Prophesy: The Final Challenge

Republished with permission from the Barge family. For more writings and fantastic works by Dr. Barge, visit www.torstore.org.

The following article written by Dr. Fred Barge years ago speaks loudly of the great need to address this issue that has been slowly whittling away and degrading the quality of chiropractic education and practice.

His final paragraph and sentence are extremely important.

They reflect a serious situation we now find ourselves in.

And that is the fact that many of our leaders have been taught, raised and have practiced in a hybrid, therapeutic version of chiropractic. They do not know what they do not know and have now become a part of the problem and not the solution.

The Final Challenge by Fred H. Barge, D.C.

History shows us that there once was a proud profession, a healing art profession that did not embrace the materia medica of allopathic medicine. A profession that withstood the onslaught of medical ridicule for a goodly period of time. A profession that was licensed on its own right to exist as a worth while healing art. But this profession slowly gave in; dissatisfied with its status, wanting the public acclaim and esteem of the more established medical fraternity, this profession seeking acceptance medicalized.

Yes, this profession is still with us today, and it’s called Osteopathy and its practitioners Osteopathic physicians. But where has their truckling got them? Oh, yes, they are in hospitals! Oh, yes, they can even be members of the AMA! But are they really accepted as full fledged M.D.s? Certainly not. Does the public look up to this profession with high esteem? Certainly not, most people do not really understand what an Osteopath is. Osteopathy has a pathetic existence as an almost illegitimate form a medicine to be tolerated, certainly not, exemplified.

Must chiropractic repeat the same error? Cannot we learn from history? As poet Angelow stated, (Paraphrased) “history cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again”

Now with a group of Texas chiropractors banding together to seek full drug prescription privileges; with Dr. Slaughter trying to slaughter our profession by forming a group of inter-disciplinary manipulators called Orthopractors; with Dr. Dallas at Western States Chiropractic College seeking to grant a degree called DCM (Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine); with four states now allowing the prescription of non-prescription drugs; with the ACA dropping its opposition to artificial immunization; with the Merky (oops Mercy) document seeking to force us into medical therapeutic model; with all this, can you not see history repeating itself again? Deja vu.

It will take courage to fight the “enemy within,” the final challenge will be to preserve the profession as a separate and distinct drugless, bloodless healing arts profession. BJ Palmer predicted it would not be the enemy without but the enemy within that would finally be the source of our greatest problem. With 50% of our colleges teaching little subluxation related analysis and technic, with some of them even denying that subluxation even exists, with these same colleges teaching little or no chiropractic philosophy, what can we expect? The doctors graduating from such colleges cannot be blamed for not knowing what they were never taught!