1975 — The Digest of Chiropractic Economics published the report of National College of Chiropractic president Joseph Janse, DC, ND, concerning the first interdisciplinary meeting to review the “Research Status of Spinal Manipulative Therapy.”

Cover of the New England Journal of Chiropractic for Spring 1975 featured the Bethesda headquarters of the National Institutes of Health

Organized by the National Institute of Neurological & Communicative Diseases and Stroke (NINCDS) and held at its facilities in Bethesda, Md., the workshop brought together clinicians, scientists and political representatives from the fields of chiropractic, osteopathy and allopathic medicine. Originally intended as a workshop on chiropractic, the title of the meeting was changed to avoid alienating the non-DC participants.

Dr. Murray Goldstein, an osteopathic physician and official at NINCDS, planned the meeting, which reviewed the meager available literature on spinal manipulative therapy (SMT). The faculty of the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College collected thousands of abstracts of relevant scientific articles. This compendium eventually resulted in the Chiropractic Research Abstracts Collection (CRAC), a valuable resource for the subsequent scientific investigations of SMT.

The general consensus of the meeting was that available scientific information did not permit any strong conclusions about the clinical value of SMT, but that much greater research in this field of health care was definitely warranted. Many chiropractic scholars perceive this landmark meeting as the moment of birth for the science of chiropractic.