Backs & Barrenness

Many osteopaths on the way to their national convention in Chicago last week understood that King George VI's personal osteopath was to make them a speech and thus put a royal gloss on their rising profession. Dr. W. Kelman Macdonald of Edinburgh, who was the American Osteopathic Association's chief guest, does not belong to the King's medical household. Nearest approach to an osteopath in that prize group of British doctors is the Manipulative Surgeon to the King Sir Morton Smart.*

Dr. MacDonald, however, brought U. S. osteopaths something far more useful to them than gloss. The greatest weakness in their theory that "one of the primary causes of disease [is] a mechanical maladjustment ['osteopathic lesion'] of some sort which . . . may be found in a joint, muscle, ligament or other tissue," has been that no osteopath was ever able to produce a lesion in any creature by a scientifically impeccable experiment. Osteopath Louisa Burns of South Pasadena, Calif, claimed to do so, but could not convince sceptics. Dr. MacDonald appeared at Chicago last week with X-ray and documentary proofs that he had made female rats incapable of bearing children simply by whacking their spines out of shape. He performed his experiments at the Scottish Osteopathic Re-search Institute, an affiliate of the University of Edinburgh headed by the Viceroy of India, the medically-minded Marquess of Linlithgow.

The vertebrae in the back of the rats which Dr. MacDonald banged correspond to those in the small of a woman's back where sympathetic nerves emerge from the spinal cord to connect with the sex organs. "Lesions" in other spinal areas do not produce barrenness.

"These findings," said this doctor of medicine who was converted when an osteopath cured him of colitis, "check with the fact that minor accidents are a common cause of sterility in women. Hunting field accidents frequently lead to subsequent sterility. The spine is liable to become twisted when women ride sidesaddle. In badminton and tennis, it is very easy to produce an osteopathic lesion. A badly done swallow [U. S.: swan] dive may have similar results. Overindulgence in sports and the craze for speed are in a general way favorable to barrenness. . . . Quite frequently a patient consults an osteopath and complains of sciatica, and sometimes she prefers to keep her sciatica and remain sterile."

scrupulous osteopaths avoid exploiting the fact that King George's Pediatrician George Frederic Still has the same family name as Osteopathy's late Founder Andrew Taylor Still (1828-1917).

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