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

Meanwhile, back in America, chiropractors were coming under increasing pressure from the medical establishment, which disapproved of their philosophy and methods. Doctors continued to encourage the arrest of chiropractors for practising medicine without a licence, and by 1940 there had been over 15,000 prosecutions. Palmer strongly endorsed the Universal Chiropractic Association’s policy of covering legal expenses and supporting members who had been arrested, which resulted in 80 per cent of chiropractors walking free from court.

When the legal route failed to dampen chiropractic spirits, the American Medical Association (AMA) tried other tactics, which culminated in 1963 in the formation of the Committee on Quackery. Its secretary, H. Doyle Taylor, wrote a memo to the AMA Board of Trustees, which reaffirmed that the Committee on Quackery considered its prime mission to be the ‘containment of Chiropractic and ultimately the elimination of Chiropractic.’ The Committee’s activities included lobbying to keep chiropractors outside the Medicare health-insurance programme, and arguing that chiropractic therapy should not be recognized by the US Office of Education.

This antagonism might seem unreasonable, but remember that the medical establishment had several reasons for despising chiropractors. These included their belief in the unscientific notion of innate intelligence, their denial that bacteria and viruses cause many diseases, and their conviction that realigning a patient’s spine could cure every ailment. On top of all this, conventional doctors were shocked by the fact that many chiropractors were fond of the E-meter, another bizarre diagnostic gadget. Invented in the 1940s by a chiropractor named Volney Mathison, the E-meter has a needle that swings back and forth across a scale when a patient holds on to two electrical contacts — apparently this is enough to determine a patient’s state of health. The E-meter was also widely used by the Church of Scientology, so much so that many Scientologists believe that it was invented by their founder L. Ron Hubbard. Unfortunately, the E-meter is nothing more than a piece of technical hocus-pocus, which is why in 1963 the US Food & Drug Administration seized more than 100 of them from the Founding Church of Scientology. In many ways, the E-meter bears a resemblance to the equally bogus neurocalometer, invented two decades earlier by B. J. Palmer.

Conventional doctors were equally dismissive of applied kinesiology, a method invented in 1964 by a chiropractor called George J. Goodheart, who argued that diseases could be identified by manually testing the strength of muscle groups. A patient’s muscles supposedly become immediately stronger if a treatment is beneficial, or the muscles become weaker if the treatment is harmful, or if a toxin or allergen is brought close to the body. Typically, the patient holds out an arm and a tester pushes against it to feel the strength and steadiness of the resistance. This is, of course, a highly subjective measurement, and it is hard to imagine why it should have any medical value. Indeed, controlled trials show that the claims of applied kinesiology have no basis in reality.

As far as the AMA was concerned, all these problems were compounded by the ambition of many chiropractors to act as primary care givers. In other words, chiropractors argued that they could replace general practitioners because they could also offer regular check-ups, long-term preventative treatments and cures for many conditions. In the 1950s and 1960s it was possible to find adverts for chiropractors with claims such as ‘there are very few diseases, as they are understood today, which are not treatable by Chiropractic method’, or ‘Correction and treatment of both acute and chronic polio by chiropractic methods have been unusually successful.’

The AMA continued to fight back with its concerted effort to eliminate the chiropractic profession, but in 1976 its campaign suddenly backfired. ‘Sore Throat’, an anonymous source within the AMA, leaked material that revealed the details and the extent of the AMA’s campaign, which prompted Chester A. Wilk, a chiropractor from Chicago, to file an anti-trust lawsuit against the AMA. Wilk was arguing that the AMA’s campaign against chiropractors amounted to anti-competitive behaviour, and that the medical establishment was merely trying to corner the market in treating patients.

After dragging on for over a decade, the lawsuit eventually ended in 1987. Judge Susan Getzendanner, who had presided over the case, ruled that the AMA had indeed acted unfairly against chiropractors: