I wrote this story many years ago, in 2010.

Based on a true story — well, sort of.

Once upon a time, there was a small town named Sickville, USA. Sickville was an economically thriving community, and its financial well-being depended on many healthcare companies that regularly provided services to the citizens living within its borders.

According to the local census bureau, Sickville had a population of 10,000. Approximately 2,500 of the townspeople were healthcare practitioners. The remainder of the residents worked in other health-related occupations.

Arrest them all for murder!

Many of Sickville’s citizens were staff members at one of three local hospitals. Some in the community drove the 50 delivery trucks that routinely carried medical supplies to 20 community drugstores. Others worked for the locally owned ambulance company. The small town proudly operated 100 state-of-the-art patient transport vehicles.

Almost every resident of Sickville earned a good living. Ninety percent of the population had no mortgage or car payments. The people of Sickville seemed to have plenty of money to buy whatever they wanted, and many of them had become wealthy.

Unfortunately, most of Sickville’s population was not very healthy. The citizens couldn’t enjoy the money they were earning. People were often too sick to go on vacation and take part in other fun activities. Most of the townspeople were challenged with chronic colds and recurring bouts of influenza and coronaviruses. Others suffered from autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. A growing number of citizens had recently developed more severe illnesses, like cancer and leukemia.

Very few of the town’s residents had all of their body parts. In Sickville, it was considered a standard practice to have elective surgery for precautionary measures. Useless organs that often caused problems later in a person’s life, like gallbladders, appendices, and tonsils, were routinely removed by one of the town’s 200 surgeons. Men and women were also regularly encouraged to have vasectomies and hysterectomies after the age of 40. These were common-sense health practices routinely taught and reinforced in the Sickville Public School System.

A tiny number of individuals living in Sickville (about 150 people) were homeless. They were the ones who didn’t have an official disease yet, but it was only a matter of time before they would be diagnosed with one. Every resident living in Sickville became unhealthy sooner or later. That’s why there was always such a significant demand for medical doctors and other healthcare services.

The townspeople referred to the homeless as the poor and unfortunate ones who roamed around looking for handouts. None of them could afford quality healthcare services, so they missed out on the many disease prevention programs that the more affluent citizens took advantage of.

A new town ordinance had recently been passed requiring every citizen living in Sickville to visit a medical physician at least once per month. Regular medical visits ensured that all residents, except the homeless, were up to date on vaccines, antiviral drugs, and other preventive healthcare protocols mandated by the local medical board.

Preventive care was a big deal in Sickville. The town’s medical doctors had determined many years earlier that the only way to prevent newer, deadlier diseases was to continue developing and administering an assortment of vaccines. The medical board had declared an all-out war on sickness and mainly invisible germs. Germs were everywhere, and people needed to hide from them. Hand sanitizers and disinfectants were produced in a local factory and were an essential part of fighting dangerous germs in the atmosphere.

Another new law required the residents of Sickville to display their diagnosed diseases on the front of their driver’s licenses. The local medical board felt it was important for the town council members to keep track of all active illnesses in the community. This was because officially diagnosed diseases translated into profitable revenue streams for the entire town.

One September afternoon, something very unusual happened in Sickville. A new doctor moved into the only vacant building in town. This practitioner was different from the other doctors. He prescribed no medicines, administered no vaccines, performed no surgeries, and he didn’t wear a white coat. He called himself a CHIROPRACTOR.

Quickly, the chiropractor opened his professional office inside the once-vacant building. The people of Sickville were inquisitive about the new doctor. He had brought only a few chairs for his waiting room and a strange-looking table he used to treat his patients.

At first, the chiropractor only took care of the community’s homeless people. He bartered with his patients instead of charging them a fee. In return, the patients painted his office and helped him in other ways. He’d ask his patients to lie on the strange table and would feel their backs. Every once in a while, he’d push his hands down onto their spines. That’s pretty much all the chiropractor would do.

It didn’t take very long for gossip to get out to the other people of Sickville. The chatter began traveling fast about how the chiropractor practiced a strange brand of medicine. Many townspeople thought he was crazy – a quack!

After a while, some of the other citizens in town began going to the chiropractor. They enjoyed visiting him because he taught them interesting concepts they’d never heard before from other healthcare practitioners.

The chiropractor explained to his new patients how the human brain sent essential messages to the entire body through the spinal cord, and how the spine protected the spinal cord. He also explained how spinal adjustments helped realign the spinal bones when they became misaligned. The chiropractor told his patients that once the spinal bones were aligned correctly, the brain’s messages could get through to the entire body, and health could be restored naturally, without taking drugs.

The chiropractor also explained that when the nervous system worked properly and wasn’t interfered with by misaligned spinal bones, the townspeople would be healthier and wouldn’t have to remove their body parts surgically. He explained that the removal of tonsils, appendices, and gallbladders was not a smart thing to do. The chiropractor also went on to explain that receiving vaccines was a waste of time and that the shots harmed their immune systems. The chiropractor told the community that many of the harmful diseases people in Sickville were experiencing were coming from the preventive vaccines and that vaccinations, in general, were preventing good health from being expressed in their bodies.

A year after the chiropractor opened his office, many of the townspeople were visiting him for spinal adjustments. Thousands of Sickville’s residents were now under regular chiropractic care. The new chiropractic patients stopped visiting the other doctors, and they stopped buying prescription drugs and getting vaccinations. They also stopped scheduling surgeries to remove their organs.

Because people weren’t visiting medical doctors, the physicians began moving out of Sickville to look for work in other nearby communities. The surgeons left, too, because no one wanted to have their body parts removed.

It didn’t take very long for the three hospitals to feel the effects of a decrease in business. All but one of the facilities had to close its doors. The one hospital that remained open had a lot of vacant space and decided to rent the empty parts of the building to the new chiropractor. He opened a satellite office and hired 5 additional chiropractors to help take care of all the incoming chiropractic patients.

Everyone in Sickville was beginning to get well. Almost all the diseases the townspeople had experienced for so many years had miraculously disappeared.

Unfortunately, as luck would have it, the community of Sickville began to experience financial hard times. A recession had mysteriously hit the entire area. It soon turned into an economic depression. The town was only able to keep one ambulance operating, and all but one drugstore had to close due to low sales. Financially speaking, it was a terrible time.

At one point, the economy got so bad that many townspeople lost their jobs. Many were forced to take out mortgages on their homes to pay for living expenses. After a while, residents couldn’t make their mortgage payments and lost their homes to foreclosure. The previously wealthy citizens of Sickville were broke and forced to live in shelters with the other homeless people.

One night, the local members of the medical board got together and held a secret meeting. They discussed at length the town’s shaky economy. They blamed the community’s financial problems on the new chiropractor who had moved into town. They concluded it was his radical and unscientific ideas that had destroyed most of the healthcare businesses in Sickville.

The medical board conducted a vote and unanimously decided to outlaw the practice of chiropractic in Sickville. They rationalized that the practice of chiropractic was based on pseudoscience and was a direct threat to the health and well-being of all citizens. In one secret meeting, the medical board solved the town’s biggest problem.

The very next day, the chiropractor cleared out his office and left Sickville. The townspeople were upset at first, but they soon forgot about the strange doctor with the funny table that pressed on backs.

A new practitioner immediately moved into the chiropractor’s vacant office. He was a real doctor who prescribed drugs, performed surgeries, administered vaccines, and, most importantly, wore a white coat.

Within a few months, people started getting sick all over again. Soon after that, the medical doctors returned to town. Even the surgeons came back to Sickville. People were losing their health rapidly and desperately needed to have useless organs removed. The hospital system seemed to expand overnight. Within a year, the three hospitals were back in business and filled. There was even talk about building a fourth one.

The ambulance company was busy again, just like old times. They managed to increase their fleet of patient transport vehicles to 125. People were sicker than ever. There were so many different epidemics taking place at the same time that the medical board decided to purchase three times the usual amount of vaccines for the hospitals and drugstores.

Sickville had returned to the way it was before the strange doctor, who pressed on backs, had come to town. People were so ill; they were dying faster than at any other time in the town’s recorded history.

The only consolation for the Sickville townspeople was that the economy had finally begun to recover. Because the citizens were so ill, they generated revenue streams like never before. Almost every citizen managed to climb out of debt. Money was changing hands like crazy, and the residents of Sickville were able to buy back their homes and purchase new cars.

The depression was officially over, and the economy, unlike the townspeople, was healthier than ever.

Are you looking for a quick, interesting read?

It’s vacation time, and summer is winding down. Are you going on a beach trip or headed on a flight somewhere else and don’t have the time to invest in a full-length novel?

Read The One-Hour Diner…

Read The Missing…

Read Holograms

Give one of my novellas a try. They’re all quick reads with fascinating plots designed to be devoured in a few hours or less.

Happy reading!

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Upcoming Fiction from John Reizer

Truth Engines (September 1st)

The Bike Courier (October 31st

Somewhere Between Rome and Home (2027)

The Truth Told Through Fiction

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