Quacks and Grafters

by Anonymous

FAITH CURE AND GRAFT IN SURGERY.

Suggestive Therapeutics Chief Stock in Trade—Advice of a Medical College President—Disease Prevention Rather than Cure—Hygienic Living—The Medical Pretender—“Dangerous Diagnosis” Graft—Great Flourish of Trumpets—No “Starving Time” for Him—“Big Operations”—Mutilating the Human Body—Dr. C. W. Oviatt’s Views—Dr. Maurice H. Richardson’s Incisive Statements—Crying Need for Reform—Surgery that is Useless, Conscienceless and for Purely Commercial Ends—Spirit of Surgical Graft, Especially in the West—Fee-Splitting and Commissions—A Nation of “Dollar-Chasers”—The Public’s Share of Responsibility—Senn’s Advice—The “Surgical Conscience.”

I think we have enough before us to show why intelligent people become followers of fads. Seeing so many impositions and frauds, they forget all the patient research and beneficent discoveries of noble men who have devoted their lives to the work of giving humanity better health and longer life. They are ready at once to denounce the whole medical system as a fraud, and become victims of the first “new system” or healing fad that is plausibly presented to them.

And here a question arises that is puzzling to many. If these systems are fads and frauds, why do they so rapidly get and retain so large a following among intelligent people? The answer is not hard to find. The quacks of these fad schools get their cures, as every intelligent doctor of the old schools knows, in the same way and upon the same principle that is so important a factor in medical practice, i. e., faith cure—the psychic effect of the thing done, whether it be the giving of a dose of medicine, a Christian Science pow-wow, the laying on of hands, the “removal of a lesion” by an Osteopath, the “adjustment” of the spine by a Chiropractor, or what not.

The principles of mind or faith cure are legitimately used by the honest physician. Suggestive therapeutics is being systematically studied by many who want to use it with honesty and intelligence. They realize fully that abuse of this principle figures largely in the maintenance of the shysters in their own school, and it is the very foundation of all new schools and healing fads. The people must be made to know this, or fads will continue to flourish.

The honest physician would be glad to have the people know more than this. He would be glad to have them know enough about symptoms of diseases to have some idea when they really need the help of a physician. For he knows that if the people knew this much all quacks would be speedily put out of business.

I wonder how many doctors know that observing people are beginning to suspect that many physicians regulate the number of calls they make on a patient by motives other than the condition of the patient—size of pocketbook and the condition of the roads, for instance. I am aware that such imputation is an insult to any physician worthy of the name, but the sad fact is that there are so many, when we count the quacks of all schools, unworthy of the name.

The president of a St. Louis medical college once said to a large graduating class: “Young men, don’t go to your work with timidity and doubts of your ability to succeed. Look and act your part as physicians, and when you have doubts concerning your power over disease remember this, ninety-five out of every hundred people who send for you would get well just the same if they never took a drop of your medicine.” I have never mentioned this to a doctor who did not admit that it is perhaps true. If so, is there not enough in it alone to explain the apparent success of quacks?

Again I say there are many noble and brainy physicians, and these have made practically all the great discoveries, invented all the useful appliances, written all the great books for other schools to study, and they should have credit from the people for all this, and not be misrepresented by little pretenders. Their teachings should be applied as they gave them. The best of them to-day would have the people taught that a physician’s greatest work may be done in preventing rather than in curing disease. Physicians of the Osler type would like to have the people understand how little potency drugs have to cure many dangerous diseases when they have a firm hold on the system. They would have some of the responsibility removed from the shoulders of the physician by having the people understand how much they may do by hygienic living and common-sense use of natural remedies.

But the conscientious doctor too often has to compete with the pretender who wants the people to believe that he is their hope and their salvation, and in him they must trust. He wants them to believe that he has a specific remedy for every disease that will go “right to the spot” and have the desired effect. People who believe this, and believe that without doctoring the patient could never get well, will sometimes try, or see their neighbors try, a doctor of a “new school.” When they see about the same proportion of sick recover, they conclude, of course, that the doctor of the “new school” cured them, and is worthy to be forever after intrusted with every case of disease that may arise in their families.