Dr. Michael Flynn with U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, at WHO meeting in Geneva, 2010.

Dr. Flynn is a 1975 graduate of Texas Chiropractic College. During the course of his career he has served as President of the Chiropractic Association of Louisiana and the Louisiana State Board of Examiners. For six years he was state delegate to the American Chiropractic Association (ACA) and he then served six years on the ACA Board of Governors, two as chairman. He was the first chairman of the National Chiropractic Legal Action Fund. He is a past recipient of the ACA Chiropractor of the Year Award and for the past eight years has chaired the Student ACA (SACA) Committee. Dr. Flynn is a member of the Board of the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress and was recently elected to the Association for the History of Chiropractic Board of Directors.

A second generation chiropractor, Dr. Flynn is the son of the late Dr. John Flynn, who practiced for 20 years in Louisiana before legal recognition of the profession, and was president of the state association in 1974 when the state became the last to license and regulate the profession in the United States.

Before we speak about your work with the World Federation of Chiropractic and the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress, could you share some of your early experiences with chiropractic?

My earliest experiences with chiropractic were as a young boy growing up as the son of a chiropractor in South Louisiana. My dad’s story is that he came home to Detroit after World War II and found that his mother, while he was gone, had suffered severe headaches. A friend had recommended that she see a new kind of doctor, who was advertising that he could help with headaches. My grandmother had been to all the medical doctors—it was one pill or potion after another. They finally told her that she just had to live with it. The doctor she went to for her first adjustment was Dr. Derifield, in Dearborn, Michigan.

When my dad came back, grandma said, “Son, I had these horrible headaches, and I went to the chiropractor, and I felt so much better. And now my headaches are gone, since he balanced my neck. I want you to consider becoming a chiropractor.” Dad had never heard the word before, but he took her advice and enrolled at Palmer. Four years later in 1954, when he graduated, B.J. Palmer, who was the president of the school at the time, told students who had not yet made a decision where they wanted to practice, to think about those four states—Massachusetts, New York, Mississippi and Louisiana—where there was not yet licensure for chiropractors. My dad and another friend of his chose Louisiana. He took mom, my two brothers and sister, and we came down to South Louisiana—50 miles southwest of New Orleans—not knowing a soul. I grew up in a time where my dad and consequently his family were subject to social and economic stress and hardship.  Ask any son of a chiropractor how many times he heard someone say, “My daddy says your daddy is a quack.” Dad always had lots of patients, but he also had days where he came home early because his friend, the sheriff, had called him to say that there were medical investigators in town, and he had to close the clinic today.