Chiropractic History

The beginning of chiropractic dates back to 1895, when Daniel David Palmer of Iowa performed the first chiropractic adjustment on a partially deaf janitor, Harvey Lillard, who then noticed a few days later to Palmer that his hearing seemed better. This led to Palmer opening a school of chiropractic two years later. The word “chiropractic” was coined from Greek root words by Reverend Samel Weed. Early chiropractic bore similarities to osteopathy and was ridiculed as practicing medicine without a license. Those similarities for many chiropractors, including D.D. Palmer, forced them to jailed on such charges. In 1906, D.D.’s son B. J. Palmer took the helm of the Palmer School of Chiropractic. B.J. began to accept the use of technology such as X-rays within chiropractic care. Dr. Solon Langworthy was the very first to use the word “subluxation”, and wrote the first book on chiropractic, called “Modernized Chiropractic” — “Special Philosophy — A Distinct System”, in 1906. As the years went by, the profession has been since divided; one group, called “mixers”, combining both spinal adjustments with other treatments and medications; the other, called “straights”, rely solely on spinal adjustments. Hence our name Straight Chiropractic. In recent decades chiropractic gained legitimacy and greater acceptance by medical physicians and health plans, and enjoyed a strong political base and sustained demand for services.

 Straight Chiropractors attempt to remove all subluxations in their patients without medical treatments or surgeries.  Thus, they are concerned primarily with the detection and correction of vertebral subluxation via adjustment and do not “mix” other types of therapies into their practice style.