Health Department is astonished!!!

Just yesterday my father sent me a text announcing that in St. Clair county health department discovered that 40% of the residences of St. Clair County view their Chiropractor as their primary physician.   Apparently this revelation sent shock waves through the medical community and have many medical doctors shaking their heads in bemused dismay and no doubt for some, anger.

Yes, I said anger.  Why would some feel anger at this?  I believe I have the answer, albeit a biased answer, it is non-the-less accurate...in my opinion. You see for many years now, over a century in fact, medicine has been controlled by the pharmaceutical industry and remains so today.  The catalyst for this was the passing of the Harrison Act in 1910.  This act made Cocaine, Opium and Morphine prescription only drugs, whereas before 1910 you could buy them over the counter at any general store.

 Before 1910 the pharmaceutical industry was making money hand over fist with an unregulated market.  Billion dollar corporations are considered heavy hitters today, but in 1900 most pharmaceutical companies were billion dollar companies, when wages were less than ten dollars a week.  The trouble for them was that there weren't enough doctors in practice to maintain the profit margins they were enjoying before the 'regulation' of their free market. This created a problem. So, while they scrambled to fix their 'marketing' issues, many printing presses were bought up, and medical diplomas issued to those who would fork over the cash to buy their own medical degree sans the tedium of actually attending classes.

This created a whole new class of 'physician' who had only to produce diploma from a defunct medical school, whose records had conveniently burned when a fire destroyed the administration buildings so that there was no way to actually verify the educational credentials of the newly minted MD from a defunct medical school.  Convenient yes?

 So back to the 'anger' I mentioned earlier.  It was from this batch of 'paper mill' medical doctors that modern medicine got its start. Morris Fishbein, (I have deliberately 'not' used the label Doctor, because he never finished his studies at Rush Medical school to receive a diploma) was the primary catalyst for the mentality of toxic arrogance that permeated the whole of the AMA.  It was his deliberate and aggressive attacks on natural health care practitioners that fomented the attitudes that even to this day simmer beneath the surface for some medical practitioners, especially with regard to chiropractic.  

 For decades and decades the medical practitioner was told that chiropractors were dangerous and were little more than 'rabid dogs', cute but dangerous.  If you think I'm being cute, I'm not, those were the terms used to describe chiropractors to new medical students.  It was that terminology that was drilled into their heads while they were in turn being told that they were the unquestioned authority of all things health and to have anyone question their knowledge...was heresy.  In effect they were being indoctrinated by a new religion and they were the high priests of that 'religion'.   Let's be honest here, who does not want to be told that they are the equivalent of earth bound gods?

 It was the paper mill doctors, like Morris Fishbein who fomented this 'deity' idea and created legions of 'doctors' who literally  hated anyone who did not do, say, think, eat and drink health care in exactly the same manner as they were taught to administer it...by the pharmaceutical industry who was directing Morris Fishbein to do exactly what he did to elevate their market share so that nobody dared question the use of medications for every-bloody-thing one could imagine.

This is a turning point for the entire health care industry, most especially for medicine.  How do they move away from the 'deity' mindset to a more humble, patient oriented practitioner?  To do so will create within medicine a seismic shift that will dislodge the foundation upon which they have practiced for well over a century now.  Anger?  Fear?  Shame?  These are likely each a component of their current reality.  All the effort to dislodge and discredit chiropractors only to have a great many patients view them as their primary care physician, must really cause them a great deal of anxiety.

Humility can be healthy so long as you accept responsibility for your past actions and learn from mistakes made...one can only hope that this revelation on the part of the St. Clair health department is a growth versus a catalyst for more profound hate and anger.

Let us hope.