Our next Member Spotlight focuses on a man who truly needs no introduction, if you don't know him already prepared to be impressed.
Dave Newell (previously Mealing) completed a PhD in molecular biology at Plymouth University in the mid 80's. After narrowly not taking up a a post doc position at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, he secured a lecturing post at the Anglo European College of Chiropractic (AECC) in Bournemouth, England. Spending a fabulous 10 years teaching Biochemistry, playing in bands and becoming close friends with many chiropractors, in 1997 he took up a post as Director of Research at the chiropractic department in Macquarie Univeristy in Sydney, Australia. On his return, he became Director of Research at McTimoney College of Chiropractic, where he stayed for 7 years. In 2007 he returned to the AECC as a senior lecture in biomedical sciences and research and in 2012, became Director of Research at the AECC. In addition to this post he became Reader in MSK Research in 2013 and European Acadamy Registrar in 2015. He has, or is presently, supervising a number of PhDs in collaboration with a wide range of UK Univeristies. In his spare time, he walks the cliffs and forests of Dorset, runs on the beach regularly, writes songs and plays guitar with old friends and try's to keep up with the world as its pace starts to outstrip his own. He is blessed to have many close friends and colleagues within the chiropractic profession globally and, although not a clinician, thinks of this profession as his home.
The most recent professional honors for Dave were at the WFC/ECU Biennial Congress in Athens, Greece earlier this year where he won Second Prize alongside Jenni Bolton and Emily Diment for The UK PROMs collective initiative: Final results and reflections on an 18 month study and the Private Practice award alongside pal Jonathan Field for Direct Access to Chiropractic Services Versus Physician Referral: Analysis of a Large Data Set From The UK as part of the NCMIC Louis Sportelli Original Research Awards. Under the Student Awards for Posture Presentations, Dave and fellow FTCA member Andrew L. Vitiello co-authored with AECC student Ahmet Ulusan's to bring us Development of an Effective and Low-Cost System to Monitor PROMs Using Mobile Technology and the Internet: An Exploratory Trial of the Patient Health Information (PHI) Software Application which won Second Prize. You can read all about it in the June 2015 Issue of the WFC's Quarterly Report found here.
If you wish to explore Dave's musical talents (which I highly recommend) you can find them here.
FTCA: Tell us a little bit about your background.
DN: I was born in North London, what seems like a lifetime ago. I remember it well ;-). I was adopted by a wonderful older couple who brought me up with love and compassion, but with an overly zealous focus on Pentecostal religion. So from an early age I increasingly developed an aversion to the stories told about the world that make no sense and I think that's why I became fascinated with trying to understand the world as it really was. I discovered biology and a lifelong passion and delight at what was and is being discovered concerning how life works. It did and still does fill me with an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder at just how beautiful the mechanisms of life are and just how unlikely it is we are here at all, let alone conscious of it. None of my genetic or adopted family are academic so I was, and remain a bit of an oddity. I like that.
FTCA: What makes you tic, Dave Newell?
DN: I have developed a sense that everything is understandable if you work hard enough at trying to understand it. I have always had a somewhat questioning approach to things and dislike dogmatic views or anti intellectualism, as if not knowing something is somehow wholesome, spiritual and good. I guess my upbringing has forged that view. On the other hand I understand completely why folks believe in things that are not addressable by the scientific method. I respect absolutely personal beliefs outside of a scientific or professional context but do not think these should be brought to bear in professional life, much like the idea of the separation of the church and the state. I am not religious, but as Evelyn Hall once famously said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
FTCA: We noticed you have a Molecular Biology degree, wow! Has that helped you in your research endeavors?
DN: I always say to my PhD students that doing a PHD is more of an emotional development than an intellectual one. In my day, you were dumped in a lab with some rudimentary ideas and left to get on with it. This develops a strong sense of self reliance and a willingness to solve problems as, at least in my case, I blundered through the first year with little clue as how to think about, carry out, or interpret experimentation in the lab. It also makes you quite inventive, in that you have to come up with your own solutions to things, although my long suffering supervisor finally steered me into a fruitful line of enquiry. The sense of discovering something completely new also was exhilarating no matter that it was insignificant and of no interest to the wider world. It's like stumbling in a beach with no footprints in the ands and you know you are the first to walk there. Having a spreadsheet of data in front of me, yet to be analysed still gives me the same sense of ‘I wonder what's here?’ So despite the subject area being very different, it gave me generic skills in thinking about and potentially answering questions through getting it wrong an awful lot!!
FTCA: What drew you to chiropractic?
DN: To be honest, I applied for the job. I had already started some initial teaching within a University and knew that teaching was where I fitted best. As I away in the biog., I had some choices to make, the Bronx, NY being one, but my wife at the time didn't fancy the Bronx and Bournemouth was a lovely place to live, and the college was beautiful, small and welcoming, like a big family. I think that helped. I leant about the chiropractic over the years and have always got involved at all levels where I could. I spent many 1000’s of hours talking to colleagues and students and so I feel I know the profession and its issues pretty well. In the end it has given me my career, most of my closet friends and a significant number of the loves in my life, so pretty much most of my adult life has been dominated by the profession and spent amongst it's students and clinicians around the world.
FTCA: What research are you most proud of?
DN: From the very first publication I felt a buzz at seeing something in print. So in that sense I am proud of getting anything published at all. I think the most productive research so far has been with a friend and close colleague of mine, Jonathan Field, a chiropractic clinician with irrepressible questioning intellect. He and s colleague developed a web based system for collecting patient reported outcome measures in chiropractic clinics on a routine basis and to date this system has collected over 18,000 patient outcomes that plot the recovery or otherwise of patients attending chiropractic care in a large number of UK based clinics. This data over the last 5 years or so has allowed the exploration of many clinical questions and generated a number of publications and I guess I'm most proud of being involved with this area. However, there are many more things in the pipeline.
FTCA: Anything exciting in the works that you can share with us?
DN: I have long been interested in the impact of digital technology on health. I'm an avid possessor and wearer of tech and use it for monitoring fitness and activity. Together with another colleague at the AECC, Andrew Vitiello, we are developing a smart phone app that collects patient reported outcomes, allows in app communication between partitioner and patient, supports reminders and with the University of Ulster, we are adding objective activity monitoring thought the use of the smart phone sensors. Ultimately we want to track validated patient reported outcomes from the patients own reports on their symptomatology and objective measurement of their gait and physical activities such as walking, standing, sitting etc. we are looking for extra funding for this project so anyone out there with an extra few $1000 in the bank please contact us and we will happily take your money ;-)
FTCA: What advice do you have for anyone wanting to do research?
DN: You have to really be curious and you have to really want to know the truth. You have to give up sovereignty to the real world and accept that it might trash your deeply held and preconceived beliefs about things. You have to be prepared for things not to work, for everything to stay hidden or confused and for hours of reading and assimilating and questioning and despair and self doubt that there seems to be nothing moving forward. As I said it's more an emotional attrition than an intellectual one, but if your tenacious, bloody minded, dogged and creative then nature just might reveal a little bit that no one else has seen before, and that IS amazing and a deep privilege. Oh, and along the way you develop some seriously deep humility. Always an excellent trait I feel in the face of the awesome beauty that is reality.
FTCA: What are some of the best ways to support current and future research efforts?
DN: Money. We need to build capacity within the profession of serious full time professional researchers, embedded in mainstream universities, able to access the wider expertise end specialist environments that those academic institutions can bring. We also need the profession, ie clinicians in their practices to support these researchers by joining reserve ah clinic groups and consortiums to help collect data on the ground in real life situations in order to be able to generalise the results found. So professional resets hers, preferably in multidisciplinary or multi professional research teams, working with clinicians in the field willing and able to be part of clinical studies. In Europe this model has been developed very well, particularly in Scandinavia, and most notably in Denmark with money generated by a levy from a proportion of the amount the government pays toward every patient fee, put into a chiropractic research fund. This funds professional researchers including chiropractors as part of NIKKB and there is no doubt this model has created a team of people at a national University that has considerable impact in international MSK clinical research, and most would accept is the leading light in research approachable to the chiropractic profession in Europe. I know Canada has some excellent funding models as does the US but it really is funding in the end that leverages research, as then you can provide security and longevity of careers to talented and creative people who will in the end provide some answers the questions the profession needs answering.
FTCA: What opportunities exist for chiropractors wanting to get more involved in research?
DN: There are increasingly, opportunities for full funding for PhDs in Europe. In the UK this tends to pretty low stipends and so it normally is only attractive to younger graduates who probably want an academic career. Elsewhere in the world there are many funding models and opportunities and these are often now pooping up on Facebook sites so keep an eye out for these. As is said, for clinicians out there as it were, the best opportunities are to become involved in ongoing clinical studies run by professional researchers. Unless of course they have the time and resources to pursue University based training at a Masters or PhD level.
FTCA: Can you name a few articles you believe every chiropractor should be aware of?
DN: David Cassidy’s stroke study. The Lancet paper that talks about the global burden of disability. The Bronfort report. Mitch Haas’s many papers and clinical trials. Charlotte Le Beouf Yde and colleagues amd the Nordic Subpopulation Studies, recent studies emerging from NIKKB group including Jan Hartvigsen, Peter Kent and Alice Kongstead in Denmark.
FTCA: What’s your favorite thing about being an educator?
DN: Seeing that moment when the ‘ohhhh…yes…now I get it’ moment happens. In a world where all information is at the finger tips of everyone, teachers are no longer repositories of knowledge. What an experienced teacher is, is a person that has spent many years climbing over, finding ways around, tunnelling under or bludgeoning through the barriers and walls that stood between an understanding of something and where you started, I.e, not understanding. This experience can lead to the acquisition of skills that know increasingly how to traverse those barriers easier than a novice learner. What a good teacher can then do, if a student so wishes to listen, is to suggest a sneaky way around or over such barriers by an analogy or 20 here, a diagram or 8 there, a new perspective, or an excellent book or teaching resource. Like a wood worker that know just how the wood feels under the plane, these skills are not in any books as they are not facts at all. But they can be offered when an insurmountable hurdle rears its ugly head in the path of a student. And then watching someone who felt that would never move over such a barrier, climb, reach the zenith and then move onwards in their knowledge is the most wonderful thing I can think of. Having a student come back years later having recognised that that happened is the loveliest of gifts too. That's why I'm a teacher.
FTCA: What’s the most rewarding part of your work?
DN: The chance to change another human beings life for the positive. When you think about it, it's a pretty scary responsibility but in reality, we all get on with our every day, teachers and students alike, without really thinking about it too much. However, over the years people tell you and it increasingly dawns on you that, a word here, , a small snippet of an explanation, a diagram, a joke, rebuke or a kick up the jack-see, a kind word or gentle encouragement one insignificant rainy afternoon in September 20 years ago, had a lasting and positive effect on someone. And people do come back and tell you so. Then, despite your own struggles with finding meaning in life and any sense that you have done something worthwhile, you start realise that in fact you may after all, have already achieved something good. Having that happen is just amazing and humbling and deeply meaningful.
FTCA: How has being an FTCA member been beneficial for you?
DN: I am a member of a number of FB pages and I find all of them fascinating, sometimes challenging, and often highly informative with the research they point out or highlight. This is true very much of FTCA and it has become a primary go to place whenever a notification pops up. The discussions are honest, frank, informative, and professional and it is clear that there is a strong motivation from members to move the profession forward and loose the chains of the past that some others in the profession see as important. It certainly feels like an intellectual home on FB for me and although I probably don't post as much as I should, as I try to give priority to some of the European professional pages when I can, as a international forum of like-minded chiropractic clinicians, educators and researchers it is high in my list of regular drop ins.