When you consider that thousands of Osteopaths (yes, there are several
thousand of them in the field treating the people) are buying some one of
the various Osteopathic journals by the hundreds every month and
distributing them gratis to the people until the whole country is
literally saturated, and that other cults are almost as busy disseminating
their literature, do you wonder that the people are getting biased notions
of the medical profession in general and the American Medical Association
in particular? While my faith in the integrity and efficacy of the "new
school" remained intact and at a fanatical pitch, my sympathy was with the
"independent" journals. The doctrine of "therapeutic liberty" seemed a
fair one, and one that was only American. After studying both sides, and
comparing the journals, I have commenced to wonder if the man who preaches
universal liberty so strenuously is not, in most cases, only working for
_individual license_.
I wrote a paper some time ago, out of which this booklet has grown, and
sent it to the editor of the _Journal of the American Medical
Association_. He was kind enough to say it was full of "severe truth" that
should be published to the laity. In that paper I diagnosed the
therapeutic situation of to-day as a "deplorable muddle," and I am glad to
have my diagnosis confirmed by a prominent writer in the _Journal_ of the
Association. He says:
"Therapeutics to-day cannot be called a science, it can only be called
a confusion. With a dozen dissenting opinions as to the most essential
and efficacious therapeutic agents inside the school, and a horde of
new school pretenders outside, each with his own little system that he
heralds as the best and _only_ right way, and all these separated in
everything but their attack on the regulars, there certainly is a
'turbidity of therapeutics!'"
And this therapeutic stream is the one that flows for the "healing of
nations!" Should not its waters be pure and uncontaminated, so that the
invalid who thirsts for health may drink with confidence in their healing
virtues?
If the stream shows turbid to the physician, how must it appear to his
patient as he stands upon the shore and sees conflicting currents boil and
swirl in fierce contention, forming eddies that are continually stranding
poor devils on the drifts of discarded remedies, while streams of murky
waters (new schools) pour in from every side and add their filth. To the
patient it becomes "confusion, worse confounded."
CHAPTER II.
GRAFT AND FAILUREPHOBIA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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