Wonderful Growth Claimed to Prove Merit—Osteopathy is Rational Physio-Therapy—Growth is in Exact Proportion to Advertising Received—Booklets and Journals for Gratuitous Distribution—Osteopathy Languishes or Flourishes by Patent Medicine Devices—Circular Letter from Secretary of American Osteopathic Association—Boosts by Governors and Senators—The Especial Protege of Authors—Mark Twain—Opie Reed—Emerson Hough—Sam Jones—The Orificial Surgeon—The M.D. Seeking Job as “Professor”—The Lure of “Honored Doctor” with “Big Income”—No Competition.
But what about Osteopathy? Why has it had such a wonderful growth in popularity? Why have nearly four thousand men and women, most of them intelligent and some of them educated, espoused it as a profession to follow as a life work? These are questions I shall now try to answer.
Osteopathic promoters and enthusiasts claim that the wonderful growth and popularity of Osteopathy prove beyond question its merits as a healing system. I have already dealt at length with reasons why intelligent people are so ready to fall victims to new systems of healing. The “perfect adjustment,” “perfect functioning” theory of Osteopathy is especially attractive to people made ripe for some “drugless healing” system by causes already mentioned. When Osteopathy is practiced as a combination of all manipulations and other natural aids to the inherent recuperative powers of the body, it will appeal to reason in such a way and bring such good results as to make and keep friends.
I am fully persuaded, and I believe the facts when presented will establish it, that it is the physio-therapy in Osteopathy that wins and holds the favor of intelligent people. But Osteopathy in its own name, taught as “a well-rounded system of healing adequate for every emergency,” has grown and spread largely as a “patent medicine” flourishes, i. e., in exact proportion to the advertising it has received. I would not presume to make this statement as merely my opinion. The question at issue is too important to be treated as a matter of opinion. I will present facts, and let my readers settle the point in their own minds.
Every week I get booklets or “sample copies” of journals heralding the wonderful curative powers of Osteopathy. These are published not as journals for professional reading, but to be sold to the practitioners by the hundreds or thousands, to be given to their patients for distribution by these patients to their friends. The publishers of these “boosters” say, and present testimonials to prove it, that Osteopaths find their practice languishes or flourishes just in proportion to the numbers of these journals and booklets they keep circulating in their communities. Here is a sample testimonial I received some time since on a postal card:
“Gentlemen: Since using your journals more patients have come to me than I could treat, many of them coming from neighboring towns. Quite a number have had to go home without being treated, leaving their names so that they could be notified later, as I can get to them. Your booklets bring them O. K.”
The boast is often made that Osteopathy is growing in spite of bitter opposition and persecution, and is doing it on its merits—doing it because “Truth is mighty and will prevail.” At one time I honestly believed this to be true, but I have been convinced by highest Osteopathic authority that it is not true. As some of that proof here is an extract from a circular letter from the secretary of the American Osteopathic Association:
“Now, Doctor, we feel that you have the success of Osteopathy at heart, and if you realize the activity and complete organization of the American Medical Association and their efforts to curb our limitations, and do not become a member of this Association, which stands opposed to the efforts of the big monopoly, we must believe that you are not familiar with the earnestness of the A. O. A. and its efforts. We must work in harmonious accord and with an organized purpose. When we rest on our oars the death knell begins to sound. Can you not see that unless you co-operate with your fellow-practitioners in this national effort you are sounding your own limitations?”
This from the secretary of the American Osteopathic Association, when we have boasted of superior equipment for intelligent physicians. Incidentally we pause to make excuse for the expressions: “Curbing our limitations” and “sounding your own limitations.”
But does the idea that when we quit working as an organized body “our death knell begins to sound,” indicate that Osteopathic leaders are content to trust the future of Osteopathy to its merits?