 This is Exploring Chiropractic. I'm Nathan Cashin. You may have seen my other videos where I interview students from around the world and talk about what's going on in chiropractic. I've added a couple other series. I've added the after-school interviews with chiropractors and students where we talk about stuff other than school. I've also done a little bit of a review of a book by D.D. Palmer that's probably going to keep going, just short little readings of things I find interesting. I'm going to add another one. Just on YouTube, this is going to be Exploring Chiropractic Research. I'm the host of another podcast. It's now defunct. It's called Brain Slides. And I used to design lecture slides for faculty at my undergraduate university. And I love slide design. I'm a design geek. I'm not a professional by any means. But I love talking about how can you make presentations more effective and avoid death by PowerPoint. So I want to bring all these things together with my interest in chiropractic research. And I'm going to pick an article, a paper that I read that I find interesting. And it's going to be a proof of concept, taking that information and putting it into a presentation. I'm not going to critique the paper. I'm going to try not to add my own opinions about it. But just present the information as it's there in the article. And I'm going to start with the agenda to explore vertebral subluxation research by doctors Matthew McCoy and Christopher Kent. And this is in their journal for vertebral subluxation research. 119 years ago, Didi Palmer gave the first chiropractic adjustment to Harvey Lillard. In his book The Chiropractor, Didi says, Chiropractic is a science. The foundation of chiropractic does not consist of its philosophy nor of the art of adjusting. But over these 119 years, chiropractic research has really just not dived in deep enough to determine whether what we do is really effective. There's kind of five problems, five general questions that remain to be answered. As far as chiropractic is concerned, and really focusing on the subluxation. The first one is, does vertebral subluxation exist? Do we have any papers where we can point to a subluxation and say, look, here it is, we can describe it. We can show it to others and they can replicate those findings. Nor can we measure it. How do we reliably say, this is a subluxation and this is how severe it is? We also need to answer the question of whether subluxations can make us sick. Can we show that people who have subluxations have worse health outcomes than those who are cleared? The fourth question is, can we correct it? Of course, this is what all, especially traditional chiropractors, claim to be able to do to detect and then correct subluxation. And that leads us to the fifth question, does it make us healthier? Are we able to express life more fully? Are we really more healthier than those who don't get adjusted regularly? Can we show that we can prevent severe chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, all of these other things? Can we answer these questions? There's a little bit of reasoning that we need to explain as far as why we're focusing on vertebral subluxation. And that goes back to the ideas of vitalism and holism. To kind of bring it all together, the body is a self-regulating, self-maintaining organism. The nervous system controls and coordinates all of those functions and it's housed within the vertebral column, the spine, and a subluxation can affect that. If we can correct those, then it allows the nervous system to function better and allows us to express life to the fullest. And there's three main causes that are described that lead to subluxations. And those are physical, chemical, and emotional stresses. And unfortunately throughout the world, we've developed these habits of poor exercise, poor diets, and really stressful lifestyles. All of this stuff kind of comes together, creates this cascade that allows subluxations to affect our neurobiological mechanisms and leads to poor health outcomes. That's why trying to evaluate and answer those five questions about the subluxation is really important. So to do that, there's an agenda that's been outlined and there's five main goals in this agenda. I'll go through them right now. The first one is to encourage and develop the next generation of researchers. I'm excited about this one because I've looked into the possibility of research after I graduate from chiropractic school. But one of the big challenges, well, it's going to school again in accruing more loans. So one way to address that is this proposition of providing 20 scholarships over the next 20 years for those who want to gain advanced degrees in research or in public health. That's the first goal of this agenda, to encourage and develop the next generation researchers. The next one is to focus on the research around the nature of the subluxation, to answer those five questions. So let's look at what that research might look like. Number one, we need to do research on the models of subluxation. We need to show that we can identify subluxations and explain what they are. Once we can do that, then we can measure that subluxation and show that we can reliably identify and characterize it. Then we need to do research that shows the effect of subluxation on the general public. We can show the incidents, the prevalence, the morbidity and mortality. And then what we need to do is research the clinical strategies for preventing and correcting these subluxations. So does the chiropractic adjustment clear the spine of this interference? And once we've done all that, the fifth focus of research is to measure and collect all of the health outcomes that come from this, showing that chiropractic adjustments leads to better health and enhanced solutagenesis or better expression of life. So that's the second goal, focusing on the nature of subluxation. The first was developing and encouraging next generation researchers. The third goal in this agenda is involving others. So we want to increase the utilization of vertebral subluxation screening and management. Then goal four is to create these central data repositories so that we can improve health policy regarding vertebral subluxations. And number five, really the big goal in the end is to create a marketing campaign where we involve chiropractors, students, patients, legislators, policymakers, and the general public to make them aware of subluxation and what needs to be done to correct it by utilizing chiropractic adjustments. So that's the agenda. Those five goals are kind of the roadmap for the future of chiropractic research. And that's my review of the paper by McCoy and Kent, an agenda to explore vertebral subluxation research. You can find it in their journal, the journal of vertebral subluxation research. Go to vertebralsubluxationresearch.com, create a membership or use your school's membership to log in, download the full paper. There's a lot of details I didn't cover. There's a lot of important information about how these goals can be applied and what the key focus is for each one are. And that's it for this episode of Exploring Chiropractic Research. Please leave me your comments below. How did I do? Did I understand the paper well? Did I present it in a way that was clear? How were the slides? Did I design those effectively? Leave your comments below, let me know. And I hope to see you again on the next episode of Exploring Chiropractic.