Allopathic Medicine's Criticism Of Alternative Medicine.

The first generation of allopathic doctors hardly turned the other cheek to such criticism. They gave as good as they got, putting forward a range of objections to alternative medicine. In the orthodox analysis, alternative practitioners were not simply ignoramuses and incompetents; they were zealots, medical cultists obsessed with a single theoretical and therapeutic tenet, blind and deaf to the merits of any conflicting belief or practice, and determined to bend every case to their fundamentalist faith.

The alternative doctor, a Baltimore medico declared, “circumscribes himself and practises a ... one-idea system only, and is so tied down and limited to that ... that he denies the usefulness of all known and honorable means of aiding the sick.” Regular doctors resented the label allopathy because it was implied their medicine was just another -pathy, merely one more sect instead of open-minded science. “The title ‘Allopathy',” it was objected, was an “insignificant misno-mer ... applied to us opprobriously ... with sinister motives .... [I]t is both untrue and offensive.” Hence, “when people ask you ‘what school you practise,' you may very properly answer that you are simply a PHYSICIAN, that you belong to no sect,” that you, “like the bee, take the honey of truth wherever you find it”.

Insinuation and derision were a game two could play. Homeopathy, Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, was “a mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity” (34). Another doctor characterized it as “a confused mass of rubbish”. Other unorthodox schools of practice were accorded comparable respect. For example, osteopathy was denounced by an end-of-the-century physician as “a complete system of charlatanism ... and quackery, calculated and designed to impose upon the credulous, superstitious, and ignorant”.

Soon after, the editor of JAMA described naturopathy as “a medical cesspool”. Irregulars might protest all they wanted that their methods had empirical foundations, and therefore were scientific. However, allopaths believed that enslavement to simplistic “one-idea systems” resulted in biased interpretations of clinical experience. Hence, “this subterfuge cannot avail. Call himself by what name he will, a quack is still a quack—and even if the prince of darkness should assume the garb of heavenly innocence, the cloven hoof would still betray the real personage”.

Cloven-hooved or not, alternative practitioners did see most of their patients return to health. But those successes, mainstream physicians argued, could be accounted for entirely by the operations of nature. By the mid-1800s, allopathic philosophy acknowledged that most diseases are self-limited, and will resolve themselves under anyone's care. However, that explanation was much more frequently applied to alternative patients than to mainstream ones. Homeopathy in particular, with its immaterial doses of drugs, seemed to be explainable in no other way than as “placeboism etherealized”. Homeopaths, one physician laughed, would be just as successful “were the similars left out, and atoms of taffy or sawdust ... substituted, to give their patients room to exercise their faith, and nature time and opportunity to do the work”