Dr. Lou Sportelli Shares How Chiropractic Survived

Show notes:

Ever wondered how the chiropractic profession survived its early challenges? Get ready to dive into the captivating history of the chiropractic profession, as we sit down with Dr. Lou Sportelli, a seasoned chiropractor and key player in the profession's political world. We journey back to the 1960s, a time when chiropractors faced exclusions from hospital labs and referrals from physicians. Listen to Dr. Sportelli's personal tales of the struggle, resilience, and triumph that kept the profession alive.

But this is more than just a history lesson. We delve into the dark depths of the profession's monumental legal battle with the American Medical Association (AMA). Listen as Dr. Sportelli, who was directly involved in the case, reveals the deceptive tactics deployed by the AMA to discredit and limit chiropractic. Brace yourself as we unearth the corruption and manipulation that pervaded both the medical and political systems, underscoring the significance of this battle even today. 

The episode concludes on a high note, exploring the landmark case of Wilk v. AMA, a turning point for the profession. Learn about the role of Judge Susan Getzen Daner and her crucial verdict that unmasked the AMA's unlawful economic boycott against chiropractors. We also delve into chiropractic care's significant impact on spine health, with Dr. Sportelli sharing insights on the potential of the profession to improve overall well-being. This is more than a podcast episode - it's an enlightening testament to the struggles and triumphs of the chiropractic profession.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to the Activate your Practice podcast. I'm Dr Ford. Data always wins. Hello, I'm Dr Arlen Ford and I'm the chairman and founder of Activator Methods International, and this is our new podcast called Activate your Practice. We're going to have a range of different people that we interview on this podcast and this morning I am very honored and happy to have a longtime friend of mine, dr Lou Sportelli, and Dr Sportelli agreed to do this and the title of this, I guess you would say, was how Did Chiropractic Get Saved? And if you've been watching it all lately, george McAnders, the attorney that saved chiropractic, passed away, and it was just in the last couple of weeks, and I know that Dr Sportelli knew George McAnders personally and I thought this is something we need to get on record because every student should know what these folks went through to save the profession of chiropractic. So good morning, dr Sportelli.

Speaker 2: 1:13

Good morning Arlen, Nice to see you.

Speaker 1: 1:16

And thank you for coming on because, as I said, I want this preserved for history's sake, because so many young students today don't understand the trials and tribulations that we went through in the chiropractic world to get where we are today. And so, dr Sportelli, first of all, how did you get into chiropractic?

Speaker 2: 1:35

Well, I got into it by accident. My best friend and I were walked to high school and on our way to high school we passed a chiropractor's office and my friend began to date his niece and so on Saturday morning we would go there, and of course he was a Palmer grad. Back in those days, if you were walking and breathing and you met a chiropractor, they wanted to get you into chiropractic college. So he talked to us about getting into school and so ultimately, what happened was my friend broke up with his niece. I went to chiropractic college and he did not. So that's how it happened. There was no miracles, no nothing, and I didn't know a whole lot about it except what I had seen. But once there, of course transformed my work.

Speaker 2: 2:32

What year did you graduate from? I went from Palmer. I graduated in 1962. That's kind of a magic year, arlen, because in 1963, unbeknownst to us and anybody, the AMA formed a committee on quack Whose goal it was first to contain and then to eliminate the profession of chiropractic. Now I realized nobody knew this. It was a clandestine, conspiratorial kind of committee that nobody knew about, and it happened just, fortunately for me, one year after I graduated.

Speaker 1: 3:12

Well, tell me this how did you get involved in the political world of chiropractic?

Speaker 2: 3:17

Well, stephen, I can thank Stephen Barrett, the guy who basically went on to form quack busters. He lived in a town adjacent to me, about 25 miles away, and as a result of his involvement he formed what was called the Lehigh Valley Committee against health fraud. And I thought that I was against health fraud so I tried to join the committee and of course we were excluded because we were a caravan. It really should have been the Lehigh Valley Committee against chiropractic. So he kind of got me angry. But long before that Arlen you know it's hard you started off by saying you were interested in how students would know about what's happened in our lifetime. Well, I want you to just kind of think about if there was a plan to eliminate you and you didn't know about it and then all of a sudden things began to happen. That kind of didn't make sense. I graduated in 62 and I opened up my practice in 1963 in a small town in Palmerston, pennsylvania, where I've been ever since. We had a small hospital in our town. We had a couple of physicians. We had a lot of people who had had that and so the when I, as I started out, I wanted to, for example, patients that came in, I wanted to send them for some laboratory work. Well, the hospital lab refused to take my patients. Early on, I had no idea why a hospital would refuse to do blood work and urinalysis on a patient of mine and the physicians in town would not accept my patients as referrals. Well, you can't process that, arlene. You cannot process that all of these things are happening and you don't know why. There's no sound rational reason. And I got early on into the how should I say the mix of all of this. Because there was a, the little office I rented. There was a gentleman who was 92 years old and the physician who was taking care of him was so angry that he rented it to a quack that he refused to take care of it. And he was located across the street from my office. I tell this story because it's so, it's so unusual. And right across the street from his office was a funeral home. And the people that went to the family physician, he would tell them, if you go across the street to and see that quack, you'll wind up at Schnitters that was the name of the funeral home. Well, arlene, I'm a young chiropractor. I had no idea. I had no enemies. I'm brand new in this community. Why would people be doing that? And then the then, early on, one of my patients was the president of the Lions Club and asked me if I wanted to join the Lions Club. And I said, certainly, I joined the Lions Club. And a month later a letter was read by the physician to the lion, was sent by the physician to the Lions Club and it said I have to resign because I can't belong to an organization that would have a quack as a member.

Speaker 2: 6:54

Well, none of this I mean Arlen, none of this process. You can't process any of this because there's no context, there's no foundation, there's no reason, there's no logic, there's no rationale for why these things would be happening. And then, of course, we talk about today about referrals, and there was no such thing as a referral Back then. If you lost a patient, it was a transfer because you never got the patient balance. So, little by little, from 1963 to 1964 to 1965, I mean, all of these things were happening.

Speaker 2: 7:35

But obviously I was brand new, broke and I was more concentrated on getting my practice started than I was to worry about some of this other stuff, and I worked at my practice hard every day. And so my practice began to grow. And as my practice began to grow, I began to need more and more laboratory work, more and more referrals. And pretty soon, what happened? I realized that in my local community that was never gonna happen. Unfortunately for me, my attorney, who also started at the same year I did in practice, knew a number of physicians in Allentown and introduced me to them and as a result of that introduction and so forth, that, with a lunch and a little bit of discussion, a little bit of introduction, they began to take my patients, and one of them was a radiologist, the other was an internist, the other was a gastroenterologist. So you started to get to know some of the other folks and I tried to be as professional as I can, and every patient that I sent, I sent a copy of a letter along a letter with them. And so pretty soon the practice started to grow, and it started to grow exponentially.

Speaker 2: 8:51

Well, how'd I got involved in practice? Because in 1969, which has now given me five years of good, solid practice under my belt Dr Barrett came along and of course he was an absolute nemesis of chiropractic and as a result of my fighting him, I began to essentially get involved in this whole process. Now realize now nobody still knew that the AMA was out to contain and eliminate us. But by 1969, the AMA started to realize that the word was out, that there was some information out there. And then a book came into public interest and it had copies of memorandum and so forth. Well, we didn't know anything about that and then all of a sudden a figure appeared by the name of sore throat and pretty soon a number of us and a number of organizations across the country started to receive packets in the mail and I received three of them and I still have the brown manila envelope that they came in and it was marked ST or sore throat strange. I marked them and they came from Washington DC and there was no return address on them and inside were documents, copies of documents, the same kind of documents that were enclosed in the book into the public interest.

Speaker 2: 10:29

And I remember receiving my first packet, arlon, and I will tell you that that came on a Saturday morning. I remember it like it was. Yesterday came on a Saturday morning and after practice I sat down and I read those documents and I will tell you that there's a transformational time. That happens a number of times in your lifetime and that was one of them. After reading those documents, it was like a weight lifted off my shoulders because I then knew what had been happening to me for the past almost 10 years, that the AMA was out to essentially eliminate the profession that I had gotten involved in and that totally transformed my life, that I got involved in politics, that I got involved with my state association, with my national association, with the World Federation of Chiropractic, I got involved in lobbying, I got involved in public relations and all of it designed to get a message out.

Speaker 2: 11:39

And as a result of that involvement with the AMA, with the ACA, back in 1975, that's when they had a decision to make to either support the lawsuit or not. And initially they were reluctant to support the lawsuit, thanks to their attorney, who was a guy by the name of Harry Rosenfeld, and so we finally got convinced. I was hell bent on getting the ACA to make a commitment to support this lawsuit. The ACA, to their credit, supported it initially. And that's when Jerry McAndrews was George's brother, was the executive director of the ICA and the chairman of that board was Joseph Mazarelli, and between those two guys they basically saw what was happening and basically, the rest is, as you say, history as we now know, our involvement. How did you meet George?

Speaker 1: 12:39

McAndrews.

Speaker 2: 12:40

Well, through Jerry, jerry, basically at the time. I became friends with Jerry and Joe Mazarelli early on in the early 70s and as a result of the fact that Chester Wilk was involved up to his eyeballs in trying to get this idea of litigating against the AMA which, as you can easily imagine, who wants to undertake that kind of a situation? You could almost you really couldn't even find an attorney, a law firm that would go after the AMA, because, essentially, who wants to fight the largest? Essentially, as George called them, the fourth branch of government, which is what they really were. They had that kind of authority and so nobody would take on the case.

Speaker 2: 13:35

The lawyer after lawyer just simply refused to take the case for either for economic reasons or for survival reasons, of their own firm. And Jerry convinced his brother, george, that an attorney was absolutely essential and George would have to do it. And of course he pulled the card of brother that brothers can pull. He says dad would turn over in his grave if you didn't do this. So that's how George essentially became the lawyer of record.

Speaker 1: 14:11

And what was Chester Wilk from? What was he? What was he from Chester Wilk?

Speaker 2: 14:16

Chester Wilk was from Chicago. He was in the Polish area of Chicago. Chester had always had an inkling that something was wrong. Chester wrote a couple of books himself relative to this sort of conspiracy theory. That Chester had proved to be right and, ironically, arlen and us were speaking now. Chester passed away about six months ago and George passed away on Good Friday of 2023. So both of those individuals who were essential and key in this whole process are no longer with us.

Speaker 1: 14:57

That's why I felt it was so important to get this digitized, so we'd have it on record, because I think every student in carapacted college today should listen to this to see what you guys went through. And I mean, I'm from the same era. I graduated in 61, you know and so after a couple of years in the Navy I was in practice the same time as you were, and I can confirm what you're saying. It was exactly how it was. I know the trial changed it, but how do you think it led up? What was it done?

Speaker 2: 15:28

Well, it was kind of interesting, arlen, that when they finally litigated against the AMA, the key, I mean we lost the first trial. And the reason we lost the first trial was because the AMA cleverly I mean there's no question about the fact that they executed a plan to eliminate the profession. It was masterful, it was well executed and it was absolutely done to perfection. They really had this thing down pat as to what they were going to do. The bottom line, however, is that realize the profession. Go back and realize where we were in the 60s. We weren't licensed in all of the states. Our colleges were not accredited. We had no national board, none of that kind of existed. We had a few states that were beginning to get licensed, but there was no even thought of reimbursement from any third party insurance carrier. We weren't included in any governmental program. So when you think of the fact that we really had nothing at the time in the 60s. And so if you go back to where, even today, where the ACA is making a major push to get Medicare correct, now Medicare is 50, we've been in Medicare for 50 years, darling, it has been the biggest albatross around our neck. Now everybody can be a Monday morning quarterback. But the fact of the matter is is that Medicare was passed Because Senator Bill Day, who was a chiropractor from the state of Washington, was friends with Senator Warren Magnuson. That was one of the most influential senators in the United States Senate. They were friends, both of them from Washington state, and Senator Day basically told us to Warren Magnuson about the chiropractic inclusion in Medicare and back then what we now call CMS was called HEW Health, education and Welfare. Well, the records show that we got a as far as the ICA was concerned, back then, 60 years ago. I don't know that they would agree with it today, but back then they wanted to get chiropractic in Medicare and anything, any language as far as they were concerned, was a foot in the door. Unfortunately, that foot in the door ultimately wound up, in my view, as an amputation of the foot rather than a benefit, because they limited us to such a narrow degree that it's been an albatross around this profession's neck for 50 years. And they're trying to correct that now by changing the Medicare law. And but what people don't understand is that how duplicitous the AMA was. They actually fixed when I mean fixed as in corrupted as in fraudulently interfered with a congressional hearing. Hew was supposed to have a hearing on chiropractic. In the lawsuit, after the documents were discovered, it was discovered that the report on chiropractic was written before the hearing ever started, thanks to the AMA and their connections. Now just think about that. That I mean it's not so surprising as we learn today the kind of corruption that exists within the framework of politics. It's not so hard to fathom that 50 years ago that was even easier to do. So our whole Medicare thing was predicated on a lie, on a false accusation of the AMA that wanted to limit us, even though Senator Magnus said they knew they couldn't fight him because he was too strong. They were going to Medicare was going to pass one way or another, and so they narrowed it as narrow as they could do and then fixed the report. That's number one. Think about that.

Speaker 2: 20:14

I always say that when I say the AMA did a masterful job, because what they did was first of all concentrate on the physician. They essentially brainwashed the physicians into associating chiropractic with quackery. So the education of the physicians who are going to now practice for decades they were absolutely convinced that chiropractic was worthless and quackery. That's the first thing they did. The second thing they did was to corrupt the public. Public opinion about chiropractic was formed by the media that the AMA controlled so masterfully, to have the public recognize that chiropractic was quackery, chiropractic was worthless, chiropractic was absolutely harmful. So there was a safety issue. There was a worthless issue. So they convinced the public that now you have the medics and now you have the public. And the third arm of their brilliant strategy, arlen, was to control the media. And so what they did was they essentially even to the point.

Speaker 2: 21:40

Arlen where, if you go back, many of your listeners won't remember Dear Abby, but she had a syndicated column, was probably one of the best read syndicated columnists in the newspaper. She wrote an article basically saying that chiropractic was goofus, it was goofus feather, it was worthless. And when she was deposed, arlen, she changed their story quite dramatically. And so Reader's Digest had an article just about the time we were supposed to be fighting for inclusion in Medicare and the Reader's Digest at the time was probably one of the best read magazines of all times and the article said should chiropractors be paid with your tax dollars? And then the other journal was the Consumer's Report. That was a well-read publication. They did a two-part series, chiropractic and Quackery Two-part, two months in a row. I mean the kind of campaign. Arlen was absolutely masterfully executed and chiropractic, of course, was essentially penalized as a result of that.

Speaker 2: 23:00

Then to continue this education of the public that chiropractors were uneducated, not well trained, so they basically were accusing chiropractic and our educational institutions of being less than stellar. So here's what they did Our chiropractic institutions, through their credit, wanted to hire MDs and PhDs for their faculty. Well, if there was a person who had an MD degree or a PhD degree and they were going to consider teaching at a chiropractic college, they'd receive a letter saying if you teach at a chiropractic college, you'll never teach again. So you can't call us uneducated and then prevent people who will be on our faculty from educating. So when I tell you they hit us on the accreditation front for our colleges and made us look terrible to those who were going to pass the United States Department of Education, they essentially poison legislators across the country that we didn't get our last state license until the 70s. Think about that. The late 70s, mississippi and Louisiana and Massachusetts and Louisiana. And ironically, the two chairman of the Committee on Quackery was Dr Sabatier from Louisiana and Dr Valentine from Massachusetts. I don't think that's any coincidence that those two states were our last states to get license. So when you step back and look at this thing from 30,000 feet, they basically poison the well, if you will, of every single aspect of power practice.

Speaker 2: 24:54

And then, finally, the final blow was they basically had their legal department. Well, there's two things they did. The legal department wrote a legal opinion on why chiropractors should be kept out of hospitals. That's the first one. And secondly, if you notice that the lawsuit was against the AMA, but it was also against the American College of Radiology, the American College of Orthopedics, the American College of Internal Medicine, all of the American colleges of whatever. So here's what the AMA did Brilliant, they wanted to have sort of a hands off, kind of mindset. So what they did was they wrote anti chiropractic position papers for every one of those American Medical Association societies internal medicine, radiology. So what they said was look, this isn't only us talking. The American College of Internal Medicine, the American College of Pediatrics, the American College of Radiology, they're all opposed to chiropractic. And yet the AMA wrote all of their position papers. So when you start to think of how well executed this whole article, and then finally, what's the way to kill most everything Economics.

Speaker 2: 26:19

So now the chiropractors couldn't utilize the hospitals for their X to have their X-rays done. So every chiropractor in the 60s and 70s and 80s basically had to either purchase their own X-ray machine which was expensive at the time, you figure the kind of reimbursement that was. That did not exist. So the chiropractors had to had to get themselves into debt by an X-ray machine because they couldn't get any other facility to take their X-rays. So you want to talk about an economic drain on individual practitioners.

Speaker 2: 27:01

And then back in the 60s and 70s, arlo, you know that there was only, there was only one thing you could do when you graduated chiropractic college you either set up your own practice or you flipped hamburgers for McDonald's. There was no other choices. There was no other opportunities for chiropractors except to be in private practice. And so by being in private practice they forced you into incredible debt just simply with the X-ray machine, and then prevents you from using laboratory facilities to better your diagnostic skills. So when you look at this thing in a broad picture, it was an incredible attack on the character. How we survived is nothing short of morality.

Speaker 1: 27:50

I want to ask you I've heard so many different stories about the judge and I don't know if people out there know that it was a lady.

Speaker 2: 27:57

Tell me about the judge out there During the first trial, the judge was Judge Buah, and Judge Buah had a jury and the AMA decided that they were going to attack this whole issue of chiropractic from a patient safety point of view and that the AMA was justified in their position against chiropractic because we were essentially not good clinicians and so forth and so on.

Speaker 2: 28:34

So they began to parade all of the nonsensical advertisement that chiropractors did claims from everything from you know adnoids to the hemorrhoids that they could do everything Some of these ads at the time. What people didn't realize is that that was the way the chiropractors survived. I mean, chiropractors basically back then had to do something to survive, and so they survived by doing things that maybe were a little unprofessional, a little unorthodox, maybe a little bit out there, a little huxterism. Yes, it was. But see, the issue was Arlen was that the judge made an error in that he allowed this case to be tried on patient safety. The essence of the case had nothing to do with chiropractic. What they had to do with an economic boycott that the AMA was designing in order to strangle the livelihood of the profession. So we lost the first trial and we lost the first trial simply because it was. I don't know how any jury could basically vote in favor of the things that they saw in that particular trial, and some of the worst of the worst of chiropractic came out in that trial. Well, the judge, in his wisdom, didn't feel good about this and essentially requested that George be certain to appeal the decision. So Judge Buah basically called George and basically said this you've got to appeal this.

Speaker 2: 30:32

Well, there was a brand new judge by the name of Judge Susan Getzen Daner and she was absolutely brand new on the circuit. She apparently, as the story goes, she was roaming around the judges and basically looking for some interesting cases and she went into the judges chambers and basically saw she says what's new, what's interesting, and he basically said well, this is chiropractic thing here. And so she thought it was interesting and so she decided that she'd take on the case. Well, what she didn't realize. And first of all, she really was a really very, very bright jurist. She grasped the complexities of a lot of things quicker than most would. She was also female, so she understood a couple of things which I'll point out to you later that really made a significant difference. So George, instead of having a jury trial, requested a bench trial. Now, a bench trial means that there is no jury, just the judge.

Speaker 2: 31:47

Well, all of a sudden, instead of being a bystander and a spectator, the judge was now the entire focus, because she was hearing all this. But apparently, from the recollection that I have of her performance and so forth, she must have had a photographic mind, because she was absolutely brilliant. But a few things stood out to her. First of all, she recognized early on that this case really didn't have a lot to do with chiropractic. There was a gentleman that doesn't get too much credit I think he deserves a lot of credit. His name was Miran Stano, his name. He was the economist from the University of Michigan and basically a lovely man. Has been around for a long time, just retired. But Dr Stano, as the economist for this whole deal, was credible, believable, and he was up against the same kind of a situation that George was George and another attorney up against does another attorney. Dr Stano was up against a bunch of other economists from the AMA, but he was credible and he presented himself in such a credible way that the judge immediately understood that this was absolutely an unlawful economic bulletin, and so her decision was predicated on a number of things. Number one, the clear violation of an economic boycott, which is unlawful.

Speaker 2: 33:36

But also during the trial, during her trial and she was a interesting lady in that this particular thing hit her, and that is that the suppression of evidence that supported the benefits of chiropractic. For example, there was a study that supported the fact that pregnant women had better outcomes and that was suppressed by the AMA. George tells the story and of course he exaggerates a little bit, says that this 12-inch finger that was waving saying are you telling me that you depressed information that could make childbirth easier? It didn't set up very well. I mean, what was happening was things were now starting to become discovered, the things that the AMA had in its possession, which was essentially extulable information that would make the profession look better. They suppressed all of it. She saw through that, clearly. That's why one of the most important things that occurred, aron, was the fact that the AMA fought as vigorous as they possibly could that the information from the trial not be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. One of the things that was requested, and one of the things that she granted and mandated, was that the AMA publish the findings in JAMA. Now, why was that important Because, first of all, as we look back, the AMA really didn't have all of the physicians as members.

Speaker 2: 35:41

Matter of fact, it was a pretty pathetic percentage of. But they didn't care because their money wasn't made from membership of their AMA. The money was made from pharmaceutical advertising and all of their publications, so they could survive if they had no members. So they weren't beholding to their membership, they were beholding to essentially the big pharma, which now obviously controls them, as you know. So having that published in their own Journal, it was amazing because we got letters and I still have some of those letters from some of the medics across the country. It basically said I am embarrassed. I'm embarrassed what my political organization did. I am going to open my doors for my radiology. I'm going to open my doors for my laboratory. Chiropractors are welcome.

Speaker 2: 36:41

Of course, because of the lawsuit and because of the way the lawsuit was framed, hospitals across the country now started to take a second look as to whether or not they could legally keep chiropractors out of publicly funded hospitals and hospital laboratories and hospital radiology facility.

Speaker 2: 37:07

Puppled with that, the private sectors of laboratory and MRI and other radiology facilities started to blossom because they recognized that it was a lucrative enterprise. They began to send letters as private entities to all the chiropractors saying come to our office, we welcome you. So pretty soon. In a matter of just a short period of time, chiropractors could now. They didn't have to buy their extra machines, they can use outside facilities, they can have radiologists review their films and they could not have to spend that money and they can use that room in their office for therapeutic purposes as opposed to sitting there collecting dust. With the amount of x-rays they were taking on patients, it was a tsunami of explosion that occurred. But the threat of what occurred and the threat of all of those organizations being sued and most of them settled out of court because they knew darn well that it was an unlawful activity that they were doing it changed the whole complexion of everything.

Speaker 1: 38:23

Let me ask you this. We've gone a long way. I let this run because I'm learning things myself that I had no knowledge of. I think this is really important. Where do you see the profession in the next 10 years?

Speaker 2: 38:38

I think it's encouraging. A lot of things are changing and where I see the profession is, I see us. First of all and, by the way, thankfully the VA has been a phenomenal opportunity for chiropractors all over the country and expanding on a day-by-day basis, thanks to Tony Lisi and a host of great chiropractors that got involved in it early on, where we would have never had the opportunity incidentally, we never would have had the opportunity to participate in that but had not been for RAND and had not been for the litigation and the information that was obtained from the documents. There was an injustice. Fair-minded people didn't have to like chiropractic to recognize that there was an injustice done to this profession that needed some correction. So the VA is one opportunity.

Speaker 2: 39:45

The second thing that's happening in a number of places Ireland is that, a year old enough to remember, if you basically in the 70s and 80s and 90 would have said you know, someday there's going to be a chiropractor graduating from Yale or graduating from Harvard, they'd have put you in a padded room because there was no way that those hallowed halls of those prestigious institutions would have ever considered having a chiropractor. Well, today we have chiropractors right now at Harvard. We have chiropractors at Yale. We have other chiropractic colleges setting up. We've got programs at Duke, we've got programs at Dartmouth, we're going to have soon a chiropractic college at the University of Pittsburgh and, incidentally, that is the third largest research awarded university in the country the whole area of chiropractic and I say this as you know, as we started to get licensed in all the states and so forth, the profession came together. There was litigation and there was legislation. We were focused on those two concepts. We don't need those battles anymore. Today. The battle is in the area of validation, in the area of research, and that's the concept that's moving this profession forward.

Speaker 2: 41:24

There's been enough research done, and enough I should not use the word enough. There's been a sizable amount of research done. There's been an extraordinary amount of focus on chiropractic and spinal manipulation and it's evolution all the way to. I remember when chiropractors were the spine, was figments of chiropractors imagination, and today we're having research done in neuroclasticity, we're having research done in biomarkers and what we're doing and what we do as chiropractors, we're just scratching the surface to begin to understand the importance relative to the health of the individual that chiropractors can do. And so where do I see this in the next 10, 15 years I see as having areas of involvement with universities relative to internships, relative to preceptorship, relative to opportunities for research in informatics, and all of the things that we wouldn't even begin to think about just a dozen years ago.

Speaker 2: 42:53

So I see the concept of chiropractic and what it represents in another level. Today it's absolutely being looked at both, because there's been enough studies to show what moves anything. You can have some strong beliefs and so forth, but what moves things ultimately is economics, and so healthcare is so costly and so broken in this country, and half of the elements that people seek care for are spine related, and so chiropractors have greater outcomes at lower cost, with higher levels of patient satisfaction. It doesn't get any better than that, and so the system, unfortunately, today is still a fee-for-service system. If you read anything, you see it's becoming value-based. The value of chiropractic in that system is going to be unbelievable. So I see nothing but positive things occurring as a result of ongoing research, essentially supporting and validating the fact that chiropractors are both even to the point of the research now showing which practitioner you go to determines the outcome. It doesn't get any more beneficial than that.

Speaker 1: 44:32

That kind of supports my old saying, Lou, that data always wins.

Speaker 2: 44:38

Data will win? Yes, it will, and unfortunately today they're doing. We talk about big data, whatever that means to anybody, but we're talking about the ability to analyze data today, with artificial intelligence and the amount of data that's being collected by systems that didn't exist before. So once you start doing that kind of research, there's no question that the economists who run the economics of the systems are looking to this and saying wait a minute, what's the best way to do this? And chiropractic certainly has an opportunity to talk about, even if we and I'm not discounting for one minute Arlan the other aspects of chiropractic care. But if we just focus on what people know about us, which they connect us to spine and spine is 50% of the ailments Not only is it the health ailment, but think about the lost time, lost productivity and the cost of disability. That is exponentially a number that is so huge that people are paying attention to it now.

Speaker 1: 46:00

I can't thank you enough. As I said, I kind of lived through this era, but you brought things home to me that I had never heard before, and so I hope our listening audience out there will thank Dr Lou Sportelli for taking the time to spend with us so we can put this out to the students that are in the chiropractic colleges today and to our podcast viewers. Lou, just wanted to give you a big thank you and so much for coming on and doing a great program.

Speaker 2: 46:31

Arlan, thank you, and if I have one thing to say, I would hope that your listeners would purchase a book called Container Illuminy, because they will learn in that particular publication, in that book, things that they never dreamed before or didn't know before, but will make them proud of where they are today as practitioners. Thank you so much. You're welcome. My pleasure, thank you.