• Richards D
• Grace S

• Chiropractors’ Association of Australia (CAA)
• New Zealand Chiropractors' Association
• Open Access Document
• Practice Patterns, Physicians'
• Vitalism

Objective: Although vitalism is controversial in chiropractic, discussions about it have largely been opinion-based. Only a limited amount of research has explored the meaning and value of vitalism to the profession. This paper investigates whether the findings of initial research on the meaning and value of vitalism might be generalized to a broader sample of the profession.

Methods: A quantitative research design involved an online survey of the chiropractor members of the Chiropractors’ Association of Australia and of the New Zealand Chiropractors’ Association. Invitations to participate were issued by these organizations. Respondent data were analysed via the IBM SPSS statistics package and involved respondent demographics; confirmatory factor analysis of the 3 constructs belief in vitalism, belief in neo-vitalism, and value of vitalism; and whether the mean scores for each construct were significantly affected by demographic variables.

Results: Respondent demographics broadly matched the demographics of registered chiropractors in Australia and New Zealand. Significant majorities of respondents endorsed traditional chiropractic meanings of vitalism as representing a positive, legitimate, and valuable essence of the profession’s identity and services. Majorities also disagreed that vitalism has no place in contemporary or evidence-based practice. Vitalism was endorsed statistically significantly more or endorsed less by several different groups of respondents. Much smaller minorities held views different from the majorities.

Conclusion: Majorities of respondents supported the findings of the previous research on the meaning and value of vitalism, while minorities did not. While these results suggest that the findings of the previous research might be cautiously generalized to the broader sample of the profession, such generalizability is limited by sample selection and size.

Author keywords: Chiropractic; Survey Research; Vitalism; Practice Patterns

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