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We Are Not a Healthy Profession

Dear Editor:

We are not a healthy profession. Why? The truth is, we're exactly where our educational leadership over the past century has put us. Not the AMA, not the press – our own leaders.

To be blunt, they have always believed our schools couldn't make it without students whose abilities are so poor no other professional school will take them. That fact, well-known by the public, has colored their perception of us from day one. Their thought process is simple and logical:  Inferior standards equals inferior students, equals an inferior education, equals inferior graduates, which equals an inferior profession.

This is B.J.'s legacy, who went to extremes to keep standards low. What did this produce? In History in the Making, he tells of having 200 practicing doctors identify marked vertebrae. B.J. said it was "common" to be "2, 3, 4, 5 or more" levels off. By B.J.'s own admission, many DCs couldn't even tell what bone was what!

One of my professors told me that on his first day in chiropractic college, in the late '60s, the student next to him was actually waiting on the results of his GED. A GED! It's no wonder MDs boycotted us.

In the '90s, when we last raised standards off true bottom-feeding levels, the president of our largest school, then widely regarded as a degree mill, publicly threatened to sue to keep it from happening. We as a profession have paid a heavy, heavy price for this.

One can argue that even our educators don't have enough faith in the profession, and in their own schools, to believe they can attract enough of the best. Sadly, if we'd made our schools difficult to get into years ago, we'd probably be like our competitors have been for generations – more applicants than space.

All others need to know to believe we're inferior is to look at our admission standards. Our education leaders can keep them where they are and keep the profession stuck where it is; or they can raise them to what they should have been decades ago and allow us to advance.

Until that happens, the best we'll do is stay where we are, with our degrees, competency and treatments too often in question, and far too many of our students essentially wasting four years while amassing loans they can't repay.

Edward Rowland, MA, DC
Odessa, Texas

Let's Fight for What We Do Best

Dear Editor:

I remember back in the 1950s when the osteopaths would align with us when we went to Jefferson City, Mo., for legislative matters. That all changed when the medical profession extended them hospital privileges; now they align with the MDs and oppose us more than MDs in legislative matters.

In my town, it is hard to find a DO who will manipulate, as they practice medicine and medical specialties. How times have changed here in Wisconsin. When I graduated in 1952, you could not be called or use the term doctor. We were encouraged to take the Spinal Special exam, rather than the regular Basic Science exam. To take either exam, all you had to have was a high-school degree, yet they went to the extent to investigate one of my classmates and ask him if he wouldn't rather take the Spinal Special exam.

I agree with Dr. J.C. Smith – why don't we stick to and fight for what we do best, rather than become "bastardpaths," as the osteopaths were known as in the early transition years?

James W. Bryden, DC
One of the "Chicago Four" in the Wilk v. AMA suit