Chiropractic and Politics: A Family Legacy

Chiropractic and Politics: A Family Legacy

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus shares the rich history of his family's involvement in chiropractic and politics. From his grandfather’s struggles in the 1940s to legitimize chiropractic care, to his father's battles with Medicare in the 1990s, and finally, Dr. Hulsebus's own efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, this podcast dives deep into the intersection of chiropractic and political advocacy. Learn about the challenges faced and overcome to ensure chiropractic rights and patient choices.

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Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hello. So today, as I release this, if you're watching the day it comes out, is election day. And as it's election day, I thought I would want to talk a little bit about politics in chiropractic. Now, again, today is election day, so we're not going to talk about the current election, because that's already happening, or if you're watching this, By the time past the day I'm releasing it, the election is already over, hopefully. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about chiropractic and politics. My grandfather was a graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1949. And he was thrusted into politics as a chiropractor. I say that because in 1949, it was illegal to be a graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic in the state of Illinois. Back then, it's going to be hard to believe, but politics were a little crooked, a little corrupt. There was a school in Lombard and a school in St. Louis, and these schools had a two year program to become a chiropractor. Now today, I go to school for eight years, four years undergraduate, then ten trimesters of chiropractic school. But back then it was only 18 months, or two years, depending on which of the two schools you picked. Grandpa didn't have to learn about DNA or MRIs. Those things didn't exist yet. Chiropractic school was a little different back then. So was medical school. Way different. Let's talk about chiropractic school. Palmer had longer days. They were 18, so the course there was 18 months long, because they went to school for longer periods of time. Their day started earlier and ended later than the other two schools. The other two schools had a two year program, so the amount of hours they were in the classroom was the same. That's what the law requires. But they tried to say because it was a two year program, it was a longer, more advanced program. In reality, it was the exact same number of hours. So from 49 to 63, my grandfather had to work illegally without a license. And what happened was, when you came in the clinic, you had to show my grandmother your driver's license. and the back of the license they had learned about a mark that showed that you worked for the state of Illinois. So grandma saw that mark she had a light switch under her desk she would hit that light switch and what happened was the light would go off in the room that grandpa was with the patient. When they saw the light the patient and grandpa had a back door they'd sneak out and across the street was a coffee shop. So if you came to your appointment as somebody from the state of Illinois was there to get my grandfather my grandmother will look at you drop a wink and Dr. Bob is running way behind, why don't you go grab some coffee across the street. And you knew that guy in that waiting room was there to arrest my grandfather. Now he always was one step ahead of him, he never got arrested. But lots and lots of chiropractors instead of Illinois were arrested for practicing chiropractic prior to 63. So my grandfather's friend started an organization called the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association. The Prairie State Chiropractic Association. Palmer School of Chiropractic Alumni. PSCA. PSCA. There's another one in North Carolina called the Palmetto State Chiropractic Association. Again, PSCA. And they fought up and down Illinois politics in order to get the license accredited and approved. But even after his grandfather was done with that fight, there was more fights now on the national level. Many people were arguing that what we were doing wasn't a real science. It wasn't a real thing. And I'm going to blame the AMA on that. Because if you go back and look at history, you'll see that the AMA had developed a thing called the Division on Quackery to contain and eliminate the practice of chiropractic. Now that sounds like a wicked conspiracy theory, correct? Goofy? You can look that up. Chester Wilk found out about that, a chiropractor in the Chicago area, and he sued the AMA as an Antitrust Sherman Act lawsuit. And he was able to win his lawsuit in the early 90s, the 1990s. The 1990s is important because chiropractic started in the 1890s. So almost a hundred years of lies about chiropractic was started by the AMA and Chester Wilk had to be the one to go after them. Now you've heard of me talking to Chester in the past when I talk about medical doctors having a bias towards chiropractors or not liking chiropractors and that has a lot to do with Chester Wilk's battle with the AMA. Chester Wilk had a lot to do with exposing this conspiracy about medical doctors going after chiropractors. And when he won his case at the United States Supreme Court, he was forced to print, the AMA was forced to print a whole article in the JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, fessing up to what they had done, admitting it. And that journal is still out there. It's public. I think you can look it up, but take a minute sometime and Google search the AMA versus Chester Wilk, W I L K. And you'll see what he went through and the troubles. I got to meet Chester's family. I got to meet Chester several times. It's quite a case. I've actually had the United States Supreme Court papers in my hands, in my possession for a little while. I got to read them. Wow, that was something. But let's go back to my grandfather now. So Grandpa's 1963 and he's licensed in Illinois. But in the federal level, we have a lot of problems. They're trying to say chiropractic is not real. Chiropractic colleges aren't real. And this is the time if you Google search, medical doctors versus chiropractors, you'll see a lot of the old great chiropractors on talk shows arguing behalf of chiropractic. You'll see them giving lectures, telling people how chiropractic works, explain the philosophy, the art and the science of chiropractic. And there was a lot of great ones in my grandfather's time that did this. And today I'm friends with a lot of their children and their grandchildren. My grandfather did this a little different though. Grandpa went to Washington, D. C. He went to Washington, D. C. and went to the Capitol. And he got laws passed. Some of the laws that got passed was, first of all, getting student loans approved. Federal student loans approved for chiropractic school. Now this doesn't sound like a big thing. But it really was. Because when he got the federal loans approved for chiropractic school, Now, the same governing bodies that govern medical schools, lawyer schools, every college, here in Illinois State, Illinois University, every college has an accrediting agency that allows them to get federal student loans. And so my grandfather passed for a chiropractic school to get federal student loans. This is about 1976, 1977. Now you can argue that our schools weren't real. Because the same agencies that accredited every other college in America accredited our colleges. And so if chiropractic education isn't real, then we wouldn't qualify for the federal loans. And so by getting the federal loans to cover chiropractic schools, now all of a sudden chiropractors really do go to real colleges. Our schools are legit, no matter what the AMA and other people that time are saying about us. The federal government said we were real. And the federal government said their schools were real. So if they're real. So that's how Grappa went about proving chiropractic school was real. The next thing he did was he got together with some chiropractors and they met Congressman Strong Thurman. Now, you can have a lot of opinions on Strong Thurman. I don't care who they are. I'm going to tell you what happened with chiropractic. Working with Congressman Strong Thurman, they were able to get chiropractic under Medicare. Why is this a big deal? Medicare is the federal health care system. The federal. Medicaid state. Medicare is federal. The entire 50 states. When they decided to work and work to get Medicare to cover chiropractic care, then the governing bodies that approve what's medical care and what's not Medicare, what is health care, what isn't health care, said chiropractic's covered. You can no longer say chiropractic. Care wasn't real because the same agencies that approve your medical doctor, your DO, your osteopath, everybody else under the sun, also was the same agency now that approves chiropractic care. So Grandpa didn't get Medicare to cover chiropractic because he thought getting us reimbursement by Medicare would be a good thing. That wasn't the big idea of the reimbursement. It was to legitimize what we do. Now he wasn't the only chiropractor at the table. There was, a half dozen of them, but he was one of them. And so my family has always been involved in politics on that level because Grandpa wanted to legitimize chiropractic through politics. And Grandpa wrote the handbook for, I talked about the AMA, but the chiropractic are a national association called the ICA. It's actually called the International Chiropractic Association because Dr. Palmer didn't want to be limited to just America, he wanted to get chiropractic everywhere. So we became the International Chiropractic Association, started by Dr. Palmer from Palmer College. My grandfather was a legislative chairman of the International Chiropractic Association. He ran all the legislative stuff. He was the guy, and he even wrote the handbook. So when you become a state rep, I'm the Illinois state rep of our national association. I was given the Bob Hulstaple's handbook on politics. And the thing that we look for in politics is the freedom of healthcare choice. As chiropractors, again, always make it alternative, if you have a lower back problem, if you have a health condition and you want to seek health care for it, as an American citizen, you have the right to pick whatever health care you choose to, and that would be chiropractors. In the 1990s, they came after my father, said he wasn't being ethical with Medicare, even though he had zero complaints, zero billing errors, and they demanded a lot of money from him, a lot of money from him, or all of his records. And dad knew that no chiropractor had ever won. a Medicare audit ever. Once. Zero. Zippo. Nobody. Because they never define what we have to prove for documentation to defend ourselves. So the chiropractors were audited. They gave the records up because they didn't feel like they were wrong. 100 percent were found guilty. And this is a federal offense, right? Medicare fraud is a federal offense. You could face jail time. So they came after my father. It was a pretty big deal. Matter of fact, yeah, I went all the way to Washington, D. C. and testified in front of Congress. Because he said that you can't come after me as an American citizen because I have the right to defend myself. I have a constitutional right to defend myself to have a fair trial. And because you won't define what I have to document and what's medical necessity in order to prove my care was necessary. And I've had zero complaints, zero billing issues, zero anything wrong. You can't, it's unconstitutional for you to question what I did. Because you won't define what I have to prove to do what I did. You can't. So now, they go around teaching us. We have classes. They used to literally go around every quarter and teach us. Now it's online, of course. And now they teach us what they want to show in a documentation, so now chiropractors can defend themselves. Again, I don't think my dad really wanted to get into politics, but he sure didn't want to give them all that money for not doing anything wrong. Who would? We're talking six figures they came after him for. So dad stood up and became a politician too, when he really wasn't planning on it. And my dad became the Medicare Director of the International Chiropractic Association after that. Because obviously, he understood the politics of Medicare. Now today, myself, I follow their footsteps. I'm in the same practice. We've been open since 1949. Grandpa, Dad, now me. And then what happened to me, what happened to all of us in 2020, healthcare and politics got interweaved again with the pandemic. And I wasn't looking to get that involved in politics. I wasn't looking to get involved in that kind of stuff. But what happened was COVID came and they came after chiropractors big time. And here in my county, the health department came to one chiropractor clinic. She called me and she said, I don't know what to do. They came in. They told me I can't get within six feet of my patient. How am I supposed to see my patient if I can't get within six feet of them? I get other phone calls from other chiropractors telling me, they tell me I gotta wear a mask. I'm like yeah, there's a state mandate. Everybody has to wear a mask. You're not an exception. And then they started passing laws on mandatory vaccines for healthcare providers and all this stuff started coming down. So I started calling My legislator is the way I was taught by my dad and my grandfather. I got to know them all, talk to them all, and we were able to finally come up with reasonable requests for chiropractors or reasonable requests for us to be able to see our patients and do what we termed as ease the strain on the medical system by taking in people we normally wouldn't see to help everything go through. And that made them want to keep us open and next thing you know, I am now, I became the Medicare and the legislative chairman of the International Chiropractic Association. So the Hulstubus family, my bloodline from my grandfather to my dad to myself, have always been very involved in chiropractic. Not politics, but chiropractic politics. We, we always vote for whoever gives chiropractors the most rights to be able to take care of our patients. We also vote for whoever protects our patients rights to be able to choose to come to a chiropractor. So if you ever drive by my office and you see a sign out front, that's why the sign's there. I have it up there because this is a person that fights for chiropractic rights for the patient to be able to see the chiropractor and for the chiropractor to be able to see the patient. So when it comes to politics, why am I called the legislative chiropractor, the political chiropractor? It's because I get involved because I'm fighting for patients right and access to chiropractic care. Just as my grandfather did in the 40s, the 60s, and the 70s, and my father did in the 90s and 2000s, I took over in 2020 and we're running with it ever since. So yeah, when people talk about politics, I tend to get a little involved. People go to political dinners and political functions are surprised to see me there, but that's why I'm there. So our clinic has always been very heavily involved in politics. Whether it's helping out Palmer College or helping out the International Chiropractic Association or the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association. We've always been there. We always will be there. And that's who we are. That's why we try to be leaders in our field. All right. So there you have it. Chiropractic and politics, a wholesome point of view. All right. Thanks for tuning in, listening. Hope this wasn't too boring, me talking about myself and my family. But if you have a question about chiropractic care, go ahead and leave me a message or a comment below and we'll get back to you. And that's my spiel on politics. Thanks everybody.