DOCTORS’ DIFFERENCES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 867, 19 July 1910, Page 4

DOCTORS’ DIFFERENCES.

AMERICA’S PUBLIC HEALTH.

Vigorous protests have been received in Washington from all parts of America against the Owen Bill, which creates a new Cabinet officer, who will be known as the Public Minister of Health. These protests came from the homoepaths, eclectics, osteopoths, Christian scieuiists, and other cults who flourish in,the States, and represent the Owen, the offspring of the American Medical Association, as a measure of forming a doctors’ trust for the benefit of the alopahs alone, and ostractiug every other medical school.

The protests are organised by “The League for Medical Freedom,” and, judging by the campaign in progress, the allopaths, who constitute the American Medical Association, will require all their forces of money and strategy to carry their Bill. Public opinion is by no means entirely on the side of the allopaths, who are publicly accused of jealousy and of persecuting the practitioners of rival schools, and also of trying to deprive them of many of the priveleges which they now enjoy, such, for instance, as the signing of death certificates, a right lately conferred upon osteopaths in the State of New York.

It is certain that the allopaths will not have the alleged doctors’ trust without first defeating much bitter and well-disciplined opposition. Americans are generous to new cults as a rule, whether religious or medical, and according to the opponents of the doctors’ trust, there is just as much good, and possibly more, done by unorthodox medical men as by the allopaths, and that most of the alleged cures secured by the allopaths are due not so much to drugs as to the natural tendency inherent in all persons towards self-cure. This is not a very edifying battle for laymen to witness, and the difference of the rival doctors tend to bring the entire profession into ridicule.