Interview with W. Heath Quigley, M.S., D.C. (part 2)

MDT: Let me tie up a couple loose ends. When did Clear View close down?

WHQ: In 1963.

MDT: And were the primary reasons that insurance was starting to come in,
that medications were starting to come in?

WHQ: No. They’d already come in. That brings up an interesting discussion regarding our friend at Parsons, Dr. Roberts. Dr. Roberts called one day and wanted to come out and look over the institution, which he did. He didn’t ask me ahead of time and he didn’t say anything when he left, he just did it. But I don’t think he knew very much about it. So it must have been a week or so later, I was still teaching classes, psychology one trimester and then I’d teach psychiatry the other.

Anyway, Dave called me into his office and told me that Clear View was being closed down. I was dumbfounded. “What do you mean?” I said to him. It was like the last thing in the world I would have suspected. We had 18 interns, 9 on the morning shift and 9 on the afternoon shift and they were really happy people. We were taking care of 9 students that otherwise would have to be taken care of at Palmer during their last year. Almost no one had an intern program in our profession, and we had one.

I think the most telling thing of it all, the day before…I’ll have to go back a second, ah…I’d worked from 1954 until that time, going to Des Moines almost always once a month and meeting with the Head of the Department of Health, and working out a way in which Clear View would become a hospital. We worked on that and he had me work with some of the people from the hospital division. I met with the board of hospitals twice and I received a letter from this Dr. Forrest, who said in effect that we’re set. We’ve accepted the criteria you’ve set up for chiropractic mental hospitals. He said, “I think it will be just a short time until you will be receiving the accreditation.” So I was really delighted, in fact this was a dream come true.

MDT: Sure.

WHQ: Finally getting it. We could even get funds to build more rooms, because we needed it badly. So anyway, Dave told me the news. I told him all about the impending accreditation. “Oh,” he said. “No, Dr. Roberts says if we convert this into a nursing home we’ll make a lot more money”. And I said, “ David you missed the point.” He said, “Well I don’t want to argue about it”. And I said, Okay”. And that was that. So that’s what closed it.

And I don’t think I finished one tale. I had been working on this research to determine how we were doing, comparing the amount of people who were admitted and the amount of people that were released, and the different types that were being released at that time. I told Bill, the comptroller, that I wanted those records. I told him that I had to have those records because of research. He said, “Oh don’t worry about them.” I must have gone in there six times and always got, “Don’t worry about them”. Well eventually, they were thrown into the dump. Workmen didn’t know any different and Bill didn’t do his job. He didn’t set up a caution for that, so we lost all of those records.

MDT: All those years of research that you had been doing?

WHQ: Yeah…yeah…all my records. Because first of all, we’d set up a form: the diagnosis, when the patient was admitted, when the first disorder came, and then every year, after the patient was released, we’d send out the questionnaire to the guardian…parent and/or attorney or whoever. Then we’d ask them questions such as, has this patient ever been hospitalized for a mental illness since he was released from Clear View? And we’d ask how long was it between the release and any readmission. A number of questions like that. One critical question was, is the patient able to sustain himself in society? In short, is he holding a job? These are things which, of course, define mental illness. When you attempt to define it, it’s not very easy. It sounds like it should be but it isn’t.

MDT: Right.

WHQ: So we had been doing that for many years. We had made it very easy to respond, and we had some, I’d say fairly reliable evidence. There were many others that were starting to get interested in our work. Then to have that go out the door into the dump. We had probably only 50, 60 files left that were somehow saved. I don’t know how, but there wasn’t any continuity. There wasn’t anything you could do with it.

MDT: I’ll be darned. So you never were able to obtain those results?

WHQ: No. I could never go back and get all that information. Seven, eight, nine years of information all lost. That was a disappointment, besides of course closing it down.

MDT: So then you became a faculty member at Palmer after that?

WHQ: Yeah, I just did the same thing. What I did do is maintain a private practice at home. The way I got started is that at the sanitarium, we would have a patient we felt was about ready to go home. I’d talk to the parents about it and explain that he would be released. Then they would often want him released in Davenport so we could keep an eye on him. Then I would tell him I would see him. Pretty soon other people would call. They all knew I was associated with the sanitarium and I’d end up working from about 7 until 11 about 4 nights a week.

So, that’s what happened after the sanitarium closed down. I continued to teach the two classes. Outside of Palmer however, that was the other thing I was doing. I didn’t do anything more at the school, until the end when Dave was really incapacitated. But he was terrified of the NCA. He felt they were out to get him. Of course that paranoia was partly B.J., which was still a voice inside him. You can’t blame them, that’s how it was.

MDT: Right.

WHQ: So to get back to the accreditation process at LACC…they had nobody that understood and could handle the problems of the economics. It’s was their weakest point. That’s also the one that was going to cause them to lose their business. I tried to get somebody good to come in. The only thing was that the board set the salaries at $20,000. You’re not going to get a man knowledgeable in that area for $20.000. We found one that talked good, but he also was drinking too much. He came to a meeting one time and he was pretty well intoxicated. That kind of washed that one out for good. That was intolerable, we couldn’t have that. But there were these three men that thought that they knew everything that needed to be done. They didn’t, and they clearly didn’t. So it got to be stressful. I was glad to get out of there.

MDT: What year did you get married?

WKQ: In ‘51.

MDT: In 1951. Same year you took on the sanitarium. So how’d you meet her?

WHQ: Well I met her through Hank Thompson. Hank Thompson was an entertainer who played in the clubs in that general area, very well known. He brought in a lot of people. They still say that he’s a terrible organist, but he was great in public relations…irresponsible though, in many respects, but a very likeable man. And I was doing a lot of fishing and he was a fisherman too. During this one summer we saw him quite a bit and I met his wife’s sister. She later became my wife. We didn’t go together at the time because she was married, and I never thought about her that way you know, just a nice person. But I thought she was certainly above anybody else I’d ever met. And then, later on, some years later, her husband died. And so about a month later I said, “I’m gonna call”, and I did. From then on my life changed, for the better I’d say.

MDT: What is your impression of DD Palmer. I realize you couldn’t have known him, but you must have heard family stories.

WHQ: Yeah I heard family stories. I’d say he and B.J. shared some things. Their
unshakable prejudices are among them. I think that D.D. had tremendous imagination and he willed himself to be a student. But he wasn’t really the student that he thought he was. He did have a schooling by a school master, and it took them up to the levels of Greek. I guess that was at one time figured to be where you should be in education. I felt that DD was a very, very ego-centered man. He really couldn’t see much beyond his own needs and his own concepts and ideas. He felt people were really wrong to disagree with him. He knew, and I don’t think he ever forgave the world for that.

MDT: He believed in the placebo effect, I mean he believed in that life force and he was a magnetic healer prior to this early work.

WHQ: Yes. He seemed to always have a fair success with whatever he attempted. When he married Mary, the woman who was his second wife, she had managed a hotel one time and she had a good business head. D.D. had no head at all for business. She took over the business aspect and saw that the clinic was run right. They opened the ‘hospice’, and people would come there and stay over night and be treated as hospital patients. They started off with about eight beds and then they eventually got up to something like 22.

MDT: Was this still downtown in the old Ryan Building?
WHQ: Yes. They just took up more and more room. They had quite a few people there
eventually. So all of that was pretty well blown when D.D. took off. But B.J. did a good job of getting everybody back together again and the reputation wasn’t ruined. But I felt that D.D. was extremely impulsive.

MDT: Even DD’s earliest students were in contention with him. I mean the contention
between the idea of ‘bone out of place’ versus ‘approximation of segments’.

WHQ: A lot of the early students went out to establish schools. And then they taught their brand. Oh, D.D. hated that. His judgment about people was very poor. He got associated with this Alva Gregory. And that didn’t last very long. He lost whatever he had in that. He had the money that came from what BJ had given him. After D.D. had walked out and B.J. had gotten itback on a sound footing, he told DD not to come back, that he wasn’t welcome. B.J. had people come in and evaluate the school and determine it’s value. He then gave D.D. a check for half that amount. D.D. didn’t like that, but he took it and then he went and lost it. I don’t know how he made out during those years. In fact, nobody really knows what happened to him in any detail during that long period. So I guess it’s still a mystery.

MDT: So D.D. came back before his death?

WHQ: No, he came back …it wasn’t very long, but it was after he went to jail. But they said to him, “We have to get rid of you, don’t want you ever back here”. He lived a fair number of years after that…the exact number I’d have to look up too.

MDT: Well, there’s the apocryphal story about B.J. running into him at a parade in Davenport and that it may have been a causative factor in his death. But then I’ve heard other things say no it wasn’t.

WHQ: Ah it couldn’t have been. He died of typhoid fever. So there was no chance of that. In fact, the doctor, more than once, signed a statement that it was not a case of injury. It was a case of typhoid. But it was an opportunity. It was like our democrats and republicans. If there’s any kind of a wound, we’re gonna stir it up until it becomes a raw, fatal lesion.

MDT: Sure.

WHQ: I’ve never known B.J. to ever show any physical aggression against anybody. And with all of his anger and so forth, at Dave, never once did he raise a hand or anything like that. So it doesn’t sound consistent at all.

MDT: So during the years that you were at Palmer, there was obviously an upper cervical approach, ostensibly using the NCM to define whether or not to adjust. Were many doctors adjusting other segments too, or was it very strict then?

WHQ: Let’s see, it was ‘33 when the neurocalograph came out and HIO was coming out with it. One worked with the other, BJ said. I think without the NCG, he would not have introduced this. But he was a firm believer, and again he relied on what might be called similes, rather than on facts.

For example, this idea that the nerve would be hot, was associated with a live wire.
That it would be cold was associated with the physiological reaction to that sort of problem. Of course, if he wanted to change, it wouldn’t be too difficult. Because you just simply say because this nerve is the one that’s hot instead of this one. He was caught up in that kind of thinking. He considered it logical thinking.

MDT: You are speaking of the meric system and the nerve tracing?

WHQ: Yes.

MDT: So were people adjusting in a full spine fashion out of his sight?

WHQ: I would say that the number of people that practiced the HIO work were not anywhere near as great as the number of people that practiced full spine techniques. And, not anywhere near as great as the number of people that said they practiced HIO.

MDT: Okay.

WHQ: It was like, to belong to this elite fraternity, you had to be pure upper cervical…

MDT: I understand.

WHQ: People at the school, they didn’t have much choice.

MDT: Right.

WHQ: One of the first ones to break that was Price. Price did what he wanted. He had a practice and he just went on.

MDT: Galen Price?

WHQ: Yes. B.J. would bring him in and give him a hell of a dressing down and then they’d be going on just as they always did. He didn’t pay any attention and just kept going. He didn’t feel anything was going to happen and it didn’t. I know that BJ wanted everybody to do HIO. A lot of people said this was crazy. I’ve had too much success otherwise.

If you start off that way, it’s not difficult to change to something less, but I know that in my own experience that …I was adjusting some people during those periods of time. I had a small practice. I didn’t have any time, but I did what I could…and I learned that when people came in with a very severe low back, you could palpate and detect that the difficulty was very much centered there.

MDT: Sure.

WHQ: And we all heard of cases about people who came in with low back problems, and after adjusting them upper cervically they wouldn’t respond, but then when they were adjusted in the low back, they would be astounded to found that they felt better. I think I broke away from HIO fairly early. But I wasn’t doing that, I wasn’t really in practice.

MDT: Marshal Himes gave a speech in ‘58 or ‘59 that came to be called the “Green Light Speech”. The speech said that Palmer was going to move away from strict interpretation of upper cervical back to a more segmental approach.

WHQ: Well, there were a couple of good reasons. We were getting nasty letters from the State Boards that said these students don’t know how to adjust the spinal column. And you’re going to have to start teaching the adjustment of the whole spine. Well, they knew if they started teaching, then students were going start using it. And that’s just what happened.

MDT: Sure. Well they were already going down to the Blackhawk Hotel, or into students apartments and they had been doing that for many years.

WHQ: Yes. To prohibit something that is so open, you know you’re going to fail…

MDT: If you prohibit anything, people are going want to do it, aren’t they?

WHQ: That’s right. They sure are. That’s the first thing…

MDT: You must have met a lot of the clinicians that have become well known names in chiropractic. Do any of them stand out? You know, Thompson and DeJarnette, and Gonstead and there’s many more.

WKQ: Thompson…Clyde and I were very close, good friends for a long time. In fact, his brother was married to my wife’s sister. She married Hank Thompson.

MDT: Ah. So you were friends with Clay also.

WHQ: Oh yeah…yeah. We had a lot of things that we use to laugh about so much. We’d get together and Clay was funny. I mean he couldn’t help it. He’d do things that everybody would laugh about. An example… on this one occasion, he had been lecturing in Europe. One of the European contractors knew Clay pretty well and got to work with him a little bit when he was here in the States. He took Clay on a tour down through southern Europe. They went to the Alpha Romeo factory and talked to the manager. It turned out that Argentina had ordered 12 Rolls Royces. Beautiful cars at the time. There had been changes in government down there and they had to cancel the order. So here they sat with these 12 automobiles. Clay talked to the manager and the manager told him, among other things, that he might be able to arrange a deal. He could get a pretty good price on this. So Clay was real anxious when he got back home and he told me about this. He told me the manager was going to be calling him any night now. The manager had told him that he’d call and let Clay know how much. So I got word that Clay said he had definite word that the manager would be calling. His brother said, “Why don’t you call him and pretend you’re calling from Italy?” I said, “Aw, I just gave a talk about that to the boys at the sanitarium today. No practical jokes, they don’t work out, you know?”

We just couldn’t afford it in that kind of environment. Well, somehow I decided to do it. I got my wife to get on the phone and call the office where he was. She said, “Ah, Dr. Thompson?” He said, Yes, yes!” She told him that this is the overseas operator. “Oh yes, yes, yes!” he said. “Where’s the call from?” My wife said, “I’m calling from Milan, Italy.” “Oh!”, he said. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for!” She said, “Can you hear me?” He said, “Just like you’re in the room!”

So we went from there. I could hear all of this on the other phone and so then he came on the phone and I said, “Senhor Thompson, I’m calling you from Milan.” He said, “Yes…yes I’ve been waiting for your call!” And I said, “ I’ve been talking to my employees and I’ve been talking to the boss and he says we can do something for you…”. At that point, I was beginning to feel we’re getting a little deep here you know. Clay would say, “Well, tell me…how much would it cost to change it from a right hand drive to a left hand drive?” And I don’t have any idea, but I told him “20, 000 lira”, and he says, “Well, that isn’t so bad. How much is that?” I had to make up a figure. So, finally I thought that this was too much, so I pretended that I was gonna just click the telephone and call him right back. I clicked it and tried to call him back…busy…Tried to call him back…busy…an hour and a half I tried to get back…I really was feeling bad by this time. As it turned out he had called practically every overseas operator in Europe to find out who made that call. I finally got through to him and told him that it had been me on the phone. I said, “Clay did you hear me?” He said, “What do you mean?” I repeated that it had been me on the phone. “Oh,” he said. “Well I enjoyed it anyhow!”. So anyhow we laughed about that many times, but I was very embarrassed at first.

MDT: That’s funny.

WKQ: Yeah. But ah…there were a lot of things that happened like that. One time we were up in Wisconsin at Hank’s cottage where he was staying. Clay came up with us, and we were going out fishing. He said, “I’m too tired I cannot go out in the morning”. I said, “Well, Hank will get you out”. He said, “No…no I’m not going I’m going to tell him no”. So we woke up about 3 in the morning and Hank had just come in from playing at the night club. He said to Clay, “Come on, get going. We’re going to go out and fish”. He said, “Oh, I’m too tired”. “Clay,” Hank said, “I went by that place, and the fish are jumping all over”. Clay said, “Where was it?” Hank told him and out they went. Before he left, I surreptitiously put a little note in his fishing tackle box that said, “I won’t go out fishing today”. Every time he turned around, we’d have that note someplace. Oh boy….what a time!

MDT: What would you say is the state of chiropractic these days?

WHQ: I would say that chiropractic is trying to make up its mind how and where it’s going to go. I think that the chiropractic profession is absolutely going have to base their practice on science based findings. They have no choice. Anecdotal evidence is not enough.

MDT: Right.

WHQ: This needs to be done under very close control. Now Palmer was in the position to do that, but they haven’t. They haven’t done it and what now they feel the way to practice is to wave a flag and stir people to do something. And that doesn’t work. That isn’t going to work here.
Somehow they have got to make a transition to a science based practice.

MDT: In reading the chiropractic newspapers I’m seeing about 99% of the chiropractic researchers now think that subluxation is an outmoded concept that should be done away with.

WHQ: Could be, could be. yeah. I don’t think there is any question that subluxation happens, but I don’t think it always happens with either the force or the complications that are said to follow. But I do think that it does happen.

MDT: I guess we should define subluxation from your point of view.

WHQ: That’s true, but basically what a subluxation was supposed to be was a misaligned vertebra putting pressure on a nerve.

MDT: Okay.

WHQ: There is irritation of a nerve. I don’t question that happens because I’ve seen certain, pretty good evidence on MRI’s, that it does exist. But I also was somewhat shocked and disappointed that many things you see on an MRI are not necessarily what you think they are.

MDT: There’s a synthetic quality and a computerized synthesis that occurs with the images. It is not quite as black and white as they’d like to think…

WHQ: I took the course leading to an orthopedic diplomate at LACC. This was long after I left my position there. I took it because, in California the time we had a lot of problems in the injury business, not only for the personal injury, but also for the employment problems. And at that time, we were spending over 2 billion dollars a year on back problems alone. There was one kind of trap that often happened. The insurance company would send the patient to their doctor, who would in effect say that there was nothing wrong with this man, or that what ever it was, was very minor. Then he goes back and get another doctor to examine him and this doctor says he is incapable of work. This would go back and forth, sometimes this can go on for a couple of years. The cost becomes incredible. So what they did to overcome this, and I don’t know how successful they ultimately were, they appointed people who were called qualified medical examiners. There were qualified medical examiners in each field. We were classed in the orthopedic field. There were also cardiovascular examiners, and so forth down the line…all different systems.

MDT: Sure.

WHQ: So the idea was for patients to eventually be referred to the QME, and that’s the end of it. He has the final decision. So they had to be sure these people were pretty well qualified. I took this course in orthopedics in order to qualify for that.

A Ph.D. in anatomy from Sweden taught the class. He had images of cadaver which had been sectioned transversely. Se we could see slices of the spine, just a graphic slice, an MRI slice and CT slice. So we’d be taught in a class where we would see what the x-rays showed, and then see the same thing on cat scan, and then you see the same thing that the MRI showed. It was very enlightening. It gave us some insights. He also had a network of people taking MRI’s and so forth at various radiology laboratories that he had set up. He would read the report rather than just write a report. He read the report on videotape. And the pointer would go up on the screen and he would say, “Here is where there is evidently pressure. About a two plus at this point on L-5, S-1 and so forth. The pointer would move around and, my God, it was just so clear.

Before, I would look at the images and I couldn’t see it. He was a man that I felt did a great service. He had a great interest and I think this business of doing the comparison of the logical slices between x-ray, CT and MRI really capped it. You’d look at it either way. And each one of them added to the understanding.

MDT: Do you think chiropractic is heading toward becoming a sub-specialty in orthopedics?

WHQ: I would say it’s a very great possibility, yes. I don’t think that the chiropractor can compete in what is happening in health care today if it isn’t administering medications. I don’t think there’s any way he can. That’s not necessarily his fault, it’s just the way things are. So, in some respects if you’re not practicing, you can look at this very objectively.

MDT: That part of why I am asking you these questions, because you have a perspective that’s unique, really.

WHQ: Well I guess it is, yes. My brother was a chiropractor, my grandfather was, and my dad, my uncle, my aunt it’s almost like the osteopathy families.

MDT: You said you wrote a text on chiropractic and mental health, is that what you told me?

WHQ: No, I didn’t ever write a text on it. If I said anything, I wrote a book which I’ve called ‘The Palmer Saga’.

MDT: Oh, okay, that may be what you were speaking of.

WHQ: Yes, and the Palmer Saga is just what it says it is.

MDT: Sure.

WHQ: It’s got D.D. and the rest, but it’s written more in a novel style.

MDT: Is it in print? I don’t think I’ve seen it.

WHQ: No, nobody is interested.

MDT: Oh, has it not been published?

WHQ: No, it hasn’t. The situation is that I’ve submitted it to some agents and so forth, but there wasn’t any interest. They have said it is very interesting in some respects, but they don’t think we have the audience that will read it. And after all, that’s what counts for them.

MDT: I understand.

WHQ: And I’m not going to ever do any self publishing. I don’t think that’s a very good idea. But if I could get it into the right hands, I think it would be interesting. Because it is interesting. Hell, it’s a lot better than just reading history because it’s history with a lilt.

MDT: Yes.

WHQ: For example, I begin with D.D. dying. He is in the bed hallucinating. He hallucinates his early life. His dearest wife seems to come along and sit down by his bed. It turns out to actually be the nurse. Then of course it eventually develops into the lawsuit and the problems and what happened, through the Davenport chiropractic school. Then of course we go through his other early periods. His struggle to somehow find something that would make him feel he had contributed to human beings. That’s what he wanted, he wanted to be recognized. His travels and of going to Iowa and going back to little towns where he taught school. Things of that nature. Then of course we work through that up until B.J. and his birth, and the conflicts that happen between the two of them, and the anger that developed there. All of this taking place in that Ryan Building in Davenport. Then, ultimately BJ at about the age of 18 or 19 graduating and making his life; ultimately moving to the hill and buying a big mansion, and the way it went for them. There were some pretty bad, tough times for the Palmers. There were also some very good times. The thing that really saved B.J. more than any other thing, was the fact that he intuitively guessed that radio would be big. And it was.

MDT: Boy, that was a good idea.

WKQ: Oh, without it, they’d never have beat it. But with that particular support and structure, I guess it was worth the effort. So anyhow, the book does all those things and even takes up the rest of D.D.’s life and carries it through until he dies.

MDT: Are you associated with Palmer at all anymore?

WHQ: No.

MDT: You’d think they would want to publish it, if no one else.

WKQ: I didn’t ask them. Even if they published it, the audience is very limited. I really wrote this with a larger audience in mind.

MDT: Oh, I see.

WHQ: I didn’t want to write just for chiropractors. I wanted to write this for a wider audience. I wrote those articles you said you’d read in Dynamic Chiropractic, and in a sense, that was sort of the beginning of some of those stories.

We have talked about some of those periods. … where he had that episode with his stomach, and the blockade that developed. I don’t know… it should be interesting. But I guess I just think to myself sometimes, well maybe I, and a few other people, are the only ones really interested. And yet people like to read biographies…

MDT: I don’t think potential publishers realize what it is.

WHQ: Well I guess I put it back on the shelf because I’ve got others that I’m pressing at the
same time.

MDT: So you’re still writing?

WHQ: Oh yeah, everyday.

MDT: That’s great. You’ve got a great set up here for it.

WHQ: Yeah, I sure do.

MDT: I’ve taken up more time than I should have.

WHQ: Oh, well I’m awfully glad you came along. I’m glad to have met you.

MDT: I’m very pleased to have been able to talk with you. Thank You.

Interview with W. Heath Quigley, M.S., D.C. (part 1)

A Talk With
W. Heath Quigley, M.S., D.C. (10-19-01)

Michael D. Thomas, D.C.

Interviewer’s Note: I met Dr. Quigley only moments before beginning this interview. In my introductory remarks to him, I attempted to allay any fears he might have about his words being taken out of context. Since I had said this before the tape began rolling, he summarized my comments and addressed the issue. I am including this preface in the transcript because his comments help to illustrate an idea that seems important to him.

This interview was conducted on January 19, 2001.

WHQ: You began by saying that you didn’t want to injure or hurt anybody; that the purpose [of this interview] is to put [my thoughts and memories] together for historical sake. I’m not that protective. The reason I’m not that protective is because that protection between individuals and competing concepts and philosophic concepts have really led the chiropractic profession astray many, many times. They’ve been led to say things and do things which I think have been very, very damaging. I believe that’s why we are still struggling with this profession.

MDT: Honest people take data in different directions.

WHQ: Well, you slant it your way. That’s the way you see it. And that’s perfectly normal. So when my turn comes to say whatever, I’m going to say what I think.

MDT: Let me start out the beginning. Where and when were you born?

WHQ: I was born in Pittsburgh, 1915. My father graduated from Palmer and he had met
my mother there. She was working in the school. He fell in love with her. Her sister, Mabel Palmer was a very controlling person. For many, many years, I used to do a great deal of psychological counseling and there was a phenomena that I began to call the Phoenix Phenomena. Not to good a term for it perhaps, but what it means is that, rising out of the ashes, rising out of early youth, an individual takes over. In this particular instance, Mabel took over the family, and by the time she was 12 she was running it.

MDT: I see.

WHQ: Grandfather seemed to be reasonably educated man. He went to Cornell College for a time. He was a newspaper reporter on a small paper. Grandmother was, I think, reasonably well educated for the time. Nevertheless, she became “the word”. And that’s how things went.

MDT: How did B.J. meet Mabel?

WHQ: He met her in the clinic. She came as a patient. I think there was a great
deal of interest between them right away. She saw a man who took over, and I think she wanted to merge her forces with him. She wanted to do something.

MDT: Was she already a medical doctor or was that later on?

WHQ: No, she never became a medical doctor.

MDT: I thought she had an M.D. and that was what allowed the clinic to function?

WHQ: No. That’s what people have assumed. But what she did was, she went to a medical school, but we cannot find out which one. It was in Chicago, I know it had to be something like that. They used to say it was (inaudible). I doubt it, because the school has no records of it what so ever. She wanted to learn dissection because her interest was in anatomy. So she spent her time learning anatomy and she was gone a great deal during that period. And, during that period Dave would be placed with his grandmother and grandfather, which he really loved. As a child, you always got more freedom with your grandparents than you do with your parents, so I think that was why he enjoyed staying with them so much. In this instance, she would be gone and come back. When the school was not in session, she would live at home for a time. They grew up under that kind of off and on, back and forth sort of thing. I know he told me on more than one occasion how he looked forward to staying with his grandparents. Every Friday night they would take the streetcar downtown and they would take him to a movie. That was a big thing to him. In those times, I guess it was a big thing to most kids.

So that’s where Mabel came into it. She was the post-mistress in Milan [Illinois] at the time. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I know that she came to the clinic for treatment and she got him. In the book I wrote about it, I spent a little time on B.J.’s, resolution about going up and speaking to her and staying back, and so forth. Ultimately he did, and when he did, it paid off and they were married. That was a very interesting time. It was during the time when they had the revolt against x-ray. Do you remember reading about that?

MDT: Is that when Joy Loban took off and formed the Universal Chiropractic School?

WHQ: Yes, he was a member of the Universal. And during that period, he received word from a particular student that he’d gone into the cellar of a house, which was one of the school buildings, and he found a crate marked “x-ray equipment”. So he ran down right away, expecting to paid off by Loban, and that’s how that happened.

MDT: They thought that use of x-ray was “mixing”.

WHQ Oh yeah, because here’s the problem. B.J. said he didn’t believe in diagnosis, and x-ray is diagnostic. But BJ persisted that it was not diagnosis. I really think that B.J. felt that
when you persisted and insisted long enough that ultimately it would change the nature of the whole structure of the thing and it would now not become diagnosis.

MDT: Oh, I see.

WHQ: It was that kind of thing you know? So, he would contend that looking for a subluxation
was not diagnosis. That was chiropractic. In this instance, I guess we shared the contention.

MDT: Since we’re on the topic of x-ray, I recall that the Palmer school had one of the first commercially available x-ray units.

WHQ: Apparently, yes.

MDT: They seem to have done a lot of research on their own.

WHQ Their research was primarily learning how to take that picture. It wasn’t easy back
then. You measured your KVP, among other things, with the length of the spark. You didn’t just turn a nice neat knob and nothing in sight. The machine buzzed and sparked a great deal. So I guess we could say it was research because not too many people were doing this kind of work.

MDT: Many people have said that Mabel took on too much radiation in those early days and that may have been the cause of her demise.

WHQ: No, she didn’t take on any more than many people. The girl working in the next office got just as much. Actually Mabel had a pretty bad case of Saint Vitus’ Dance. It definitely disabled her for a time, but like many things, it passes and you regain your health. She was however, left with a tick. Now a tick, by definition is not a pathologically caused disorder. Tick is a psycho-physiological response to certain kinds of stresses. She’d roll her eyes and they would roll up in her head. She’d go around like this. She controlled it rather well when she was in public. But when she was at home and sitting there talking to family, she would do this fairly often. She developed a mass on her neck about the size of a ….. . It was simply a hypertrophied, compensated muscle.

MDT: She hadn’t lost all her hair from the radiation?

WHQ: Well, she lost her hair, but that was later in life. It wasn’t due to radiation. Her hair fell out several decades later. So a lot of those things are put together, this clue, that clue and assembled unfortunately, incorrectly.

MDT: There’s a tremendous mythology in chiropractic.

WHQ: Oh yeah, there’s a mythology in everything. Whatever it is, ultimately if it has some
interest, it’s going to be speculated about.

MDT: What led you to chiropractic school?

WHQ: Well I don’t know, when I think about it. I went into the University of Pittsburgh. The first day, I walked in and sat down at these tables. There were a lot of kids going to school because there wasn’t any work. I had a counselor who was probably 2 or 3 years older than I was. At the time I had just turned 17. He asked me, “What do you want to become?” And he shocked me, you know? I realized that nobody had ever asked me that before. I told him I didn’t know. He said, “Well, what do you like to read?” I said I read a lot about science and light and about the physics of the electron, etc. I wish I hadn’t said that but I did. The guy believed it. Then I went on to the next phase and he said, “Is there anything else you like?” “Yeah,” I said, “I like astronomy.” He said, “You put all this together and that would make you a good astronomer.” So, suddenly I was on a course of becoming an astronomer, and I went home and told my folks. They were very, very puzzled by this.

I went through the first year and it was really hell. First of all, I was not disciplined enough to study, and the second thing, I was distracted. I spent a good share of my time at the Carnegie Library, which is right across the street from the University. I remember I saw this book, and it really caught me, on how to translate and how to read hieroglyphics. Now this didn’t have anything to do with the chemistry I was struggling with or the mathematics I was struggling with. Those two courses were giving me a very bad time. My Aunt Mabel had brought back from Egypt, from their round the world trips, a number of pieces that became pillows, and they were copies of the hieroglyphics on the wall of Tutankhamen’s tomb and other such things. When I looked at those, I suddenly realized I could read them. I could pronounce it and so forth. I was real pleased with that, but then that faded because I wasn’t getting any kind of real reward for it.

The first year was kind of tough. In the second year, I was taking physiology and anatomy. I just loved it. I studied and I read it…didn’t study as much as I should have, but I did study. Then it was like my life turned over and I met some people that I became very good friends with over the years.

I talked earlier about Mabel’s control. When my mother agreed to marry my father, Mabel made him promise that he would allow her to come to Davenport every year for 3 months. And he did. Every year, we would pack up at the end of May and go to Davenport, my brother and I. My brother was five years younger. So I was brought up in that atmosphere and I was conditioned in that atmosphere. When I graduated from school, I suppose like a lemming, I took off for Davenport. Dave at that time had built some tennis courts on the school property. He opened them up to the public and brought in Bill Tilden. A number of people came to play and it really stimulated them. Tennis was on another rise in popularity in that period.

I had to hurry to get out there, which I did. I took my physiology courses, not thinking really seriously about going to school. Most of my friends were going to medical school and I was kind of fluctuating back and forth. When the time came however, I was in a hurry and I went out to Davenport. David [Palmer] had an illness that intervened, and then a divorce and other things which kept him from functioning very well. He had actually a very severe “safe place” phobia. He did not go out by himself. He had just one hell of a hard time during those days. So we spent nearly all the time I was off work, together.

MDT: So you were peers in age?

WHQ: No he’s ten years older. I’d always looked up to him as a figure of importance and I thought very much of him. So, it was natural that when he wanted to go back to school we decided to go at the same time. So I started and that’s how I got in.

MDT: What year did you graduate?

WHQ: Actually in August of 1940 because I took the four-year course at that time.

MDT: Were there any instructors that were of considerable impact for you when you were going through school?

WHQ: Yes. The person that I identified with and became very close to, was Herb Hender. He was the Dean. Herb came into our lives this way: at the end of the summer in 1936, Dave was ready for a struggle against his problem and so he and I sat in the rustic room there in the Mansion and planned a trip. We finally settled on a trip down the Mississippi on a boat from Davenport. It was about a 50-foot cruiser. We were going to take this down the Mississippi River. It wasn’t long before we realized we were total amateurs and we could not do that all by ourselves. So we got a Captain. Dave also invited Herb. So Herb went along and there were the three of us. Harry Godley was the Captain’s name, and the “Pipe Dream” was the name of the boat. We had a cook too. So that’s how we roughed it down the Mississippi River, just like Tom Sawyer…(laughter). Usually we’d pull into a town like Memphis or something and stay overnight. We might spend a day getting things stocked, and then on we’d go. It took us a month to get to New Orleans that way.

MDT: That was quite an adventure.

WHQ: It’s a long river you know. And, it’s a lot longer than just drawing a line, because it curls around and moves…one day we traveled almost all day going north. The days were getting shorter then, and you didn’t dare travel at night. I suppose we’d spend about 8 hours traveling about 80 miles. We left on the 19th of September or so. After about two weeks we all knew the river pretty well. We had a marvelous time and we’d often go swimming in the river. We stopped to see different places that we’d heard about. A lot of them had the feel of the old South yet. The bales of cotton were on the levy. It had the feel of the old South, the “darkies” trying to move these bales, the people and the concepts, all of that period. The South was in many ways, a little behind where we were.

We got to New Orleans a month later. We went to the Southern Yacht Club on Lake Ponchitrain, where we put up the boat. Dave and Herb and I went into town and we all decided we wanted to stay in town so we went to the Roosevelt Hotel and took rooms there. We had a very good time. We went from place to place, exploring the French Quarter. I occasionally got some time by myself and just walked. I would often walk almost half the day, all through the Quarter, around and about. There were things that seemed to never end arousing your further interest.

At the end of about a month, it got to be time to do something. We weren’t going to stay there forever. Dave called and had his car sent down. Bill Brandon, who was the controller of the college at the time, came down, and brought the car down. He and his wife stayed a couple of days and then we took off. We thought we’d go to Florida. So we drove around and we went to Biloxi for two or three days, and then around the arch and then down the panhandle, down the handle it self and I guess we finally got to Clearwater. By this time I think it was around the end of October. The water is pretty chilly out there by that time, because we didn’t know…Florida was Florida. It was supposed to be warm. But it was good weather and we had no problems with that. Then at the end of about 2 weeks, we decided, “Let’s go where it’s really warm.” We drove to Miami. We got to Miami, and we stayed there for about a good month on the beach, where you could go out everyday and meet people and so forth. Our next step was Palm Desert and we got up there and we had a about two weeks there. Then we took the train and had them put the car on a freight car and took it up to Chicago. That’s how we finally got out. Then we started school.

MDT: So you got to know Dr. Hender very well by that time.

WHQ: Yes, we became very good friends. As a matter of fact, about a year or so later he and his wife were not happy. They had been divorced once before and gotten back together for the kids sake, so he talked to me one day. “Now that Dave is moving out of the apartment,” he said, “would you mind if I moved in with you”? I was very happy, because we’d be sharing expenses and I didn’t want to assume all the bills at this time,. So that’s just what happened. He stayed there for a couple of years in the apartment. Then he married Marie Finnerd. Marie Finnerd was the matron of Clear View. Herb had been on the staff for some number of years.

MDT: When did Clear View begin?

WHQ: 1926.

MDT: So Clear View began in 1926 and operated independently until 1951?

WHQ: Until ’51, that’s right.

MDT: And then Palmer bought it.

WHQ: Yes. However it always had a Palmer connection. A. B. Hender, the MD and chiropractor, Herb’s father, was on the staff to do the examinations and things of that nature. Then after Herb graduated, he got on the staff too. So those two preceded me. Then when I came along, I had had a fairly solid background in psychology as well. I was very anxious and I asked all kind of questions, and I guess to save themselves, they put me on the staff.

MDT: How soon did you get on the staff?

WHQ: As soon as I graduated, which would have been the later part of ’39. They brought me on and said, “Well, we’ll wait for your license but, you won’t be treating them, but you’ll be just diagnosing them.”

MDT: Were you involved with the Palmer Standardized Chiropractic Council?

WHQ: I knew of it, but I was not involved with it. For one thing it didn’t appeal to me.
I felt that it was divisionary.

MDT: It would appear so from my reading of it. They seemed to have had a kind of bunker mentality.

WHQ: Yes, exactly.

MDT: It was a sort of secret society. You couldn’t even tell your friends that
you were a part of it.

WHQ: That’s right. This is the reason that, as I said, I’ve become far, far less defensive about that. In fact, perhaps I’m not that protective at all. And ah…overly critical without any difficulty. I don’t go out of my way to be critical, but when I’m asked then I will say what I think.

MDT: It seems to me that the Council kind of collapsed when the research that they were dong took off in different directions and different members the Council were all moving in different directions.

WHQ: Yeah, one of the problems in the Council was also true of Palmer as well. They
didn’t know beans about research. They didn’t know the statistics. And if you don’t understand statistics there’s no way you can make any conclusions about what you’ve done. There are a lot of tricky things about research. You need someone who is “your enemy” to tell you where you may have made a mistake. And, where you may have, not intentionally, but where you’ve made that error. Because [if you’re not careful] what you’re doing is, you’re tipping off the patient; how you want him to behave, or want him to think, or say. These are all things that work to a great disadvantage [in poorly designed research].

MDT: Most chiropractors have not been trained in research.

WHQ: I’ve developed a tremendous respect for the placebo [effect]. I think its power is
well beyond what we’ve ever primarily and previously given it credit for.

MDT: Yes sir.

WHQ: There’s no question. Easiest thing in the world is to get a testimonial from a patient. You know, when the patient says they took so and so, or they did this and they did that, and now they’re well. I don’t like them. We were loaded with them. You know, we had all kinds of them.

MDT: Anecdotal.

WHQ: Yes, that’s right. It was very difficult to move that out of the way because everybody…well here it is, the man says so. Which means nothing more than what that says…. the man said so.

MDT: Did you work in the clinic much?

WHQ: Ah, when I was in school, BJ sort of “captured” me and put me in the Clinic. I was involved in the work that was being done with the electroencephalograph. He [B.J.] wanted to get the largest and the most powerful one in the world and he did it. And then he kept adding to it. He put on timers and so forth. He kept calling it a “channel” and he tended to inflate the very nature of it. He had an idea that instead of using pads, which he felt gave a false reading, that we should instead, use coil spring wire for the contact. Because, he said, that would always give the same “amount” [of contact]. But we weren’t counting the fact that it didn’t, because that spring ultimately gets weaker. So you’re not going to have the same contact. Besides that, what really makes a difference is how firm it is compared to whether you’re in contact or not. So, we started on this and I was interested. I did some reading on it, but there was very little reading available. There were just a few, one or two books. We had those books.

WHQ: He had a name for it [electroencephaloneuromentipograph] because he thought he was doing something different.

MDT: He liked to name things, spinographs for example.

WHQ: Yes, that’s for sure. He felt that made it non-medical. He said, “Spinograph. Well now that’s not the same thing as an x-ray”. But when you ordered the film, you didn’t order “spinographic” film, you ordered x-ray film. (laughter) There were a lot of inconsistencies. At the time you shrug your shoulders and go on. We had at that time, some very severe cases of epilepsy. They would have tremendous convulsions. I will never forget, one day I was checking and doing something with the neck of one of these patients, getting ready to put him on the table. This guy let out a scream like I’ve never heard before or since. You know, the kind of sound that makes your tongue cleave to the top of your mouth and you can’t move. Finally he started to backup, just like he went into reverse. He hit the table and I was able to catch him as he started to fall and then we put him on the table. I did have electrodes on him, and we saw the beginning of the seizure and how it classically went through the stages. So a lot of good things came from that.

But when he [B.J.] put it on the low back…I finally had to tell him, “B.J., I know you not gonna like this, but here’s what’s happening. We have the electrodes on this fellow’s back. But what you’re picking up is the heart, the cardiogram”.

MDT: It’s a whole magnitude greater than the EEG.

WHQ: Oh yeah. My heavens yes.

MDT: All the EEG machines today have a component that actually subtracts that
waveform for them.

WHQ: Yes.

MDT: So you wouldn’t have been able to even see the EEG waves.

WHQ: That’s right. As I said this was an early machine. God, it stood about half, three-quarters the height of this room and each one had oscilloscopes, but we didn’t deal with that, we
dealt with the paper graph. …He would look at some of those over and over again, and all it was, was the EKG. And he was attempting to make his decisions about whether the impulses were getting through on that basis. He didn’t understand waveforms. He didn’t understand collapse of forms, or any of those matters, so he wrote very little about it. In fact he wrote a book. People used to ask, “What do you have on that machine?” And they [the Clinic Staff] would tell them go to the bookstore. They had a book there about the electroencephalogram, but there was absolutely nothing in there about research. And that was the title of it, Research of So and So…
You read all of that and you keep looking for the answer and there isn’t any answer. So gradually that was done to all the patients routinely.

By that time, I had decided that this was kind of a dead end now. We’d gone through the preliminary, we’ve done those things, and I think I felt like I was as useful as I was ever going to be there. I don’t know what I did next, but I did something different, I got out of there. I would be in and out of the clinic however, and I had different jobs there. One was interviewing patients that were having emotional problems. Some of those we sent out to Clear View.

And that became a pattern then after a while. In fact, we are still in communication with a lady up here in Alabama who calls us now. I first met her when I was a director of Clear View. They called out to the house and asked me to come in to see a lady. I went in to see her and we did take her. She became a patient, and she was a wonderful patient. She was not what I had first thought. We’ve had some strange people here…anyway, during my initial interview with her, I said to her, “Miss. Davis, how did this happen? This illness you have?” She said, “Well that’s easy. My blood and possum blood got mixed”. Then she went on to explain that they lived out in the wooded country. I recall she was probably about 12 or something like that, because she was married when she was 13. Anyway, she said that her mother had killed this possum and was butchering it. She had asked the girl to help her and the girl had contaminated a cut on her hand. They had always assumed that’s what happened to her. She was ill for some time.

MDT: What was your relationship like with BJ?

WHQ: He treated me very well. I often said he treated me better, and it’s true, far better than
he treated Dave. He depended on me tremendously, because as time went on…well he knew my
…my “bent”. He would have called me “medically minded”. We didn’t argue about it. Just when he’d get into trouble, he’d call. I went to Sarasota one time around 1951. I spent a month and a half there. He had a terrible ulcer, and when it acted up he was in big trouble. I got there that time and he really was only semiconscious. He was delirious. One thing that probably didn’t help was that he was severely dehydrated.

And he had absolutely no idea of how to eat with an ulcer. I can remember this one time, he came back from New Orleans. He called and I went in [to see him]. He was complaining about the pain and so forth and I said, “Well, what did you eat?” He said, “ I’ve only been eating simple foods”. I said, “What did you have?” He said, “I just had a shrimp cocktail.” And that was his concept of a simple bland food. He had no idea about it.

We went through this a number of times. I went to Palm Beach there one time for a month and a half or so. And I pulled him out of there. He almost died one time when we were in Davenport. And if everyone hadn’t acted quickly he would have. So after that attack, probably about 1961, I called Dr. Haroldson. He met me at a pathological lab and I brought BJ in. I wouldn’t say kicking and screaming all the way, but with as much energy as he had, he was complaining about not really wanting to go. I had thought it was an obstruction and sure enough it was. Ultimately the scarring covered up. Oh, what an ordeal they put him through, lying on that table. Lyle Sherman should have known better, but he took an x-ray with a contrasting agent. Nobody told B.J. that you need to get rid of the contrast afterwards. And he couldn’t pass it so it turned to concrete in his stomach. And I saw the first films and they were just white.. After they broke it up a while, you could see some form. It made a nice cement in there.

MDT: Good grief.

WHQ: I remember the gastroenterologist said to me, as he held up the film, “You couldn’t get a fiber from a brush through that hole.” Obviously, there was only one thing to do. B.J. didn’t want to talk to anybody. He really hardly recognized anybody by this time. I got him out in the car and took him home and got him into bed. Then Dr. Herb came over and he told BJ that he recommended he have surgery. And BJ said, “Absolutely not. I’ll take my chances.” Well, when he learned what his chances were, that he had three days left to live, he decided to go ahead with the surgery. I stayed with him and he called in Ralph and Herb and talked to them. Of course they all said, “You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it.” They said, “Think of all of those who depend upon you.” That made a perfect opening for him. He had the surgery, and he did a lot better, stomach-wise after that.

It was only about a year and a half later that the tumor in the intestine finally killed him. It wasn’t the stomach trouble but the intestinal tumor. At least he had pretty good digestion after that.

MDT: He must have been an amazingly charismatic person to have been able to pull so many people and so much, a whole profession together like he did.

WHQ: He seemed so unmoving at times, you know? “This is how it’s gonna be”. And people said, “Okay, that’s how it’s gonna be”. But he did have a charisma, no question about it. And he also had something, which you call “presence”. He could walk into a room and maybe nobody knew him, he went into someplace in New York or something and they just see him and you know…they’d stop and all of a sudden the room would be looking at B.J. And he wouldn’t be doing anything fantastic or grotesque, just walking through the room. He did have a presence there is no question about it. It really was something.

MDT: He was so critical to chiropractic’s continuance, and yet he’s also responsible for a lot of the division that exists.

WHQ: Oh yeah, sure.

MDT: So much of the good and so much that has been bad for chiropractic can be traced back to him.

WHQ: That’s true. That’s absolutely true and many people don’t realize that. This profession centered around him more than it centered around anybody else. In his instance, there were so many ways that he was involved. And, he took some pretty hard blows. One of them was when they fired him from the original ICA. They did it because there was, as usual, two organizations.
The NCA was doing quite well and his wasn’t. If anybody was mixing, he would refuse the case, and things like that. The NCA was simply signing them up right and left. And they just finally said, he isn’t going to give in, so they replaced him. And that went on until ultimately he made his way back in…

MDT: Was this the controversy surrounding the NCM?

WHQ: Part of it was the NCM. I’m glad you mentioned that. Yeah, That was part of it.
What B.J. wanted was that nobody could join the association unless they leased an NCM.
Then they could be a member. Of course, that just made so many people angry. They saw it as a effort to plunder the organization and the people. But that was his idea, and of course when he thought something was a good idea then it had to be good.

MDT: Are great men always that polarizing?

WHQ: No, I don’t think so. But I don’t think they are individuals who are easily
led to accept everybody, they don’t.

MDT: There was apparently great animosity between Dave and his father?

WHQ: Yeah…well, when you say animosity, Dave didn’t show much animosity. He
was not a very aggressive man. BJ, when he felt it was required of him, was very sometimes very harsh with Dave, very harsh. But that’s where he and Mabel ran into so much trouble, because she was highly protective of Dave. And God, after he was 30 years old she was still referring to him as her chick, and that kind of thing; within the family of course. It’s an interesting thing that B.J. treated Dave just as his father had treated him. Which is a very common thing. And he treated him in a B.J. style and not D.D. style. Nevertheless, he treated him very coolly at times.

I remember one time, God, I haven’t thought about it for about a long time. In the classroom building, which wasn’t in much use then, this is back in 19…. probably 38 or 39, B.J. had called Dave out and he told him he wanted him to start breaking open these bundles …and I don’t even remember what was in them, but they had to break the boards away and things like that….shipping cartons. He just put him in a very embarrassing position, because they had other workmen there too. Dave was at the time, at least in title, Vice President of the school and the Vice President of the Broadcasting Company. And here he is being emasculated in front of these men. Those kinds of things are not easily forgotten. And so it wasn’t smart, it gained nothing and actually it made BJ look bad. He was picking on the kid. He wasn’t so much of a kid, but nevertheless, that was how they did that.

MDT: From my reading of the times, it seems that right after B.J.’s death, everything shifted pretty dramatically. I hear stories about a group of men that went into the clinic and just cleared all the records out, and destroyed many of the records of the clinic

WHQ: No. They did take down some things. Dave had all of the epigrams painted over, which was one of the first major improvements in a long, long time. It didn’t look like an educational institution. It looked like a freak place. A lot of people enjoyed looking and reading all these different things.

I think what gave birth to that story that you just told me is [related to] research I was doing at Clear View. I conducted research for a good share of the time I was at Clear View. I wanted to find out how well we were doing compared to State institutions and other institutions. A professor of statistics from Columbia University, had a daughter at the sanatorium and he and I talked quite often. I asked him about the structure of a study that would give validity to how well we were doing. That’s a very complicated problem because of diagnostic differences and things that will happen. So he set me up and we talked a lot until we got a program, and then I started on that program about ‘54. I extended it, extended out until 61.

In October ’61, Dave got this educational consultant, a Dr. Roberts. Dr. Roberts was from a school named Parsons in a little town in Iowa, about 60 to 70 miles from Davenport. That school had been just barely making it. In fact they weren’t going to make it. It had lost it’s accreditation and it was almost gone when he came in and told the people that he could save the school. He talked them into it and they raised money and sent him to Washington. At that period, we were worried about Russia passing us up in education and all these other areas, so there was a handing out of money to institutions like this school. He brought them up to 3, 000 students from something like 250.
.
He was a fast talking man and my first impression was that this guy was dangerous. I didn’t like the statements he was making. At least they didn’t appear seemly. Well, he promised Dave he would take Palmer College from probably 1200 [students] at the time, to a goal of 3000.

So they came in with their big crew and took over admissions and set up all this equipment that they rented. IBM equipment, the best at the time, a bunch of automatic typewriters, all typing the same letter and things like that. And he had a list from the Department of Education, Federal Department, of all the addresses of people who had indicated in some form or another they wanted to go to advanced education. They sent out these letters. While they were waiting for the crush, they were doing everything possible to not be over run…and they weren’t. There were two inquiries in a matter of one month and at the end of two months, he said, “Wait until that second month”, and they waited, No better. Maybe one or two more letters came in, so it became evident that this wasn’t a very good way to go about it.

Roberts could never understand it. He didn’t understand the situations and problems and the things around it. I think Dave had his first lesson in being disillusioned with this man. Well, it went on and on. Finally, after an inspection by the accreditation group on the Northwest, and Parsons was considered part of the Northwest, they put Parsons on what they called a temporary, not final, but a temporary loss of accreditation. You can still function, but you have to tell everybody that you’re on probation. At that point, Roberts was the President of Parsons in addition to being an educational consultant to Palmer. Well, things got worse and worse,. Parsons started to collapse and Dave began to wake up a little. He had made donations of $50,000 or more, to that school.

So they began to wake up, and then the whole thing began to fall apart. This guy was ambitious. He had a concept of stringing schools like Parsons across Iowa like a sting of pearls. He took over and made several schools into these successful colleges. One of them is, the last I heard, still sitting there in a corn field in Nebraska. Everything ready to go, it had laboratories, they had this and that. but never did even one student ever cross it’s portals

MDT: Oh my goodness.

WHQ: So by this time Dave had awakened somewhat. Besides, we were getting pressure and very important pressure from the CCE, the Chiropractic Commission of Education on what we’re gonna do. And, if you don’t do what they require, you’ll lose out. Well Dave didn’t believe this. He didn’t believe it for a long time. And when he did, he called me in a panic. We weren’t on the best of terms during this period because he held it against me that I had supported BJ during that period when he and BJ were at odds. Well, there wasn’t anything to do. You couldn’t gain anything by supporting David, there was nothing to support. So anyhow…with this happening and with one of the states having already closed it’s doors to any school that did not have accreditation, either with the CCE or with….Well, this was actually…it goes back to the commission on education. To the National Chiropractic Association, who as far back as, I think, about 1955 or 56, established this accreditation process.

In fact, my brother was on one of those committees. He was an examiner, and he went out
and examined the schools the way they do today. In the process of all of this, Dave called me and asked if I would head up an accreditation committee. The first thing we did was to go through a process in which you would get the privilege to be able to take students and collect money from them. We got that particular level of accreditation, which was very low, and then we went to work on the next level. He didn’t want to. Dave fought it tooth and toenail. For one thing, he couldn’t be all the things he wanted to be in the institution, including the president. He could be the president, but he couldn’t be some of the other things he was trying to take over. And he fought them.

By this time he’d had the stroke. Some of the judgements he made after that, I thought were questionable. But eventually we got it. It wasn’t easy, but we’ve always worked hard on it. Jack Miller was very good. He worked very hard on it and we worked our way through it. It was a pleasure to have this. Many still have the ICA concept that this was just a way of ruining Palmer. Well if they did, they were ruining all the other schools around too. When Dave had the stroke there was a kind of a revival of our old friendship. He was so seriously ill, having a hard time. I did what I could, and eventually as it turned out that he asked me to take over, which I did for a couple of years. I was called the Chief Administrative…no …what the hell was the title? It was supposed to suggest that whoever had the title was running the school, but Dave would not give up his presidency. That didn’t mean anything to me. But the problem was that there came certain problems with it….

The thing that brought this to a head was the fact that there were a group of people who were attempting to get rid of me. Not completely just out of the school…and …I don’t want to go into any depth, but I’ll simply say this. His attorney’s took over a great deal of the responsibility of that school. He took it away from many of those who shouldn’t have it. They wanted me and Dave to sign things I felt were illegal. In fact they were illegal. I refused to do it. So at the next meeting I was told that I was finished. And so I said, “Okay”, you know…I wasn’t going to fight that. I thought about it and went to a couple of attorneys in town, not to be reinstated, but to be paid for the contract. Not a one of them would take it.

MDT: Oh.

WHQ: Which is understandable. About 5 or 6 days later I got a call from California asking me if I would consider taking over LACC. I said, “Oh I didn’t think so”, because I really thought then I was going to come down to Florida and practice. That was what we were talking about. In fact, my wife was very disappointed we didn’t. But I said okay. I went out and I met with them, and I came back and I thought about it. I called them up and said, “No, I don’t think I will”. They kept on and they called me 2 or 3 times that week. I finally said, “Well okay, I’ll go out again”, and I did. They offered me a little bit better deal and I thought that might be a good thing. This would be nice change. It would be a different background, it would be a different philosophy. It’d be a lot of different things that might,… not that I was completely in love with their philosophy, but basically it looked like a good challenge, and ah so I did.

MDT: You took over after Earl Homewood had been President.

WHQ: Yes that’s right.

MDT: He was only a president for a short time or something?

WHQ: Yes, he was. I think they called him president pro tem or something like that. There was an element in the school, in the board that was attempting to get rid of him. I didn’t realize that for a while, but they were and they finally did. They harassed him in some respects.

MDT: I don’t know much about him except for the text he wrote.

WHQ: He was a person that was well respected there in LACC and by the profession for that

matter,. He had partly retired. He was living out in the desert, not in a camp…when you say live in the desert, they lived around Palm Springs or something like that.

MDT: Sure.

WHQ: That was an interesting period. I thought that it was harrowing in some respects. There
Were so many things going on, and what they didn’t tell me, is,…LACC was one of the first schools to be accredited by the CCE…what they didn’t tell me at the time, that they were on probation. They were in trouble because of financial difficulties. But we got it back on track in about 6 months. Things went okay after that,. But this other group thought… there was 2 or 3 of them… that thought they knew everything that needed to be known about running a school, and they tried to interfere. They’d go into the clinic and look into records and so forth. I was really disappointed with one fellow. I went to great efforts to get him. He was really a fine gentlemen, I felt…and he did a good job for one of the chiropractic schools. He had a very high office at the University of New Mexico, and our first several meetings went very well. And then when I was protesting because I felt just as I did at Palmer. I was not going to be responsible for what these guys were doing.

MDT: Right.

WHQ: And they were arrogant, and they were known to be arrogant long before I ever came
on the scene. I was so surprised. He said”, “Well, try to get along with them the best you can”. And I said, “I can’t live in this kind of an environment:. “Well,” he said, “just do the best you can”. I felt that was wrong, because he knew they were doing wrong. He knew they were violating the things on that accreditation level

MDT: How long were you President of LACC?

WHQ: I went there in ‘76 and left in ‘80…well, I guess it was 4 years.
.
MDT: So you left Palmer in 75 or 76?

WHQ: Yes, that’s right.

Interview with Steven MacDonald, D.C.

A Talk With
Dr. Steven N. MacDonald
An Interview by Dr. Michael Thomas

(this interview originally published in NUCCA News)

Dr. Steven MacDonald is one of the hardest working people in the NUCCA organization. He is currently the Chairman of the Education Committee. Dr. MacDonald went to Gonzaga University and graduated with a degree in biology. Graduating from Palmer (Davenport) in 1978, He worked for a few months with Dr. Harold Farris before opening a practice in Pacific Grove, California on the Monterey peninsula. He is still in private practice there. Dr. MacDonald became certified in the NUCCA work in 1993.

Dr. MacDonald told me that he feels very close to his daughter, Emily. She is nineteen years old and lives in Seattle, studying ballet. Emily has drawn some of the illustrations for the articles Dr. MacDonald has published. When he is out of the office and away from his professional work, he sails and writes poetry. He also remarked that it is important to him to maintain a balance, spending some time by himself, some with family and some with friends.

MDT: How did you find out about chiropractic?

SNM: I found out about chiropractic through my college counselor. I went to a Jesuit, Catholic school and we had a priest that was a counselor for all the pre-med students. I was in pre-med, and I was actually going to try to become a medical physician. But after a while, I became disenchanted. There was so much competition and back-stabbing going on with the students trying to get into medical school that I soon became very frustrated. That was not why I wanted to be a doctor. It seemed like the students who got the positions in medical school were the very ones I respected the least. So I dropped out and went into counseling.

But then I had a friend that went to chiropractic school at Palmer, and he came back really excited. He said I really ought to look into it. I still had about five years to complete a master’s in counseling, so I decided that I would try it for six months or a year at chiropractic school and see if I liked it. My counselor at the University really encouraged me. He went to a chiropractor in Spokane, Washington and believed it to be a good profession. He also thought I’d be good at it. I fell in love with chiropractic in Dr. Galen Price’s philosophy classes, and after three months I realized I was in the right place. It just fit like a glove.

MDT: When did you start at Palmer?

SNM: I started in 1974 and I graduated in 1978. I was supposed to graduate in 1977 but I dropped out to get married. A lot of my teachers tried to talk me out of it. They said I’d never come back. I went home and worked in a hospital for a while as a lab tech and I knew that all I really wanted was to come back to Palmer, and I did. I came back and finished with my wife.

MDT: What did you do after graduation?

SNM: First I went to California and interned with Dr. Harold Farris in Fresno. He was doing NUCCA and he gave me a chance to work in his office. I did his x-rays for him. He would see a hundred patients a day and have them scheduled till 6 at night, but he would sometimes leave at five o’clock and turn the rest over to me. It scared the heck out of me. I would just kind of go in there and hope for the best. (laughter) Back then, the teaching didn’t seem as good for NUCCA. When we came out of school we had to go and intern with someone to really learn to do the work properly. It allowed us to spend more time in x-ray, more time in the adjusting, gathering more experience.

MDT: How did you find out about NUCCA?

SNM: I found out about NUCCA because of Sherry Dickholtz, Dr. Dickholtz, Sr.’s daughter. She was in my classes with me and we became friends. I can remember being in Splanchnology class, asking her what her dad did. I knew he was in chiropractic and I asked her what kind of technique he practiced. She told me,
“Well he uses the NUCCA method which is adjusting the atlas only.”
I looked at her and asked, “Does he make any money?” (laughter)
She said, “Well yeah, he bought me a new stereo for Christmas! He must be doing okay!”

So then she invited me to a lecture that Friday night that Dr. Dickholtz was coming to give at the school. I almost didn’t go. I thought I would just go and stand at the back so I could leave early. I went to the x-ray department, and he was up in the front of the room, talking. You know how energetic he gets. He was talking about how important the brainstem was; how important the upper cervical region was, the atlas and axis; that it was the most important neurological area and all the nerves of the body had to pass through this area. He told how many of the brain control centers were there and that we’d better have the skill of a brain surgeon if we were going to work with this area. If we were going to try to adjust this area, he said that we’d better know the biomechanics of the cervical spine, backwards and forwards. That really caught my interest because at school, biomechanics was hardly even taught. We were being taught different techniques but nobody could really explain why things worked the way they did. And he really grabbed my attention and made me realize that I really wanted to learn more about this area.

So I went home and ordered all the Monographs and read them cover to cover. Then Sherry invited me to her father’s office. I showed up one Saturday morning and he wasn’t even expecting me. But he let me spend the day there and I became really sold on it. I knew that that was what I really wanted to do. It was the only thing in chiropractic that really caught my interest.

MDT: Were you able to practice NUCCA in clinic?

SNM: Yes, …actually in some ways we probably weren’t really supposed to. We were supposed to do Grostic, I think. NUCCA wasn’t really an accepted technique. But the instructors in clinic didn’t really know….

MDT: They couldn’t tell the difference.

SNM: Right. Then I became a “Gold Coat” after so many adjustments and passing an exam. That made it possible for me to adjust unsupervised. I could then supervise other NUCCA student doctors as they adjusted their patients.

I can remember that Dr. John D. Grostic was there then too. He had just come out of a marriage, and had come over to Palmer to teach for a while. I remember him coming into the clinic. I took my first Grostic class from him at Palmer. I got introduced to Grostic that way, through him. But I think he was in a kind of transitional period in his life then. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and there wasn’t a lot of energy in the class. I had to go back to the NUCCA seminars to get the real details. Sherry and I would go up to Dr. Grostic’s office and ask him a lot of questions. She knew him better than I did.

MDT: Was there anybody else at Palmer that was an influence for you?

SNM: Not really. We were kind of on our own. We were kind of an island there, and no body else was that interested in NUCCA. It was just our own interest really…

MDT: So after Palmer you went to Fresno.

SNM: Yes, I went to work with Dr. Harold Farris. He is still practicing there. He had bought Dr. George Wentland’s practice. Dr. Wentland had opened up the San Juaquin valley and Fresno area to NUCCA, and been very successful. He had broken his back and had to sell his practice. So Harold Farris came in and bought it. Dr. Farris had a huge practice there in Fresno and he needed somebody to help take x-rays. After I graduated from Palmer, I went down and made an appointment with him. We talked. He made an offer to me and I took it. I was only there for about six months. I didn’t really like Fresno. I decided that if I was going to move to California then I was going to live by the ocean. We moved over to Monterrey peninsula and decided to open up an office in Pacific Grove and start from scratch. I have always loved this area. It’s so beautiful, I always felt like I was on vacation. It gave me a chance to really build a practice here.

MDT: How did you build your practice?

SNM: It was hard in the beginning because in 1979, nobody knew anything about NUCCA here. Everybody pretty much accepted full spine practice as chiropractic here. In fact, some of the full spine doctors said I would never make it. They said that there was already too much competition. I think those statements made it even more of a challenge to me because it made me want to show them that I could make it. Basically, the practice built by word of mouth.

I would go out and talk to different organizations like the Rotary club, and the Lions. That wasn’t very successful because I wasn’t a very dynamic speaker. I would look out into the audiences and see people sleeping.!(laughter) I joined the Chamber of Commerce and got to know people. Pretty soon, people were getting the message. Slowly but surely, word was getting out about what I was doing, and people were telling others that there is a better way to do chiropractic in a more gentle and scientific way. It slowly built up.

MDT: When did you begin going to the NUCCA seminars?

SNM: I started going to the NUCCA seminars when I was a sophomore, around 6th or 7th quarter, with Sherry Dickholtz. We’d get in the car and all go together. None of us had any money. We just did the best we could, getting back there, going real cheap.

We often didn’t even understand what Dr. Gregory was saying in the seminars. It was going right over our heads. But we knew that we wanted to learn it. One idea would come through once in a while and the light bulb would go off in our heads. We knew we were in the right place learning the right work. It was like listening to a Nobel Prize science scholar. We would just be in awe as he talked. We couldn’t get enough of it.

I remember seeing Dr. McClelland, with his handlebar mustache. He looked like some old famous westerner, with his cowboy hat on. He talked about how he’d had to carry a gun back home in Texas. He came to Monroe every time. He and Dr. Nakano, they showed up at every seminar and were always an inspiration to all of us. They just knew this was the best work, and even as old as they were, they would just keep coming and coming and inspired the rest of us, I think.

Back then, Dr. Gregory did pretty much the only instructing. He did almost everything. When you look at the seminars today, we’ve become more sophisticated, and broken down the information down into parts. Dr. Gregory would be rambling through three days of talks, and was practically falling over bythe end. He’d be doing professional services at the beginning and then trying to give every talk. A few times he would be so exhausted that he would start to fall over and Dr. Pond or Dr. Berti would have to catch him. He gave it everythinghehad and hewould be so worn out.

MDT: Do you remember talking much with Dr. Gregory?

SNM: Oh yes. I actually tried to intern with him, but he never had the room. I remember asking him who I should intern with and he really didn’t want me to intern with anybody. He wanted me to just go out on my own because he thought if I interned with somebody else that I would learn their bad habits. He just wanted me to constantly stay in direct touch with him, write him and call him and ask him questions, study the Monographs and come to the seminars. He wanted me to try to be pure in my approach to the work. He felt like there was too much going on in other offices and that we students would learn too many bad habits.

MDT: So it may be easier if you don’t have to unlearn the errors you’ve been taught. Samuel Clemens used to say that it wasn’t what people didn’t know that worried him, it was what they “knew” that wasn’t true.

SNM: Yeah, so I took that to heart. I went out and struggled on my own and built my own practice. It was well worth it.

I remember trying to understand torque. I remember several of the doctors kept asking questions about how torque worked and nobody seemed to know the answer. Everybody was just kind of going clockwise or counter-clockwise with the elbows and nobody really knew… It just frustrated us all. It made me determined to figure it out on my own and understand. I think Dr. Berti was the only person who finally explained it at one of his workshops in Seattle. He explained how torque worked as far as the anterior and posterior columns go and that really helped me.

I remember that many doctors were really helpful back then. I remember Dr. Elliott, Sr. used to be really extremely helpful. He would come up to the rooms and spend hours working with us on the biomechanics and on adjusting at the seminar He was a real inspiration. Everybody seemed to really give one hundred percent to try to get us to really learn to become good doctors and good adjusters

MDT: There is a deep feeling of connection among NUCCA doctors.

SNM: Yeah, I think that feeling of connection is one of the things that attracted me to NUCCA. When I went to other technique seminars, it was a different story. I remember one in which the doctor spent the first two hours showing slides of his home, and his Mercedes, and his huge practice with its conference room where he would bring doctors and insurance adjustors, to intimidate them. There was just so much talk at all of these seminars about money. NUCCA was the only place I found that really talked about chiropractic, and about adjusting, and correcting the atlas subluxation complex. There was a real dedication to the work in evidence. Money was not primary, it was about learning this work. Everybody had a real spirit. The love of the work is where the success and wealth came from. And, everybody seemed to be making enough money because their commitment was to doing good work for their patients.

We are like a family in NUCCA , too. When we go back to the seminars its like a reunion. Even though we have our spats and fights we are family doing this work and trying to bring it to the world and trying to learn it and do the best we can.

MDT:I really felt that this last seminar in an intense way.

SNM: Yeah. I did too, especially in the planning session. The group of doctors who cared enough to stay, were committed to making NUCCA last into the future and become more successful and presentable to the world. We were all there to help each other. Nobody was there to undermine anyone.

MDT: Have you seen change in the way the work is taught?

SNM: I think the biggest thing is that it is taught better today. When I was a student we would listen to Dr. Gregory and he would try to show us as best he could, but learning the work was almost a process of osmosis back then. Some people had a natural gift for it but it was very difficult for most of us.

MDT: It was difficult to put words to the experience?

SNM: Yeah, It was a bit of a closed group back then. But today I notice we’ve gotten more oriented to educating the students. I think Dr. Denton really started bringing some more educational process to the seminars, having more modules, more one-on-one work. And we’ve really tried to break down the work into smaller pieces and try to explain it to people in the best possible way instead of just throwing it out there and hoping for the best.

MDT: NUCCA has gone through an extensive maturational process in terms of its teaching of the adjustment.

SNM: Dr. Gregory was always trying to tell us that the adjustment was simple. The triceps pull was extremely difficult to learn at first. And there was a lot of criticism about it. But now it has matured, and has a life of its own. We’re making it simpler, and easier, and doctors are learning it much more quickly. The learning curve is much better now. I think that anytime a new idea is presented to a group there are difficulties in teaching it at first. At this point, we’ve had a chance to simplify it more, and understand it better, so I think the shift has probably already occurred.

When I write an article on the triceps pull, I try to simplify the process and make it more understandable, because for too long it’s been too complicated, and too difficult. We’ve lost a lot of people to this work that have felt that it is too difficult. But to me, the key is to do your homework, learn the anatomy and think it through in your head. It probably isn’t possible to learn this work if you just want to be spoon fed the answers. There is no alternative to self-motivation and perseverance. Even so, I always try to bring more clarity to the work, not more difficulty.

MDT: You are the chairman of the Educational Committee, so you are able to have great input into how the work is taught.

SNM: When we put the seminars together, we try to construct them in such a way that will enhance more one-on-one instruction. We want to give more instruction on adjusting, biomechanics, and x-ray too. We may be trying to do too much in three days. But it’s hard for people to get away from their practices for longer than three days even though, in the old days, the seminars lasted five days. We’re trying to bring in more neurology, more one-on-one help. We’re trying to get more people to bring in their x-rays, so we can look them over. There is just so much to include. The good news is that we are getting more help from all the doctors and we have more doctors teaching today than ever before. We’re spreading it out a lot more. I think the baton has been passed down to a lot of doctors. Everyone wants to help now. We have Dr. John Dunn wanting to do all the headpiece placement instruction, Dr. Denton doing the biomechanics instruction, Dr. Schrock helps with adjusting, and Dr. Cockwill teaching neurology. Everybody wants to help. We have all these people who have gone through part two certification that want to help too. I have part two people calling me asking to help with the teaching.

MDT: That’s great.

SNM: Yeah, everybody wants to be part of the progress of the work. So we’re spreading it out a lot more now, not just leaving it up to a few top dogs. We’re spreading it out to more certified doctors and more part two certified doctors that have a real expertise in a given area.

People are learning more quickly. We don’t have the same drop-out rate we had in the past. I notice it in the Palmer NUCCA classes. We used to have a big drop-out rate at Palmer but it was only because we didn’t have the instruction arranged correctly. We were teaching the x-ray first and people were getting blown away, so we changed it around and now we teach biomechanics first –the “why” we’re doing what we’re doing. Then people want to learn to analyze x-ray. We have an almost 95% completion rate in the Palmer NUCCA course now. Before, we only had about 50% of the class complete the course. We are now trying to bring that rationale to the seminars too. We still have to figure out some wrinkles, we haven’t matured completely yet, but it is an ongoing evolutionary process. If we can make the instruction more step by step, we’ll get more people to stick with it in the beginning classes.

MDT: What do you enjoy the most about practicing?

SNM: I enjoy my patients. We’re like a family. Some doctors just want to go into the room, adjust, and go out of the room. I’m not that way. I like the whole person. And when that person comes into my office, I see them as a human being that I enjoy meeting. I enjoy getting to know them. And I want to help them. They are bringing their problems to me. I’m going to analyze these problems according to the NUCCA method and give them the best adjustment I can.

There are so many wonderful things about practice. The adjustment, the biomechanics, understanding the problem of each person who comes in, all of this is a challenge that I enjoy. I am trying to get the best correction I can, and at the same time, acknowledging the personal part of them, getting to know them, talking with them, hearing about their family, and building a rapport with that person.

When I broke my leg a couple of years ago, so many people from my practice came to see me in the hospital. Others sent notes and packages. When I came back, they wanted to help me. They would move my table for me when I needed it moved. People were really there for me. It was really inspiring.

MDT: That is real validation of the impact you have with your patients. And, of the relationships you have established.

SNM: It showed we really are a family

MDT: When did you get certified?

SNM: I think it was 1993. It was a tough process. I got denied several times by Dr. Gregory and Dr. Berti. I just kept going because I felt like if I just kept knocking at the door that eventually somebody would answer it! (laughter) I would get the x-rays back with red lines all over them and I just kept trying. I really liked it because it kept encouraging me to be better. It kept challenging me to bring my work to a higher level. That was exciting. It was almost like being in a masters or a doctoral program again. It forced me to improve myself. I especially like the work questions that were given in part three of the certification process. You had to give examples of types 1,2, 3, and 4 and why you did what you did in each particular case, and what you would do differently next time. The questions asked me how I would improve the reduction, and it was exciting working in that context. It made me use my brain, and I was kind of sad when the process ended.

MDT: Where do you see NUCCA going in the future?

SNM: Well NUCCA has a life of its own. I think it’ll go where ever it decides to go. We are just trying to steer the ship the best we can and keep the course that Dr. Gregory set. It’s important to reduce the subluxation, to educate ourselves as completely as possible about the biomechanics, to visualize the adjustment more clearly and completely, and to give better and better adjustments, to have good x-rays. That’s the core, that’s the vision we’re trying to protect, and trying to encourage. I think it’ll go where it needs to go. Where ever that is, I am not so much concerned with how widely spread it becomes. I am more concerned with the quality of the work, and that we keep the quality of the work. We have good doctors out there doing good quality, conscientious adjusting. We can’t take shortcuts.

MDT: Any advice for the new student?

SNM: Well, I think they shouldn’t get too discouraged. I mean, in the beginning, I got very discouraged. There were nights when I just a couple years into practice that I would look at those post x-rays, and sometimes they would look worse. I would get so upset I would just slam the door closed at night when I would walk away from my office and I would question myself, “Why am I doing this? What’s going on here?” But because I loved the work so much, and because there wasn’t any other kind of chiropractic I wanted to do, I knew I had to just stick it out. I had to keep on learning and hope that eventually, it would come together. I believed that the more I persevered, and the harder I worked, the more it would begin to come together. If this is work you really want to do, and you stick with it, the rewards are tremendous.

Down the road, your patients and your practice will prosper according to your abilities in the NUCCA work. And, your patients will thank you forever. I have people that come in every day that thank me for helping them through doing this work. I have people who were able to have children today because of the adjustment, and they couldn’t have children before being adjusted. Some people were suicidal because they couldn’t find any relief. Now they are happily married and have children. I know I’m doing the right thing. I just try to do the best I can. I know the healing doesn’t come from me, but I am trying to do good work.

I am just happy to be one of the five percent of the world’s population that does something they love. I love going to my office. My patients even tell me that they can really tell I love my work. I am really blessed to have a work in my life that is challenging and enjoyable and rewarding.

MDT: Thank you Doctor.

Interview with Marshall Dickholtz, Sr., D.C.

A Talk with
Dr. Marshall Dickholtz, Sr.

By Michael Thomas, D.C.

(Interview originally published in The NUCCA News in 2000.)

Dr. Marshall Dickholtz, Sr. is seventy six years young. He has the energy of at least two thirty eight year olds and he shows no sign of slowing down. A founding board member of NUCCA, Dr. Dickholtz, Sr. has been of invaluable service to several generations of upper cervical chiropractors. His mechanical inclinations and innovative mind have resulted in many if not most of our current x-ray protocols. These include invention of, and use of the chin centering device, filter system, x-ray alignment (booklet and video), numerous articles on improving film accuracy, investigation of improved grids, invention of and use of the horizontal lines wall chart, investigation into improvement in the teaching of the roll-in and other phases of the adjustment.

He has been incredibly selfless in terms of time and money in teaching many, many students in all phases of the work. He is presently finishing up an amazing study which will probably be published in the medical, peer-review literature and promises to open some eyes. Dr. Dickholtz has also quietly and consistently kept us all supplied with the various x-ray analysis templates and maintained the high degree of quality that is mandatory for this work and for which NUCCA has become known.

Dr. Dickholtz has been married to his wife, Mary Ann for forty six years and has been known to cut a mean rug with her. He has two children, well known to the NUCCA community. Dr. Sherry Gaber who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Dr. Marshall Dickholtz, Jr. who practices in Morton Grove, Illinois. They are also both certified NUCCA doctors.

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MDT How did you become involved with chiropractic?

MDS I had been a pre-med student at one point and then been out of school for about ten years. I went down to Arkansas for a year to work in sales and Dr. Tina Murphy was my landlady. She got a lot of students involved with chiropractic. She told me what school to go to and what technique to take up. She was using the Grostic technique at the time. Being the wonderful person that she was, she gave me free chiropractic care.

I took up the Grostic technique as soon as I graduated in 1956. I began to go to the Grostic seminars immediately, and in fact I have never used any technique other than the Grostic technique, as it was called at the time. I was with Dr. Grostic for seven years. There were fifty people at the seminars. He had, and this is important, a beginner’s class that lasted for five days. All of the beginner’s, and if I remember right, all of the people who took the classes were adjusted by Dr. Grostic. The advanced classes were also five days. There was one beginner’s class, and two advanced classes a year. It was a private enterprise. NUCCA is a non profit organization.

Dr. Grostic was quite a person. He was soft spoken and very determined, very exacting. You couldn’t go to his class unless you had two references from other Grostic doctors. You had to be referred. Of course he didn’t give us all the detail that Dr. Gregory gave us in later years.

Registration for his classes was cut off at 50 applicants. So when you got your application in the mail, you sent it out the next day so you could be sure you had a spot in that class. At one time, to be in the advanced class, everybody had to send in a set of pre and post x-rays. If your x-rays were not up to par, you couldn’t get into the May class. In other words, it was very important that you didn’t have a low arch, I‘ll tell you that! If you did, your x-rays were turned down immediately. A straight arch would not do. The arch has got to be slightly elevated so you can pinpoint the exact spots of the attachments. You’re dealing with some very small measurements. In my office we might have to occasionally send a patient back to get re-filmed two or three times to get a perfect x-ray.

MDT What was Dr. Gregory’s role in the Grostic days?

MDS Dr. Gregory developed the work along with Dr. Grostic. Unbeknownst to Dr. Gregory, Dr. Grostic went out and patented the work. I think you might say it was a shock to Dr. Gregory. Gregory always stayed in the background. Grostic had wanted him to help teach the classes, but he never came to the forefront. Just before Dr. Grostic passed away, he asked Dr. Gregory to begin teaching some one day classes in Monroe. I attended these classes once a month for a year or so. We would drive up there early Saturday morning and Gregory would charge us a whole ten dollars to teach us the class, look at our patient’s x-rays, and even adjust us. He took that money and bought a tape recorder for our classes. He never made a dime from any of the chiropractic seminars. He left 400,000 dollars for NUCCRA in perpetuity. This allows NUCCRA to spend the interest. I was the treasurer for NUCCA for twenty five years and the treasurer for NUCCRA for fifteen years.

The two point pivot system was invented by Dr. Gregory. Grostic introduced the two point pivot system after Gregory showed it to him. But Grostic had said you should only use it on baby skulls. We even had a baby cephalometer. I am one of the few still alive who attended both classes. It’s a shame that Dr. Gregory never got the recognition in his lifetime that he should have gotten. Gregory figured out the four basic types. He also mentioned a fifth basic type, as far as I’m concerned, which is the abnormal type one where the head and neck is leaning away from laterality. Get rid of laterality, and don’t worry about the lower neck… Gregory mentioned that in class. I give full credit to Dr. Gregory for everything that I know.

Due to the small handicap I have of one bad wrist, I had to use everything to the nth degree that he taught me otherwise I couldn’t do what I do today. I had fractured my wrist and the medical doctor didn’t read the film correctly. By the timeI realised I had a broken wrist, there was non-union of the fracture. I don’t have any real radial deviation or dorsal flexion of my wrist so I only take right hand contacts. The point is that if you get your parallel forces lined up then regardless of which contact hand you use, there shouldn’t be any problems.

Dr.Gregory should be well remembered for all that he did. When he formed NUCCA he didn’t want his name connected with the technique name. His reasoning was that other people will add to it and it shouldn’t carry one man’s name. He was so unselfish in every way.

MDT You were there at the beginning of NUCCA.

MDS I am a founding director of NUCCA. We had Saturday classes for a while before it was decided we should have an organization. He felt we needed an organization to perpetuate the work. In fact, I still worry about the perpetuation of this work. Unless we can get the students to understand the critical need for sharp x-ray films and a good roll-in they aren’t going to be able to reduce the subluxation to the degree necessary to make a statistical difference.

MDT Gregory wasn’t the first President of NUCCA was he?

MDS No, it was Irwin Matthias. He was President for a year or two and then we voted Dr. Gregory into the president’s position. It’s always been a democratic organization.

MDT Your contributions are immense. Every time I take a film I think of you because so much of the procedure has come from you, from the chin centering device, the use of the leaded fishing line or beaded chain, and mirror on the wall, the filters, closing down the port, and so much more. You have also been responsible for the templates and quality control in manufacture of the x-ray analysis instruments.

“Unless you teach
a good roll-in
and good, sharp x-rays,
the work will be lost.”

MDS I have a machine shop background, as did Dr. Gregory. When you have a machine shop background you’ve got to be more mechanically minded and precise. I’ve probably got that advantage over my fellow chiropractors.

MDT What were the initial goals of NUCCA?

MDS The initial goals of NUCCA were to help sick people. Gregory once said that if it takes adjusting the big toe, we’ll adjust the big toe. The point is that we aren’t interested in perpetuating what we’ve done if something else is better.

MDT But so far nothing else has come up….

MDS Nothing’s come up. Basically and essentially, the way we measure post x-rays should be the criteria of everything we do. Nothing else counts. If it takes adjusting them on the other side to get good post x-rays then I would say, adjust them on the other side. But on the other hand, people mis-mark their x-rays to make them look better. I’ve never found in the few cases I did accidentally adjust on the opposite side that it worked out. They never would hold their adjustment. Temporarily, they may feel better, but the case falls apart later on. It just doesn’t work to adjust on the wrong side. There have been chiropractors that use different techniques who would profess it’s okay to adjust that way.

MDT Have the goals of NUCCA changed?

MDS I don’t think the goals of NUCCA have changed. NUCCA stands for reducing the subluxation. The way it is taught has to change to produce better chiropractors faster..

In my office we sell no vitamins or minerals. There is nothing but my office equipment, x-ray, the neurocalometer, side posture tables, and my two hands. No massage therapists, nothing. When you want to do research, you’ve got a clear understanding of your results when you do one thing. If you start to mix in more things, you don’t know if it was the vitamins or the massage or the colonic or the ultrsound. You just can’t do all those things and come up with a clean research project. When you start to do these other things you may get away from the demand, from the accuracy that is necessary to help sick people. Very soon we will have research from my office which will show the results of what a certified NUCCA doctor is capable of doing.

MDT What are your thoughts on certification?

MDS The certification process helps to perpetuate the accuracy which is critical to reduction of the subluxation.

MDT Would you mind talking about the triceps pull?

MDS According to Dr. Gregory, the object of the triceps pull is to get the shoulders to move first. Gregory said that from an engineering standpoint, the largest body, or weight, moves first. Our body has to move first because that is the largest weight. If your elbows move first when you put your hands on the patient, you’re actually going to push. The weight behind your arms isn’t so great and you won’t produce the desired result. You want the largest lever to move first. Consequently, we place our body and it’s parallel forces in balance. Then you have to move your body off balance to get the force vectors moving toward the patient. The whole body is involved in adjusting the patient. The triceps pull involves many more muscles than just the triceps. You’re talking about your supraspinatus muscle, the deltoids and others.

The triceps is the focus for the adjustor. If you pull your distal triceps first, then your elbows will come in first. If you pull a little higher up, say in the belly, the elbow and the head of the humerus will go deeper in the socket. If you pull your triceps high enough, the head of the humerus goes into the glenoid fossa first before the rest of the arm or the shoulder moves. So you’ve got to pull your triceps in high to get your scapula to begin to move. Then the clavicles, episternal notch, and chest come forward. That’s what gets your body in the proper motion. This is all done with virtually no depth. It’s not just a matter of putting your hands on the patient and thinking about it, you’ve got to get your parallel forces to come forward which is your whole torso coming toward the patient. The depth should be about a sixteenth and never more than one eighth of an inch. The patient should barely feel the adjustment if at all. You may not believe this but 100% of my patients do not feel me adjust them.

MDT What are the most common problems people have in getting clear x-rays?

MDS The most common problem is getting rid of scatter radiation. The best way to address this is to close down the port. That will improve the quality of your x-rays by 40-50 %. The port opening should be about one quarter inch by three eighths of an inch. You need very low radiation to check your port opening. Maybe 50 kvp at 1/30th of a second. That will show you your port opening. First though, you must have your equipment aligned vertically and horizontally. Put a marker just off center of your grid carrier so you know which side of the port you are looking at. Drill only an eighth inch hole in a 1/16th inch lead plug. Scribe a vertical line on the front of the plug so it is always replaced in the same position. Use some needle nose files to fine tune the size. Spot it in with some super glue after it is in place. I use a 24 by 30 centimeter film, not a 10 by 12, however, you want the width of the port to expose 80% of the width of a 10 by 12. You want 100% of the heighth. Then you want to put 1/16th lead strips on the side of the front of your collimator. This makes a very sharp white line on each side of your film. Then you never have to move your collimators again.

“Basically and essentially,
the way we measure
post x-rays should be
the criteria of
everything we do.
Nothing else counts.”

MDT You love to teach.

MDS I don’t want any knowledge that Dr.Gregory gave me and I gained over forty three years to be lost. There’s just so much…..Right now, raise your arm in front of you with your elbow pointing at the floor. The long head of your triceps now has a straight shot from the olecranon process to the glenoid fossa. Can you feel that?

MDT Yes I can.

MDS Isn’t that easy? It took me many years to work out this simple stuff. You know the horizontal lines chart we put on the wall? It took me thirty seven years to think of it. Gregory would have loved that. Anytime a patient comes in with a type two, three or four, look at their earlobes before you adjust them. See if their head is in the same position as when they were before their first adjustment. If the head starts to get away from that position on these types, two, three and four, maybe you have to raise the height vector a little bit, maybe support their head a little different. Isn’t that simple? It just isn’t that complicated and we should be able to teach it so chiropractors help sick people. If you help sick people, you’ll make money.

We had a chiropractor come in yesterday. She just graduated from school, a chronic fatigue case. I looked at her x-rays and her head is way forward. I told her she’d never been really adjusted in her whole life. I hate to tell people that, but it is the truth. I used to take care of two percent of the Palmer students and five percent of the National students.

MDT You are the new president of NUCCRA.

MDS Yes, I am. The board is now composed of myself, Dr.Dunn, Dr. Denton, Dr. Dickholtz, Jr., Dr. Brooks, and Dr. Palmer. NUCCRA was founded as a research organization and we have to produce. We have several projects under way at this point. We’ve got to strive to get things published in peer review journals as fast as possible. Dr.’s Dunn and Seemann are working on a grant proposal right now in the area of sports performance. Dr. C. Woodfield is working on writing up several projects that we have worked on. Our present project is on chronic fatigue syndrome.

MDT You have lived and breathed this work for a long time.

MDS The last forty three years of my life. Well, hopefully if we can get these projects published and the NUCCA organization is brought to the forefront, we will be able to attract more chiropractors who will stay with the work. It takes doctors who will keep doing it even if it is harder, because it’s right. We can get the statistical results. That’s what will perpetuate the science.

MDT Thanks for your time and your amazing efforts over all these years, Doctor Dickholtz.

MDS Any questions?

MDT Only a million, but that’ll have to do for now!

Interview with Robert Brooks, D.C.

A Talk With
Dr. Robert Brooks

by Michael Thomas, D.C.

You seem to live and breathe chiropractic.

(laughter). Chiropractic is a natural for me. Chiropractic is embedded in what I consider to be a non-interference philosophy. At the age of four and a half, my mother told me I had the power of life inside and that I knew what was right for me, and no one else did. I was to listen to my inner guidance rather than listening to anything or anyone else, not even my parents.

So my entire youth was created out of listening to my own truth. When I was seventeen years old, I met a chiropractor who said that there was the power of life inside the human body. He told me that misalignment of the spine interfered with parts of the body, which then didn’t work correctly, and people got sick. When you corrected the spine, it set the power of life free and people got well. This very simple truth wound up manifesting a destiny for me in chiropractic.

How did you decide to become a chiropractor?

I knew at that moment, at that first encounter, when that chiropractor delivered the message to me, exactly what I was going to do with my life. I asked him then, “What do I do to become one?”. In 1963, there were no prerequisites for chiropractic school, so I called Palmer College of Chiropractic and they sent me an information packet. I filled in the application and sent it back, and was accepted. Before making the decision to go to chiropractic school, my plans were to attend Oklahoma State University to pursue a career in mathematics. In April of 1963, I turned seventeen, in May I graduated from high school, in June I met the chiropractor, and in October I matriculated at Palmer.

What was your Palmer experience like?

At seventeen, I was quite frankly, still wet behind the ears. Being seven hundred miles from home was the furthest I’d ever slept from my own bed. In the first two years at Palmer I was busy taking things seriously, pursuing the information on how the human body worked, embracing the academic life. These things were very vital to me. But then something happened, and I discovered that being with people and having relationships with other people was perhaps as important, if not more important than the academic side of college.

So the last two years of Palmer College, were more of a focus in people and relationships than were the first two. Half way through Palmer, I was actually quite disappointed in the number of people who were there to become doctors so they could make money. They weren’t there from a vision of what is possible with chiropractic. With that discouragement, I left Palmer, came home, and went to the University of Tulsa for two years and took pre-med courses. The people in pre-med were so much more insane than the people in chiropractic that I went back to chiropractic school.

My last two years of chiropractic school were a lot of fun and it took me three years to complete the two. At the end of that time, I graduated from Palmer at the ripe old age of twenty-four. I was ready to meet the world and practice chiropractic.

How did you begin your chiropractic career?

When I graduated from Palmer in 1970, I had expected to come home and work with the man who had introduced me to chiropractic. When I got home and talked with him, I discovered that this was not his idea at all. So I spent the first several months after my graduation from Palmer working as a carpenter and building houses. At one point, I went with my father on a vacation tour of the Holy Land. We went to Rome, Athens, Cairo, and Jerusalem and then to the Dead Sea. It was actually in Jerusalem while following the Stations of the Cross that I became inspired, as I considered how much one man had been able to do with his life.

So I came home to Oklahoma and began the process of opening my own office. The first office I opened was in a downtown area of Tulsa, a city of about 350,000 people. It had no parking. It was on a street corner. There were a lot of people downtown everyday, but it was not very accessible. After nine months in that office, the busiest day I’d had was twelve patients. I knew it would take another five years just to begin to make a living. I was not willing to do that.

In a moment of reflection, I was inspired to go to the little town of Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I went there and opened a “full-spine” practice, or what I now call a “segmental” practice. I saw ten new patients the first day. Over the next thirty days, my practice grew until I was seeing one hundred patient visits per day. Over the next 60 to 90 days, I was seeing over one hundred and fifty patient visits per day doing segmental adjusting. I did that for the first three years of my practice life.

Quite frankly, it was a great experience for me. A lot of people received tremendous results. A lot of sick people were relieved, and got well. But the problem I had with that practice was that I couldn’t imagine the human spine being made to need to be adjusted once a week or once a month for the rest of the person’s life. I thought there must be some way to correct the spine. It just couldn’t need to be adjusted over and over for the rest of the patient’s life. Of course those ideas were generated from reading B.J. Palmer’s Green Books. I had bought a set of Green Books while I was still in school. The Palmer bookstore had been trying to get rid of the books after B.J.’s death. I had thought they’d look good in my library someday. Once in practice though, I had begun opening and reading them. Reading those green books, really did amplify my awareness of the principles of universal and innate intelligence, and of structural interference, but also of the notion that structural interference could respond to principles of engineering and mathematics and measurement.

So you began to look for another way to work?

After three years of that “segmental” practice, I actually closed it and took an eighteen-month sabbatical. I took every technique course that I could find. I went to the different colleges. I went through their libraries. I found their books on chiropractic, and spinal care of any kind. I took a look at lots and lots of different procedures that were available to correct the spine and wound up going through the upper cervical procedures too.

I started with Pettibon, and HIO, then Blair, and finally, NUCCA. When I got to NUCCA, things started to make sense. I can’t tell you though, that they made sense right away. But the “picture” from the information I received at my first NUCCA class in 1977 gave me a notion that if Dr. Gregory was correct about how a spine can subluxate, and how it’s corrected, it made everyone else wrong. I had to sit with that concept for several years before I finally comprehended the “bigness” of his picture. He told us that when the entire spine is subluxated, it is locked down by C1. He explained that the relationships between all the bones were altered because they move as a mechanical system in an integrated fashion. Because of that, if you didn’t correct the entire spine back to normal position, you would need to adjust or manipulate the relationship between the different segments of the spine for the rest of the person’s life.

So the realization of that idea is what made you stay with the NUCCA work?

Well, that’s another story altogether! I happen to be a bit of a skeptic. I mean in the sense of the philosophical school started by Aristotle, A skeptic is someone who actually takes a look or observes what is in their reality. Some of it is true to them, and some of it is not. A skeptic is simply a person who is discerning whether or not the information that’s presented is true to them. So I took on Dr. Gregory’s work as a bit of a skeptic in the beginning. I spent the first several years saying that “this may be right, and it may not”. So, I spent my first four or five years (almost in the sense of attempting to prove him wrong), taking pre x-rays, making adjustments, taking post x-rays, and examining the results.

What do you most remember about Dr. Gregory?

One of my favorite experiences was back in that first 1977 class that I took. I had already been to a lot of seminars. I had learned a lot of things. I had examined a tremendous amount of information by the time I went to my first NUCCA seminar. I can remember asking Dr. Gregory a question about how the cervical spine functioned, and his answer to me was, “I don’t know.” It was the first place I had been that anyone had had the integrity and the candor to quite frankly say , “I don’t know”. Most of the people I had studied with, if they didn’t have the answer, would use logic, and usually make up an answer that had nothing to do with their observations or experiences.

My experience with Dr. Gregory was that he knew what he knew, and he knew what he didn’t know. He was very clear about the two. His compassion, his passion, and his integrity for the work that he did, combined with the benefit that it had for humanity was very apparent to me. He was almost unmovable in his convictions about what he knew and what he didn’t know.

Who else has been important to you in your growth in chiropractic?

There have been three giants for me in chiropractic. B.J. Palmer of course, was the first one. His contributions to what I’m going to call the “evolution of life” and his investigation into the depths of how life “works”, had great impact on me. He examined what is behind this life of ours. At some point most of us realize that we’re only going to know so much about how life works. The rest of it is a stepping into the unknown.

B.J. Palmer had the ability to integrate the spiritual nature of life -what we in chiropractic call universal intelligence- (and which in computer language is simply information), and innate intelligence (which is that part of the universal that is inside us), into “energy” which is again, in computer language, power. Finally, he integrated this synthesis into the materialization of the manifest world. He was able to describe the interface between our consciousness (or our innate awareness), and the outer world. Intelligence, force and matter in B.J.’s world has become the information that manifests itself on the computer screen as information, energy and materialization. B.J. Palmer was, in my life, a giant who created that awareness for me. He illuminated the language of traditional spirituality, of religion, in such a way that it enhanced my grasp of my own personal spirituality.

The second mentor in my life, the second giant who made a contribution toward me, was Dr. Sid Williams. What Sid Williams did for me, was that he chose to live his own life regardless of the outcome. Even when he was committed to something in the world, he was really only committed to his own truth. Because of his commitment to his own truth, he’s been able to accomplish a great deal, without losing sight of the possibilities of the evolution of life.

Dr. Gregory was my third. I spent several years… in fact, from 1977 until today, I have actually only missed one NUCCA class. And I attended all of the NUCCA classes that Dr. Gregory presented until his death. I have been a part of the organizational structure of NUCCA since 1979.

You have also been very involved with Palmer and the Alumni Association.

It has been my desire to influence chiropractic with the ability to correct the subluxated spine. Our profession is replete with belief systems, believing some things that don’t exist, believing some things that do exist, and actually arming ourselves against each other if we violate each other’s beliefs. My time at Palmer was an effort to make a contribution toward breaking down some of those barriers. I want to interest people in what I would call, from Dr. Gregory, a “voice of reason” in a chiropractic profession that has a tendency to go “mad”.

Students are very important to you.

Yes. Palmer College has been very important to me and through my thirty years of practice there have been 42 of my patients who have become chiropractors. My desire since the early 80’s has been to not only take care of as many people as I possibly can, but to get other people taking care of people as well. So it has been very important to me to recruit students into chiropractic and to look at the clinical education of the chiropractor. I love to take a look at the views and paradigms that chiropractic students have about their profession and how they are going to be taking care of the people they see as patients in their practice. Palmer College has been a great open door for me to be able to be a contribution and to give back from my experience of thirty years of practice.

You’ve been conducting your own seminars.

Early on in NUCCA, I saw the need for us to investigate the subluxated spine, and to actually do more research, because I felt like we didn’t have all the answers. We were still in the process of figuring out what we needed to do to correct the subluxated spine. And of course, some of them correct back to normal fairly easily. But there were some that would still be problem cases. We just simply didn’t know yet how they worked and we needed to know what to do to handle them.

“How is what we are doing affecting the nervous system?” “How is it affecting the physiology of the body?” “If its affecting the physiology then what conditions or diseases or even symptomatic pictures will we be best at addressing for the people that we serve?” The need to investigate all of those areas became very clear to me. I also knew that without the ability to measure the subluxation and determine its correction (with pre and post X-rays) that all of the other research on the effects of the subluxated spine and it’s correction were going to receive only mixed results. All of the procedures or techniques correct some of the spines some of the time. They just don’t know when.

I also saw a need for people to be able to correct the subluxated spine. I saw chiropractors working on it and working on it but maybe not ever getting it completely corrected. So I made a choice back in the early eighties, between being a researcher, and being someone who would recruit people into our work. I have no idea how many people, since the early eighties, I have actually encouraged to attend a NUCCA conference and educational program, but I am sure the number is over two or three hundred. I would constantly go to the colleges to talk with people about the possibilities of correcting the entire spine rather than just the relationship from one bone to another. I would encourage them to take a look at NUCCA as a body of information.

My destiny might be better served by bringing people into the work rather than actually investigating it or even teaching it myself. NUCCA has for years, been the very best place to come and learn how to correct the upper cervical spine. Teaching our work was a niche that has been completely filled by doctors who are certified. So I chose some years ago not to take on a teaching role with NUCCA. I actually wrote and passed all three parts of the certification process in 1989, but then chose not to become certified to become a teacher. I had the idea that if I were a certified instructor for NUCCA, it might limit what I was able to say to people in the colleges to actually get them to come to our programs. That was a very conscious choice.

Again, in the last two years I have actually reversed that decision and am now going through the certification process again. This time I’m working on NUCCA certification as a way of being able to speak people about our organization and our procedures.

With thirty years of practice experience, I started teaching a class to chiropractic students and chiropractors called, “Taking Care of People” in 1996. The seminar that I teach is actually the office procedure, patient management, patient education, and office philosophy aspects of the chiropractic practice. I have trained twenty-eight chiropractic associates and in thirty years, I have seen all kinds of people come into the work and develop through all kinds of stages. I have functioned in every possible context for practice, from having a donation system, to having monthly fees, having case fees, having fees per visit, having an introductory fee or a new patient fee and then follow-up fees. In my relationship with my associates I have learned how to help doctors establish fees and to enroll patients into a practice. My class is concerned with the office procedures and office management for people who would like to take on the correction of the entire spine with the NUCCA procedure. In 1999 alone, I had 290 chiropractic students go through my class.

What direction is NUCCA moving in?

I’ve been on the NUCCA Board now through three different administrations. Obviously, when Dr. Gregory was alive, NUCCA was very much a monarchy. Dr. Gregory was however, so far ahead of the rest of us that it was very easy to follow the dictums and directives of the “monarch”. He had so much integrity and was just simply not willing to compromise his convictions. He was a wonderful benevolent leader for NUCCA.

At the loss of a monarch, there are things that happen organizationally. Usually the people that were the closest to that leader will take over the organization for a period of time. When NUCCA made its transition after Dr. Gregory’s death, we had a number of people who were trying to maintain the heritage and tradition of the organization. Those people were keeping NUCCA to its standard and to it’s roots. They did an incredible job of doing that.

NUCCA has been the educational branch of our work. NUCCRA has been the research branch. The certified doctors have now become the actual teaching branch of our procedure. The future of NUCCA is for us to continue to find better ways to teach people how to detect and correct the subluxated spine. Our heritage from Dr. Gregory of observation, measurement, and reason, as a way to address the subluxated spine are still the very cornerstones of the foundation of who we are. So our task is to maintain those principles of observation, measurement, and reason, as a way of looking at the subluxated spine. The NUCCA procedures offer a way of measuring the subluxated spine, of determining the correction to be made, and then making that correction, making the post x-ray , making that measurement , and then reasoning what has occurred from that correction, and if that correction is complete, then leaving it alone. Then if its not complete, if its only a reduction, then to again, reason what needs to be done to get a better reduction or a complete correction. To do that, to take a post x-ray, and to observe it, measure it, and to reason it out again. We are constantly enhancing our ability to detect and correct the subluxated spine.

I see NUCCA taking on new ways of teaching. There are several styles of learning which require several styles of teaching. Our work takes a special blend of intelligence and almost athletic ability to perform. There may be people with a great deal of athletic ability to perform the adjustment who may struggle with taking on the analysis: the x-ray taking, the x-ray analysis, patient positioning for the adjustment, the actual adjustment itself, the post x-ray taking, analysis and reasoning. There may be people who have a little more trouble performing the act than actually figuring out what they’re doing, and there may be people who are able to figure out what they’re doing incredibly and have a little bit more trouble performing the act.. I see the future of NUCCA as an organization that is going to address both of those concerns. We have thirty people right now in the certification program, the most we’ve ever had. So people are not only interested in doing our work now, but are also interested in teaching it.

We recently had a planning session for NUCCRA in which we reorganized how NUCCRA is going to function. NUCCRA, as the research branch, now has a research director, Jim Palmer. He’s been with our organization in a consulting capacity for a number of years and he will now take on the task of coordinating all of the research to be done, how its published, and how we get it out to our certified doctors, and instructors.

I am very excited about the publishing of a textbook to introduce people to our work. We can put this text on the shelves of libraries in our own profession so that people who are looking for information about what chiropractic is and what’s possible, will have access to our tremendous body of knowledge. We still represent such a small proportion of chiropractic that every thing we can do to get information out is extremely important. This textbook is a very big part of that.

NUCCA has also recently had a planning session. At the NUCCA planning session, it was very important for NUCCA to get clear about its identity, about who we are, about our heritage from Dr. Gregory, about how we see chiropractic and how we see our relationship to the people we serve. It is also important for us in NUCCA to begin to take a look at the possibility of extraordinary growth. We are on the verge of having hundreds of people go through our educational process and it is necessary for us to take a look at how to take care of these people who come through.

We are looking at a number of different aspects regarding how to support our members and how to facilitate learning. NUCCA is now also endowed with money that at some point will become available as scholarships for educational programs. It may become available for practice loans for chiropractors coming out of school to start a practice. We may be able to use that endowment money for resources that our members will be able to access in their process of becoming NUCCA chiropractors. We also are creating an educational fund within NUCCA that is going to create a way for corporations, individuals, and our own members to make contributions to our organization that are tax deductible. We hope to make NUCCA a part of estate planning, and to actually then create the resources than that we’re going to need to continue to grow and take care of the doctors and students that we educate and bring along into the practice of chiropractic.

I’m very optimistic right now about the future of NUCCA and NUCCRA, about an opening for us to be able to bring new ideas into the work. We’re creating an “open forum” at the NUCCA conferences where people will be able to simply throw ideas out with the notion that all of us are making discoveries in this work, and that some of those discoveries need to be shared with everybody else. There may come a time where the “We’ve already figured it out and this is the way it is,” attitude will be replaced with “Let’s continue to investigate it, What are you seeing?” “This is what I’m seeing.” So the “open forum” is going to be a great way for us to actually develop with the group mind faster than any individual mind can develop on its own. Any of the ideas from the open forum with merit will be supported by research (through observation, measurement, and reason). This research done by our certified Doctors will be published through NUCCRA, regardless of what those findings are. We need to know not only what works, we need to know what doesn’t work, as well. So if we try something and it doesn’t work, its just as important to publish that as it is to publish what does work.

What’s your own vision for NUCCA?

I see NUCCA as an organization composed of chiropractors, chiropractic students, and of patients. Patients are going to be a very vital part of our future. To have patients who are supportive members of our organization so that our education and our research can actually then be branched into a way to let the people know world wide about the value of our service and what it can actually mean in their lives. We must then provide doctors to take care of them. This will become a very important part of our future.

My own vision for NUCCA is to make sure that NUCCA is financially secure. We must have the money and the resources for NUCCA to continue regardless of who our leaders are. It is also my personal vision for NUCCA to create an architecture or framework for unlimited growth for an organizational structure that will function seamlessly and will actually grow organically. It is necessary to maintain the conviction of Dr. Gregory, to see our organization as a group of determined individuals staying true to themselves but working toward the common goal of detecting and correcting the subluxated spine. I have heard Dr. Gregory say: “it doesn’t make any difference how you correct the subluxation as long as it gets corrected.”

I also see an organization that stays true to its heritage but transforms itself to the rapid changes in today’s world. We will have new technology, fewer X-rays, more effective biomechanics and improved teaching methods. We will become known worldwide and will be the procedure of choice for many patients and doctors. I see our organization ready for these challenges and getting stronger each year as we embrace diversity and acceptance and tolerance.

What do you want to do in the future?

I want to create a Chiropractic Institute. After taking a one-year sabbatical from January first until December thirty first of 1999, I have returned to practice with a renewed commitment to chiropractic and to NUCCA. I as setting up a group practice, a model for our future. The group will be twenty chiropractors providing patient care and each one will be training at least one intern. Six chiropractors have already agreed to come and by the end of the year five of us will be actively practicing. The economics of the group practice will allow all of us to be more profitable as individuals and to have the resources collectively to reach more people, to conduct and publish research and to make a huge impact on chiropractic.

The Institute will be a facility where we’ll provide not only the correction of the subluxated spine but also some diagnostics such as MRI, video-fluoroscopy, EMG, and the instrumentation necessary to verify and validate the effects of the subluxated spine. We will continue to pioneer technology and procedures to better detect and correct the atlas subluxation complex. As a group we will have the staff and resources to publish our findings about what we’re discovering on a day to day basis. We will be publishing case studies and research papers to the health care community and patient testimonials to the public.

I will continue to teach seminars for the office procedure and patient relationship part of the NUCCA practice. I will also continue to support NUCCA and NUCCRA in any way that I am needed.

In closing I want to mention that chiropractic has been very good to me. I am really grateful for having found chiropractic, and I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to be of service to my fellow man. I can’t think of anything that I would rather do than to help another person by removing the interference from their life, which was created by the subluxated spine. Sometimes we forget the very value of what we do in our own lives and in the lives of the people we touch. Sometimes its easy to just correct the subluxated spine and forget about the story of that human being that we just touched and how significant a difference it is going to make in that person’s life. So with my focus on getting an Institute for Spinal Care up and running I would like to say that I’m not going to forget the importance of what we do for every person we adjust.

Thank you Dr. Brooks.