For the past decade, Koren has written, published, and sold brochures describing what he believes about the wonders of his chosen profession. He sells the pamphlets mostly to other chiropractors, who usually leave them in waiting rooms to be picked up by patients. The Federal Trade Commission calls them advertising. And that disagreement is causing Koren a lot of grief. The FTC says some of the claims in the pamphlets are misleading, and if Koren doesn't allow the commission to set itself up as his ad hoc editorial and scientific advisory board, he could be in big trouble.
Definitions often come from positions of power.
When the FTC says your speech is advertising, unless you are very wealthy and very brave, you must agree and accept the consequences that follow from that definition. Most people think of chiropractic as, at best, something good for back pains and, at worst, pure quackery. Subluxations, which most M.D.s say are figments of the chiropractic imagination, are misalignments in the vertebrae. The chiropractor, mostly using only his hands, realigns them. There are about 55,000 licensed chiropractors in the United States, and they saw 21 million patients in 1996.