By Arlan Fuhr, DC
Let me tell you. It all started in 1967 when I practiced in a small farming town in southern Minnesota. We saw 1,000 chiropractic patients a week, and our elbows and wrists were killing us. We had to find a better way to put force into the body without causing harm to our own.
I had told a dentist friend who was a patient about our problems. He came into the office one day and showed me a piece of equipment that dentists used to split wisdom teeth. It had a scalpel on the end of it, which he jokingly recommended we remove. The good news was that the instrument worked, and it started a 60-year quest to build a chiropractic adjusting instrument that was painless for the patient and exactly what we needed to save our elbows and wrists.
At Activator Methods International, we went through many reiterations while building the Activator V. It is a fifth-generation electronic instrument that took a lot of expertise to develop.
At the start, we employed a biomechanist from Baylor Medical School to be our head of biomechanical research. We were very fortunate that he agreed to assist us because we have the only handheld cordless electronic adjusting instrument on the market today.
That same biomechanist has not only written a paper on the forces of our instruments, but he also has been instrumental in the development of the new pediatric tip and geriatric tip for the Activator V. The tips have been generated to optimize force reduction, making them ideal for the delicate adjustments needed in pediatric and geriatric care. By the year 2030, over half of the population of the United States will be over the age of 65, so it is prudent to have a way to adjust this population of patients.
We have long been interested in chiropractic safety for the geriatric population. I wanted to know if we could safely adjust an osteoporotic femur head. To learn this, we needed to find some osteoporotic subjects for the project.
Our research center in Madrid, Spain, could do this project, but we needed to supply the center with appropriate test subjects. It was a great cost but proved to be a huge successs.
We found out that it was safe to adjust an osteoporotic hip, and after three weeks of care, the trabecular bone tissue in the heart of the femur started to grow again. Chiropractic never ceases to amaze me. A paper on the osteoporotic hip was published in Scientific Report, a branch of the famous journal Nature, which reaches 80% of the academic community.
About a week ago, a student approached me at our Florida Chiropractic Association booth and asked why an AAI is more money to own than other handheld adjusting instruments. Her question brought about the thought that other students and doctors were likely asking the same question. Therefore, I will attempt to address it here.
The AAIs are made of the highest-grade stainless steel available, and they have a two-year warranty. An Activator doctor told me his Activator II had failed him recently. I asked him how long he had used the device, and he said, “Only 25 years.” This made me chuckle. Does that tell you anything about our quality?
Now, here’s the real reason for the cost! Our Activator team has spent the past five years bringing Activator into compliance with the upcoming regulations that will be required in 2025. Not only was it a huge amount of work, but it also cost our company a half-million dollars.
New regulatory bodies called ISO 13485, MEDSAP, and CE all have different regulations that will be adopted by the FDA in 2025. If your company is not compliant, you will not be able to sell your product. Also, if you happen to be sued, you will be in real trouble. So that is why an AAI costs more than the knockoffs.
Another reason you want an AAI in practice is that it is not a matter of if you will be sued but when you will be sued in today’s litigious society. Activator Methods International has a senior instructor who has defended Activator for over 40 years and never lost a case. He has been that successful because we have the research to back us up — over 150 research papers and 30 clinical trials to date. No other instrument technique matches this dedication. In fact, we know of no other instrument that has any clinical trials.
We now have over 2,000 proficiency-rated doctors all over the world. In the last month alone, we referred 17,000 patients to those doctors through a list that we maintain. We have a program in chiropractic universities that allows students to take our proficiency test. As soon as they get a license to practice chiropractic, they are placed on that proficiency-rated list.
That can be beneficial to new practitioners. For instance, the Joint and Chiro-One like to hire Activator-proficient doctors of chiropractic because they help bring in new patients to their operations. We take care of our doctors for their entire careers.
About the Author
Arlan W. Fuhr, DC, Founder and Chairman of Activator Methods International, is the co-inventor of the Activator Adjusting Instrument and the Activator Method Chiropractic Technique. To learn more about Activator Methods visitActivator.com.
