COVER GLOBAL LEADERSHIP East meets west ver since she can remember, Carol Donohue had wanted to move to India. Growing up in New York, she was always fascinated with Indian culture and found their women most beautiful. It probably did not come as a surprise to her family and friends that not long after she graduated from Parker University she announced she is going to start her chiropractic practice in Gurgaon, just southwest of Delhi in India. “It just kind of connected that I could do chiro-practic and live in India,” says Donohue, who was recently in Mumbai volunteering with 86 other chiropractic doctors and students from various parts of the world for the Sant Nirankari Mission. In January she started working at OrthoCure, a chain of orthopedic rehab clinics in India. Donohue is the most recent North-Ameri-ca-trained chiropractor to join the growing number of DCs that have set up a practice in this South Asian nation. To date, 10 chiropractors permanently practice across major cities in India – all belonging to the Indian Association of Chiropractic Doctors (IACD), a full member of the World Federation of Chiropractic. Launched in 2006, the IACD aims to promote and bring chiropractic to the Indian population. Although one of its ultimate goals is to establish a chiropractic school there, for now the IACD is focused on bringing more licensed MARI-LEN DE GUZMAN is the editor of Canadian Chiropractor magazine. You can email her at mdeguzman@ annexbusinessmedia.com 20 Canadian Chiropractor April 2018 E Canadian doctors’ quest to bring chiropractic to India by mari -len de guzman chiropractors to practice in India. And with only 10 full-time and nearly a dozen part-time chiro-practors, amid a population of more than 1.3 billion, there’s plenty of room for growth. “We are starting to see more chiropractors coming to India,” notes Dr. Kalpesh Ghelani, president of the IACD. He opened his clinic in Mumbai two years ago and has since been trav-elling back and forth between India and the States, where he also runs the Meridian Chiro-practic clinic in Schaumburg, Ill. Just in the last six months, three more chiro-practors from the U.S. and Canada have set up shop in India, according to Ghelani. The growth may be slow, but there appears to be a swelling of interest among chiropractors from the west want-ing to take their healing skills to a country that knows very little about chiropractic but can greatly benefit from it. Since 2013, chiropractors from different parts of the world have been volunteering at the chiropractic clinic at the Sant Nirankari Mission, held twice a year. Mission trip Much of the Indian people’s brush with chiro-practic is through mission trips. The Sant Nirankari Mission is one of the biggest missions to include chiropractic services in their commu-nity outreach. The organization hosts a bi-annual event, called Samagam, that takes place every November in Delhi and January in Mumbai. It is a non-denominational spiritual gathering at-tended by millions of people from all over India. For decades, the event has provided free medical, eye and dental services and, over the last five years, a chiropractic clinic at the Samagam. That is where 87 chiropractic doctors and students last January volunteered for five days, assessing and treating those who came to the clinic. www.canadianchiropractor.ca Photo: Mari-Len De Guzman
Chiropractic + Naturopathic Doctor April 2018: Page 20
