Chiropractic’s Whole Health Moment: Workshop Maps Profession’s Path Into Team Care

The paper argues that the profession’s founding philosophy, with its emphasis on the body’s innate resilience and holistic well-being, overlaps in striking ways with a healthcare reform movement now gaining institutional traction in the United States, and that chiropractors could become recognized contributors within multidisciplinary teams rather than remaining on the periphery of conventional medicine.

The commentary is not a clinical trial or a systematic review. It is a synthesis of perspectives gathered at the 2025 Association of Chiropractic Colleges Education Conference and Research Agenda Conference, held in New Orleans, Louisiana. Two separate 60-minute workshop sessions convened 105 attendees, including chiropractic academicians, researchers, practitioners, students, and organizational leaders, most of them based in North America and primarily in the United States. Participants worked in 14 small groups to answer two questions: how the chiropractic profession aligns with whole health, and how chiropractors can contribute to whole health in clinical practice and healthcare education. Notes taken by group scribes yielded 401 distinct comments, which the authors analyzed using an inductive thematic approach, grouping them into 14 themes.

Whole health, as defined in a recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, is physical, behavioral, spiritual, and socioeconomic well-being as defined by individuals, families, and communities, delivered through interprofessional, team-based approaches anchored in longitudinal relationships to promote well-being, disease prevention, and restoration of health. The commentary traces parallel origins: both whole health and chiropractic arose from a desire to reform healthcare systems perceived as overly mechanistic and disease-oriented. Chiropractic, founded in the midwestern United States in the late 19th century, was grounded in a vitalistic view of health, holding that the body has an innate tendency to seek and maintain homeostasis, and early chiropractic also embraced holism, a non-reductionist view requiring consideration of the whole person rather than only a condition or symptoms.

Workshop participants identified historical alignment in two principal areas. The first was innate healing and resilience: the earliest definition of chiropractic states that the body’s functions are performed by Innate in health and disease, a vitalistic philosophy participants linked to whole health’s encouragement of self-care and lifestyle medicine. One group summarized the shared outlook with the phrase that health is not merely the absence of sickness, but the presence of flourishing and vitality. The second was person-centeredness and patient values. Participants described chiropractors as having a patient-centered focus, meeting patients where they are, and noted that the profession’s multi-modal scope of practice allows for choice in patient care, echoing the U.S. Veterans Health Administration’s Whole Health Program practice of asking patients what matters to them.

Several themes bridged past and future. Holism emerged as a continuing thread, with participants noting that chiropractors are educated to consider more than the chief complaint, and asserting that the profession should become more conversant about how health is shaped by the contexts where people live, work, study, and play, including screening for socioeconomic risk factors that can be documented with ICD-10 Z-Codes. Therapeutic alliance and patient empowerment formed another bridge: given chiropractic’s historical foundation of trusted relationships and high patient satisfaction, participants saw an opportunity to coach patients toward self-care and behavioral change, a shift one group described as moving away from a you-need-me paradigm toward you’ve-got-this.

Direct access also featured prominently. The commentary cites a U.S. National Center for Health Workforce Analysis projection of a shortage of 87,150 full-time-equivalent primary care physicians by 2037, expected to be especially acute in non-metropolitan areas. As direct access providers, chiropractors can deliver guideline-concordant care without referral, which the authors suggest may be particularly important in rural and medically underserved regions where specialist referrals carry financial and geographic barriers. Participants also saw chiropractic visits as checkpoints that can detect at-risk patterns before they escalate, with multiple groups noting an opportunity for chiropractors to recognize and triage mental health concerns and engage in suicide prevention efforts by connecting at-risk individuals with appropriate resources.

Therapeutic conservatism, preventive health, and longitudinal care rounded out the overlapping themes. The profession’s historical preference for initiating care with the least invasive options mirrors today’s stepped care approach and is reflected in best practice guidelines for back pain, and the authors argue that offering evidence-based first-line care for spinal pain can reduce care escalation and downstream costs. On prevention, recent practice analysis research shows chiropractors frequently counsel patients on physical activity, diet, and stress reduction, although such services are rarely reimbursable when delivered by a chiropractor, meaning they may go undocumented. The commentary also observes that chiropractic treatment plans commonly involve multiple visits over a course of care, which may provide additional opportunities to develop therapeutic alliances and observe health longitudinally, something one group called multiple touchpoints for multiple aspects of health.

Looking forward, participants emphasized evidence-based practice, communication and advocacy, integration into multidisciplinary teams, and forward-facing education. They called for high-quality research to drive the profession forward, including developing measures of whole health and identifying implementation strategies for whole health practice behaviors. On integration, participants noted that chiropractic’s presence in multidisciplinary settings is accelerating, particularly around chronic pain management and opioid alternatives, with examples ranging from private practices to federally funded programs such as the U.S. Veterans Health Administration, some of which have incorporated chiropractic into whole health service lines. Educational recommendations included embedding whole health competencies such as psychosocial assessment, interdisciplinary collaboration, and trauma-informed care into pre- and post-graduate curricula, and expanding interprofessional education, which recent scoping reviews associate with improved collaborative behaviors and patient-centered care.

The authors are careful about scope. The commentary explicitly states that it is not intended to produce generalizable knowledge or represent the chiropractic profession at large. The workshop prompts were designed to elicit perceived alignment and future contributions rather than to explore non-alignment, risks, or dissenting perspectives, and the discussion was largely positive toward whole health. Attendees were mostly affiliated with academic institutions and healthcare delivery systems in North America, and the authors acknowledge that chiropractors in other regions and cultural contexts may not share the conference group’s investment in the whole health paradigm. The project was determined not to be human subjects research by the Life Chiropractic College West Institutional Review Board, and participants were informed that their contributions could be used in a published manuscript.

The conclusions are correspondingly measured. The whole health paradigm, the authors write, presents an opportunity for chiropractors to be recognized contributors within multidisciplinary teams, using their expertise to aid chronic disease prevention, patient empowerment, and healthcare delivery innovations, but continued education and training, policy changes, and further research are required for the profession to provide value within that framework. The commentary closes with eight proposed calls to action for chiropractic stakeholders, including embedding whole health competencies in training, pursuing research on preventive benefits, integrating chiropractic into spine pain care pathways with interoperable electronic health records, and reducing structural barriers such as insurance coverage gaps for preventive services delivered by chiropractors.

Subject of Research: A commentary on chiropractic's alignment with the whole health paradigm based on workshop perspectives from a North American educational conference.

Article Title: Whole health and chiropractic: a commentary on historical roots, contemporary relevance, and future directions

Article References: Maiers, M., Ward, K., Ramcharan, M., Benjamin, L., Burton, W., Cupler, Z., Gudavalli, M. R., Halloran, S., Holmes, B., Huybrecht, S., Jenkins, J., Johnson, C. D., Majoris, N. C., Margrave, A., Moos, E., Morales, V., Muller, R. D., Passmore, S., Price, M. R., … Zhang, Q. (2026). Whole health and chiropractic: a commentary on historical roots, contemporary relevance, and future directions. Chiropractic & Manual Therapies, 34(1), Article 47. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12998-026-00676-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12998-026-00676-6

Keywords: chiropractic, whole health, biopsychosocial care, integrative medicine, workshop commentary, preventive health, interprofessional education, spine care, patient-centered care, health policy, Whole, health