An open question
Not what you studied. What formed you.
One · before anything else
Most people find at least one of those is zero. Hold your three numbers.
Two · what 336 people said
Between 2020 and 2023 we recorded approximately 336 long-form conversations with chiropractic stakeholders across fifteen countries, asking each of them what actually prepared them for this work. The conversations were published as they happened. Nobody was counting anything.
This year we transcribed all of them and counted.
They named the practice they stood in. The doctor who let them ask a stupid question. The lineage they trained in. The thing they built that nobody assigned.
The most formative years a chiropractor gets are the least structured.
Three · one number worth sitting with
A teacher within living memory is named more often, in stories about personal formation, than the founder of the profession. Reggie Gold is named in 45.
Nobody organised that. No committee decided it. Practitioners were asked how they came to this work, and the same names kept arriving, for years, across continents.
Four · what changed on July 1
Grad PLUS was eliminated for new borrowers. Professional students — and chiropractic is named explicitly in the statute — can now borrow $50,000 a year and $200,000 total in federal loans. That is the whole professional education.
Life Chiropractic College West's median federal debt at completion is $206,392. That is above the new lifetime cap, and median means half of every recent class borrowed more than that.
It is four of the ten programs the Department of Education reports on, not one. This is federal data, not ours, and we would rather name it than be found to have skipped past it.
Five · what we want from you
We would rather hear it from inside the profession than from someone outside it. We can show you the conversations, the method, and the code. If a number is wrong we would rather fix it than defend it.
Not a commitment. In those 336 conversations, roughly forty people said they would open a door to a student — and almost every one of them said it in the last two minutes of an hour-long video that nobody watches to the end.
Ask a third-year where they are doing their preceptorship and most do not know. Ask a pre-chiropractic student where they can observe and they will tell you they emailed three offices and never heard back. Meanwhile the offer was already made and nobody could find it.
We are calling it the Bridge — the span between people who have arrived and people who have not. It only works if someone stands on both ends. Six ways to be one end →