. What this profession actually does for the people who come lie down on our tables each day.

Before you jump in with a statement about how you already know this based on xyz, I want to challenge you to stop and ask yourself what biases and assumptions you might be making in whatever your initial thoughts on this are. I know I have them. But how many of us have honestly asked a patient or someone we know sees a chiropractor what it means in their life to have chiropractic care without adding what we think it should mean to them based on our own biases?

That’s what Scharmer’s Theory U outlines in his process of how you undergo transformational change on an organizational level. Not by picking a side. Not by finding a compromise that makes everyone half-satisfied. Something different — what Scharmer calls presencing. Letting go of the position long enough to see what’s actually under the surface of the conflict and tension and creating something from that place instead.

I know something about that kind of letting go.

In 2021, after a second wrist surgery, an insurance audit, and a bankruptcy, I stepped away from chiropractic in what I later realized was a trauma laced decision made from a low point of physical and emotional brokenness. But when I did, I didn’t know who I was without the title “chiropractor”.

For most of my adult life, “chiropractor” wasn’t just my job. It was my identity, my purpose, the thing I’d built my whole sense of self around. So when it was gone — by necessity, not by choice — I wasn’t just out of a career. I was floundering in the world completely unsure of who I was.

It took actually letting go — being willing to jump into that abyss of not knowing, of asking the question “who am I” without this thing that has defined me for over a decade, with no guarantee of what would be on the other side. As often happens when we learn to “let go and let God”, or whatever phrasing works for you, I found my way back to chiropractic three years later. And when I came back, how I approached my practice and belonging to the chiropractic profession looked completely different.

I was clear I still loved the profession despite the suffering I had been through in being a part of it. It’s something I love, but it also no longer defines who I am. I have boundaries I didn’t have before. And I found a version of being a chiropractor that allows me to be who I am and not who someone else said I needed to be.

I didn’t find my way back by staying stuck in the story of disempowerment and hurt at the hands of the profession and the insurance industry, or by ignoring the dark sides of how we were trained to be servant leaders and over give from an empty cup. I found my way back by elevating above the surface level “stuff” and letting it go entirely.

That’s the part of letting go that doesn’t get talked about enough — in Theory U, or in chiropractic. It’s not a strategy. It’s not a step in a five-point plan. It’s being willing to stand in the unknown long enough that something different can finally surface. And it’s terrifying, because there’s no guarantee of what comes next, or whether “you” will still be there when it does.

To take it a step further: if that’s true for one person and one identity, what might it mean for an entire profession to join together in standing of the abyss of letting go of everything we have been, and instead allow curiosity and the unknown to help us create something new?

What If

What if neither side has to win?

What if the philosophy isn’t something to defend or discard, but something to actually sit with — honestly, without the need to prove it right or prove it wrong?

What if “innate intelligence” isn’t a marketing liability or a sacred relic, but a real question about how the body heals that we’ve been too afraid to actually explore, because exploring it might mean admitting we don’t fully understand what we’re protecting?

What if legitimacy was never actually about western medicine’s approval — and chasing it has cost us the very thing that made us distinct in the first place?

What if the profession’s identity crisis isn’t a problem to be solved by one side finally winning the argument — but a launch point? The kind that shows up right before something new becomes possible, if enough people are willing to stand in the discomfort of not knowing yet?

I don’t have the answer to any of this. And I know I can’t get there alone.

But I think the question is worth asking. Not the old question of which side is right.

A different one: what becomes possible if we stop needing to be?