A Chiropracticness Test.

BACKGROUND: There is little homogeneity of opinion in the chiropractic profession about its essence and identity. Matters compromising the establishment of a coherent identity include the issue of vertebral subluxation, philosophy, mercantilism, poverty of qualifications in some chiropractic college faculty, and lack of intellectual productivity in some chiropractic college faculty.

DISCUSSION: The Chiropractic profession has mislabeled rhetoric, supposition and cant as philosophy, whilst showing sparse evidence for the existence of more than a few chiropractors writing in philosophy as a discipline. There is no evidence for "Chiropractic Philosophy". I propose, however, that a better use of the discipline of philosophy can be of great use to the Chiropractic profession. Various thinkers throughout the ages have written about deduction, induction and falsificationism as methods to discover more reliably the nature of things in the world about us. Each method has strengths and frailties, but some of the latter are insurmountable for our purposes.

SUMMARY: Using a contrivance of that method which seems most suited, sui generis, for the purpose, I propose a Chiropracticness Test as a tool to assist the search for essence and identity in Chiropractic.