In 1999, the world was getting ready to welcome in the year 2000...whilst worrying that the millennium bug would bring about the apocalypse. Livin’ La Vida Loca, Baby One More Time, and Mambo No. 5 were in constant rotation on the radio. Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace dominated the Box Office, with Notting Hill, The Matrix, and The Sixth Sense also high up the charts. In the US, the first seasons of The Sopranos and The West Wing were aired – whilst on terrestrial TV in the UK (which still only had five channels), Holby City, Spaced and The League of Gentleman debuted. On multiple fronts, excitement was in the air. And in St Helier, a thirty-three year old Charles Robottom opened the Orchard Chiropractic & Health Centre.
Here he is with his first appointment book (of course, there was no online booking back then!)
As Charles established the Centre, the world continued to change. Thankfully, the millennium bug did not result in the apocalypse. People started to listen to their pop hits on their MP3 players, and then their iPods and iPhones. There’d be a third Star Wars trilogy, as well as three more Matrix movies.
Whilst he might not have saved the galaxy quite so many times as Luke Skywalker or Neo, since 1999, Charles has sure saved a lot of people from shoulder, neck, and lower back pain. Amidst all those cultural shifts, he has used chiropractic (invented in 1895) and sacro occipital (invented in the 1920s) technique to improve the lives of the countless patients who have walked through his doors, with sports injuries, sciatica, and a whole host of other ailments. After twenty-five years in business, there’s very little this Jersey chiropractor hasn’t treated!
In the early to mid-twentieth century, chiropractors were viewed with some scepticism by the rest of the medical establishment, who considered the claims of what practitioners could do with their hands nothing more than pseudo-science. The widespread acceptance of chiropractic, and the increased number of chiropractors in the UK and Jersey, is actually a relatively recent development. In fact, also 25 years ago the General Chiropractic Council (GCC) was established by the UK Parliament to regulate the profession and today there are almost 3,800 members registered with the GCC across the UK. Nowadays, chiropractors are a valued and integral part of the medical community, working hand in hand with GPs to achieve the best outcomes for patients.
We have technologies now that would have been far beyond the wildest dreams of the men who invented chiropractic and the gentle sacro occipital technique (SOT), Daniel David Palmer and Major Bertrand DeJarnette. We don’t think anything of carrying around tiny computers in our pockets with us everywhere we go – they wouldn’t know what computers were! And how would you explain to them the omnipresent force of the internet and now social media, which was still in its very earliest stages when the Orchard Chiropractic & Health Centre opened? That’s before you get on to the seemingly inescapable dominance of AI, the opportunities and perils of which we are still struggling to get our heads around.
But as the technologies that shape our daily lives keep changing in all kinds of ways, the Chiropractors at the Orchard Chiropractic & Health Centre have retained their patient-centred approach, the central tenets of which were established over a century ago. And whatever new developments the world has in store over the next twenty-five years, that at least, won’t change.
Here's to 25 happy years of Orchard Chiropractic & Health Centre and counting..
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