A Perfectly Reasonable Question About a Six Year Old Plan

A doctor cornered me at a state meeting last spring, coffee in one hand, and asked what the Chiropractic Future Strategic Plan actually was, not hostile about it and not embarrassed either, just asking the way you’d ask about a bill you’d heard mentioned twice at a bar and never bothered to look up because nothing in his Tuesday had ever required him to know. Nine years in practice, a full schedule, dues paid most years, and the plan he was asking about had already existed for six years by that point, built by people who gave up weekends and standing to make something for the whole profession, and here was a genuinely competent doctor who had simply never crossed paths with it.

Apathy is the word that gets reached for in moments like this, too busy, too heads down, doesn’t care about the bigger picture, and it’s a comfortable explanation because it hands you someone to be irritated at, except it doesn’t hold up against a doctor like this one. He wasn’t dismissive about any of it. He runs a clean practice, keeps current on technique, and if you asked him directly whether chiropractic should matter more in twenty years he’d say yes without hesitating, which means the apathy story requires something about him that simply isn’t true. He cares. He just cares about a version of the profession that ends at his own front door, and nobody ever gave him a reason to think it extended any further than that.

The real problem is that his practice and the profession’s political infrastructure were never wired together for him in any way he could feel. The PAC, the state association, the strategic plan, none of it was ever shown to connect to what happens in his exam room on a Tuesday afternoon, and nobody walked him through the actual mechanism by which one affects the other. He wasn’t ignoring a link between his license and that world. He didn’t know the link existed, and there’s a real difference between a man who looks away from something and a man who was never shown it in the first place.

Five years from now, a scope fight lands in his legislature, and the association’s leverage is thin because participation has been thin for a decade, and the negotiated outcome comes back worse than it needed to, and something changes in what he’s allowed to do inside his own building. He’ll feel that as bad luck, or bad politicians, or bad timing, because that’s the only language available to him for it, and he almost certainly won’t trace it back to a coffee station conversation where he once asked, with real curiosity, what a six-year-old plan was.

Telling him the PAC matters hasn’t worked, and it’s not for lack of trying, since it’s been said from that exact podium more times than anyone bothered counting, and it has produced nothing, because matters is a claim and he’s a clinician who runs his whole professional life on findings rather than claims. What might actually move him is smaller and considerably more expensive to build, something like this specific vote, this dollar figure, this scope outcome, and what it would have meant inside his own building if the number had landed differently, and nobody has built that at any real scale, partly because it doesn’t scale easily across fifty states and partly because it is simply easier to keep repeating that it matters than to do the harder work of proving it.

Even that might not be enough to move him. He could read the exact mechanism laid out in front of him, nod at it the way you nod at something well argued, and walk back to the patient waiting in room two without another thought. Seeing the wiring and being moved enough by it to act are two entirely separate problems, and the profession has mostly poured its energy into the first one, and done that poorly, without ever pausing to ask whether solving it would be sufficient on its own even if they got it right.

Nobody lied to that doctor, and nobody hid anything from him either. The plan sat in plain view for six years, waiting for someone to walk up to a coffee station and ask what it was.

Dr. Glenn Jaffe is a practicing chiropractor with more than twenty years in the profession. He served as president of the North Carolina Chiropractic Association and has worked at the national and legislative level on the profession's governance priorities. He is the founder of BoldAzure, a leadership platform for chiropractors. He writes about where the profession is, how it got there, and what maturation actually requires.

Learn more at boldazure.com