The recurring question in every conversation was some version of the same one: how did you come to this, and what actually prepared you for it? The conversations were published as they happened. Nobody was counting anything.
Three years later we transcribed 333 of the 336 — three have no usable transcript — and counted how often each school, teaching lineage, technique, organization and text appeared, and more importantly, in how many separate conversations each appeared.
How to read every number on this page
Each figure is the number of distinct conversations in which something was named, out of 333 usable transcripts. Something named forty times in one conversation counts once. That is deliberate: one person's enthusiasm should not outweigh twenty people's passing mention.
Named is not endorsed. Some mentions are critical. The count measures presence in the profession's formation stories, nothing else.
Conversations are not people. A share of 52% means 172 of 333 transcripts, not 52% of practitioners. At least eleven people in this corpus sat for more than one conversation, so the per-person figure is lower and we do not yet know it precisely.
These counts cover the English-language conversations only. The keyword extraction ran on English, so the Spanish- and Portuguese-language conversations return nothing by design. Every figure below therefore under-represents the international side of this corpus, and Barcelona in particular is a floor rather than a count.
Where people trained
| Institution | Conversations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Life University | 172 | 52% |
| Palmer | 138 | 41% |
| Life West | 123 | 37% |
| Sherman | 70 | 21% |
| Parker | 63 | 19% |
| Logan | 31 | 9% |
| Barcelona College | 19 | 6% |
More than half of these conversations mention Life University. Three institutions appear in a third or more of everything recorded. The selection caveats below matter here more than anywhere else on this page.
The teaching lineages
| Lineage or method community | Conversations |
|---|---|
| Gonstead | 44 |
| Kairos Training Culture | 34 |
| Bio-Geometric Integration | 33 |
| Mastery Love Service | 33 |
| Activator | 29 |
| Sacro Occipital Technique | 26 |
| Dynamic Essentials | 23 |
| Toggle Recoil | 23 |
| Chiropractic BioPhysics | 22 |
| Functional Neurology | 16 |
This is the layer no institution can produce about itself. Seminar communities and teaching cultures are not credentialing bodies, they keep no public rosters, and no register exists anywhere of who came through which one. Yet they appear in these conversations at rates comparable to the schools.
The organizations
| Organization | Conversations |
|---|---|
| ICPA | 30 |
| State associations (combined) | 23 |
| International Chiropractors Association | 22 |
| IFCO | 16 |
| American Chiropractic Association | below threshold |
The absence is worth stating plainly, along with what it does and does not mean. The ACA is the largest chiropractic membership organization in the United States. In 333 transcripts about personal formation, it did not appear often enough to register.
That does not mean the ACA is unimportant or that its members are absent from the profession. It means that when practitioners in this particular corpus described their own formation, they named teaching lineages, schools and texts — and named the ICA, ICPA and IFCO — more often. The most likely explanation is selection: this corpus reflects who agreed to sit down with us, and that network leans a particular direction. That is a limitation of the corpus rather than a fact about the profession, and we would rather say so than let a silence do argumentative work it hasn't earned.
The texts
| Text | Conversations |
|---|---|
| The Green Books | 71 |
| The Big Idea | 27 |
| Chiropractic First | 17 |
A century-old set of texts is the single most-referenced formative resource in this corpus — named in more conversations than any technique, any seminar community, and every organization.
Method, and what this is not
We would rather over-state the limitations than have someone else find them.
This is not a representative sample
The people in these 336 recordings agreed to a long recorded conversation. That population skews toward practitioners who speak publicly, who teach, who are active in seminar communities, and who were reachable through one interviewer's network between 2020 and 2023. A different interviewer would produce different counts.
The conversations are three to six years old
Roles have changed. Some organizations named here have new leadership. At least one person named has since died.
Name counts are floors, not totals
Transcripts came from automatic speech recognition, which reliably mangles proper nouns — one researcher's surname was rendered as an unrelated English word in four separate conversations. Institution and technique names transcribe cleanly and are reliable. Personal names are undercounts by an unknown margin.
Counting mentions is not measuring influence
A widely-taught method whose name is rarely spoken aloud would be invisible here. Where a name overlapped with ordinary speech, the count was inflated and that row was excluded rather than published.
Why publish it
Chiropractic has no map of its own formation. Schools know their enrollments. Associations know their members. Seminar communities know their attendees. Nobody holds the picture of how those pieces combine in a single person's path — because nobody was in a position to ask several hundred people the same question and keep the recordings.
We were, by accident. The counting was the cheap part.
If your organization, school or teaching community appears here, we would like you to check that we have represented it accurately. We can show you the conversations, the method, and the code. If something is wrong we would rather fix it than defend it. And if you don't appear, or appear less than you would expect, we would like to understand why — because the most useful version of this document is the one that survives being argued with by the people it describes.
Related
The Directory
The people behind the conversations.
For the Profession
What this is being built for.
Findings No. 1: cost and earnings
Federal debt and earnings data for every program.
The Conversations
Where these 336 recordings live.
Check your own record
If you were one of the 336, or if your organization appears above, write to us and we will show you exactly what the corpus says.
Get in touch