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Subject:      Healthy Skepticism
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Date:         Sat, 20 Mar 1993 23:19:33 -0600

The following appears in the March issue of The Skeptic, the
newsletter of the North Texas Skeptics.  This material may be
distributed for noncommercial use.  Other use requires the permission
of the author.

John Blanton
Secretary, The North Texas Skeptics
[e-mail]
================================================

Healthy Skepticism

Medical "Pathies" By Tim Gorski, M.D. (Last in a Series)

Osteopathy

Andrew T. Still gave osteopathy it's start in the 19th
Century.  Still, like his Methodist minister father,
practiced medicine largely as a self-taught see-and-do
profession.  With this kind of religious background, and
after watching helplessly as three of his own children died
of spinal meningitis, Still went into the magnetic healing
business.  Later, he developed an interest in bonesetting
and gained a reputation as a "lightning bonesetter."  From
this he went on to becoming convinced of the benefits of
spinal manipulation therapy, which he claimed could cure
heart disease and other illnesses besides those of a
musculoskeletal nature.

Still's osteopathy incorporated obvious religious elements.
He regarded it as "God's law" and theorized the divine
infusion into human beings of "the highest known order of
force (electricity)" which, "when it plays freely all
through your system, you feel well.  Shut it off in one
place and congestion may result; in this case a medical
doctor, by dosing you with drugs, would increase this
congestion until it resulted in decay.  ...Not so with an
Osteopath.  He removes the obstruction, lets the life-giving
current have full play, and the man is restored to health."
Still taught that obstruction of the flow of this force is
the cause of all disease and that, excepting osteopaths,
physicians were treating only effects that manifested as
different diseases. 1

Daniel David Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, evidently
borrowed freely from the ideas of Still.  His name was said
to have appeared in Still's guest book in the early 1890s
and Palmer is said to have been directly instructed by an
osteopath.  But whereas chiropractic remains to this day
strongly wedded to its "one cause" theory of disease and the
notion that spinal manipulation can effectively treat every
disorder, osteopathy was almost immediately directed back
towards the mainstream.

This was because, soon after Still opened his American
School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri, a visiting
Scottish physician, seeing some promise in Still's methods,
agreed to become an instructor in the newly founded school.
Smith saw to it that the faculty soon included a number of
members who were highly trained in the scientific and
medical knowledge of the day.  Still objected to such
"medicalization" of his system, but he never seriously
challenged it, probably in large part because it enabled
graduates of his school to obtain their medical licenses.
And with this auspicious beginning, the passage of time saw
osteopathy's gradual accommodation with and eventual
acceptance of the use of medication, of surgery, and other
theories of disease causation.  By the 1950s, Still's
metaphysical notions had almost entirely withered away, to
the extent that a study committee of the American Medical
Association (AMA) was able to say that "modern osteopathic
education teaches the acceptance and recognition of all
etiological factors and all pathological manifestations of
disease as well as the utilization of all diagnostic and
therapeutic procedures taught in schools of medicine." 2
As a result, the main difficulty with osteopathy today is
that it is in something of an identity crisis.  About the
only thing that distinguishes osteopathic training is the
continued inclusion in the curriculum of spinal
manipulation, which does appear to have a place in the
management of certain musculoskeletal disorders.  But many
osteopaths go on to make little or no use of this practice.
Meanwhile, Medical Doctor physicians who have an interest in
manipulative techniques can learn them.  There is even an
Academy of Manual Medicine, just as there are professional
societies for other aspects of the contemporary practice of
scientific medicine.

Allopathy Double-talk

Allopathy, as it turns out, was another invention of
homeopath Samuel Hahnemann, being his term for all medical
theories and practices which didn't fit into his like cures
like superstition.  (Whereas "homeo" means "same, "allo"
means "other.")  Today, allopathy is sometimes applied to
the kind of medicine learned and practiced by M.D. degree
physicians, although many of them may not know it.  Often
it's an innocent usage by D.O. degree physicians who are
trying to distinguish themselves from the M.D.s.  But
because most physicians with either degree are practicing
the same sort of medicine, the term allopathy is of no more
use than that of osteopathy, except as a sort of
anachronism.

More often, allopathy is a term used by quacks to smear
their opposition.  There are several advantages in their
doing so.  One is that it appears to ally them with
osteopaths, even though most D.O.s, like most M.D.s, are
practicing legitimate medicine.  Another reason is that
quacks wish to portray their enemy as an exclusive medical
sectarian establishment, for the public will understandably
let them get away with failing to address objections to
their methods that can be cast as the jealous and
idiosyncratic disapproval of self-interested competition.

Finally, and most importantly, quacks need very much to
avoid facing up to the fact that their detractors are
defending an honest and open scientific approach.  And above
all, quacks need their victims to believe that their methods
are an "alternative," not to the continually evolving facts
and reason of medical science, but to some nebulous (and
nefarious) scheme of "allopathic," "orthodox," and/or
"traditional" medicine.

Medical "-pathies" have a vestigial use as identifiers of
outworn and outdated ideas about health and disease from
medicine's prescientific infancy.  They are irrelevant when
it comes to modern medical science.
Notes:

1. A.T. Still, Autobiography of Andrew T. Still, pp. 235,
289-290, self-published, Kirksville, Mo., 1897, cited in
Fuller, Robert C., Alternative Medicine and American
Religious Life, Oxford University Press, 1989.

2. "Report of the Committee for the study of relations
between Osteopathy and Medicine," Journal of the American
Medical Association, 152:734, cited in Fuller.

This information is provided by the D/FW Council Against
Health Fraud. For more information, or to report suspected
health fraud, please contact the Council at Box 202577,
Arlington, TX 76007, or call metro 214-263-8989.

Dr. Gorski is a practicing physician, chairman of the D/FW
Council Against Health Fraud and an NTS Technical Advisor.