This textbook occupies a deliberately different position from the numbered volumes of the Black Book Series. It carries no series number, and it does not presuppose a reader who has already studied Palmer or Gonstead listing, the Vertebral Subluxation Complex, or any other clinical model taught elsewhere in the PCC PRESS catalog. It is written for the reader who is encountering chiropractic technique for the very first time — the pre-course student who has not yet chosen, and should not yet be asked to choose, a clinical path.
At PALMS Chiropractic College, every student begins here. Before a student commits to a particular clinical lineage — before they study Palmer listing, before they specialize in any single technique system — they learn the National Listing System and Diversified Technique as a shared general foundation. This is not a matter of one system being taught first because it is simpler, or more basic, or a stepping stone to be set aside once the "real" material begins. It is taught first because it is genuinely general: a full-spine analytical and adjustive system built, from its founding at National College in 1906, around broad scope and general applicability, and because a practitioner who has mastered it can read a spine and communicate clinically with any colleague, regardless of which lineage that colleague later chose.
I want to be direct about something that matters to me as an educator, and that I hope shapes how you read every chapter of this book: this volume does not exist to argue that the National Listing System is superior to Palmer listing, or that Diversified Technique is superior to any other adjustive method. It exists to give every PALMS graduate a genuinely common foundation, so that the choice they eventually make — Palmer, Gonstead, Thompson, or another lineage entirely — is an informed choice built on real fluency in a second, equally legitimate tradition, not a default reached because no alternative was ever properly taught.
You may read this volume before you encounter any other PCC PRESS textbook, and many pre-course students do exactly that. You may equally well read it after you have already worked through material from elsewhere in the catalog, returning to it once you are ready to add a second analytical language to the one you have already begun learning. Either order serves the book's purpose. What matters is that you read it as a complete, self-contained foundation in its own right — because that is exactly what it was written to be.