QUACK-RIDDEN STATE

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3614, 18 November 1924, Page 2

QUACK-RIDDEN STATE

NEW YORK’S PLIGHT. DEAD DOCTORS’ NAMES USED. Asserting that more than 2,500 quacks are practising in this State, Dr Augustus S, Downing, Assistant Commissioner of i Education for New York State, lately announced that efforts to legislate these charlatans out of the medical profession would be pressed in 1925. In making this announcement, he said that representatives of the profession soon would confer with State education officials on action to be taken at the next session of the Legislature on a Bill requiring annual registration of physicians. At the same time he declared that some fakers were practising on dead men’s licenses, and he called on medical men to purify the profession. “ In nearly every section of New York State there are men who practise medicine who have no right to practise it. I am conservative when I estimate their number to be about 2,500,” he said. “There are different kinds of quacks. There are those who brazenly pose as physicians, and engage in regular practice; there are those who set themselves up as ‘ specialists,’ and do their deadly work at fancy prices. “ One case in point occurred up State, where a quack was giving treatment to a j patient whose skin eventually broke out into a. rash. The ‘ doctor ’ told this man that he had expected this rash, and that it was a good sign. The patient was not satisfied, but lie went to a regular physician, who found that the man had smallpox. ’ ’ There are scores of cases which give mute testimony to the deadly work of the quack—tombstones marking the paths of peddlers of cures and collectors of cash. In most cases it is the poor and the ignorant who foot the bill, but now and then some clever charlatan sets himself up in an elaborate plant designed to Jure people with money and 'hyproehrondiacal tendencies. “We have no ‘diploma mill’ graduates doing business in this State’ as regularly licensed physicians,” said Dr Downing. “We are sure of that because our licensing tests are very strict. The trouble is, however, that we have no way of , checking up how many physicians really are licensed, and the only way we can do it is through a system requiring annual registration. “ Why, even in the limited way that | we have been able to investigate condi- ; tions in the medical profession, we have discovered that there are men practising j medicine on dead men’s licenses. Think of that! ” I “ There are two things more that must be stopped,” said Dr Downing. “ One is j the use of the term ‘ doctor ’ by a person i who has no legal right to employ that ] term, and the other is a ban upon fraudulent and misleading advertising. There is no more dangerous means employed for deceiving and defrauding the public than the use of the word ‘ doctor ’ by quacks. Innocent and ignorant people at once jump to the conclusion that a man who advertises a certain cure and calls himself a ‘ doctor ’ must be a licensed physician. “ Diploma mills turn out such quacks and charlatans by the hundreds, giving them worthless diplomas, and confer upon them titles of this or that. There aie ‘ doctors ’ in this State who are not I even graduates of ‘diploma mills.’ ”