How was ABC discovered?

By Dr Jesse Jutkowitz - Founder and developer of ABC™

The way ABC™ came about starts before I knew anything about body manipulation.

It starts in high school.

I thought I wanted to be a doctor so I volunteered to work in a hospital my sophomore year. The story is long but after using a defibrillator unsuccessfully on a patient whose heart stopped I was quite disappointed. A doc told me not to be so disappointed, this was not TV and most of the time the thing did not work.

He further added to that, if it is not an infection we can give people antibiotics for or something we can do surgery on there really is not much we can do for people but relieve their pain.

I was flabbergasted. This was not the profession I imagined being part of for the rest of my life. I interviewed other docs and nurses and got the same basic talk.

I quit volunteering at the hospital after discovering that and was quite aimless for the next 5+ years. Then, during a summer off a friend told me I should go to Chiropractic school. I could help people and make a lot of money.

The only thing I knew about Chiropractors was that one day my father could not move when he woke up and we went to work without him. When I returned that night he was walking about fine. He took me with him to the next visit but the guy said nothing I understood or was interested in.

I looked into chiro school a bit and decided to go.

Chiropractic College

When you go the Chiropractic school one of the things that happens in the first week of school as a Freshman is that you get assigned an intern in the junior clinic. That is the Junior Clinic. It is their practice before they go to the public clinic as a senior. They take you in as a new patient and treat you over time. This guy did an exam, took x-rays and explained something to me that I understood nothing of. It was like he was talking Greek. Anyway, he lays me down on my side puts his hands at the base of my head and does an adjustment — to me it was, he banged on the top of my neck really hard. Scared the heck out of me.

I got up and felt quite a bit different but did not know what the difference was. After a hour or two I realized the stomach pain I constantly had ever since I can remember was gone.

It was quite strange. I literally had had stomach pain since I was born for all I remembered. Now it was gone. I tested it by eating all the foods that made the pain worse and… no pain. I got diarrhea from the grease and spicy foods but no pain. Very strange. However, it gave the me absolute reality that this stuff (manipulating bones to get healthy) worked.

People do not generally realize the first year in Chiropractic school is like the first year in medical school — anatomy, physiology (how the body works), biochemistry and all that. In the second semester they add starting to teach about adjusting bones. It is what other professions call manipulating bones or manipulation. Some chiropractors get upset when that word is used in relation to Chiropractic rather than “adjustment” of bones — as in adjusting the positions of the bones — but it is the same thing.

Anyway, in the second semester they started teaching about body mechanics and adjustment of bones. I have a self-taught background in mechanical engineering. It is a longer story but in high school I was trying to design something and asked an engineer. He told me I would have to learn calculus and all this other stuff to do it effectively. I went to a bookstore and bought all these books like self-taught calculus and others — no internet in those days — and learned how to the engineering stuff. It taught me enough to design my machine, which was useful to no one but me but I had the knowledge too.

The reason that is important is that the doctor teaching the course — chiropractic doctor — said things that just did not make sense. The biggest one was, if you lay someone face down and push down on their back or you lay them face up and put your hand behind their back and push up the same thing happens.

This made no sense to me and I asked if I got behind my car and pushed and then got in front of my car and pushed I would not expect the same thing to happen. He said, “Bodies are different.” I asked the guy next to me to stand up. I pushed on sideways on his shoulder and his body moved in the direction I pushed. I pushed sideways on the other shoulder (opposite direction) and his body moved in the other direction. I looked up at the teacher and said, “No it’s not.” He said, “I will cover it with you after the class.”

After the class I went up to him and he said, “Don’t ever do that to me again” and left. After interviewing many chiropractors in school and out I got the same types of comments. I was left with — adjusting bone positions to have a body regain or be healthy definitely worked — because of what happened with my stomach pain. However, no one seemed to know mechanically how it worked or the best way to do it. There are literally dozens of “techniques” to do manipulation in Chiropractic and close to a hundred if you add in the techniques from other professions like Osteopathy, physical therapy and others.

Like everyone else, I set out to figure out the best way to treat my patients.

What a confusion of ideas and methods I discovered. I learned that this was not unusual and that every student in Chiropractic, Osteopathy, physical therapy, massage and any other profession doing physical body work to fix bodies discovers and undergoes the same confusion.

A larger confusion in human endeavor you will probably never find.

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