Chiropractic care is not just for people with bad backs.
By: Leon Tovey
Lying on my back atop the padded chiropractor’s table, my left arm pointed at the ceiling, I told myself that this time I’d be ready.
"OK, now make a fist and point your thumb at your feet," Dr. Debra DeMarco said.
I did as I was told and Dr. DeMarco, who runs Monroe Chiropractic Care out of an office on East Railroad Avenue in Jamesburg, reached out and took hold of my wrist.
"OK, now resist," she said.
Just as before, I didn’t have to resist very hard as Dr. DeMarco, a petite woman in her early 40s, tried to force my arm down. I am by no means the world’s biggest, strongest man, but as she pulled on my arm, the picture that came to mind was of a sparrow trying to pull down a buffalo.
She eased off for a moment and then said, "OK, now again."
And then, just as before, it happened. As I began to resist, she reached down and touched a spot low on my forehead and between my eyes with the first two fingers of her right hand.
My arm dropped instantly.
The first time Dr. DeMarco had performed this bit of acupressure on me, I’d laughed and insisted that she try it again, certain that I’d simply been distracted by her sudden movement toward my eyes.
She’d laughed in response, told me I was just like one of the macho teenage boys she saw from time to time and given me another demonstration in how the human body really is more than the sum of its parts.
The good, the bad and the ugly
According to the American Chiropractic Association, the roots of chiropractic care go back almost 5,000 years, with ancient Chinese and Greek texts mentioning manipulation of the spine as a way of treating a number of health problems.
The central premise of the practice is that the human body is largely a self-healing machine governed by the structure and function of the spine.
The practice began to gain momentum in the United States at the end of the 19th century an era remembered as much for eugenics, phrenology and other psuedo-sciences and medical quackeries as it is for legitimate breakthroughs in medical and scientific understanding.
It is probably this unfortunate bit of temporal happenstance that leads people to view chiropractic with skepticism or derision a view that Dr. DeMarco says she’s quite familiar with.
"I always tell new patients, first thing, ‘let me have it,’" Dr. DeMarco said. "Tell me everything you’ve heard about chiropractic and chiropractors, good, bad or ugly. And I find that most people who don’t like chiropractors have never been to one."
Dr. DeMarco, whose proper title is D.C., which stands for doctor of chiropractic, says people’s widespread misconceptions about chiropractic seem to be driven both by a perception of the practice as "hippie pseudo-medicine" and a belief that "health comes from a bottle."
And she says that while the former is difficult to combat (she can point to four years of post-graduate education just like a "real" doctor in chiropractic medicine to silence the skeptics), the latter is almost impossible.
"People will tell me, ‘Oh, I’m basically healthy,’ and then they’ll give me a list of 10 medications they’re on," Dr. DeMarco said. "It’s funny well, not funny but it really seems like cancer is the line at which people stop saying, ‘I’m healthy.’"
Dr. DeMarco has been practicing in Jamesburg (the origins of the name Monroe Chiropractic Care are elusive, even to her) since 1983. She says that while chiropractic has made great strides as an accepted form of treatment for a number of health ailments, the practice has suffered setbacks in recent years.
"Managed care and HMOs have things going the opposite way now," she said. "In the ’60s and ’70s, chiropractic was viewed skeptically by insurance companies and there was no coverage for it. But in the ’80s and ’90s there was some progress, and that’s being undone more and more by these plans.
"Which just doesn’t make a lot of sense when you consider that a year’s worth of chiropractic care costs about the same as a day spent in traction in the hospital."
Dr. DeMarco said she takes a holistic approach to treating her patients, offering nutritional advice in addition to manipulative therapy. She keeps a large, black three-ring binder filled with articles about nutrition, holistic medicine and alternative treatments for everything from allergies to infant ear infections in each of her three treatment rooms.
She says the mission of chiropractic care is not to supplant or replace what most people consider traditional medical treatment, but to complement it by filling in what she sees as its greatest lack the old axiom about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure.
She says standard medical practice, with its emphasis on invasive techniques and pharmaceuticals, is great at treating problems but does little to prevent them.
"I’m not saying we can cure everything, but we are about educating people and getting the word out about total health," she said. "My goal is to have people be more responsible for their own health."
Changing my perceptions
While visiting my wife’s family in Germany over the holidays I fell ill. It was no big deal, just the flu.
But when I vomited and couldn’t get out of bed one morning, my father-in-law an educated, no-nonsense German guy who believes in taking care of business immediately insisted (over my protestations that all I needed was a little bed rest and plenty of fluids) that I visit a doctor.
About an hour later, the doctor told me I needed bed rest, plenty of fluids and no alcohol. She also told me to come see her again if I didn’t feel better in a couple of days, and that I should pay her 40 euros (about $54 at the time).
Modern medicine at its finest, I thought.
When I decided to write a story about chiropractic care in general, and Monroe Chiropractic in particular, my intention was to look into how the practice had become much more mainstream in recent years. My attitude toward doctors and medicine has been shaped largely by incidents like the one mentioned above and I wanted to highlight the ways in which chiropractic complemented the body’s ability to heal itself.
When I visited Dr. DeMarco she ran through a battery of questions about my medical history, not unlike my general practitioner. Unlike my general practitioner though, she took an active interest in the fact that my left hip is held together with the help of a pair of stainless steel screws (souvenirs of an especially memorable game of mailbox baseball played when I was 16) and that I suffer from occasional headaches.
After an examination that included the aforementioned acupressure demonstration, Dr. DeMarco concluded that while my bad hip had restricted my movements somewhat (I can’t tilt my head as far to the left as I can to the right, for example), I was in pretty good shape considering I’d been thrown through the passenger-side window of a rolling car.
And the headaches?
"You need to work on your posture," Dr. DeMarco said.
She recommended that I get an X-ray of my neck and make an appointment to come see her again. And then she billed my insurance.
Psuedo-medicine? Seems like the real deal to me.
While the human body may be largely a self-healing machine, the human mind can be a cantankerous, stubborn thing. After my visit with the German doctor, I stayed in bed, drank plenty of fluids and didn’t drink any alcohol (even on New Year’s Eve) for two days.
If I hadn’t spent the money for the doctor to give me that advice, I probably wouldn’t have even though I knew I should.
By the same token, I’ve always known my posture isn’t great. But since my visit to Dr. DeMarco, I’ve been very conscious of sitting up straight in my chair.
And you know what? I haven’t had a single headache.
Monroe Chiropractic is located at 15 E. Railroad Ave. behind Family Framers. Office hours are 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Saturdays. Appointments can be made by calling (732) 521-1333.

