Review of The Medical War Against Chiropractors: The Untold Story from Persecution to Vindication

Warner Robins, GA: CreateSpace, 2011, 262 pages, ISBN: 1453744878, $24.95.

T he Medical War Against Chiropractors by James C. Smith, DC, tells the important story of organized medicine's long battle with the chiropractic profession. With a chiropractic career spanning 32 years, Dr. Smith is able to tell the largely unknown tale of medicine's persecution of chiropractic from both a historical and personal perspective, turning what could potentially be a dry accounting of facts and dates into something much deeper in meaning.

Unbeknownst to many people, the chiropractic profession has faced adversity from organized medicine since its founding by D.D. Palmer in 1895. Like any other “irregular” form of health care, chiropractic did not go unnoticed by the medical “authorities” of the time in the American Medical Association (AMA) and the state medical societies. By the time “Old Dad Chiro” founded the chiropractic profession, the AMA had been eliminating competitors for nearly 50 years. Chiropractic was simply a new nuisance to train their efforts against, but to the credit of the chiropractic profession, it remains independent 117 years later.

Dr. Smith follows the tale of medical discrimination against chiropractic from its earliest years to the 1920s, when the AMA was led by Morris Fishbein. Drawing on many sources including internal AMA documents unearthed in the Wilk v. AMA antitrust lawsuit, he convincingly describes the organized plan hatched by the AMA to, in their own words, “contain and eliminate” the chiropractic profession, supplementing this with many examples of how this plan was implemented over a period of decades. It is difficult to understand today what it was like for early chiropractors to practice in fear of being extorted, arrested, and even jailed for the “practice of medicine without a license.” In fact, an estimated 12,000 chiropractors were arrested in the United States during the worst years of medical persecution, with 642 known to have served jail time, often for long periods of time and under hard conditions, in the company of murderers and other actual criminals.

The AMA's plan to destroy chiropractic culminated in the early 1960s, when the so-called “Iowa Plan” was constructed as a specific road map to secretly attack chiropractic at all levels and from every angle. During his research for The Medical War Against Chiropractors, Dr. Smith uncovered many examples of the implementation of this war and how it affected doctors and their families, as well as the patients these people were simply trying to care for. Lives were ruined as a result of the AMA's actions against the chiropractic profession, and in this book Smith brings these accounts to the public's eye for the first time.

The author goes into great detail surrounding the epic story of the Wilk v. AMA trial, in which chiropractor Chester Wilk and his co-plaintiff colleagues, represented by attorney George McAndrews (the son of a chiropractor who faced medical discrimination), sued the AMA and a long list of co-conspirators for conducting an illegal boycott of the chiropractic profession. Through two courtroom trials and a series of appeals culminating in a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of the chiropractors, involving millions of pages of documents and the cooperation of many “angels” within the medical profession and AMA itself, Mr. McAndrews was able to prove that there had, in fact, been a decades-long battle forged against chiropractors in secret meetings, which then played out in numerous public and private settings.

Dr. Smith's tale continues to the current day, where battles are still being fought on many fronts. Even now, the negative undercurrent of past biases still emerges in popular media, likely influencing the decisions of millions of Americans who would benefit from chiropractic care, to use other, often less effective forms of treatment.

The Medical War Against Chiropractors is an ambitious effort to tell a story that spans 117 years, but Dr. Smith rises to the occasion, never getting bogged down in the minutiae of the events and facts yet still giving a comprehensive account. As a testament to Dr. Smith's writing ability, this book reads more like a novel than a nonfiction historical text. At the same time, it is well researched and documented, with references throughout. In my personal experience teaching and writing about chiropractic history, most people, particularly medical professionals and even many chiropractors, are unaware that these events happened. Dr. C. Smith's The Medical War Against Chiropractors is an ambitious undertaking; it is an essential read that gives critical insight into both the chiropractic profession and the fascinating transformation of American medicine from an eclectic collection of practices into the politically and financially driven juggernaut that it is today.