REGGIE GOLD (1) INDUCTIVE REASONING CHIROPRACTIC LECTURE

Why on earth should chiropractic have a philosophy? Dentistry doesn't have a philosophy. Podiatry doesn't have a philosophy. Optometry doesn't have a philosophy. Medicine doesn't. Law doesn't. Architecture doesn't. Why in the world does chiropractic need a philosophy? And the answer is chiropractic doesn't need a philosophy at all. Chiropractic is a philosophy. And I want to go right back to the very beginning when the Palmers developed chiropractic. First D.D. who discovered the principle, and then his son B.J. who set forth the principles that were labeled chiropractic. And chiropractic was defined as, first of all, the philosophy, art and science of things natural. And there's a colon. And it goes on to describe that it is also a system of adjusting the segments of the spinal column by hand only for the correction of the cause of dis ease. Now, there's a lot of discussion in chiropractic as to whether that definition should be broadened at this point, whether the term by hand only is really relevant, whether it was ever relevant. And I'm not going to touch upon any of those things. That's not our concern. My concern with you this evening and through this whole series of talks is going to be the first part of the definition, the philosophy, art and science of things natural. Chiropractic started out as a study of nature. I think maybe we should even go into the word philosophy. What does that mean? Well, from two Greek words, philosophas, the word philosophy means a love of wisdom, a search for understanding. And that's what this philosophy is all about. It has nothing to do with adjusting the spine. That's secondary. The real basis of chiropractic is a study, a search for wisdom, of our relationship with our universe. So chiropractic doesn't need a philosophy. Chiropractic is first and foremost a philosophy from which grows a system of adjusting the segments of the spinal column by hand only for the correction of the cause of dis ease. And later on we'll be talking about this term. Dis ease, which is very different from the word disease, has totally different meaning. I assume that many of you have a background in philosophy courses in schools and colleges. It's unfortunate, I think, that in most college courses in philosophy, they don't teach any philosophy at all. They teach the history of certain philosophers. And you learn what this philosopher thought and what that philosopher thought. And if you're very unlucky, you learn what you're Supposed to think. The idea of philosophy is not to supply answers, it is to supply questions. It seems we have a whole educational system today that is content to fill people's minds with truth. Now, I've been a teacher for a lot of years, and I don't see the teacher's job as filling minds with anything. Not truth and not half truth, and not what we believe to be true. Today, the job of a teacher, as I see it, is not to fill the mind, but to open the mind, to cause thought and to help people to follow the logic of their own understanding, to achieve a pathway to truth. And that's the meaning of the term philosophy. Within this seeking for truth, there are two prime methods that are used. And I don't intend to get terribly technical with you, but we must understand this. There is what is currently referred to as the scientific method, which is inductive reasoning. And we're going to discuss that at great length this evening. And the other method that is used is deductive reasoning. Let's compare these two. We live in a society today which leans very heavily upon inductive reasoning. This is the way the world thinks today. The scientific method, the seeking of knowledge, as opposed to the seeking of understanding, which can be achieved only by deductive reasoning. You'll notice in our educational system, even with the young kids, we don't teach them to think. We tell them what they're supposed to do. We tell them what truth is. It bothers me a great deal. See a little kid going to an art class at age 5. And the teacher says, draw a tree. And the little child draws what he or she sees. And the teacher says, no, no, that's not what a tree looks like. Let me tell you what you're supposed to see when you look at a tree. And we grow up being taught what we're supposed to see, what we're supposed to hear, what we're supposed to think, what we're supposed to feel. And it's always the power of authority that tells somebody what they're supposed to do. Johnny, go to bed. It's past your bedtime. Well, how do you know it's his bedtime? Well, the fact is, I'm sick of him. I've had enough for one day. I'm entitled to some rest. Okay, Johnny, I've had enough of you for one day. Would you please go to bed? But don't lie to the kid. Don't tell him he needs his sleep. Don't you think his little body knows better than you do whether he needs Sleep or not, Eat your spinach. It's good for you. Who said so? Popeye? I mean, think about it. Where do we get this knowledge about what's good for us? Somebody taught us. Somebody studied the subject. Aha. The basis of inductive reasoning is that you study and study and study. Now, obviously, the universe is too big for anybody to study all of it. The human body is much too complex for any one person to study all of it. So the human body or the universe. And we're going to do a lot of this tonight, use the universe as a comparison with the human body, the microcosm of the human body into the macrocosm of the universe. And a lot of truths can be seen. A lot of parallels can be seen in both. The human body is much too complex for any one person to study it all. Certainly the universe is too complex for everybody, any one person to understand it all. So we cut it up in pieces. You study the stars, I'll. You'll study the kidneys, you'll study the heart, you'll study the liver. And each one becomes an expert on his narrow little field. Taken out of context, of reality. With a whole, they say, a specialist is somebody who learns more and more about less and less until the absolute expert knows everything there is to know about nothing at all. I don't wish to put down specialists and experts, but let's understand. When you take something out of context, it's no longer an essential truth. If our purpose is the search for truth, and we've admitted philosophically, that's what we're going to try and do. Philosophy is a search for truth, a search for understanding, then we're cheating ourselves. If we take things out of context. Inductive reasoning is based upon the premise that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. Now, since you can't study the whole thing, what you do is study each of the parts individually. Of course, when you're dealing with something like the human body, it's much too complex for any one person to study all of the parts. So one person studies one part and one another and one another. Then they put all of their knowledge together and they say, this is anatomy, or this is physiology, this is pathology. This is what the human body is all about. But there are certain shortcomings in this. It almost works when you're dealing with mechanical, inanimate things. I think if you were to take a human corpse and study all of its parts for. Well, until it decayed and rotted and ran away, you'd Learn a lot about it. But then you're studying a corpse, not a living person. How do you study a living person? Well, I know let's start out on the assumption that all people are basically alike. And then we can study a dozen people and know what all the others are like. Well, how do you like that for a shortcoming? Would you please look at the person next to you? You see how different they are? Okay. They're as different on the inside as they are on the outside. If I study all the people on this half of the room, I could learn, for example, that your Average temperature is 98.6. Now I pick somebody out from the other side and I say, okay, you should be 98.6. And if you're not, you're sick. I will make you 98.6 because that's your normal temperature. You see what we've done? We've gone from an average into normal and assumed they're the same word, they're not the same at all. It is not normal to be average. In fact, the average man is just average. Let's take a look at this inductive reasoning, this studying the parts and see some of its shortcomings, particularly when we're studying living things. Remember, when you work with mechanical things, inductive reasoning seems to work fairly well because you can make a complete study of something mechanical. You can weigh it, you can measure it, you can quantify it. The great tool of science, the absolute imperative tool of science, is quantification. You must be able to measure and quantify things if you are to be scientific. Without quantity, without measurement, there's no such thing as science. But you can't quantify, you can't measure a living person. Every chiropractor in the room knows that somebody comes in who has a back problem. Chiropractic is applied in a certain way. The back problem disappears, the next person comes in. If you apply chiropractic in exactly the same way, the back problem may not disappear, certainly not in the same space of time. BJ Palmer, reporting on this, said, the first time I had a case of sciatica, I gave one adjustment and the pain disappeared in a matter of minutes. So a little while later, somebody came in with sciatica and said, how long will it take to get a cure? And he said, a couple of minutes. One week later, they still had their pain. He said, that made me a liar for seven days. So the next time somebody came in with sciatica and asked how long would it take? I told them seven days. And it took me a month, which made me a liar, for three weeks, and on and on and on. Because we're dealing with people who are different from each other. We're dealing with mysterious things that defy quantity that can't be measured. If I cut my finger, how long will it take to heal? I have no idea. If I cut your finger, will it take the same time? Of course not. And yet the government is telling us how many units of vitamin A we need every day. How many units of vitamin A who needs? Oh, the average. Is there an average person in this room? Are you trying to tell me I need as much vitamin A today as I want tomorrow, or I need it yesterday? Averages don't work. Our search is for truth. It may be true that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, but it is never true that that the whole is equal to just some of its parts. When we study the human body, we're studying just some of the parts. Don't you realize, those of you that are chiropractic students, the very textbooks from which you are now studying are already out of date. And when your kid brother or sister or your son or daughter go to Chiropractic College 20 years from now, the textbooks you are now using will be laughed at. They will not be acceptable. Not because the human body has changed, but because knowledge of the human body has grown. Every year we learn more about the human body than we've learned in all past history combined. So that what you're learning today is just part of the truth, and a part of the truth is a lie. It's well and good to study part of the truth. Better to have part of the knowledge than none at all. The mistake comes in assuming that that little bit is enough to make judgments on and go ahead and alter it in the light of today's knowledge. This is where the danger comes. Let's look at some of the changes that have taken place in the treatment of disease in the last 50 years as new knowledge comes in. I remember when I was, oh, 7, 8, 10 years old. I don't remember how old. I went to visit an aunt in a hospital and I don't even remember why she was there, what she was sick from. The only memory I have in my mind is that there was a patient standing in the hall wearing pajama trousers, no jacket, and he was being flicked with a wet towel by an orderly. And every time he got snapped with a towel and got a little red welt, he'd stagger a few steps down the corridor and stop. And as soon as he stopped and they'd flick him again with a wet towel and kept him moving. And now I had learned this wet towel principle when I was sharing a bathtub with my little brother. In fact, when he went howling to mother, mother explained to me that it's not nice to hit people with wet towels. I learned the principle of kindness and non violence in exactly that manner. So I knew it's not nice to hit people with wet towels. Now here's this authority figure in a white jacket hitting this guy with a wet towel. And I asked my mother how come he can do this and I can't. And she didn't know what's going on. So we asked the nurses, or she asked the nurses. The information came back to me. The man had been bitten by a poisonous snake. And everybody knew that if you're bitten by a poisonous snake, and this was in England, the snakes were adders. I don't even know if you have adders here in the United States, but an adder bite could be fatal. You go into a coma and you die. And the idea was to prevent people from going into a coma. Now if you keep it moving, you can't go into a coma. And that's how they prevented death from snakebite. And this idea is so ridiculous. You ever watch the old Sherlock Holmes movies on television? I mean, it's not a hundred years ago. Oh, come along, Watson. We haven't a moment to lose. The guy's taking poison and they're walking him up and down the hall so he can't fall asleep. And they really think the poison will be less effective if they keep him awake today. When you're bitten by a poisonous snake, do they move you around? No. What do they do? The exact opposite. Don't move him. You don't want to circulate the poison through the body. Now they believe that if you don't move, your circulation will stop. Ten years ago, a person bitten by a poisonous snake, they put a tourniquet on it to stop the poison from circulating. And they could do it. They would stop the blood from circulating and the limb would turn gangrenous and they'd have to amputate. So now they don't do that anymore. The point is we're acting or they are acting on partial knowledge. And partial knowledge constantly requires change. Do you know that George Washington died because a physician drew poisonous blood out of his body? He had a fever. How do you treat a person with a fever in George Washington's Day. That's easy. You bleed off the poisoned blood, that makes him healthy. And they took away the bad blood. And he was stupid enough to die. He didn't realize they were doing him good. The Earl of Lochley, also known as Robin Hood, died the same way. Lots of people died today. They don't draw your blood off when you're sick. Today, if you get sick, you get a transfusion. You know what Boyd's textbook of pathology has to say about blood transfusions? Says it kills more people today than blood letting ever did. See, when they first started doing blood transfusions, they didn't know there were different types of blood. They thought blood is blood. You're sick, you need more because blood fights off disease. So if you're sick, we'll give you somebody else's blood. And if you die, that was bad luck. No cause is bad luck. Many years later, they discovered that blood is not all the same. There are types A, B, A, B and O. And if you get the wrong type, it will kill you. So then they started separating blood, and they only gave the right type, and still people died, even with the right type of blood. Then they discovered the X and Y factor, and they further categorized blood. Then they discover the Rh factor and further categorized it. Now it's, you know, the 1980s. We're really up there now. Now, finally, blood trusions. Blood transfusions are perfectly safe, except today, blood transfusions still kill more people than bloodletting ever did. Now, should we stop transfusions? I don't know. That's not my business. Ideally, policy. Not in details. I don't make medical decisions. What I'm saying is, when you make decisions based upon partial knowledge, you are taking a great risk. That's all. That part of the truth is not the truth. Truth taken out of context sometimes is a lie. One of my favorite stories concerns a railroad crossing guard whose job was to prevent trains and cars from crashing into each other. When the train was going through town, this little man would get off and he wave his red flag and the cars would stop so the train could go through. Except at night, of course, when they couldn't see his flag. Then he waved a red lantern. One night, he's out there. He gets off the train. He waves his lantern, and here comes the car that's not stopping. It's not even slowing down. It's just coming right at him. The last second, he leaped aside to save his own life. The car smashed into the train. Dead bodies all over the place. A horrible Accident. And here's this guard really shattered. He went into court and testified that he waved his flag. And finally the court of inquiry decided the fault was with a car driver because he didn't stop on the way home from the hearing. The railroad crossing guard was talking to the friend who drove him there, and he was saying, boy, I'm glad that's over. I hate those things. I was sweating all through that miserable hearing. And the friend said, hey, what do you have to sweat about? You told the truth, right? You waved your flag, your lantern, and the car didn't stop. He said, yeah, I waved my lantern. The car didn't stop. Then what are you worrying about? He said, well, I was afraid one of those smart lawyers was going to ask me, was the lamp a light? See, he told the truth, but it wasn't quite the whole truth. Part of the truth out of context is an outright lie. It's like an ant crawling up a Rembrandt painting. If you could communicate with that ant. And you said, what's a Rembrandt painting? Well, it's a smudge of black paint. He's not lying. That's what it is to him. That's all he can see. And yet, because it's taken out of context, it's not really true. You don't know what a Rembrandt painting is from the ants viewpoint. In order to understand the whole thing, you have to step far enough back and see all of the canvas and all of the paint and all of the brush strokes and also feel the emotion that that painting arouses in you. Not in the artist, not in somebody else who's looking at it, but in you. What you communicate as a feeling from that painting is not valid for somebody else. There are intangibles involved, and the intangibles can't be quantified, they can't be measured. Let's go back and look at some of the other changes that have come about through following inductive reasoning. Inductively. We test things. We don't randomly grab a medication and shove it into somebody. We test it first as they tested diethylstilbestrol and found it perfectly safe. Now, diethylstilbestrol, for those who don't know, was a drug that was used on pregnant women. Almost 100% of pregnant women at one point were given diethylstilbestrol first to prevent miscarriage, which is interesting because today it's being used to cause miscarriage. It's the morning after birth control pill is diethyl Sylvesterol at the same time they gave it to dry up the breast milk because science knew it could make better food for babies than nature could make. You talk about arrogance. They studied babies and they studied breast milk and they said, we can do better. Breast milk is unhealthy. Let's dry it all up with this diethylstilbestrol and then we'll make good food for the babies, you know, Similac and things like that. But before they would do this, of course, they had to test the diethylstilbestrol to make sure it was safe. Because you inject chemicals into people, they can do damage. So they tested the diethylstilbestrol. They did not find, apparently, as far as we can tell, a single case of side effects from this chemical. It was perfectly safe. Twenty years later, unfortunately, the side effects began to show. Not on the women who took it, but on the next generation. They first discovered 15 to 20 year old girls with an increase of incidence in vaginal cancer that they traced back to diethylstilbestrol. And then they found cancer in males traceable back to the diethyl still bestal. Not that they took, but that their mothers had taken a generation before. So before we say, hey, things are safe, we've studied it, maybe we better look a few generations beyond. You know, we all know today that X rays are perfectly safe. In which generation? How much do we mess up the genetic pool of future humanity by preserving our foods and altering the ecology? My God, if we can ever learn a lesson, it's from the ecology. You can't change the ecology without an effect passing on from one to the other. You talk about the domino effect, boy, you'll see it in nature when you start changing the ecology. The farmers out in Arizona were very upset that coyotes were destroying their crops. Well, there's only one way to stop coyotes from destroying the crops. You kill the little bastards. So they put a bounty. The state of Arizona put a bounty of 25 cents on the head of every coyote that could be killed. And weekends the kids went off with their little 22 rifles and their traps and they killed coyotes and they killed each other. And finally the program was successful. They virtually wiped out the coyote population of Arizona. But then they discovered something unfortunate. It is true that coyotes actually raid hen houses. What they will do if they get the chance is steal the eggs. That's kind of a goodie, a delicacy for coyotes. And that's why they were all being destroyed. But the farmers found out that while coyotes like eggs as A delicacy that's not their staple diet. Their staple diet is field mice and rats. Guess what happened when the coyotes were all gone? The state of Arizona became overrun with field mice and rats, doing millions of dollars worth of damage to other crops. Now the Arizona farmers pay farmers in Oregon who ranch coyotes. And they buy thousands of pairs of coyotes and turn them loose in the countryside, hoping to restore the balance of nature, which they messed up. You see, we look at a little bit of the picture and we don't see the broad effect. It's like taking medication to do one thing and it does something else. There's no such thing as a chemical without a side effect. And I'm not saying drugs and medicines are always bad. I'm just saying that they do certain things and not always the same things in different people. That's the problem. We'll test the drug on a thousand people and say only one had a negative reaction and that one wasn't a severe negative reaction. So everybody assumes the drug is Safe until number 1007 takes it and kills over and drops dead. You know, this stuff masquerades as science. There is nothing scientific about the practice of medicine. Let's talk about science for a moment. We're talking about the scientific method. Chemistry is a science. If I take an exactly measured quantity of pure chemical and X and react it under closely monitored conditions with a measured quantity of pure chemical Y, and I measure the reaction, I measure the result. I've performed a chemical experiment. Now let's do it again. Same quantity of compound X, same quantity of compound Y, both pure, exactly the same, carefully monitored circumstances, what will the result be? The same. Absolutely. 100% the same. If the circumstances are the same, the chemicals are the same, there's no way it could be different. You do it again and again and again, you always get the same result. Good. Let's try that with the science of medicine. Let's take the first five people and we'll give each of them an aspirin to cure a headache. Now, the first one takes his aspirin and the headache's gone. Side effect zero. Terrific. I'll take another one tomorrow when the headache comes back. The second person, we give him the aspirin. It doesn't really work. He takes two more and the headache's gone. It doesn't cause much of a side effect. He gets kind of double vision for a while and it clears up soon enough. So that was fine. We give it to the third one. His headache doesn't go away. Give it to the fourth one, the headache goes away, but he starts throwing up, he's vomiting blood, and they give it to the fifth one, he keels over and drops dead. Now, where is the science when we don't know what the result is going to be? Why is it that this carefully measured chemical doesn't have the same effect in all people? Because in order for it to be chemistry, to be a science, you must react the same chemicals each time. When you're putting chemicals into human beings, the human being you're putting in putting it into is a very complex series of chemicals. And no two of us are alike, as I said, we're as different on the inside as we are on the outside. No two human beings have the same fingerprints. No two human beings manufacture the same amount of cholesterol, the same amount of insulin, the same amount of thyroxin, or at the same time, even day to day, we change. My father was tested for penicillin allergy. And they tested him and he had no allergy to penicillin. So they gave him the penicillin and he blew up and died. The shot they gave him to test him sensitized him to the drug. The Chinese say, you cannot step in the same river twice. Of course you can't. The water has moved and you have moved. You've changed. I'm not the same person today as I was yesterday. The fact that I took aspirin safely yesterday doesn't mean that it's safe today. My chemistry has changed because of what I did yesterday. Let's keep looking at some of the changes going on in the treatment of disease today. Change is brought about by the fact that yesterday's treatment was imperfect. Every year the federal government takes off the market at least a thousand different drugs. Why, if they were good? Ah, because now we have something better. If you have something better than what you had yesterday wasn't perfect, was it? What was wrong with it? Well, it didn't work all the time, and it had some side effects on some people. So you're saying what you're giving us now will work all the time and won't have any side effects? I like that term, side effect. You like that term? You know, I studied philosophy, they told me, I studied science, they told me about the law of cause and effect. There's cause and effect and side effect. Come on. If I give you two aspirin, you bleed to death. That's the effect. That's not a side effect. That's good Madison Avenue salesmanship to cover up the fact that that happened because of this. Drugs don't have side effects. But the point is, the effects of drugs are. Are unpredictable. And there's. I'm still not saying don't use them. What I'm saying is don't call them science. That's all. It's not a science. It's only a science if it is duplicable and therefore predictable. No drug, even the one you took yesterday, is predictable today. And no chiropractic adjustment is predictable in its results. You're not dealing with the same human body you were dealing with yesterday. How stupid it is for a chiropractor to say, yes, this adjustment will make you. Well, now, the only thing we can say is this adjustment making you freer from vertebral subluxation than you were before. Having the nerve channels a little more open than they were before will allow your body to perform a little better than it could if the nerve channels were blocked off. And somehow you think that's enough? For years, I sit there in the office and people would want guarantees. And they come in and they say things to me like, well, now, look, if you open up all these nerve channels, you think my backache will go away. And the honest answer is, how the hell do I know? So I turned it around and said, look, supposing we open up all the nerve channels and your backache doesn't go away. What do you want to do then? Close off the nerve channels? Or do you think it makes sense to keep them open because that's the way they belong. See, that's why we should be administering chiropractic, because human beings are meant to be free from vertebral subluxation. They're meant to have nerve channels open. I don't know why we work so hard trying to convince people that chiropractic makes sense. Let me ask you something. Let's say you've never heard of chiropractic, and I want to tell you. And there are people here that are not chiropractors. Let's tell you about the largest blood vessel in the body. In most bodies that have been studied so far anyway. It's called the aorta. And it carries most of the blood from the heart to the rest of the body. And it seems that almost everybody has one. And if it's somebody who doesn't have one, I haven't met them yet. Now, supposing we were to tie a piece of string around your aorta, loop it in a knot and pull it tight. I am going to suggest to you that you be better off without that piece of string. Would you buy that or do you need scientific proof? What in the hell is there to prove about chiropractic? All we are suggesting is that a nerve system without pressure or interference functions better than a nerve system with pressure or interference. Go home and put a rubber band around your finger and just let it sit there for an hour or two. And you tell me, would you function better without it? Obviously, the same thing holds true of the spinal cord. What is there to prove? It is so incredibly simple. And the point about this whole discussion is that the parts of the human body, like the parts of the universe, are all interrelated. When you affect one one part, you affect it all. We can't predict what the changes will be, but there is a principle involved here. When you put chemicals into the human body, you change the body. You change the entire body. Your attitudes, your moods, your ability to resist disease, your speed of recovery, your memory, your concentration, every single thing about you changes when you put chemicals in your body and your body makes chemicals. And in order to make the right chemicals at the right place at the right time, it's a good idea to have the brain which regulates things, the central computer in total control of all the glands and organs that make the chemicals. Obviously, if you interfere with the communications lines, you've lost harmony. It seems to me that chiropractic should introduce itself as a restorer of harmony within the body. Doesn't mean you'll never get sick. Doesn't mean if you are sick, you're now going to get well. What it means is your body now can function in better harmony with itself than it could before. And it seems to me, when you're in better harmony with yourself, you're in better harmony with your friends, your neighbors, your family. Look what happens at an imbalance in body chemistry, how it affects moods and attitudes. And my God, you got somebody down there in Washington, D.C. making decisions for war or peace in the world. And his body chemistry just may be a little out of balance. A, because he's subluxated, and B, because he goes through the day taking medications to change his chemistry. Do those medications improve his chemistry? Well, they may make his heart beat faster or slower, whatever he's taking, but they also affect other things. You can't put chemicals into your body without changing the entire body. Now, inductive reasoning depends upon experts who study one result of one chemical and says this chemical will reduce your high blood pressure. And it will. But they don't know what else It'll do. Inductive reasoning has three major shortcomings when it's dealing with the human body. The first major shortcoming is the fact that we don't know enough about the human body. How much do you think they know about the human body now? The people in medical schools today? How much do you think they know? How much do you think they're learning? What is the sum total of knowledge of all of the experts in the world about the human body? I once asked somebody who is a very learned PhD in neurophysiology, what do you think is the sum total of all human knowledge about physiology? Are we finished now? Are we still learning more? And he said we probably know about one millionth part of 1%. But it doesn't seem like an awful lot to be making judgments on and changing things, does it? One millionth part of 1%. When do you think we'll know it all? Whenever we do. That'll be the time for the knowledgeable people to start running my body. I'll know about yours. Right now. I don't trust the knowledge of human beings to know what's going on in my body. They didn't study my body. They studied averages. They studied a hundred men and found the Average height was 5ft 8 and a half. Now what are they going to do with me? Cut 2 inches off the top? I don't fit the average. There's nothing about me that's average and there's nothing about you that's average. So this judgment of what most people can survive or tolerate is a little scary. So that's the first problem that I find with inductive reasoning applied to living things. We're not studying the sum of the parts, we're studying just some of the parts, just a few little bits and pieces. And whether it's medicine or chiropractic or any other so called science, science, it doesn't know anything about that individual body. The second thing is that if we did know everything about that body, we have the kind of mind that's capable of looking at all the parts and adding them up wrong. Don't you believe medical science, for example, has studied body parts and functions and come to false conclusions? Wasn't that many years ago that somebody decided that cholesterol is causing cardiovascular disease? How do they know that? Well, that's easy. Every time they cut open somebody who died of cardiovascular disease, they can see the cholesterol build up around the valves and the arteries. That's true. I just wonder though, do you think maybe it's possible, at least in some of the cases, that rather than the cholesterol buildup causing cardiovascular disease, is it possible that when you have cardiovascular disease, your body can't manage cholesterol properly and so it builds up up in the valves? Wow, I never thought of that. See, we look at A and B and we assume that A caused B. Maybe it isn't that way, maybe it's the other way around. Maybe this cause and effect thing are not quite what we thought. Every time we find somebody with kidney disease and we find bacteria in the kidney, we say, you see those damn bacteria that killed another kidney cell. Let's follow a kidney case, let's follow somebody who has kidney infections. And it's very easy to demonstrate the presence of bacteria. It's also very easy to shoot them up with penicillin. If the penicillin doesn't kill them, the penicillin will kill the bacteria. And they've survived and it worked, they got a cure. But most of the time, six months or a year later, they have another infection. Oh, that's okay. We'll take another shot of penicillin, clear up the last one and it'll clear up the next one too if it'll be kill them. But why do you think they keep getting these infections over and over again? And why always in the same kidney? Ask the people who've had it. Always the same kidney again and again and again. You think they're all left handed bacteria? Are the bacteria causing the kidney disease? Or is a diseased kidney a natural breeding ground for bacteria? Maybe we're not looking at cause and effect in their proper relationships. Look, if you go home from here and you see a dead bird lying in the road being eaten by maggots, are you going to assume that a group of maggots jumped up and caught a bird and killed it? Think about it. You go home, outside your house is a garbage can, right? It's Thursday night, tomorrow the garbage man is coming. So you put out all your garbage and you go out there and the next morning there's flies around all over the place. I hate flies. I love all living things except those damn flies, right? Whoever created the universe made everything in perfect balance. Except you see the movie. Oh God, he screwed up with the flies. Who in hell discovers, decides which are the flowers and which are the weeds? Who makes these decisions that we're fit to live and flies should be killed? Who decides who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? How you go home anyway and you don't like flies because they spread disease, right? You get out your little fly swatter and you kill all the flies. Zap, zap, zap. And they're all dead. Go in the house and come out 10 minutes later. What do you find? More flies eating the same garbage. Plus eating the bodies of the flies you just killed. Now you get really mad and you go inside and get your can of DDT and you kill all the flies. And half the neighbors come out the next morning. What do you find? More flies. Look, if you want to get rid of flies, most people don't like flies. If you don't want flies around a garbage can, I'll tell you how to get rid of them once and for all. Put out a clean garbage can. The flies will look. There's nothing to eat, they take off. What do you think, they're stupid? They're not going to hang around a clean garbage can. Well, the same is true of bacteria. They come to your body if there's something to eat, they stay and they multiply. Nothing to eat. What's the point in hanging around you when your body gets sick and we can run down? Of course that's a breeding ground for bacteria. We don't blame the bacteria. They didn't make you sick. You see, we look at all the facts and we come to false conclusions. That's the second thing wrong with this inductive reasoning. And it sounds silly the way we're talking about it tonight, but the whole world is doing it. The whole world is out there killing flies and bacteria, thinking that's improving the world. And what they're doing is creating new breeds of flies and bacteria, the so called resistant strains. Hospital staphylococcus. I just love that talk about hospital staff in the papers. You read our hospitals are understaffed. Don't you believe it. They're overstaffed with a resistant staphylococcus. Caused by what? Caused by penicillin. Because you know when you shoot somebody up with penicillin, any bacterium that gets a fatal dose will die. What about the ones that don't quite get enough to kill them? What do they do? Well, they build up a resistance. They make an enzyme which our scientists have now put a label on. They call it penicillin ace, an enzyme made by bacteria, these stupid little bacteria. And they know how to make an enzyme to counteract penicillin and they know how to pass it on to their children and their children's children. So we get whole breeds now of penicillin resistant microorganisms. Now how much are we messing up the ecology, Messing up the whole genetic pool of future humanity by changing things? We don't know anything about plundering the Earth for our own immediate good. Without regard to what's happening in the future. And I warned you that the philosophy of chiropractic doesn't deal with sickness and health. It doesn't deal with adjusting the spine. It deals with a vision of the relationships of things to each other in the universe. And all parts are interrelated, just as all parts in the human body are related. When Archimedes sat in his little bathtub and dropped the soap and noticed that the water level rose, he observed a principle that according to the volume of what goes into the water, the water level will rise just that much. You drop in something bigger, no matter how irregular. You can measure the total volume of that which goes into the tube simply by seeing how much the water goes up. So you take your little rowboat out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and you drop a dime overboard. You think the ocean is going to rise. Oh, yes, it is, if it's true. In principle, it is true. You don't have to observe it. You understand it by common logic. The same is true in the human body. You don't mess with the human body without altering all of it. All the parts are interrelated, just as all the parts of the universe are interrelated. How dare we assume that we can change the ecology. Unless you really feel you can do a better job of recreating the universe than the wisdom which is supposed to maintain it. Now, if you feel you can improve upon nature, terrific. I mean, this, to me, is the ultimate arrogance. And yet there are people going around trying to improve nature. Let's go back to another similar point to this in chiropractic. I had a discussion not too long ago with a chiropractor who was talking to me about introducing into his practice a method for healing broken bones. Faster than nature could do it. He said, all you got to do is put them in a pyramid. Now, I don't know whether pyramids work or not. He says, well, they use it for sharpening razor blades. It's got to work on broken bones. So I don't understand the relationship. Thought for a minute. Let's assume this thing does work on sharpening razor blades. You put your razor blades in a pyramid, they get sharper. How do you sharpen a blade? You don't really sharpen it. You grind away the sides. You wear it down. I don't think I want to put my bones in something that's going to wear them down. But my point is, if it takes nature six weeks to heal a broken bone and sitting in a pyramid can do it in two hours or 20 minutes or whatever, which do you think is better? See, I come from a school of thought which says nature's way is perfect. Now, I don't understand what's wrong with healing it in four weeks instead of six. But it's not nature's way, therefore it's not natural, and therefore it's not perfect. I come from a school of thought that says nature's way is perfect. Even though I don't understand the perfection, I happen to believe there is a purpose for flies. Even though I don't understand it, I don't believe we make the universe better by killing the flies. I. There's a book I would love to recommend for you, I think, called One Straw Revolution, written by a Japanese farmer who discovered something interesting. And he said he wrote this book out of laziness. It is common procedure in Japan to plant rice at one season and barley the next. So they get two crops a year, and all of the farmers have planted their rice. And when the rice comes up and they've harvested that, then they plant barley and they get another crop. He said, I have a better idea. I'm going to plant my rice and barley at the same time. I said, you're out of your mind. The barley's not going to come up now. He said, yes, but the barley knows that. I'll just make one sowing of rice and barley. The rice will come up when it should, and the barley will come up when it should. And sure enough, it worked. Then he said, you know, there's another thing I'm not going to do. I'm not going to poison the insects. But then the insects will destroy your crop. He said, I don't believe that. And sure enough, the insects started destroying his crop. But then one year there were a lot of frogs that destroyed the insects. And the next year there were no frogs, but there were turtles that destroyed the insects. And another year it was birds, and another year was something else. And it seems that nature has a way of balancing things out. And this particular farmer, without any chemicals, without altering nature, working with the ecology instead of against it, is growing better crops for less money than all the people that are poisoning the environment. And now, all of a sudden, all the industrialized farmers from all over the world all are going to Japan to take lessons from this old guy who wrote A book called One Straw Revolution. And if you're interested, and I'm sure some of the bookstores have it, I don't remember the author's name. One Straw Revolution, about the Japanese farmer, written by the Japanese farmer. Fun to read. But these same principles of the ecology hold true for the human body. Inductive reasoning is a betrayal because it looks only at part of the truth. It doesn't understand the big picture. It's like the ant crawling up the Rembrandt. You don't understand it. Yes, this treatment or that treatment will lower the blood pressure, but what else is it doing? Well, we don't know. I haven't seen anything else. That's great, but you can't assume there isn't anything else. You know if you swallowed two aspirin and it was going to knock 10 minutes off your life, I wish it would do it then and there. Wouldn't that be nice? You swallow two aspirin, you drop dead for 10 minutes. Then you come back two weeks later, you get another headache, you take two more aspirin, you drop dead for 10minutes again. Pretty soon you figure out what's causing it. But it doesn't work that way. It knocks 10 minutes off the end and we don't know it's happening. We say, hey, no side effects, meaning nothing I can associate. There is no effect without a cause and there's no cause without an effect. You said causes in motion. We can't always predict what the effects are going to be. So we've now seen two of the three things that make inductive reasoning very unsafe when you're dealing with living things. One, we're not studying the sum of the parts. We're studying just the few that we've so far discovered. Let me enlarge upon that for just a little bit. There was a debate that took place near Sherman College in Spartanburg, South Carolina when I was teaching there. A group of students were taking their pre chiropractic studies at Wofford College where they came under great ridicule from some of the pre med students and particularly a certain instructor in it was biochemistry. A biochemistry instructor was attacking chiropractic every chance he got in the classroom. And the students were pre chiropractic. They didn't have enough knowledge to discuss or debate or defend themselves. So they got me involved in this thing and they set up a debate. All right, Reggie is going to debate chiropractic with the biochemistry anti chiropractic person. And they took the big auditorium and some of you in this room, maybe were there or remember it. And they had the whole audience there. And I went up to debate chiropractic. Unfortunately, the poor man didn't even know what chiropractic was. He hated it, but he thought it was some kind of massage. He had no understanding what it was all about or the principles. Well, these guys claim they can cure cancer with massage. That's what he thought. I don't know where he got that from. So since we couldn't debate chiropractic and I didn't want to disappoint the audience, let's debate what you do know about. What's your hot subject? What do you want to talk about? And he was into eugenics. This was his big thing, genetic surgery. Since we've cracked the genetic code and we understand the genes, do you realize we can destroy disease before people are born? We can take somebody who is going to be a dwarf and cure dwarfism, so they're normal size. You can take somebody who's going to be mentally retarded at birth and change their body chemistry so they can be a genius. He said, pretty soon we can just make geniuses at will. I said, it's great. Who's going to collect the garbage? You know what happens when we produce nothing but geniuses. And he said, well, it'll have to be left in the hands of wise men to attain the balance. I don't quite know what he meant by that. But we went on and discussed this whole genetic code thing and how they could alter it chemically. And the question came up, how long have we known about the DNA molecule and the genetic code, this little double helix? And he said, oh, it's, it's 20 years now since these two British scientists identified it and discovered it. And then we've learned to manipulate it. That's the word they use to manipulate the DNA molecule. And a lady, it was question time. A lady from the audience asked, well, how long have we known about it? And he said it's been 20 years. And then she said, well, do you think we'll know any more about it ten years from now? He said, it's fascinating. We're now learning more every year than we've known in all prior history. And she said, well, what about 100 years from now? You think we'll know more? Then he said, my one regret is that I can't be alive I 100 years from now to see all the life saving procedures that have come from this new knowledge. It's coming in so fast. 100 years from now, it's incredible what human knowledge will be. And she said, well, what about a thousand years from now will we know even more than 100 years from now? And he said, it boggles the mind. A thousand years from now, it just boggles the mind to think what we can, what we will know about the human body. With all the new devices, the new sciences that are helping us to rediscover things based upon yesterday's research we can put in today's and tomorrow's research, each one building upon the past. A thousand years from now. It's incredible what we should know, what we will know. And the lady from the audience said, well, don't you think we better wait a few hundred years at least before we start messing around with something where we still have more knowledge coming in every year? Shouldn't we wait until all the knowledge is in? Maybe we should know the relationship of man to his universe before we start changing man or the universe. Don't you realize when you change man, you change the universe? Unless you think you can improve the universe. I mean, if that's your arrogance, great, let's change man. And that's about where this discussion died. It turned out that the lady that was asking these piercing questions was also a biochemist, and she happened to be his wife. Wife. I'd have loved to be a little fly on the window of their car as they were driving home that night. Might have been a very interesting discussion. The point is, we just don't know enough. We're getting in new knowledge all the time. Maybe we are not fit yet to improve upon the human race or upon one individual human being. The second problem is that even if we have all the information in, we're going to guess wrong. We have fallible minds. We make errors. Remember, we know absolutely nothing about that individual body. We know about the averages of bodies. 1000 people treated in such a way, most of them will respond by so and so 1001. We don't know. Let's take a decision. I pity chiropractors who make this kind of decision, who set themselves up as the family doctor. And a patient comes in and boy, I've fallen into this trap myself so many times, and it's so tempting. You so desperately need to stop people from making a mistake. And when somebody comes in and says, look, my son has appendicitis, do you think we should undergo the surgery? Or do you think being free of adjustment, he'll get well by himself? Of course, the honest answer is, how the hell Do I know the truth of the matter is that if we don't send them for surgery, some are going to die. Appendicitis kills even people that are not subluxated. If you don't send them for surgery, a thousand out of a thousand, some may die. Of course, if you do send them for surgery, some may die. Who wouldn't have died otherwise? Now is the problem. We've got all the statistics, but we don't know what category this person falls into. And how do you play God? How do you say, well, if I were you, I say, I can't tell you what to do, but if it were my child. And then you tell them what to do. I mean, we're covering up our advice by pretending it's not advice. And that may hold you legally secure, but morally you're still influencing that person's decision. And I don't know what the answer is to this. Yeah, I. Do you know what the answer is? To stop doing what medicine has done. Chiropractors came along and objected to the paternalism of medicine that told people what to do. The arrogance of a doctor looking down a little boy's throat and saying, well, those tonsils are going to come out without saying what the tonsils do, what a life without them would be, what the surgical risk is, what it'll be like being without them. If they do come out and he survives, the doctor makes the decision for the parents. Well, if you don't do it my way, I won't be responsible. You mean if you take him out, you will be responsible? Well, no, I don't mean that exactly. So the chiropractors didn't like this.