Medicine: Physical Therapy

Odors of roast beef, warm rubber and ozone pervaded the 22nd floor of the Kansas City (Mo.) Hotel Kansas Citian last week. The odors arose from electric knives, heat applicators and ultraviolet light generators in operation. Those machines and a variety of similar medical machines, ornamented with shiny chromium and nickel, dials, gauges, thermometers, bulbs, motors, rheostats, pedals, levers, knobs and buttons were working because 400 physicians who are sincerely trying to put physical therapy on a respectable basis in the U. S. met in Kansas City to conduct a Congress of Physical Therapy.

First off, the physical therapists felt obliged to explain their specialty to a world that was ready to call them quacks. London’s Dr. Franz Nagelschmidt, who fostered physical therapy in 1912 with his Textbook of Diathermy and who recently discovered a therapeutic electric current which reduces fatty tissue without dieting or drugging, volunteered to explain one aspect. Said he last week in Kansas City:

”When we investigate biological processes, we find at the root electricity. All pathology is essentially variations in physiology. Many processes formerly considered as chemical are now revealed as electric phenomena. In essence there is very little difference between chemical and physical medicine.

“Drugs are an established scientific medical aid. Still, their application is general. They affect some organs and tissues adversely as they benefit other organs or tissues. In electrical therapy we can concentrate on the particular without affecting other parts of the patient. With it we can increase or decrease blood circulation, gland secretion, nerve tension, muscle tension, metabolic change. . . .

“No panacea, physical therapy nevertheless asserts increasingly its claim to being as important to general medicine as are chemistry, drugs and surgery.”

Legitimate doctors are just beginning to understand the multitude of effects that physical agents—machines, baths, heat, electricity, exercises—have on human beings. According to Dr. Nagelschmidt, “Physical therapy has left the field of empiricism and has entered the scientific realm.” On the other hand virtually anyone can learn to manipulate virtually any physiotherapeutic device in a few hours. One of the best schools for the training of such technicians, the New Haven School of Physical Therapy, headed by an M. D., requires only a high-school diploma of students. They pursue their training course in twelve months, during which they learn the intricacies of many machines and acquire some understanding of why the machines are used for certain ailments. Presumably they go to work for honest doctors. But there is little in law, custom or fact to deter them from buying a shiny machine or two and going into the medical business themselves. So many unqualified men and women have bought such devices and peddle their services that the Congress of Physical Therapy was obliged to declare last week: “Our aim is to take therapeutics as far as possible out of the hands of quacks.”

Doctors can buy a neat little colonic irrigator for $160; an infra-red lamp for $42.50; an ultraviolet lamp for $228; an ionizer for $49.50; a rubber covered heating blanket for $285; a short-wave machine, with which to operate an electric knife or an artificial fever box, for less than $500; a portable x-ray machine for about $800.

Doctors believe that the prices of such apparatus are too high. Nonetheless, some buyers find that the machines pay for themselves with surprising speed. For one thing, patients on whom they are used feel that something is really being done for them, are willing to pay. For another, some doctors are definitely getting good therapeutic results, especially with some of the heat-producing machines. Said Dr. Disraeli Kobak of Chicago, editor of the Archives of Physical Therapy, XRay, Radium, last week: “The medical world has gone crazy over the possibilities of radiathermy. It is the greatest discovery in the field of medical science since Roentgen’s discovery of the x-ray.”

Several years ago Dr. Kobak sprayed his right side with short radio waves. At Kansas City last week he averred that there still is a difference in temperature between his two sides.

High temperatures (105° to 106° F.) generated in electrically heated blankets or cabinets are curing a high percentage of cases of venereal disease, no matter how far advanced. Dr. Ralph Henry Kuhns of Chicago reported that even in cases of general paresis, one-third of the cases improve to such an extent that they can be released from custody and returned to their relatives.

Dr. William Waddell Duke of Kansas City cited several cases of sensitivity to heat and light, a newly recognized disease. Said he: “A doctor discovered that his wife grew sick from the heat in coffee. The wife of a baseball player was sensitive to light, grew sick watching ball games played on bright days. Persons sensitive to cold grew sick from eating ice cream, drinking ice water, swimming in cold water. Even vivacious conversation, in some instances, arouses heat in sensitive persons to the extent they grow sick. Such a patient had a stomach attack while describing her symptoms to me.”

The sensation of the Congress of Physical Therapy belonged to that category of medicine only by stretching definitions. According to Dr. Gustav Kolischer, Chicago urologist, “We are on the right track to a definite cure of cancer.” Said he:

“Cancer is a constitutional derangement. Biologists have known for a long time that there exists in the human body a well defined system of especially endowed cells in which reside all defensive forces of the body. The cells are paramount in controlling cancer. These macrophage cells rush to the spot to fight cancer, but frequently do not have sufficient strength and are not in sufficient volume to make a successful fight. We have successfully taken these cells from the spleen of the human body, made a large culture of them in the labora-tory and injected them in the tissue surrounding the cancer. If it is an internal cancer, the injections frequently result in anchoring it to the surface where it can be removed easily. In all cases it shuts off tissue nourishment from the cancer and kills it.”