One faker says he has found that most diseases are caused by defective eyes, and proposes to cure anything from consumption to ingrown toe-nails with glasses. Another agrees that the predisposing cause of diseases is eye strain, but the first fellow is irrational in his treatment. Glasses are unnatural and therefore all wrong. To cure the eyes use his wonderful nature-assisting ointment; that goes right to the optic nerve and makes old eyes young, weak eyes strong, relieves nerve strain and thereby makes sick people well.
Another has found that “infused” blood is the real elixir of life. He reports 100 per cent. of twenty cases of tuberculosis cured by his beneficent discovery. I wonder why we have a “Great White Plague” at all; or why we have international conventions to discuss means of staying the ravages of this terrible disease; or why State medical boards are devoting so much space in their bulletins to warn and educate the people against the awful fatality of consumption, when to cure it is so easy if doctors will only use blood?
Even if the hemotherapist does claim a little too much, there is yet no cause for terror. A leading Osteopathic journal proclaims in large letters that the Osteopath can remove the obstruction so that nature will cure consumption.
Christian Scientists and Magnetic Healers have not yet admitted their defeat, and there are many regulars who have not surrendered to the plague. So the poor consumptive may hope on (while his money lasts). Our most conscientious physicians not only admit limitations in curing tuberculosis, but try to teach the people that they must not rely on being “cured” if they are attacked, but must work with the physician to prevent its contagion. The intelligent layman can say “Amen” to that doctrine.
The question may be fairly put: “Why not have more of such frankness from the physician?” The manner in which the admissions of doctors that they are unable to control tuberculosis with medicine or surgery alone has been received by intelligent people should encourage the profession. It would seem more fair to take the stand of Professor Osler when he says that sound hygienic advice for the prevention of diseases must largely take the place of present medication and pretence of cure.
As a member of the American Medical Association recently said, “The placebo will not fool intelligent people always.” And when it is generally known that most of a physician’s medicines are given as placebos, do you wonder that the claims of “drugless healers” receive such serious consideration?
The absurd, conflicting claims of quack pretenders are bad enough to muddle the situation and add to the turbidity of therapeutics; but all this is not doing the medical profession nearly as much harm, nor driving as many people into the ranks of fad followers, as the inconsistencies and contradictions among the so-called regulars.
This was my opinion before I made any special study of therapeutics, and while studying I found numbers of prominent medical men who agree with me. One of them says that the “criticisms,” quarrels, contradictions, and inconsistencies of medical men are doing more to lower the profession in the estimation of the intelligent laity and to cause people to follow the fads of “new schools” than all else combined.
Think for a moment of some of these inconsistencies and contradictions. One doctor in a town tells the people that he “breaks up” typhoid fever. His rival, perhaps from the same college, tells the people that typhoid must “run its course” and cannot be broken up, and that any man who claims the contrary is a liar and a shyster. One surgeon makes a portion of the people believe he has saved dozens of lives in that community by surgical operations; the other physicians of the town tell the people openly, or at least hint, that there has been a great deal of needless butchery performed in that community in the name of surgery. And then the people see editorials in the daily press about the fad of having operations performed, and read in their health culture or Osteopathic journals from articles by the greatest M.D.s, in which it is admitted that surgery is practiced too largely as a graft. Professor Osler is quoted as saying:
“Surgeons are finding altogether too many cases of appendicitis these days. Appendicitis is becoming so common and so easily detected that the physician’s wife can diagnose a case of it over the telephone.”