THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OSTEOPATHY.

How desperately those students worked. Many of them were men and women with gray heads, who had found themselves stranded at a time of life when they should have been able to retire on a competency. They had staked their little all on this last venture, and what was before them if they should fail heaven only knew. How eagerly they looked forward to the time when they should have struggled through the lessons in anatomy, chemistry, physiology, symptomatology and all the rest, and should be ready to receive the wonderful principles of Osteopathy they were to apply in performing the miraculous cures that were to make them wealthy and famous. Need I tell the physician who was a conscientious student of anatomy in his school days, that there was disappointment when the time came to enter the class in “theory and practice” of Osteopathy?There had been vague ideas of a systematized, infallible, touch-the-button system that always cured. Instead, we were instructed in a lot of indefinite movements and manipulations that somehow left us speculating as to just how much of it all was done for effect.

We had heard so often that Osteopathy was a complete satisfying science that did things specifically! Now it began to dawn upon us that there was indeed a “wealth of undeveloped scientific facts” in Osteopathy, as those glittering circulars had said when they thought to attract young men ambitious for original research. They had said, “Much yet remains to be discovered.” Some of us wondered if the “undeveloped” and “undiscovered” scientific facts were not the main constituents of the “science.”

The students expected something exact and tangible, and how eagerly they grasped at anything in the way of bringing quick results in curing the sick.

If Osteopathy is so complete, why did so many students, after they had received everything the learned (?) professors had to impart, procure Juettner’s “Modern Physio-Therapy” and Ling’s “Manual Therapy” and Rosse’s “Cures Without Drugs” and Kellogg’s work on “Hydrotherapy”? They felt that they needed all they could get.

It was customary for the students to begin “treating” after they had been in school a few months, and medical men will hardly be surprised to know that they worked with more faith in their healing powers and performed more wonderful (?) cures in their freshman year than they ever did afterward.I have in mind a student, one of the brightest I ever met, who read a cheap book on Osteopathic practice, went into a community where he was unknown, and practiced as an Osteopathic physician. In a few months he had made enough money to pay his way through an Osteopathic college, which he entered professing to believe that Osteopathy would cure all the ills flesh is heir to, but which he left two years later to take a medical course. He secured his D.O. degree, but I notice that it is his M.D. degree he flourishes with pride.

Can students be blamed for getting a little weak in faith when men who told them that the great principles of Osteopathy were sufficient to cure everything, have been known to backslide so far as to go and take medical courses themselves?

How do you suppose it affects students of an Osteopathic college to read in a representative journal that the secretary of their school, and the greatest of all its boosters, calls medical men into his own family when there is sickness in it?

There are many men and women practicing to-day who try to be honest and conscientious, and by using all the good in Osteopathy, massage, Swedish movements, hydrotherapy, and all the rest of the adjuncts of physio-therapy, do a great deal of good. The practitioner who does use these agencies, however, is denounced by the stand-patters as a “drifter.” They say he is not a true Osteopath, but a mongrel who is belittling the great science. That circular letter from the secretary of the American Osteopathic Association said that one of the greatest needs of organization was to preserve Osteopathy in its primal purity as it came from its founder, A. T. Still.

If our medical brethren and the laity could read some of the acrimonious discussions on the question of using adjuncts, they would certainly be impressed with the exactness (?) of Osteopathic science.

There is one idea of Osteopathy that even the popular mind has grasped, and that is that it is essentially finding “lesions” and correcting them. Yet the question has been very prominent and pertinent among Osteopaths: “Are you a lesion Osteopath?” Think of it, gentlemen, asking an Osteopath if he is a “lesionist”! Yet there are plenty of Osteopaths who are stupid enough (or honest enough) not to be able to find bones “subluxed” every time they look at a patient. Practitioners who really want to do their patrons good will use adjuncts even if they are denounced by the stand-patters.

I believe every conscientious Osteopath must sometimes feel that it is safer to use rational remedies than to rely on “bone setting,” or “inhibiting a center,” but for the grafter it is not so spectacular and involves more hard work.

The stand-patters of the American Osteopathic Association have not eliminated all trouble when they get Osteopaths to stick to the “bone setting, inhibiting” idea. The chiropractic man threatens to steal their thunder here. The Chiropractor has found that when it comes to using mysterious maneuvers and manipulations as bases for mind cure, one thing is about as good as another, except that the more mysterious a thing looks the better it works. So the Chiropractor simply gives his healing “thrusts” or his wonderful “adjustments,” touches the buttons along the spine as it were, when—presto! disease has flown before his healing touch and blessed health has come to reign instead!

The Osteopath denounces the Chiropractor as a brazen fraud who has stolen all that is good in Chiropractics (if there is anything good) from Osteopathy. But Chiropractics follows so closely what the “old liner” calls the true theory of Osteopathy that, between him and the drifter who gives an hour of crude massage, or uses the forbidden accessories, the true Osteopath has a hard time maintaining the dignity (?) of Osteopathy and keeping its practitioners from drifting.

Some of the most ardent supporters of true Osteopathy I have ever known have drifted entirely away from it. After practicing two or three years, abusing medicine and medical men all the time, and proclaiming to the people continually that they had in Osteopathy all that a sick world could ever need, it is suddenly learned that the “Osteopath is gone.” He has “silently folded his tent and stolen away,” and where has he gone? He has gone to a medical college to study that same medicine he has so industriously abused while he was gathering in the shekels as an Osteopath. Going to learn and practice the science he has so persistently denounced as a fraud and a curse to humanity.The intelligent, conscientious Osteopath who dares to brave the scorn of the stand-patter and use all the legitimate adjuncts of Osteopathy found in physio-therapy, may do a great deal of good as a physician. I have found many physicians willing to acknowledge this, and even recommend the services of such an Osteopath when physio-therapy was indicated.

When a physician, however, meets a fellow who claims to have in his Osteopathy a wonderful system, complete and all-sufficient to cope with any and all diseases, and that his system is founded on a knowledge of the relation and function of the various parts and organs of the body such as no other school of therapeutics has ever been able to discover, then he knows that he has met a man of the same mental and moral calibre as the shyster in his own school. He knows he has met a fellow who is exploiting a thing, that may be good in its way and place, as a graft. And he knows that this grafter gets his wonderful cures largely as any other quack gets his; the primary effects of his “scientific manipulations” are on the minds of those treated.

The intelligent physician knows that the Osteopath got his boastedly superior knowledge of anatomy mostly from the same text-books and same class of cadavers that other physicians had to master if they graduated from a reputable school. All that talk we have heard so much about the Osteopaths being the “finest anatomists in the world” sounds plausible, and is believed by the laity generally.

The quotation I gave above has been much used in Osteopathic literature as coming from an eminent medical man. What foundation is there for such a belief? The Osteopath may be a good anatomist. He has about the same opportunities to learn anatomy the medical student has. If he is a good and conscientious student he may consider his anatomy of more importance than does the medical student who is not expecting to do much surgery. If he is a natural shyster and shirk he can get through a course in Osteopathy and get his diploma, and this diploma may be about the only proof he could ever give that he is a “superior anatomist.”

Great stress has always been laid by Osteopaths upon the amount of study and research done by their students on the cadaver. I want to give you some specimens of the learning of the man (an M.D.) who presided over the dissecting-room when I pursued my “profound research” on the “lateral half.” This great man, whose superior knowledge of anatomy, I presume, induced by the wise management of the college to employ him as a demonstrator, in an article written for the organ of the school expresses himself thus:

“It is needless to say that the first impression of an M. D. would not be favorable to Osteopathy, because he has spent years fixing in his mind that if you had a bad case of torticollis not to touch it, but give a man morphine or something of the same character with an external blister or hot application and in a week or ten days he would be all right. In the meanwhile watch the patient’s general health, relieve the induced constipation by suitable means and rearrange what he has disarranged in his treatment. On the other hand, let the Osteopath get hold of this patient, and with his vast and we might say perfect knowledge of anatomy, he at once, with no other tools than his hands, inhibits the nerves supplying the affected parts, and in five minutes the patient can freely move his head and shoulders, entirely relieved from pain. Would not the medical man be angry? Would he not feel like wiping off the earth with all the Osteopaths? Doctor, with your medical education a course in Osteopathy would teach you that it is not necessary to subject your patients to myxedema by removing the thyroid gland to cure goitre. You would not have to lie awake nights studying means to stop one of those troublesome bowel complaints in children, nor to insist upon the enforced diet in chronic diarrhea, and a thousand other things which are purely physiological and are not done by any magical presto change, but by methods which are perfectly rational if you will only listen long enough to have them explained to you. I will agree that at first impression all methods look alike to the medical man, but when explained by an intelligent teacher they will bring their just reward.”