Chiropractors for Fair Journalism
Creative Writing Lessons
for Chiropractors and Students
Unlike scientific papers that conclude only what the evidence shows, in creative writing the method may be much different. The goal with writing articles for the lay media is to take the findings of the scientific articles and interpret them for public consumption. Unfortunately, most of our best articles about the benefits of chiropractic care to help in the healthcare reform effort remains lost in the journals never to be seen by the public or in the lay media.
In order to become an effective writer, you must do your homework and get up the learning curve. You need to become familiar with the current research, the personalities within spine care, both medical and chiropractic, as well as understand the issues involved, such as the criticism of the disc theory and the tsunami of spine surgery.
I urge you to read my book, The Medical War Against Chiropractic, to become familiar with these issues. The first half of my book deals with the history of the war and explains the source of the medical bigotry–the infamous Morris Fishbein. The second half deals with the paradigm shift in spine care from drugs, shots, and surgery to “hands-on” care such as chiropractic SMT, decompression, massage therapy, active rehab and acupuncture. My book includes many other sources for you to become familiar with as well.
The goal of these Writing Tips is to give you organizational concepts to improve your writing. These are not intended to teach you about misplaced modifiers, verb tenses, or dangling participles. Hopefully you have an instructor or editor to help you with those grammatical issues. I want to give you an organizational overview how I approach writing with the five Lessons in this section.
The biggest suggestion I can make to you is to write about what you love the most, which in our case is the passion we have for our professional healing art. You can read the many articles I have written to give you a sense of my passion, both positive and negative, of the many issues we chiropractors face.
When I think of the 12,000 DCs who were arrested in the first half of the 20th century for doing what I do daily, it inflames my better senses to realize how vicious the medical profession was to persecute these fine men and women whose goal was to get sick people well without the use of drugs or surgery.
As well, you can imagine the broken lives of patients who were victimized by unscrupulous MDs who refused to send them to chiropractors, instead choosing to treat them with addictive drugs, ineffective epidural shots, or, worst of all, spine fusions based on an outdated disc theory, only to leave a wake of disability behind.
Indeed, if such stories don’t stir your emotions, then you must be naive or brain-dead to the travesty now occurring in spine care in America, if not the entire world. And don’t think for one moment that scientific research or failed clinical results will persuade these MDs to stop. This $100 billion industry has no interest in stopping its predation upon these unsuspecting patients despite the comparative studies like AHCPR that have conclusively shown our brand of care is far superior to medical care.
If you have any spunk in your soul, if you care for the masses of people suffering from spinal disorders and pain, and if you are interested in fighting against the medical wave of unnecessary and harmful procedures, I urge you to take up arms. The power of the pen is the key to our success since we cannot compete with the massive medical lobby or its control of the media. We can, however, use the local press, cable television, and internet to spread our story. In this website I’ve given you various examples of my written articles, videos and books to study. I urge you to take the best of mine and develop your own unique style. Please send your work to me so I can post it on this website.
To begin your writing lessons, start with Lesson 1.