Life or Death Postulates

Man is either alive, or he’s dead.
If he’s alive, there’s a reason.
If he’s dead, there’s a reason.
Man is either healthy, or he’s sick.
If he’s healthy, there’s a reason.
If he’s sick, there’s a reason.
If he’s healthy, there’s a logical,
reasonable, and consistent explanation.
—B.J. Palmer

The above statement is the essence of chiropractic philosophy. Chiropractic bases its practice on clear, logical reasoning. While there must be a reason, or perhaps many reasons for disease, it is more important to find the logical, reasonable and consistent reason for health. Addressing health is far more important than addressing disease. If you get rid of a disease but do not restore health, a void remains. Into that void will come another disease or perhaps the same one will return. You must have health, it is prerequisite to getting well and to the prevention of disease.
The logical reason for a lack of health is that the body is not functioning as it should. In fact, that may very well be the true definition of health, a state in which each and every cell in the body is working as it should. If we follow the logic of this thinking, it would make sense to examine the body and determine if the body is working properly and if it is not, why it is not. We in the chiropractic profession believe that we have found a cause. We admit that we have not looked further for other reasons why the body may work at less than perfect efficiency. There may be others, we just have not looked for them. The reason is that the cause we in chiropractic have found involves the nerve system, the master system of the body, which is concerned with the organization of every activity, the production of every chemical, and the running of every cell. Further, we have found that interference in this nervous system occurs in just about everybody and occur at the level of the vertebral column. This is enough to keep us busy.

What is the reason for sickness? That is the job of the medical doctor to determine that reason or reasons. It may be that one of the reasons for a disease, a major one, is a lack of health. The problem is that medicine is not looking for a lack of health, which is inside the person. They are looking for outside causes, bacteria, viruses, the environment, the weather, stress, as well as things you put into your body. It may be that there is some importance to those things but a lack of health, a body not working properly, is present in every situation. The medical doctor does not look for that. He cannot be expected to. He was not trained to do that. That is the role of the chiropractor, to find that one cause, an interference in the nerve system at the vertebral level. In correcting those subluxations, the body will work better in all situations under all circumstances. That is a prerequisite to a healthy body.