Newhouse acted surprised when he turned to find Jack staring at him with silent intensity. Newhouse quickly misconstrued Jack’s expression as awed appreciation. “Lydia will be happy to make you an appointment. I’m sure we’ll have an opening within the month, if your symptoms can wait. We are booked solid with follow-ups, and initial visits take considerably more time to go through the diagnostic procedure and X-rays. Don’t take the relaxed situation today as typical. Monday afternoons are booked lightly for continuing educational purposes. Usually, it’s pandemonium around here.”

Jack couldn’t believe what went on in that office. If it wasn’t so pathetic, it would have been funny. Understanding Newhouse was one thing. But what about the patients? Nichelle Barlow seemed intelligent and educated. So how could she be so foolish as to trust this man peddling phony therapy based on screwball ideas of innate intelligence?

“Mr. Stapleton?” Newhouse questioned. “Hello! I didn’t mean to overwhelm you quite so much. Are you okay?”

Jack shook himself out of his mini-trance. “Earlier, in the beginning of our conversation,” he began, “you said there’d been a falling-out among chiropractors? Somehow we became distracted and you never finished what you were going to say.”

“You’re right! We got off the track of talking about Daniel David Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, to talking about Davenport, Iowa, where he set up the first chiropractic medical school.”

“What kind of falling-out were you referring to?”

“Simple! During the nineties a whole bunch of turncoat chiropractors allowed themselves to be browbeaten by conventional doctors into limiting themselves to treating back problems alone.”

“You mean, giving up on treating such things as acute sinusitis.”

“Exactly! The AMA had been against chiropractic forever, instigating lawsuits and the like. They were afraid we’d steal their business, which of course we were doing, because patients aren’t stupid.”

Jack wasn’t so sure of that, but he didn’t interrupt.

“Anyway,” Newhouse continued, “sometime around 1990 the Supreme Court finally silenced the AMA, ruling in favor of chiropractors by stating categorically that conventional medicine through the AMA had tried to discredit chiropractic therapy to maintain a monopoly over health care in this country.”

Jack made a mental note to look into that ruling. Considering what he’d learned that afternoon about chiropractic, it seemed inconceivable the Supreme Court would have ruled in chiropractic’s favor, although he assumed that the ruling involved the monopoly issue only and had nothing to do with efficacy.

“You’d think that such a ruling would have helped chiropractic,” Newhouse continued. “But strangely enough it split us. A number of conventional doctors, obviously from seeing our benefits, started working with us, at least with those chiropractors willing to limit themselves. Over the years these traitors have been dubbed ‘mixers’ because they’ve been duped into limiting themselves to back problems exclusively and by doing so betraying the chiropractic movement.” Newhouse paused momentarily, then added derisively: “Meaning, of course, they are not real chiropractors.”

“And what are you stalwart patriotic chiropractors called?” Jack demanded, allowing a full dose of his infamous sarcasm to manifest itself.