Foundations of Chiropractic Exam 1 Practice 2026 – Your All-in-One Guide to Success!

The spine’s relationship to overall health is the starting idea here: early chiropractic thinking held that misalignments of the vertebral column, or subluxations, could disrupt nerve function and thus health, so adjusting the spine was seen as a primary way to restore healing. This view is historically tied to D.D. Palmer, who founded chiropractic and articulated the subluxation theory as the basis for care. A.T. Still, while he emphasized the spine within his osteopathic framework and stressed the body's capacity to heal itself, his work belongs to osteopathy rather than chiropractic. The other figures are linked to the Palmer lineage or to osteopathy, but the earliest chiropractic emphasis on spine–health is associated with Palmer’s work.