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.”