A few years back, Derek MacBay worked in our San Diego Seaside Chiropractic office. He was a fun and enthusiastic addition to our office and everybody loved him. Yesterday I received an announcement and it hit me emotionally, much harder than I expected it would. It was the announcement that Derek had graduated from Chiropractic College.
Although chiropractic is one of the most amazing and beautiful inventions ever created on this planet, being a chiropractor is not necessarily the easiest job. I have such tremendous respect and admiration for Derek, for having made it through what he just went through. As a chiropractic student you are expected to learn all of the same information that is learned by medical students, other than studying about surgery and drugs. A chiropractic student these days is expected to learn how to diagnose everything from Osgood-Schlatter Disease to lung cancer and to be able to know if that pain running down the patients arm is coming from a pinched nerve in their neck or if the patient is suffering from a heart attack. It is a tremendous amount of information that has to be learned in an extremely short period of time. By a short period of time, I mean three and a half or four years.
A chiropractic student generally graduates Chiropractic College with over 100,000 dollars in debt. A chiropractic student is expected to have the same diagnostic skill level as a medical doctor graduating from medical school, but a chiropractic student has to do it without all of the help that medical students receive. Medical students have many more programs and facilities available to them than chiropractic students. A massive amount of money flows from pharmaceutical companies into medical schools, which allow the medical schools to have much nicer facilities. There are also many more programs available to help the medical student finance his or her education, than for the chiropractic student.
Most if not all the medical schools in California are also financed through your tax dollars. Places like University of California, San Diego Medical School or UCLA Medical School, are public institutions funded, in addition to pharmaceutical companies, by the state of California and your tax dollars. Chiropractic Colleges on the other hand receive none of this. As a medical doctor you also have programs available to you where you can do things like practice in a rural area that doesn’t have as many medical doctors in it for a certain amount of years and have some or all of your student loans forgiven.
The average salary of medical doctors is still astronomically higher than the average starting salary of chiropractors. So for somebody like Derek to go through what he has gone through, he’s done it purely from the view point of helping others and making the world a better place. I know Derek, and I know how energetic and passionate he is about life. I know that as a result of his graduating he is going to touch, shape and save thousands and thousands of lives.
For Derek, on behalf of Myself, Reagan, my Wife, Seaside Chiropractic, the entire chiropractic profession and as a member of the human race, I congratulate you on what you have accomplished. I am thrilled to watch the story of your life, and the miracles you will create unfold before us. So Good-Bye! Derek MacBay, the previous employee and assistant of Seaside Chiropractic and Hello! Dr. Derek MacBay Chiropractor.