Now I'm ready to add my voice to the din. Now that I have a few minutes, that my wife has distracted the kid.
My chiropractor and I have the same opinion - our family is not going to get debilitated by swine flu. We disagree, however, on why.
See, I've based my opinion on science - empirical data and statistical history. He's based his on near-psychotic delusions.
I'm writing this having spent the day home with my kid, who's been hacking for the past 3 days and whose temperature has broken the point where his daycare would call us to take him home.
According to our "doctor," this means everything is as it should be.
He's not wrong in theory, he's wrong in practice.
What my son is exhibiting is a "normal" reaction to a foreign body. Most of us call this "sick." I do not consider this a "normal" state.
In our discussion this morning, he reitterated his lack of belief in "germ theory." (you can hear the quotes when he says it.) See, bacteria and viruses don't make people ill... sorry, "symptomatic." He feels you don't catch colds from viruses, because viruses are all around us - you come into contact with them all the time. (this is his assertion, and I'm sure there's some study somewhere, likely done by other chiropractors, that would validate this claim.) You get them, he says, when your imune system is compromised - when your spine is out of alignment.
When he reitterates, yet again, that a healthy imune system fights illness, I ask, isn't it better to not get infected in the first place?
I used the analogy of a trained fighter. You could be a 10th-degree blackbelt, and, if you ever found yourself in an altercation, it would likely save your life. I know just enough self defense tricks that it could possibly, maybe, save my life - if I were ever in need of it. I'm still standing today, not because of fighting skills, but because I don't get into those kinds of altercations.
This is when the "doctor" goes into psychotic denial mode.
"But you're going to get it anyway," he says. Except for the fact that I rarely (pre-kid, anyway) get sick. Arguably it's because I have a healthy imune system. I also wash my hands and don't suck on used kleenex.
"You're arguing that I'm OK because I have air bags, I'm saying I'd rather not get into an accident."
He mocked our teaching our son to cough into his elbow. This is a man who doesn't wash his hands after taking a dump in the office. He then procedes to touch people around the face and neck.
Make no mistake, the only reason my family goes to him is because my wife works for him. No one is twisting my arm to get me to go to a chiropractor - I will probably continue to go regularly, to someone else, after my wife finds her new job. I do find it beneficial. I also continue to take naproxen and ibuprofin for my tendonitis.
Tomorrow we're steam-cleaning my son's plush toys. Most of the victims of bubonic plague didn't believe in germ theory, either.
