Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

Conventional doctors were suspicious of Palmer’s quasi-religious philosophy, and they were particularly angered by his extraordinary claim that the spine was the root cause of disease and that spinal manipulation was the best way to cure patients. They were annoyed by his boast that ‘chiropractic is a science of healing without drugs’, and they were alarmed by his refusal to acknowledge the role of germs in causing many of the diseases prevalent at the time. Not surprisingly, it was not long before there was a campaign against Palmer, led by a local doctor named Heinrich Matthey. He accused Palmer of teaching an unproven medical concept and practising medicine without a licence. In fact, this led to Palmer being taken to court three times and on the third occasion, in 1906, he was sentenced to time in jail when he refused to pay a fine. If anything, this strengthened the fast-growing movement: chiropractic therapy had its first martyr, and many more would follow.

D. D. Palmer’s son was Bartlett Joshua Palmer, and it was he who continued to promote chiropractic therapy while his father was indisposed. He became successful in his own right, so much so that he was able to buy the first car in Davenport, but unfortunately in 1913 he ran over his father at the Palmer School of Chiropractic home-coming parade. D. D. Palmer died just a few weeks later — officially the cause of the death was recorded as typhoid, but it seems more likely that his death was a direct result of injuries caused by his son. Indeed, there is speculation that this was not an accident, but rather a case of patricide. Father and son had become bitter rivals over the leadership of the chiropractic movement. Also B. J. Palmer had always resented his father and the way that he had treated his family:

When each of our sisters reached eighteen, they were driven out of home and onto the streets of Davenport to make their living any way they could…All three of us got beatings with straps until we carried welts, for which father was often arrested and spent nights in jail…Father was so deeply involved and so busy with thinking and writings on Chiropractic, he hardly knew he had any children.

B. J. Palmer, who already led the Universal Chiropractic Association, became the new undisputed figurehead of the movement. He was a smart operator and shrewd entrepreneur. He rapidly accumulated a large fortune by teaching students and treating patients. On top of all this, in 1924 he started a lucrative sideline in selling neurocalometers, which supposedly helped chiropractors by detecting subluxations. Palmer was very proud of his invention and promoted it widely, but from a modern point of view we can see that it was clearly a worthless piece of technology. The neurocalometer contained nothing more than a simple thermocouple, which is a standard piece of electrical equipment designed to measure temperature. Hence, it would have been useless for detecting misalignments in the spine or pinched nerves. Although each neurocalometer cost less than $100 to build, he initially sold them for $1,150, and then he increased the price to $2,200. To put this figure into context, $2,200 would have been enough to buy a house in Iowa in the 1920s, and yet Palmer somehow persuaded over 2,000 graduates from his college and other chiropractors to buy his bogus invention.

Not surprisingly, his customers ended up dissatisfied. An attorney acting on behalf of one of the disgruntled customers attempted to sue Palmer: ‘In all our experience as practicing attorneys, nothing more closely resembling a fraud and a swindle has ever been brought to our personal attention than this proposition which your school is submitting to its graduates.’

In such situations, Palmer would repair his reputation by promoting himself on WOC, one of America’s pioneering radio stations, which he had established in 1922. Although it carried programmes on a range of subjects, such as current affairs and cookery, it also broadcast lectures by Palmer as well as other programmes directly related to chiropractic therapy. Its audience stretched across large parts of America and Canada, and Palmer even claimed he had listeners in Scotland, Samoa and at the North Pole.

Thanks to his radio station and other clever marketing techniques, Palmer oversaw the growth of the chiropractic movement over the next few decades, not just in America but also in Europe. For example, the British Chiropractic Association was founded in 1925 and the European Chiropractors’ Union formed in 1932, by which time there were 126 chiropractors in Britain, seventy-six across Norway, Denmark and Sweden, and a few dozen others in Ireland, Belgium and elsewhere.