Medicine: Osteopaths in Cleveland

The 9,000 osteopaths in the U. S. last year collected some $43,000,000 from patients who believe that most diseases can be cured by manipulation of joints. Simultaneously 400 students graduated from the six “strong”* osteopathic colleges and began to earn money on their own account. When the American Osteopathic Association decided to hold its 39th convention in Cleveland last week Governor Martin Luther Davey welcomed it to the State, Mayor Harry Lyman Davis, to the city. When last week the Association hinted at holding its next convention in Manhattan, Governor Herbert Henry Lehman telegraphed: “The people of New York will be very highly honored. . . .” The Mer-chants Association of New York City telegraphed: “Upon recommendation of Dr. Goldwater, Commissioner of Hospitals. Mayor LaGuardia is issuing invitation to be forwarded by telegraph.”

All those signs of acceptance, respectability and achievement emboldened the composite ego of the 1,500 osteopaths who attended the Cleveland convention. President George J. Conley, 64, of Kansas City, who is a doctor of medicine as well as of osteopathy, declared: “The allopathic school of medicine is appropriating the grosser aspects of the osteopathic concepts and is unfairly exploiting them without due credit, as originating in their own minds, under the names of ‘body mechanics,’ ‘applied physiology,’ ‘postural abnormalities,’ etc.”

More humbly, Dr. Conley pointed to osteopathy’s great current weakness. The cult started with the single theory that all disease was caused by malposition of bones and could be cured by manipulation of joints. After 43 years of osteopathic education, osteopaths still do not understand, said Dr. Conley, exactly what happens in the tissues as a result of an osteopathic lesion, as well as the physiological reactions following its correction.

The man elected to succeed Dr. Conley as A. O. A. president, Dr. Thomas Rankin

Thorburn, 47, Manhattan ear-throat-nose specialist, is more cocky about osteopathy. A doctor of medicine, he once declined the invitation of a medical school to establish a full course in osteopathy, because the medical school refused to require six years for the osteopathy course. To the Cleveland convention he promised lots of publicity for osteopaths: “What osteopathy requires is the presentation of proper information to newspapers and magazines, and otherwise, and one of the most important steps in securing this is a personal understanding of osteopathy on the part of editors of newspapers and magazines. When this same knowledge is shared by other influential persons in public life, politicians, nursing organizations, special writers, commercial corporations and other individuals and groups, then real progress will be made.”

Other osteopaths who were grounded well enough in their subject to get places on the convention program, had the following remarks to make: ¶ “Many cases of congenital deafness in children can be traced to drugs administered to their mothers during the pre-natal period. The chief offender seems to be quinine, then the salicylates, then alcohol. Drugs circulating in the blood act upon the auditory nerve more often than any other nerve or special sense.”—G. H. Meyers, Tulsa.

¶ “Children in homes where meals, playtime and bedtime are irregular and where there is laxity in school attendance are found to be in constant need of attention from the doctor. Proper home life would reduce children’s doctor bills 25 to 50%.” —Ernest R. Proctor, Chicago.

¶ “Doctors have found that patients have had to change their glasses after having their feet normalized.”—Victor W. Purdy, Milwaukee.

¶ “There is no arch in the human foot. In construction, the foot is a cantilever truss and when our feet are in good condition, we are actually walking upon springs. Nobody can have perfect feet without having a perfect spine.”—Philip Sumner Spence, White Plains, N. Y.

*Because their curricula are practically the same as those of high-grade medical schools.