When all the camouflage and obfuscation is removed, an idea stands alone, and its strengths and weaknesses become patently obvious. Simplicity promotes clarity and makes avoidance of issues very difficult, leaving ideas to stand or fall based solely on their merits. Each chiropractor must choose one to live by or else exist in a clouded world of half truths, where refusing to face facts results not only in an inability to talk about chiropractic with clarity, but also to practice it. Paradigm one maintains that chiropractic cures all disease. They neglect to mention, however, that while it is true that the only power that heals the body is the power that made it, sometimes even that is not enough.
Some people are beyond healing.
The pretense that all sick people get well when properly adjusted merely holds us up to ridicule. This slogan, incidentally, even if true, would offer chiropractic care only to sick people and deny it to those who are not yet sick with clinical or laboratory symptoms. A second paradigm of chiropractic thinking and practice holds that only some sick people get better when their vertebral subluxations are corrected. Because of the nature of their disease, or the advanced stages of it, others require medical intervention or adjunctive therapy. This paradigm of treating some and referring others sounds logical and caring, and is most likely to earn us the respect of the community of health care providers.