Cultural Authority and the Chiropractic Profession

Cultural authority: an editorial by John M Ventura, DC

In the excellent text, Surviving in Health Care by Dieter Enzman, MD, (Mosby, 1997) a working definition of cultural authority is proposed, and more importantly, a strategy for achieving cultural authority is outlined.

The ability of medicine to achieve cultural authority in the early 1900s was a “confluence of factors encompassing professionalism, the Industrial Age and an incentive-skewed market.” What may be most remarkable, given the almost exponential growth of health care costs through the 20th century, was the duration that medical cultural authority went unchecked. Medicine was said to have achieved “professional sovereignty.” Whether consequential to, or simply a reflection of, the constraints of managed care, medicine has lost some of its authority. Dr Enzman’s book is an effort to place medicine back on a path to achieving a new measure of cultural authority. The relevance for the chiropractic profession is that cultural authority is defined in a manner which may be pragmatically applied, and Dr Enzman has a lot to teach the chiropractic profession with his recommendations to the medical profession. If and when the chiropractic profession takes on this challenge may be the determining factor between merely surviving into the 21st century versus thriving. Our future is not guaranteed. A collective effort of well thought out strategies will be needed to implement the requirements for achieving cultural authority.

Cultural authority allows a profession to define its own professional truth. The profession decides what is fact and what is fiction and the public accepts the rules set forth. Cultural authority is characteristically unique in “having authority without having to overtly exercise it” as opposed to social authority, which is the ability to command people. There are two primary features of cultural authority: competency and legitimacy. Competency is a demonstration of technical expertise. Legitimacy is achieved by using competency to advance public health.

Competency requires validation by peers and rational foundation (scientific basis). A key feature of this technical expertise is that competency must be gained as a group - not individually. The beginning of shared professional competency for medicine was achieved by standardized training, based upon the principles of science. An intended benefit of professional competency is that when any individual member of a profession gives advice, that advice is representative of “shared professional standards”, not the idiosyncratic recommendations of a renegade practitioner. Professional legitimacy includes collegiality, cognitive approach, moral attributes. You be the judge of how well the chiropractic profession has demonstrated collegiality, a cognitive approach to health issues and high moral attributes.

If we can agree that achieving cultural authority is in the best interests of the chiropractic profession (the ability to define our own professional truth), then we might ask what steps the chiropractic profession can take to achieve some measure of cultural authority? As was the case for medicine, chiropractors need to demonstrate competency and legitimacy to the public. And this must be done by the collective efforts of the entire profession.

Dr Enzman describes the following for the medical profession to regain some its lost cultural authority:

• Continually demonstrate competency to the public; proof of training and licensing is no longer sufficient
• Provide ‘credible data’ to validate medical claims and recommendations
• Focus upon outcome analysis, a ‘crucial’ factor for the medical profession
• Standardization of practice patterns, both regionally and within each specialty
• Standardize the lexicon, which demonstrate peer validation of competency
• Focus upon the societal value of health, not upon reimbursement
• Avoid ‘filtering and restricting information available to patients’; embrace the informed consumer(patient)
• Be leaders and therefore, be honest, at all times

There is a theme that surfaces in the above recommendations of Dr Enzman – patient centered, evidence based care. Patient centered, evidence based care needs to be the mantra of the chiropractic profession. The following represents a partial list of the steps necessary to place the chiropractic profession on the road towards cultural authority:

• Standardize the training of chiropractors using principles of science, best available evidence, and consensus (though the consensus must be based upon the previous two attributes).
  
• Raise the standards for admission to and graduation from chiropractic colleges, and raise the standards for licensing
  
• Standardize the chiropractic lexicon
  
• Affiliate chiropractic colleges with established and proven universities so that resources (faculty, research facilities, etc.) can be shared
  
• Define the most fundamental aspects of chiropractic care: subluxation (in a quantifiable, testable manner); treatment frequency and duration for given clinical presentations;
• Standardize clinical outcome measures to validate responses to chiropractic care (“credible data”)
  
• Increase funding towards chiropractic research
  
• Encourage attendance at research symposiums
  
• Professional unity: one primary organization to represent the profession politically; all chiropractic colleges embrace and implement collectively determined standards of care;
  
• Patient centered, evidence based care is the foundation for training of chiropractors
• Reduce variation of approaches to diagnosis and treatment within the profession
• Increase training in all manner of public health issues for chiropractors
• Encourage chiropractors to become involved with APHA

The public perception of the chiropractic profession, by and large, is not one of trust. In 1990, the McLean County (Illinois) Chamber of Commerce's Professional Committee surveyed a population of people (12% of which were chiropractic patients) with the following results: only stockbrokers scored lower on a scale of trustworthiness than chiropractors, over 45% of those surveyed felt chiropractic ethics were below average. In the Canada Speaks survey, held in 2002 and again in 2006, chiropractic trustworthiness improved from 15th place to 12th place (49% of those surveyed felt chiropractors to be trustworthy), but still well below medical physicians(80%) and nurses(87%). Clear demonstrations of competency and legitimacy, by the profession as a whole, are required to increase public trust, and therefore, increase the cultural authority of the chiropractic profession.