A discussion of graft in connection with doctoring would not be complete if nothing were said about the traveling medicine faker. Every summer our towns are visited by smooth-tongued frauds who give free shows on the streets. They harangue the people by the hour with borrowed spiels, full of big medical terms, and usually full of abuse of regular practitioners, which local physicians must note with humiliation is too often received by people without resentment and often with applause.
Only last summer I was standing by while one of these grafters was making his spiel, and gathering dollars by the pocketful for a “sure shot” rheumatism cure. His was a sure cure, doubly guaranteed; no cure, money all refunded (if you could get it). A physician standing near laughed rather a mirthless laugh, and remarked that Barnum was right when he said, “The American people like to be humbugged.” When the medical man left, a man who had just become the happy possessor of enough of the wonderful herb to make a quart of the rheumatism router, remarked: “He couldn’t be a worse humbug than that old duffer. He doctored me for six weeks, and told me all the time that his medicine would cure me in a few days. I got worse all the time until I went to Dr. ——, who told me to use a sack of hot bran mash on my back, and I was able to get around in two days.”
In this man’s remarks there is an explanation of the reason the crowd laughed when they heard the quack abusing the regular practitioner, and of the reason the people handed their hard-earned dollars to the grafter at the rate of forty in ten minutes, by actual count. If all doctors were honest and told the people what all authorities have agreed upon about rheumatism, i. e., that internal medication does it little good, and the main reliance must be on external application, traveling and patent medicine fakers who make a specialty of rheumatism cure would be “put out of business,” and there would be eliminated one source of much loss of faith in medicine.
I learned by experience as an Osteopath that many people lose faith in medicine and in the honesty of physicians because of the failure of medicine to cure rheumatism where the physician had promised a cure. Patients afflicted with other diseases get well anyway, or the sexton puts them where they cannot tell people of the physician’s failure to cure them. The rheumatic patient lives on, and talks on of “Doc’s” failure to stop his rheumatic pains. All doctors know that rheumatism is the universal disease of our fickle climate. If it were not for rheumatic pains, and neuralgic pains that often come from nerves irritated by contracted muscles, the Osteopath in the average country town would get more lonesome than he does. People who are otherwise skeptical concerning the merits of Osteopathy will admit that it seems rational treatment for rheumatism.
Yet this is a disease that Osteopathy of the specific-adjustment, bone-setting, nerve-inhibiting brand has little beneficial effect upon. All the Osteopathic treatments I ever gave or saw given in cases of rheumatism that really did any good, were long, laborious massages. The medical man who as “professor” in an Osteopathic college said, “When the Osteopath with his vast knowledge of anatomy gets hold of a case of torticollis he inhibits the nerves and cures it in five minutes,” was talking driveling rot.
I have seen some of the best Osteopaths treat wry-neck, and the work they did was to knead and stretch and pull, which by starting circulation and working out soreness, gradually relieved the patient. A hot application, by expanding tissues and stimulating circulation, would have had the same effect, perhaps more slowly manifested.
To call any Osteopathic treatment massage is always resented as an insult by the guardians of the science. What is the Osteopath doing, who rolls and twists and pulls and kneads for a full hour, if he isn’t giving a massage treatment? Of course, it sounds more dignified, and perhaps helps to “preserve the purity of Osteopathy as a separate system,” to call it “reducing subluxations,” “correcting lesions,” “inhibiting and stimulating” nerves. The treatment also acts better as a placebo to call it by these names.
As students we were taught that all Osteopathic movements were primarily to adjust something. Some of us worried for fear we wouldn’t know when the adjusting was complete. We were told that all the movements we were taught to make were potent to “move things,” so we worried again for fear we might move something in the wrong direction. We were assured, however, that since the tendency was always toward the normal, all we had to do was to agitate, stir things up a bit, and the thing out of place would find its place. How specific! How scientific!
We were told that when in the midst of our “agitation” we heard something “pop,” we could be sure the thing out of place had gone back. When a student had so mastered the great bone-setting science as to be able to “pop” stray cervical vertebræ he was looked upon with envy by the fellows who had not joined the association for protection against suits for malpractice, and did not know just how much of an owl they could make of a man and not break his neck.
The fellow who lacked clairvoyant powers to locate straying things, and could not always find the “missing link” of the spine, could go through the prescribed motions just the same. If he could do it with sufficient facial contortions to indicate supreme physical exertion, and at the same time preserve the look of serious gravity and professional importance of a quack medical doctor giving particular directions for the dosing of the placebo he is leaving, he might manage to make a sound vertebra “pop.” This, with his big show of doing something, has its effect on the patient’s mind anyway.