Agent of Social Change – the Doctor of Chiropractic
Perhaps you entered chiropractic to inspire, lead, and improve the lives of people. While practicing chiropractic is considered a profession and an occupation, there are frequently more threads of deeper purpose and meaning in almost all doctors’ hearts for service. As doctors of chiropractic, we frequently come to know our patients in friendship and community with special care bonds not found in other healing relationships.
Doctor – Patient Relationship
Frequent visits utilizing our hands and touch to gently mend a body injured and in pain is a significant factor in the unique doctor-patient relationship. As any doctor knows who has practiced for some time, the feeling we receive and provide is special and virtually impossible to duplicate. As a result, the call doctors of chiropractic yearn to answer is frequently to transform, engage, and change the health outcomes of community, country, and planet. However, the actual global effect many doctors wind up having often falls dramatically short of their deepest desires of service.
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Caught up in the daily challenges of staff management, business administration, unexpected patient issues, and third-party payers’, the chiropractic physician’s attention is pulled from the higher callings of service and global change. When these competing forces culminate as a collective body over time, doctor’s passions for service and global change may wane, and in some cases, the once grand visions a doctor held narrow and survival takes center stage. However, this trap is the harnessed compass we must avoid or our true abilities to change and transform can falter and in many cases die. Instead, we must ask ourselves the question.
How can we become more effective, lead more people, and have a stronger voice in the changes taking place around us?
The essence is simple and often takes only a little extra time or use of our talent to expose a new window of opportunity or step through a previously unopened door. The path to leading more people, garnering more community support, and changing more peoples’ lives comes through our volunteer and service effort. Charitable endeavor is the seed the world hungers for and is often starved from tasting in any large scale that makes a lasting impact. However, when enough like-minded and empowered individuals come together in a unified voice, movements take place, laws change, and countries shift cultural tides. The education movement of the nineteenth century, civil rights, gender equality, equal access for disabled, and countless other movements have made significant strides because a large collective body of “action-oriented” people decided the status quo was “unacceptable” and drove social change.
As you look around your life, your community, our country and our global challenges, WHAT SOCIAL INJUSTICES ARE UNACCEPTABLE TO YOU? I believe there are pivotal moments in everyone’s life when an encounter makes us stand up and take notice. We experience, observe, or participate in a circumstance or with someone in his or her life and witness an injustice that is UNACCEPTABLE. As a result, we decide we can no longer stand by and allow it to continue. Mothers Against Drug Driving (MADD), anti-bullying advocacy groups, and homeless assistance are examples of collective groups of people coming together to change and propel higher quality standards of life for everyone pushing social change.
Coming Together
Often people from different backgrounds and professional experiences come together in cause and take a stand for the faceless, the voiceless, and the weakest members of society who lack the ability to stand and be noticed. Is this morally just and necessary? I believe it is and we are all called to do something that stands outside of our own need and succeeds in dramatically improving the lives of others.
Agents of Change
Among the strongest and most powerful agents of change are doctors of chiropractic. Our inclination toward thinking and acting in step not with the crowd but on our own methodologies, we hold the knowledge, ability, and character necessary to create vital social change on a global scale. Educated and experienced in matters of healthcare, business, communication skills, leadership role, and knowing how to exercise compassion for people who are suffering, doctors of chiropractic are perhaps the most unique and underutilized agents of social change in the United States today.
Why are we not the leaders of social change, compassion and justice, and propelling the “discussion” taking place in the media and within the political roundtables? Unfortunately, we must blame ourselves. We stand in the mire of inactivity, happy to accept the status quo and feeling our lives are comfortable with house, car, food, and enough money to have some of the nice things in life. But I know this is frequently not enough for many doctors, and it certainly was not for me. I wanted to be a larger voice in the political discussions taking place in education, healthcare, global poverty, and economic transformation in third world nations. I wanted to utilize my extensive experience garnered through loving chiropractic service to take a larger role and be a more powerful servant to the most needy around the world. Remarkably, what I have discovered is that I am not alone among my colleagues. Many of you yearn to do more but wonder where should you start.
Conclusion
Start with the action. Action is the single greatest discovery that moves lives and a necessary element the great thinkers and doers of life recognize. Howard Thurman, the great theologian, and activist said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do it. Because what the world needs are people who come alive.” Within the four walls of thousands of chiropractic offices across the United States and internationally resides the living force to change the world, but we must ask ourselves what makes us come alive. Then we must act, and then act again, and again until we have changed the world. Chiropractors are the agents of social change, and I invite my fellow chiropractors to stand up and act!
Note about the author:
Dr. Warren Bruhl has practiced in Illinois since 1986 and has served in leadership for the Chicago Chiropractic Society. He was a highly successful practitioner for over 25 years focusing care for families and pediatrics with a diplomate in chiropractic pediatrics. Dr. Bruhl left full-time practice in 2011 to take the leadership role as executive director of Gear for Goals (G4G) and director of Dreamweaver International. Dreamweaver International is a registered 501(C)(3), non-profit charity, providing education, healthcare, and humanitarian assistance around the globe. Dr. Bruhl’s role as executive director of the Gear for Goals (G4G) project of Dreamweaver enables him to be a part of bringing sports and the arts to the poorest children around the world. In 2013, Gear for Goals (G4G) provided sports equipment to 20,000 children in 14 countries. Dreamweaver International operates a full-time college in Kenya and will build a multidisciplinary hospital in 2014 that will include chiropractic services. In addition to Dr. Bruhl’s work with Dreamweaver International, he has now assumed a leadership role serving on the board for the Illinois Chiropractic Foundation. To learn more about Dreamweaver International and Gear for Goals (G4G) visit www.dreamweaver911.org.
