Prospective students are lured by false promises of status and success. At most chiropractic colleges, students are exposed to cultlike indoctrination into a deviant belief system. They are taught false theories of disease and healing and persuaded to accept them as gospel. They are taught to disdain science and distrust medical doctors. A few reform-minded schools are trying to move away from teaching chiropractic philosophy as a substitute for science, but these are under attack as heretical.
Chiropractic students learn conversational medicine.
This enables them to speak as if they know about disease and healing processes and creates the illusion that they understand medical science. Chiropractic literature, however, indicates that many chiropractors don't even understand the most basic concepts of disease etiology. Some chiropractic authors still attack the germ theory as erroneous, and speak of it as if it were scientific medicine's only theory of causation. Many new graduates are dumped into the cold, hard world where survival values often displace ethics. Many discover that they are not in a true profession, but a guild of survivors who must sink or swim.