Chiropractic Cracks a
Defense
Daily Observer
The medical
profession is having its troubles with the Federal Trade Commission, which
treats it as a trade and demands that physicians be permitted to advertise.
Until now advertising has not been encouraged by the American Medical
Association (AMA) and its members have been prohibited from advertising. In
many states regulations by the respective boards of medical examiners which
grants physicians licenses to practice have forbidden advertising, and as a
matter of fact, even the size of the doctor’s shingle has been limited.
The medical profession is also having its problems with the
chiropractors who deem themselves physicians and who have brought suits against
the AMA on the basis of the fact that the old code of ethics forbade physicians
from acting as consultants or to associate in any manner with those, who according to the AMA
practiced with cults. The AMA took the
position then ( although it may deny this in court today) that chiropractic was
a cult, that its methods were not based on scientific advances, and that it
erred in its insistence that forever and all time all bodily problems could be
traced to abnormal pressures on various nerves that could be corrected by
manipulation.
The merry war in which the AMA and the Chiropractic
Association tried to out manipulate each
other continued unabated and almost unnoticed until the government became the
larges purchaser of medical care through Medicare and Medicaid. The
chiropractors wanted a piece of the action, wanted reimbursement for their
services, and accumulated enough political wallop to become accredited
practitioners of their art. To gain this they were asked to prove by xx-ray
that the problem they were treating, namely subluxation, really existed. At
first the x-ray had to be read by a licensed medial radiologist. Since the
radiologists were prohibited by the AMA from consorting with cultists which
included all chiropractors, the latter found it difficult to obtain Medicare
and Medicaid reimbursement, and so brought suit against the AMA for
discrimination. To date they have been winning their suits. The AMA hasn’t
enough money to pay out against all the damage claims that could be filed and
has sort of thrown in the sponge.
Chiropractors are now applying to hospitals for staff
appointments. I do not know what capacity they could fill, or whether or not
they would have admitting privileges.
What troubles the physicians is that the medical profession
progresses scientifically, gradually incorporating new facts into its
armamentarium as a basis for modifying methods of practice. The profession is
very deliberate about this and continues to change dramatically by virtue of a
continuing feedback from the basic sciences physiology, chemistry,
pharmacology. Medicine indeed is broad based. Chiropractic walks the balance
beam of a theory promulgated 100 years ago and unchanged since that time. The
fact that manipulation helps people is demonstrated by the fact that chiropractors
are busy.
James Cyriax, a British Orthopedist argues that manipulation
therapy has a value and that there ought to be a specialty for medical
orthopedics in which manipulation would play a role. Instead of shunning
manipulation entirely he feels that the medical profession should investigate
the technique and try to understand which conditions are improved by it and
which might worsen as a result of manipulation. Cyriax feels that by shunning
something that has proved demonstrably useful, the medical profession has left
it in the hands of those with whom it will always remain naught but a limited
technique.
The way things stand according to the courts and the state
Boards of Medical Examiners, chiropractic and medicine are both professions in
their own right. The medical profession has always subjected its empiricisms
its methods and its observations to scientific scrutiny. To date chiropractic
has denied itself the advantage of this sort of self-examination.