OSTEOPATHY AS RELATED TO SOME OTHER FAKES.

A discussion of graft in connection with doctoring would not be complete if nothing were said about the traveling medicine faker. Every summer our towns are visited by smooth-tongued frauds who give free shows on the streets. They harangue the people by the hour with borrowed spiels, full of big medical terms, and usually full of abuse of regular practitioners, which local physicians must note with humiliation is too often received by people without resentment and often with applause.

Only last summer I was standing by while one of these grafters was making his spiel, and gathering dollars by the pocketful for a “sure shot” rheumatism cure. His was a sure cure, doubly guaranteed; no cure, money all refunded (if you could get it). A physician standing near laughed rather a mirthless laugh, and remarked that Barnum was right when he said, “The American people like to be humbugged.” When the medical man left, a man who had just become the happy possessor of enough of the wonderful herb to make a quart of the rheumatism router, remarked: “He couldn’t be a worse humbug than that old duffer. He doctored me for six weeks, and told me all the time that his medicine would cure me in a few days. I got worse all the time until I went to Dr. ——, who told me to use a sack of hot bran mash on my back, and I was able to get around in two days.”

In this man’s remarks there is an explanation of the reason the crowd laughed when they heard the quack abusing the regular practitioner, and of the reason the people handed their hard-earned dollars to the grafter at the rate of forty in ten minutes, by actual count. If all doctors were honest and told the people what all authorities have agreed upon about rheumatism, i. e., that internal medication does it little good, and the main reliance must be on external application, traveling and patent medicine fakers who make a specialty of rheumatism cure would be “put out of business,” and there would be eliminated one source of much loss of faith in medicine.

I learned by experience as an Osteopath that many people lose faith in medicine and in the honesty of physicians because of the failure of medicine to cure rheumatism where the physician had promised a cure. Patients afflicted with other diseases get well anyway, or the sexton puts them where they cannot tell people of the physician’s failure to cure them. The rheumatic patient lives on, and talks on of “Doc’s” failure to stop his rheumatic pains. All doctors know that rheumatism is the universal disease of our fickle climate. If it were not for rheumatic pains, and neuralgic pains that often come from nerves irritated by contracted muscles, the Osteopath in the average country town would get more lonesome than he does. People who are otherwise skeptical concerning the merits of Osteopathy will admit that it seems rational treatment for rheumatism.

Yet this is a disease that Osteopathy of the specific-adjustment, bone-setting, nerve-inhibiting brand has little beneficial effect upon. All the Osteopathic treatments I ever gave or saw given in cases of rheumatism that really did any good, were long, laborious massages. The medical man who as “professor” in an Osteopathic college said, “When the Osteopath with his vast knowledge of anatomy gets hold of a case of torticollis he inhibits the nerves and cures it in five minutes,” was talking driveling rot.

I have seen some of the best Osteopaths treat wry-neck, and the work they did was to knead and stretch and pull, which by starting circulation and working out soreness, gradually relieved the patient. A hot application, by expanding tissues and stimulating circulation, would have had the same effect, perhaps more slowly manifested.

To call any Osteopathic treatment massage is always resented as an insult by the guardians of the science. What is the Osteopath doing, who rolls and twists and pulls and kneads for a full hour, if he isn’t giving a massage treatment? Of course, it sounds more dignified, and perhaps helps to “preserve the purity of Osteopathy as a separate system,” to call it “reducing subluxations,” “correcting lesions,” “inhibiting and stimulating” nerves. The treatment also acts better as a placebo to call it by these names.

As students we were taught that all Osteopathic movements were primarily to adjust something. Some of us worried for fear we wouldn’t know when the adjusting was complete. We were told that all the movements we were taught to make were potent to “move things,” so we worried again for fear we might move something in the wrong direction. We were assured, however, that since the tendency was always toward the normal, all we had to do was to agitate, stir things up a bit, and the thing out of place would find its place. How specific! How scientific!

We were told that when in the midst of our “agitation” we heard something “pop,” we could be sure the thing out of place had gone back. When a student had so mastered the great bone-setting science as to be able to “pop” stray cervical vertebrÆ he was looked upon with envy by the fellows who had not joined the association for protection against suits for malpractice, and did not know just how much of an owl they could make of a man and not break his neck.

The fellow who lacked clairvoyant powers to locate straying things, and could not always find the “missing link” of the spine, could go through the prescribed motions just the same. If he could do it with sufficient facial contortions to indicate supreme physical exertion, and at the same time preserve the look of serious gravity and professional importance of a quack medical doctor giving particular directions for the dosing of the placebo he is leaving, he might manage to make a sound vertebra “pop.” This, with his big show of doing something, has its effect on the patient’s mind anyway.

We were taught that Osteopathy was applied common sense, that it was all reasonable and rational, and simply meant “finding something wrong and putting it right.” Some of us thought it only fair to tell our patients what we were trying to do, and what we did it for. There is where we made our big mistake. To say we were relaxing muscles, or trying to lift and tone up a rickety chest wall, or straighten a warped spine, was altogether too simple. It was like telling a man that you were going to give him a dose of oil for the bellyache when he wanted an operation for appendicitis. It was too common, and some would go to an Osteopath who could find vertebra and ribs and hips displaced, something that would make the community “sit up and take notice.” If one has to be sick, why not have something worth while?

Where Osteopathy has always been so administered that people have the idea that it means to find things out of place and put them back, it is a gentleman’s job, professional, scientific and genteel. Men have been known to give twenty to forty treatments a day at two dollars per treatment. In many communities, however, the adjustment idea has so degenerated that to give an Osteopathic treatment is no job for a high collar on a hot day. To strip a hard-muscled, two-hundred-pound laborer down to a perspiration-soaked and scented undershirt, and manipulate him for an hour while he has every one of his five hundred work-hardened muscles rigidly set to protect himself from the terrible neck-wrenching, bone-twisting ordeal he has been told an Osteopathic treatment would subject him to—I say when you have tried that sort of a thing for an hour you will conclude that an Osteopathic treatment is no job for a kid-gloved dandy nor for a lily-fingered lady, as it has been so glowingly pictured.

I know the brethren will say that true Osteopathy does not give an hour’s shotgun treatment, but finds the lesion, corrects it, collects its two dollars, and quits until “day after to-morrow,” when it “corrects” and collects again as long as there is anything to co—llect!

I practiced for three years in a town where people made their first acquaintance with Osteopathy through the treatments of a man who afterwards held the position of demonstrator of Osteopathic “movements” and “manipulations” in one of the largest and boastedly superior schools of Osteopathy. The people certainly should have received correct ideas of Osteopathy from him. He was followed in the town by a bright young fellow from “Pap’s” school, where the genuine “lesion,” blown-in-the-bottle brand of Osteopathy has always been taught. This fellow was such an excellent Osteopath that he made enough money in two years to enable him to quit Osteopathy forever. This he did, using the money he had gathered as an Osteopath to take him through a medical college.

I followed these two shining lights who I supposed had established Osteopathy on a correct basis. I started in to give specific treatments as I had been taught to do; that is, to hunt for the lesion, correct it if I found it, and quit, even if I had not been more than fifteen or twenty minutes at it. I found that in many cases my patients were not satisfied. I did not know just what was the matter at first, and lost some desirable patients (lost their patronage, I mean—they were not in much danger of dying when they came to me). I was soon enlightened, however, by some more outspoken than the rest. They said I did not “treat as long as that other doctor,” and when I had done what I thought was indicated at times a patient would say, “You didn’t give me that neck-twisting movement,” or that “leg-pulling treatment.” No matter what I thought was indicated, I had to give all the movements each time that had ever been given before.

A physician who has had to dose out something he knew would do no good, just to satisfy the patient and keep him from sending for another doctor who he feared might give something worse, can appreciate the violence done a fellow’s conscience as he administers those wonderfully curative movements. He cannot, however, appreciate the emotions that come from the strenuous exertion over a sweaty body in a close room on a July day.Incidentally, this difference in the physical exertion necessary to get the same results has determined a good many to quit Osteopathy and take up medicine. A young man who had almost completed a course in Osteopathy told me he was going to study medicine when he had finished Osteopathy, as he had found that giving “treatments was too d——d hard work.”