This fall, the ICPA is pleased to announce its collaboration with Pangea, a holistic practitioner conference for pediatric wellness. From their conference overview they distinctly recognize, “Professionals who care for children and are involved in today's healthcare system will need to rely upon supportive, collaborative relationships for the purpose of healing the child.”

On behalf of its members and the chiropractic profession, the ICPA is actively involved in this collaboration. We will be presenting research, participating in a round table discussion and of course have a booth. We encourage those doctors of chiropractic who are interested in fostering collaborations to attend this and other similar conferences on behalf of chiropractic. It is through these types of events we can offer practitioners of like mind the importance chiropractic plays in the family wellness movement.

I wholeheartedly support the need for collaboration in the healing arts and I recognize effective collaboration will only happen between groups of like mind and philosophies. There is much talk about the importance of chiropractic’s acceptance in the medical community. In our attempts to accomplish this however, we have sometimes compromised the basis of our empirical core and have leaned towards mechanistic modes of practice and research for this validation. It is imperative that in our efforts to collaborate, we remain consistent with our core empirical foundation by choosing practitioners that share our vitalistic approach to health.

The medical profession itself is experiencing an identity crisis. There is the traditional mechanistic sector that continues to treat conditions and diseases with suppressive, short term treatments. There is also a strong emergence of a vitalistc sector, those practitioners who recognize and respect the process of healing from a non-invasive, on-going, supportive manner. It is these practitioners who understand the basic principles of chiropractic, are not threatened by it and who are interested in collaborating in practice and advanced care for their patients.

In the past few years, the ICPA has formed wonderful alliances with midwives, natural birth and parenting practitioners, psychologists, homeopaths, acupuncturists, osteopaths and holistic pediatricians. Coming from the common ground of empiricism, collaboration is easy and fruitful. The ICPA will continue to foster these important alliances on behalf of our practitioners and the whole chiropractic profession. We see that the public is becoming aware of the distinct differences between mechanistic and vitalistc care and are actively choosing more holistic practices for their families. As chiropractors, this is our opportunity to offer the empirical core values and services of chiropractic in cooperation with practitioners of like mind and service.

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