AC Milan’s ageing stars arrive for their Champions League clash with Manchester United straight from… the Lab of the Gods
It was a funny day yesterday as I had three patients of mine tell me about an article they had read in the daily mail. The journalist wrote about the way that Milan Lab, AC Milan’s secretive high tech lab, was prolonging and boosting the lucrative careers of their star football players.
It was funny because I was there only a little while back on a visit to my uncle and had been on the phone to him only the evening before but he had ommitted to tell me about the article.
I read the article and was nothing short of pleased that, since David Beckham is playing for AC Milan the British media have been paying attention to the work this man has been doing for the last 40 years and have for the first time (as far as i am aware) acknowledged he is a chiropractor. Our family is one of the biggest chiropractic families in the world (in fact I am trying to get my sister to come and work along side me next year) and one thing that this does is that you are being spoonfed the basic principles of the profession from an early age onwards. Jean-Pierre (the chap at the centre of the article), his passion, dedication and passion is one of the main reasons I got into chiropractic myself and he taught me a thing or two about the basic principles of chiropractic. He was also the first one in our family to take on the profession.
In a nutshell: I am hijacking the Beckham-craze based opportunity to send you a blog about why this strange voodoo magic called chiropractic actually just is common sense:
Milan lab is built around the basic principles of chiropractic. Admittedly the multi-million pound execution of it, but the basic principles never the less.
Health, performance and wellbeing are all the produce, and the potential end-result of biomechanical, biochemical and psychological health. Problems in one area may affect another area but will definitely affect the whole. The point is that you can look at health and wellbeing as the mere absence of disease or a state of optimum wellbeing in each of those areas. That is your individual choice. Although there are substantial cultural reasons for these variations in attitudes. It’s only recently (I blogged on this topic before) in our social-cultural evolution in the West that we are even in a position to consider making that choice as it is really only in the last 25 years that medicine and technology have caught up with this dream; simply put before then we just had to make do with what we got and be happy if that ended up meaning a nice healthy long life, whilst all the while accepting that the statistics were stacked against this ever happening.The British (unlike the Italians who in the view of this country seem to be hand-bag slinging hypochondriac nancies) in particular are very good at maintaining the Victorian values of “getting on with it” with little if any expectation that it will get you anywhere. It took me a while to get used to you Brits, but after nearly 13 years i think I have sussed you out… Stiff upper lip and all that.
Chiropractic has been talking about this dream for over a century, and although mistakes were made over the years (one being that all disease would be caused by spinal problems… don’t get me started) it is still this dream we are trying to realise. One of the problems is of course cost of execution. When you have a vested interest in keeping a person at their optimum performance and that it costs you less to provide that then not to (it cost 70 million Euros to just set up Milan Lab but it has saved over 200 million) then it makes perfect sense to do so, but when on the other hand it is the general public we are talking about, value becomes relative. Players have a value. Hard cold cash. Purchase, performance and retail. When they don’t play they cost more than they would if they did. You, me, most people on this planet of course have just as much value, but not many people will be willing to pay for it… and if you don’t work there is social security. So, at least for now, the costs involved in making this dream work are prohibitive.
My personal dream is to provide this service to the general public. I won’t be able to buy the incredibly expensive equipment and treatments that they offer at Milan Lab, but there are cheaper, allbeit not quite as accurate approximations (my five year plan 
but then you, me, most people on this planet don’t need to be 100%, we can afford to be 80% and in the context of our lives it would make very little if any difference. To illustrate the point two recent new patients of mine will need to spend approximately £3000 each on corrective dental care. That’s a lot. in the meanwhile (or until they win teh lottery) I keep them going with dental splints which cost just under £15 each, but bearing in mind that they had spent a small fortune on care and treatment over the years before seeing me, you could argue that they should have had this treatment done years back and they would have in actual fact saved money by now.
The wonderful benefits of hindsight…
So back to the chiropractic vision: keeping in balance biomechanical, biochemical and psychological well-being to achieve optimum health (resulting in reduction of likelihood of injuries and maximising longevity). The problem with this vision (in my not so humble opinion) is that this requires one practictioner to be good if not excellent at all three. Take it from me, being any good at just one of them is very hard work. Chiropractic practice (as opposed to “the vision”) is really quite good at biomechanical health. In fact chiropractors are really over-qualified in this regard, but we need to be because we are under constant scrutiny and there are some very vocal people out there and ready to critisize us at any given opportunity. So we tend to practice mostly as “back fixers” or whiplash-guys. The fact is though that that is not what we actually are here to do. It is what you, the public, hear we are good at and come to us for. One day there will be true chiropractic clinics, which I envisage will be the first truly holistic preventative polyclinics and will involve a number of clinicians helping you be your best, but until then I can only thank Jean-Pierre Meersseman DC, for keeping the dream alive.
