Manipulations

In St. Louis last week the rambling Municipal Auditorium bustled with doctors who do a good deal of worrying and considerable arguing about their professional status. Supporting their claim to cover every branch of medicine and surgery, the 2,000 visitors at the annual convention of the American Osteopathic Association heard papers and discussions on neuropsychiatry, gynecology, proctology, techniques in brain surgery. But stamping them as "sectarian," within the definition of the American Medical Association, was their obsession with the memory and dogma of osteopathy's founder, Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, whose life and work were endlessly eulogized.

Built-in Drugstore. Virginia-born Dr. Still was a lanky (6 ft. 4 in.), bearded frontiersman who studied the art of healing with his father, a medical missionary among the Shawnee Indians. In 1864, Still lost three children in an epidemic of spinal meningitis. The shock crystallized his dissatisfaction with current medical methods. After ten years of horse-and-saddlebag practice in Missouri, Still proclaimed his faith:

"I believe that the Maker of man has deposited in the human body drugs in abundance to cure all infirmities . . . that all the remedies necessary to health are compounded within the human body."

Still had stumbled upon a crude version of the modern concept of antibodies. The body's own drugs, he thought, were concentrated in the blood; therefore, a full supply of blood to the whole system was necessary to health. Dr. Still preached that manipulation of the spine, muscles and joints, to preserve a normal blood flow, could prevent or cure practically any ailment.

The emphasis on manipulation exposed osteopathy* to ridicule. Medical history was full of quack bonesetters, and Still's disciples were lumped with them. Orthodox doctors agitated for state laws to curb the osteopaths. Chiropractors, with less formal education, came along and won a name as spine manipulators, and thus helped bring osteopathy into disrepute by association.. Finally, orthodox M.D s had developed a bone science of their own called it orthopedics, and left the osteopaths high & dry.

A Doctor--Plus. Last week the osteopaths' new president, husky Dr. H. Dale Pearson of Erie, Pa., accepted a challenge to define osteopathy. Said he: "It is a school of medicine which regards structural integrity as a primary factor in the maintenance of health . . . Infection is more likely if structural disturbances cause a lowering in the resistance in any body part. It does not maintain, however hat techniques of manipulation alone will cure all disease, nor that all disease derives from structural malformation. It never has. The osteopath is trained as a complete doctor--plus." Osteopaths must take at least two years of premedical college work, followed by a four-year course at one of six state-approved colleges (in Chicago, Kansas City, Des Moines, Los Angeles, Kirksville, Mo., Philadelphia). The course includes the full range of medical subjects, though about a quarter of it is devoted to osteopathy. Eight states will not license osteopaths as general practitioners and bar them from using drugs. In Kansas an osteopath may not operate, but he may deliver a baby (since Kansas does not class obstetrics as surgery). As 77-year-old Dr. George Conley, an osteopath since 1901, complained at the convention: a Kansas osteopath who delivers a baby "can bite off the umbilical cord, or grind it off against a stone, but the law says he can't cut it."

In practice, most of the 11,233 osteopaths in the U.S. are virtually limited to manipulation because that is the type of case their reputation attracts. Treated as pariahs by the Brahmins of orthodox medical societies, not infrequently denounced as quacks, osteopaths might be expected to develop all sorts of complexes. But even complexes, they claim, can be eased by manipulation.

*Literally, "bone disease." "Osteotherapy" would have been a better word for it.

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