After serving in the U.S. Army he determined that he wished to pursue chiropractic as a lifetime career and upon discharge he enrolled in the Texas Chiropractic College in San Antonio, Texas. He graduated as a Salutatorian from the Texas Chiropractic College in December of 1959.
In the latter part of 1959 Dr. Julius Trolio, President of the Texas Chiropractic College and Dr. William Harper, Dean of T.C.C. asked Dr. Walter Rhodes to go and take the Texas Basic Science Certificate Examination even though he already had a Basic Science Certificate by exemption because of his high grade levels in the courses involved. This was during the time when the American Medical Association was actively engaged in “Educating the Public”, about the chiropractors lack of education, a contention proved beyond doubt when the A.M.A. was found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-trust law of the United States in 1987.
The test was taken by 159 candidates, all of them Osteopaths or Medical Doctors except for Walter Rhodes. There were fifty-two failures. Dr. Rhodes paced either first, second or third. They would give the T.C.C. officials no more information than that. Dr. Walter Rhodes was the very first chiropractor to pass the Basic Science Examination in Texas. This was only the beginning of firsts for him.
He was the first and only chiropractor to have a complete edition of the Texas Chiropractic of Journal dedicated to his work on a theory regarding the functional mechanism of the nervous system. This was in 1966 when Dr. Douglas Ray was President of the Texas Chiropractic Association.
Dr. J. P. Johnston, President of the Texas Chiropractic Association in 1987, asked Dr. Rhodes to coordinate with the Texas Chiropractic College in Pasadena, Texas to begin a series of classes to certify Chiropractic Consultants. That class was the first of its type in the nation.
Dr. Rhodes was awarded the first Diplomate Status in Chiropractic Consulting (shared with Dr. John M. Nash) by the American Board of Chiropractic Consultants, an organization he helped found in 1988.
He was appointed as ad hoc consultant to the President of T.C.A. by Dr. J. P. Johnston, the first to ever hold such an honor. He was one of the four chiropractors to be invited by the Cuban Health Delivery System to come to Havana, Cuba and inspect the Cuban Health Delivery System and discuss the possible role of chiropractic care there in the future.
Dr. Rhodes wrote The Race Between Sanity and Madness in 1972, a book about the pathophysiology of the Nervous System. The History of Chiropractic in Texas was commissioned by the Texas Chiropractic Association’s Board of Directors and was finished by Dr. Rhodes in the late 1970s.
Dr. Rhodes has been instrumental in getting the Councils of Expertise established thereby to protect the chiropractor who is charged with malpractice.
He has been involved in designing an educational program for Texas Chiropractors to affect the education and the politics in Texas.
