Many in our profession say that traditional chiropractic words don’t matter – its just semantics. They state that in order to be understood by other professions and the public we need to drop the usage of such words as adjustment, subluxation, analysis etc. They maintain that others will not understand us when we use chiropractic terminology.
I have a strong disagreement to this position. I see huge strength in our lexicon. It gives meaning and richness to our profession; in fact it is a key to the survival of the profession. I don’t think that we can be a profession without our unique language.
As a board member of the New Zealand College of Chiropractic I have a fierce resolve that chiropractic strengthens its position as a separate and distinct profession. Our president, Dr Phil McMaster recently wrote a short opinion piece which quite eloquently addresses this issue.
He stated the following:
“A set of special and carefully chosen words connected together that are understood by a specific group of people is called a conversational domain and all professions have one.
This is important because a conversational domain provides a profession the ability to have conversations with each other that make contextual sense. The language the profession uses gives credibility and positions them as experts in their chosen field.
As a profession, we have largely failed to adequately explain our unique perspective and approach to health and optimal function in a context that clearly delineates chiropractic as distinct from other professions. This failure has led to confusion both in the public and professional sectors as well as within our own ranks and it’s no one’s fault but our own.
Chiropractic has always had a conversational domain but we haven’t explained ourselves well enough contextually and in some cases we have even tried to fake ‘expertise’ by trying to speak authoritatively from another profession’s domain.
Only when chiropractic embraces its own clearly defined and understood conversational domain that utilizes both traditional and new language that is supported by chiropracTIC specific research, will it be respected as a stand-alone profession that we can all be proud of”.
How is your conversational domain?
