My journey to chiropractic from Riyadh
by Abdul H. S. Mohammed
Mohammed
The reason I call myself blessed is because my family moved from India to Saudi Arabia before I was born, allowing me the privilege of learning both cultures, and by the age of 15, I had learned four languages. This helped me tremendously to interact with people from Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, while living in Saudi Arabia. Now, how is that relevant?
We learn a lot of principles from our parents. Here is my best one: “help people.” As much as she would preach, my mom’s greatest words and acts are also connected to helping people. That is how I achieve my greatest contentment, whichever part of the world the people are from. This led on to my childhood ambition of helping people by improving their health. Hence, I chose my subjects as biology, chemistry and physics at one of the best schools in the country.
When I was 16, my best friend searched for treatments for his back pain, and he happened to try chiropractic. His absolute excitement from the benefits from chiropractic encouraged me to explore. The most impressive concept for me was the fact that chiropractic is non-invasive in restoring health. That idea blew me away, and after a tremendous amount of research, I decided helping people improve their health without any side effects was the refinement of my childhood ambition.
I began my chiropractic journey by finding a chiropractor. I come from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and there are only three chiropractors in the entire city. Google only knew one. I visited an American chiropractor, who spent almost an hour with me out of surprise that someone from the Middle East wanted to study chiropractic. He helped me get in touch with other chiropractors. He let me observe, made me do research, and assessed my knowledge for a couple of months. It has been an honor to be his friend for the past three years. There is no other way I would have learned as much.
With a lot of hurdles, including my family selling a house to pay my tuition, and after a lot of chiropractic explanations, it was finally time to be the only current chiropractic student from Saudi Arabia (and India, too). I arrived in England on 12th October, 2008 for the first time, not knowing a single person in the continent, and all my interactions were purely with strangers.
As part of my extra-curricular activities, I chose areas of interest that would help me enhance my knowledge and experience in chiropractic. What I have enjoyed the most is mentoring students from the years below. It has been a great learning experience with them. I have also been running the AECC philosophy club, known as “The Insight Club,” in which I organized external speakers to deliver lectures at the college. It is the only club in the college which brings in external chiropractors, and aims to motivate students.
As I understood more about chiropractic in the last three years of my education, new questions arose in my mind, and the biggest ones are: why have so many people never heard of chiropractic, and who is responsible for that?
By the second half of this century, I believe chiropractors have the potential to make sure everyone on the planet knows what chiropractic is. Like everyone who has teeth knows of dentistry, all of us do have a spine.
I believe all seven billion people must get their spines checked. A good place for me to expand chiropractic would be in a developing country like India, with the second highest population in the world, and only four chiropractors.
To be a financially rich man is not one of my priorities. Making chiropractic reach the poorest people is my paramount desire. My intentions are to expand chiropractic and its education in the East by taking care of one person at a time, and helping people who are dying from poor lifestyle, sickness care, and poverty. The whole idea is to build a healthy future for ourselves and the generations we will never meet. That’s The BIG Idea!