May
7
The Master of None
One of my running jokes is that “I’m surprisingly handy for a doctor.” I have my father to thank for that. I think one of the greatest things my dad ever taught me was how to think. He taught me how to figure things out. This skill helps me in my personal life as well as my professional one.
I’m a lot like my father in the sense that I rarely need someone to come to the house to fix things. I know how to fix cars and how to fix houses and if I don’t know how to fix something, just like my dad, I’ll figure it out. Honestly, at times it’s a curse. If there is something around the house that my wife wants me to fix, she will never take the “I don’t know how to fix it” excuse. Either she will call me out on it right away or she will just “try to fix it” herself because she knows once she really messes it up, I’ll fix it.
Now I’m not saying I’m an expert at everything. I’ve fixed a lot of my own stuff and I’ve helped a lot of friends fix things, but I doubt that many people will be paying me to fix their stuff any time soon. And the truth is…they shouldn’t, at least not very much. The reason I say this is simple. I’m not an expert electrician, drywaller, plumber, mechanic, landscaper or any other of the many professionals that I have impersonated at various times throughout my life.
The ironic thing is that even though I am a jack-of-all-trades in my personal life, I am NOT AT ALL in my professional life. I’m a professional Upper Cervical doctor. It’s what I do and I don’t mind saying, I’m good at it. But a lot of people don’t understand that. Especially since Upper Cervical is associated with chiropractic which has definitely evolved into a jack-of-all trades profession.
There are a lot of people out there who are simply amazed at how “little” we do in our office. Because I have a DC (Doctor of Chiropractic) after my name I’m supposed to have a giant menu in my office that includes pillows, supplements, herbs, monavie, goji juice, vitamin D, vitamin B, vitamin C, foot baths, massage, aromatherapy, physical therapy, sports therapy, acupuncture, energy work, nutritional counseling, colon cleansing, weight-loss consulting, oil-changes, hair cuts, lawn care and fortune telling just to name a few. Now I’ll admit, I exaggerated a bit there at the end, but not much.
Now I’m not in any way saying that any of those services are unnecessary. They all have their place. But there are a lot of people out there that have no idea what chiropractic or Upper Cervical are really about because a bunch of Doctors with DC behind their name insist on spending more time trying to expand their menu instead of mastering their skill. This should be considered a crime against our fellow man. Because of our never ending pursuit to expand our scope of practice in hopes of some day becoming “Real Doctors” we have confused the public to the point that they have missed the most profound but yet simple health principle ever discovered: Health from above down inside out. Shame on us!
Of course there are times when a Jack-of-all-trades is nice. My wife really appreciates the fact that I can do so many things around the house. But the fact that I own a pipe wrench and know how to use it doesn’t make me a plumber, and just because a Chiropractor owns a bunch of acupuncture needles and took a couple weekend classes to learn where to stick them, doesn’t mean they are an acupuncturist. In spite of what their weekend seminar certificate says.
The bottom line is this. There are a lot of doctors and natural health care providers out there that try to be everything to everybody. Often they disguise their lack of excellence in any one area with the “we do whatever our patients need” explanation. It sounds great on the surface, but you should always remember, any time you are working with a jack-of-all-trades it is very possible that you are also working with a Master-of-None.
Dr. Jerry Kennedy is an Upper Cervical Doctor in Belleville, Illinois.
