Post Wilk: Is Our Future Secure?

In its 11-and-a-half decades of existence, the chiropractic profession has faced formidable challenges. From the jailing of founder D.D. Palmer to the vicious attacks by the AMA, only the resolve of courageous practitioners and the patients they served carried the day.

Recall that organized medicine opposed the very existence of chiropractic as a profession. On Nov. 2, 1963, the AMA created a “Committee on Quackery” with the goal of first containing and then eliminating chiropractic. Doyle Taylor, the director of the AMA Department of Investigation, served as secretary of the Committee on Quackery. The House of Delegates, governing body of the American Medical Association, had said formally: “Either the theories and practices of scientific medicine are right and those of the cultists are wrong, or the theories and practices of the cultists are right and those of scientific medicine are wrong.”1