Update USA 05-16-22
We have some good news to share with you this week about some of the work that we’ve been doing in the military, as well as continued conversations into the infrastructure of chiropractic. So please make sure you watch this all the way through. Well, good morning, American chiropractors. My name is Bharon Hoag. I am the Executive Director of OneChiropractic and The Chiropractic Defense Council coming to you today, Monday, May 16th, 2022 for your weekly update.
I haven’t talked too much with you about this work just because we’ve been doing it for a very long time, but had a great call with our lobbying team this week on a number of different reasons, but one of them is the work that we’ve been doing to try to get chiropractic more accepted into our military, whether you know this or not currently chiropractors cannot serve in our military, as officers. Chiropractors can join the military, but they have to do some of their trade. They cannot operate as a chiropractor. That’s an issue as far as we’re concerned. Back in 1993, George Bush Senior did sign into law through the NDAA which is the defense spending bill. Chiropractors could be commissioned officers, but it’s just never happened. And, various organizations throughout the profession have tried to do bills and some good work has been done specifically through the VA but nothing to do with active duty. So we took this on a couple of years ago with the great help of a number of state organizations and chiro health USA and, and a number of people that helped us get this thing started while we were getting on our feet. But now we’ve been running with this thing ever since, and we’ve been doing a lot of lobbying. We’ve been doing a lot of work and we finally now have in the NDAA at least a proposal we’ll find out in July if it’s going to take, but we have all of the support we need from the Senate armed services committee, the house armed services committee, the chairs of those organizations. Everyone is supporting that. We put in a pilot project within the NDAA to be able to pick a base and actually hire the appropriate number of chiropractors to make that service available to our men and women in active duty.
So we’re working very aggressively to try to prove to the military why they need to start integrating chiropractic more appropriately. The path that we’ve been on has been interesting. It’s not exactly what we started. We started to create commissioned officers and we’re finding that that’s going to be a very large lift and until the industry the military rather understands the institutional need for this that’s going to be a very difficult thing to happen. So we’ve changed our strategy with the help of some of our members of the armed services committees, telling us the path that we think would be best. We’ve also located a number of service men and women that are pro chiropractic that are helping us work from the inside. So lots of great work being done there, I hopefully will be able to share with you the update in July on whether that went through, but we believe right now we have word that it should get through. And then the fund gets to start and we’ll start actively working with different military bases and figuring out where to do this pilot, what branch and so on and so forth.
So thank you so much to all you that are watching this, that have been aware of this work we’ve been doing. Especially the state organizations, The Michigan Association of Chiropractors, Colorado Chiropractic Association, Nebraska Chiropractic Physicians Association, North Carolina Chiropractic Association, Chi Health USA, so many great organizations that have helped us financially in the very beginning to get started with a pretty good contribution.
So thank you for loving us. Thank you for being a part of spreading the word we need. More people share this video. So people understand the work that’s being done. We don’t do political work for the sake of politics. We do the work we need to do to make sure that chiropractic becomes the number one healthcare choice in the world. And we’re unapologetic about the path in which we’re going to take to do that. We’ll work with anyone and everyone, but we’re done with the egos, we’re done with the attitudes, we’re done with the power struggles. This is about moving our profession forward in the right direction. And our organization’s going to put our money where our mouth is, and we’re going to do the work that needs to be done. So we love you. We appreciate you. Hopefully this gets you fired up this week and you’re ready to go out and love and serve. You do what you do. You be the chiropractor, you be the person at the table, or you be the support staff.
(This is a computer generated transcript. Please forgive any errors.)
