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.