There are, by the best count anyone has made, something over one hundred thousand chiropractors at work in the world, spread across ninety countries.
In sixty-eight of those countries the practice is recognised in law. In thirty-nine, the title is protected by statute, which means it is an offence for a person who is not a chiropractor to say that they are. In forty-six, somebody other than the patient pays for at least part of it.
In Switzerland, chiropractic is one of five professions the federal government designates as medical, alongside human medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and pharmacy. Swiss chiropractors train in the medical faculty of the University of Zurich and take the same first years as the medical students. Basic Swiss health insurance covers it. In Denmark the training is a publicly funded five-year university degree at Odense, where the chiropractic and the medical students share a bachelor curriculum and sit the same examinations. Australia licenses just under seven thousand of them through the same national agency that licenses its doctors, its nurses, and its pharmacists.
The man who began it was born in Ontario. He said the method had been given to him at a séance in Iowa in either 1895 or 1896, by a doctor who had been dead fifty years.
I’m Allen Schyf, and this is a Polite Disputes WOW! episode.
Music: Truth Be Told by Maarten Schellekens.
