Chiropractic Has Nothing To Do With Back Pain

(A Love Letter to Frequency, Vitalism, and the Power We've Forgotten)

They say you should write about what people are asking, about pain points, about popular topics. That’s what gets noticed, that really catches people’s attention. And I get that, but that’s not what’s alive for me right now. Sometimes what needs to be written is what nobody is asking about. Because they think they already know. This is that kind of article.

Thinking we know what’s going on is a dangerous place for individuals, professions, and societies to be in. Because we’re trapped. Wrote the stoic Epictetus, “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows”. “The best slave is the one who thinks he is free," echoed Goethe. Fixed views in a complex, changing world lead to suffering.

So here's what I want to say, something that flies right in the face of what most people, even most chiropractors, think they already know:Chiropractic has nothing to do with back pain.Yes, you read that right. And yes, I’m a chiropractor.

We live in a society that’s for generations been led to believe real medicine to be the prevailing allopathic model and that through it’s advances we are now freed from the primitive, even barbaric, healing practices of the past. Sadly, this has left so much of our population, chiropractors included, locked in a mechanistic, reductionistic model of our profession.

And because most people—including most chiropractors—think they know what chiropractic is, we stay stuck. The truth has been bred out of us until, after a few generations, we’ve forgotten that for the vast majority of history it was common knowledge that our bodies, through their connection with an innate intelligence and universal intelligence, healed themself. Worse yet, we’ve been trained to believe this truth to be unscientific, outdated, or even embarrassing. It’s not just a philosophical problem—it’s a crisis of identity.

What We’re Taught—and What’s Missing

In school, we’re told chiropractic is an excellent conservative care option for neuromuscular complaints. A great evidence-based option for spinal pain. And when the symptoms get too complex? Refer out to the MDs. We're taught this is respectable, responsible, and science-backed. This isn’t wrong, it’s just really really small. Ultimately, it’s not even what chiropractic is.

And that’s the tragedy: Yes, chiropractic works for back pain—but it’s so much more than that. 

I remember “philosophy” classes in my chiropractic program that read like an apologetic history class - we were taught that the the founders of this profession had some pretty crazy ideas, but (sarcasm) thank God we were redeemed by science and got in our lane treating back pain. Now we’re accepted by the medical establishment AND even accepted by Medicare! 

This is the public image of chiropractic. It’s what is more and more taught in the schools. It’s what, sadly, most of my generation of chiropractors stands to practice their entire lives. We were never shown the real potential of chiropractic or the true nature of healing.

Here’s what Sue Brown, creator of BGI (Bio-Geometric Integration) and one of the great modern chiropractors, wrote on it:

To understand BGI, it is necessary to first have an understanding of chiropractic. Not the mainstream view of chiropractors as “back doctors,” but the original intention of chiropractic, that being, “to release interference to the expression of the innate intelligence of the body.” There is an organizing intelligence in the body that coordinates our heartbeat, breathing, digestion and chemical balance without conscious thought. It allows us to walk, talk, think and listen without knowing the complex interactions that must take place for those things to occur. All actions and reactions and all healing occur as a result of the expression of this intelligence. The only reason we experience dis-ease in our lives, whether it expresses as a physical symptom, a chemical dependency or an emotional/mental pattern is that there is an interference in the expression of this intelligence. This interference is what the chiropractic profession calls a subluxation. And the chiropractic adjustment is intended to release the subluxation, thus releasing the interference to the expression of the innate intelligence of the body. 

THAT’s what this is about. Any intervention a practitioner applies, chiropractor or not, only heals through it’s capacity to unblock and amplify this innate intelligence in the body. 

This sounds nice but until we experience it in our own bodies it can feel just theoriteical or naive. That’s why Donny Epstein, creator of Network Spinal (a primary technique which I practice) and one of the greatest contemporary chiropractors once said “the problem with most chiropractors is that they’ve never had a chiropractic experience”.

When I had mine, all this became real.

My Come to Jesus Moment

I went to chiropractic school because I thought it was a cooler way to do physical therapy; I had been adjusted once, on my 24th birthday, and I didn’t particularly like it. I certainly didn’t see it as anything more than popping backs. So I went through almost my entire graduate program as one of those people, and rather than expanding my idea of chiropractic my education largely confirmed my narrow, fixed view.

But in Spring of 2021 I had a chiropractic experience. I attended my first seminar in Network Spinal and witnessed people’s entire nervous systems unwinding and remodelling themselves in front of my eyes. Spines undulated, people cried and had emotional releases, there were long periods of silence as people recalibrated. At the end of the weekend a world class chiropractor who has since then become a mentor for me, Dr. Matt Lyon, applied a toggle adjustment to my upper cervicals. I ended up in the parking lot laughing and crying hysterically with joy. It felt like I was on a small dose of mushrooms for two days afterwards. This was a chiropractic experience - this was the power of a real adjustment.

What the hell was going on here?

The Foundation of Chiropractic

The founders of chiropractic, they weren’t talking about back pain. They were talking about tone. They were talking about frequency.

D.D. Palmer wrote, “Life is the expression of tone. Tone is the normal degree of nerve tension. Tone is expressed in function by the normal elasticity, activity, strength, and excitability of the various organs, as observed in a state of health.”

Let’s pause there.

Tone. Not structure. Not pain. Not even alignment. But tone—frequency, energy, and information flow through the body’s wiring system, the nervous system.

Chiropractic is based on the Grand Premise that every living thing contains within it an Innate Intelligence, which is an expression of Universal Intelligence. This Intelligence, this energy, is conducted through the nervous system, which governs the action and coordination of every part of the human system. Stress held within or placed upon the nervous system limits this energy and inevitably leads to dis-ease in the person - whether it’s back pain, depression, or colon cancer. By removing this interference we restore the flow of energy in the body and it can heal itself.

This is the Vitalistic understanding of healing. It’s not unique to chiropractic, but common to every healing tradition other than our modern allopathic model, which gained supremacy in the early 1900’s after the Flexner (backed by the Rockafellers and Carnegies)and the rise of the American Medical Association.

Now the new age “good vibe” culture of today is meeting breakthrough science in regenerative and frequency medicine is meeting modern quantum understanding of the fractal nature of the universe…all confirming what Chiropractors have been saying since the inception of our profession in the 1890’s.

As Nikola Tesla told us, “if you want to know the secrets of the universe, look to energy, frequency, and vibration”.

Chiropractic as Frequency Medicine

Before anyone in the West was talking about “energy medicine,” before the mainstream was exploring quantum biology, before we had language for vibrational coherence—D.D. Palmer was saying life is governed by tone. And tone is frequency.

That makes chiropractic one of the earliest modern expressions of what we might now call frequency medicine.

The spine was never the end goal. It was the portal. A way to access and influence the nervous system—the interface between consciousness and biology. Between the seen and unseen. Between what you do and who you are.

From a vitalistic perspective, symptoms are not the enemy. They are messengers, information about the system’s current coherence (or incoherence). Chiropractic, when practiced with this intention, doesn’t “fix” the body. It clears interference so that the body’s innate intelligence—its own internal healing wisdom—can come back online.

This is not fringe spirituality. This is foundational biology.

The Profession’s Identity Crisis

Why don’t more people know this? Why don’t more chiropractors know this?

Because our profession has been split. On one side, we’ve got evidence-based, biomechanical practitioners. On the other, we’ve got principled, vitalistic chiropractors who still speak the language of energy, tone, and innate intelligence. And tragically, these camps often ridicule each other.

Mechanistic practitioners say the vitalists are unscientific. Vitalists say the mechanists are missing the whole point. And in the crossfire, the public loses access to the deeper healing potential that chiropractic can offer.

It’s like saying that dance is just good for cardio or that meditation is just for stress relief. It’s true—but if you’re limited to that you’re missing out on SO much more.

That’s why chiropractors end up getting burnt out cracking backs with the noble intention of reducing pain. There’s not a bigger why. But I have met chiropractors who are on fire with passion, loving their life, still practicing after fifty years because they know that what their work really does is to liberate life and help each of their patients more fully express the divine potential within them. It’s a big difference.

I feel a lot of compassion for so many in the allied medical professions who either aren’t open to or were never exposed to a vitalistic understanding of the world. It really does impoverish the whole career and limits their ability to help others.  

Sue Brown and The Potential Energy Theory of Subluxation

I’ve found the late Sue Brown to be one of the most inspiring for me in broadening and deepening my understanding of what we’re really doing as practitioners and recipients when we’re healing.

She understood that all dis-ease is caused by bound stress that blocks the ability of our bodies to self-organize. Bringing the modern quantum physics understanding of ourselves into the original chiropractic understanding, she redefined these blocks (“subluxations”) not just as physical restrictions but alterations in the harmonics of the energetic patterned geometry that gives rise to our physical, mental, and emotional bodies.

What she understood is that the integration of new information into ourselves, that is the digestion of our life experiences, is what allows us to evolve. Trauma is just an experience that we couldn’t digest at the time. And the only reason that it still affects us today is that it is still with us, unintegrated, undigested. It’s not a problem, it’s potential energy.

This means that by meeting these subluxations and applying the appropriate adjustments that allow our self-organizing systems to integrate the information, we reclaim that energy and evolve to a higher level of organization. We become more whole, more complex, and more resilient expressions of the universal intelligence that was, is, and always will be running the show.

Now THAT is a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning, both as a practitioner and as someone who is on their healing journey. I truly wish that more of us were educated in this so that we could participate in this grand adventure of life with agency in this life-affirming way.

Returning to the Root

That being said, here’s an invitation to all of us —chiropractors, practitioners, and all of us who are intentionally on a journey to wholeness:

Suspend the illusion that you’re working with a purely physical idea.

Play with the possibility that all symptoms might be the result of a distortion in tone due to un-integrated trauma.

Understand trauma as potential energy and apply your technologies, whatever they are, to bring awareness and acceptance to them. Trust that with this, the intelligence of the body can reclaim that energy and heal.

When you’re not sure what to do, remember that you’re working with an intelligent system. Start tracing the line back to tone. Back to frequency. Back to the question: what is the underlying signal this person’s body is trying to send? What’s asking for acceptance?

The potential energy theory of subluxation says that interference—be it structural, emotional, energetic, or chemical—creates a distortion in the signal, a dam in the flow. Remove the interference, and the intelligence of the system begins to express again. This is healing from the inside out.

We have a profession founded on this principle, yet most of us were trained to forget it. But some of us remember. And more of us are waking up. We’re blending ancient wisdom with contemporary science, reclaiming the language of frequency, and returning to the heart of what chiropractic can be. More and more people across allied disciplines are doing the same.

For the Practitioners Reading This

You don’t have to be a chiropractor to feel this. If you’re a healer, therapist, or coach working with the nervous system, the subtle body, or the patterns stored in tissue—you’re playing in the same frequency field.

Chiropractic, at its best, offers a direct interface with this field. And when wielded with reverence, with clarity, and with intention—it’s a powerful tool for liberation.

So whether or not you adjust spines, I hope this sparks curiosity. I hope it reminds you that the body isn’t a broken car - it’s an infinitely intelligent, harmonic, self-organizing instrument that is just waiting for the opportunity to integrate old stresses and evolve to a higher level.

Healing is and always will be above-down-inside out.

If you’re ready for your chiropractic experience, let’s talk.

I would love for you to have an experience of what it feels to release trauma, reclaim your energy, and realize your potential. Find out more at www.drkentdrever.com and book a free 10min consultation here

In service,

Dr. Kent