Confessions of a Former Chiropractor
J. Michael Menke recounts his journey from idealistic trainee to disillusioned ex-practitioner, describing how [[Palmer College of Chiropractic]] and the profession’s culture mixed hands-on care, metaphysical claims, and aggressive practice management to produce questionable outcomes. He details routines such as applied kinesiology and spinal adjustments that often rely on expectation, ritual, and salesmanship rather than robust evidence, and notes how institutions like [[Stanford’s Green Medical Library]] declined chiropractic journals while entities such as the [[NIH Office of Alternative Medicine]] briefly legitimized parts of the field. Menke criticizes continuing-education gurus, referral-driven economics, and reliance on outdated doctrine, invoking [[Avedis Donabedian]]’s framework to show systemic failure, argues that better science tends to shrink claimed effects to placebo and natural recovery, and concludes that leaving the field became an act of professional hygiene.