The Merger

Dr. Ethan Allen, DO, interviewed by Dr. Michael Seffinger, DO

April 6, 2002

• Dr. Seffinger:  Would you like to tell us where you came from, where you were born, and leading up to your education, how you applied to and began your schooling at COP&S in California in the 1940s?
• Dr. Allen:  Starting from my early childhood, I was born in Fargo, North Dakota. When I was 4 years old my parents moved to Wyoming and all my schooling and education was in Laramie, Wyoming. I graduated from University of Wyoming in 1943. Actually I was part of the class of 1944, since the war had started, in order to continue to have the deferment from going into military service, you had to continue the four quarters of the school year. I graduated two quarters ahead of my actual graduating class in electrical engineering and my first job after graduation was with General Electrics in Fort Wayne, Indiana in the “small motors division” and we were making electric motors and converters that were going on the B-29 which is an all electric plane, no hydraulics. After working at GE for three months, recruiters came from New York that were looking for young engineers to go on to a special project, the Manhattan project. They interviewed at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and also at Lima, Ohio, which had Westinghouse and about 30 of us were recruited to go back to Columbia University for a crash program on high vacuum techniques, and the mass “spectrometer”. And after completing the training there I was sent to the Chrysler corporation in Detroit, MI, which was making defuser components for the atomic bomb project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I became aware that I was actually working on the atomic bomb after I was in Detroit for about 6 weeks or so. They had a meeting of executives and scientists and after they left I was in the meeting room. I noticed a book on physics and after getting the name of the book, I went to the library in Detroit and picked up the same book; it didn’t take too long in reading it to realize that the atomic bomb development was the project that Manhattan was working on. The Kellex Corporation that I was working for was part of the Manhattan project. After working in Detroit during the summer, I asked to be moved to a different locality. Detroit was not the happiest place to work, and I was transferred to Milwaukee and worked for the A.O. Smith Corporation, which was building heat exchangers, which followed the defusers in the Oak Ridge Plant. It was there that I was talking with a fellow engineer about the possibility of using my electrical knowledge and looking to the future with atomic energy and electronics and going into medicine. And his comment was, “if you’re going to be going into a profession doing something new and different you ought to get into the osteopathic profession because they’re not so hide-bound and slow to accept new ideas.” Not knowing anything about the osteopathic profession, I went to the Milwaukee library and found two books on osteopathy and then was quite anxious to accept that profession and get into it. The idea was still delayed with the war going on and upon completion of the work and building of the components in Milwaukee, I was sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee and lived and worked there for several months doing the actual assembly work. I was a high vacuum engineer and the system had to be air tight and so a vacuum pump involved testing with helium to make sure that everything was air tight and not able to cause contamination. After several months there the status of the war was changing, especially after the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944. The order came out from the Manpower Director that no one was to be deferred any longer under 22 years old, and I was called up by the draft board, and was inducted in Denver, CO. When I was asked whether I wanted to go into the Army or Navy, and since I wore glasses I never dreamed I would make it, but I asked for the Navy, and so I went to basic training in San Diego. While in San Diego, I took the Eddie Test which had to do with my electrical knowledge and I had no difficulty passing. I made the raise in rank from a seamen 3rd to a seamen 1st which is like being a sergeant in the Army. And then went to primary school in Chicago for a month and secondary school in the former Del Monte Hotel which is near Monterey, CA. While I was there, the 1st atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Then I talked with fellow members of the radio class; that was the pre-Navy project which I had been working on. Since my prior time in the service I wouldn’t discuss what my activity had been prior to entering service. Upon completion of secondary school I was transferred to Ward Island, the naval air station out of Corpus Cristi, TX, and I was in the Naval Air Corp as a radio radar technician, and continued to be in the Navy until May 1946 when I was discharged and went back to the University of Wyoming. My decision at that time had been pretty complete that I was going to go into the osteopathic profession. An incident happened that was very personal, in that my mother, while I was in the service and perhaps even when I was still working on the atomic bomb, became quite ill and the doctors had concluded that she probably had stomach cancer and her sister lived in Inglewood, California and suggested that she come to California and to go the Osteopathic Clinic and she did. At the clinic it was discovered that her problem was not stomach cancer but outlet obstruction of the stomach apparently due to scar tissue from chronic ulcer disease. She was operated on by Dr. Edward Abbott who was the post-graduate director for COP&S at Glendale Community Hospital. She had the gastro-jejunal bypass, and when the surgery was done, she made a prompt recovery, regained her health and went back home to Wyoming. So, this was a reinforcement of my decision to come into the osteopathic profession. I did not have the requirements for pre-med so I took a year at the University of Wyoming in 1946-7 to get pre-med and then I came out to California and was accepted into the COP&S class of 1951, entering 1947, and of course I had immediate visitations and acceptance and encouragement from Dr. Abbott who had remembered my mother and he also then helped as an advisor to get me into the osteopathic college. I had been in military service so I had the GI bill for 3 years of my schooling and there were several, in fact a majority of the persons in the entering class in 1947 were veterans, and the class had persons who were older than you’d expect because they’ve given four or five years of their life to military service and probably the average age was 30-34 years of age. We had 3 ladies in the class of 85 people. There were chiropractors in the class and we ended up having 3 persons come into our class that had flunked out of the class ahead of us because of confrontations with the biology teacher, I think it was, anyway she had dismissed them and the students were sent back into our class. I had a close friendship with a classmate named Dr. Frank Keller. He had actually started at Kirksville in 1940 and had had an injury during the summer vacation between freshman and sophomore year and developed osteomyelitis in a finger that was injured while he was working and he had to drop out of school. Then, when the war started in 1941 he was one of the early ones to be drafted and was then in the military service for 4 years. But he had to begin the 1st year at Kirksville again, and so in our osteopathic (manipulation) classes he was ahead of the rest of us and actually monitored us and helped us. His brother was a professor at Kirksville so there was a quick induction into osteopathy with Frank and his brother, still having fellowship with Frank over the distance from Kirksville to LA. The college was on Griffin Ave in downtown LA, directly across the street was the Osteopathic County Hospital. In those days the school had a college clinic which was a 3 story building adjacent to the railroad tracks so the same railroad that goes by the college in Pomona often interrupted classes in COP&S as the train whistled and rumbled by. So great déjà vu when I’m in Pomona and hear the train going by! In the clinic we had our first two years in academics and were aware the 2nd two years would be clinical work and the clinic started in the junior year. Our classes were the 1st half of the day and we worked in the clinic the 2nd half of the day. The clinic had patients that had been there often for many years and each of the specialties were there for clinics including osteopathic medicine, gynecology, neurology, psychiatry, and so on, pediatrics. So the patients as they came in would be inventoried as to the particular problem they had; and the student would pick up on their care and do the history and physical and then meeting with the director of the clinic and decide on which one of the specialties they would follow. So if you had a cardiac problem patient would see the cardiologist and you would then follow a patient on the day that the particular service was being held. You’d report on your patient and give your opinion and impression and other students with cardiac patients would be there too. And the cardiologist would instruct us and counsel us and direct the course of treatment for the patient and directed when the patient would come back. So I had several patients for OMI in the early days and went to the osteopathic for care; and I went to the osteopathic clinic when I had no patients to take at the clinic. The patients there might have been there many years, sometimes their charts were several inches thick and they had been in osteopathic care for many years. So as the students finish their term they would be passed on to the next junior class to be picked up and taken care of for the next year. So you had patients that were going to the eye clinic or eye, ears, nose, and throat and for pediatrics and for osteopathic manipulation and for cardiology and pulmonology and so on. In the senior year our service was done at the county hospital and the situation was somewhat similar. We would have patients that transferred to our care and we would conduct them through the various services that they needed. Two services that took us outside the clinic both in the junior year and senior year was obstetrics, they were assigned to a city health clinic and they would see the patients pre-natally and then some of these were home deliveries and when the patient was having delivery we would go with the intern and the resident to the patients home and do the delivery. Most of the deliveries were in East Los Angeles and if the patient was not able to deliver in the home they went to a small hospital on 1st street. They have their obstetrical care there otherwise that was just for the ones that previously scheduled for home delivery.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Was that an osteopathic hospital?
• Dr. Allen:  I don’t think it was truly an osteopathic hospital because these were county clinics.
• Dr. Seffinger:  These county OB clinics since the early 1900s and I know that DOs had been training in them since 1917 or 1918, and they were usually run by MDs.
• Dr. Allen:  We had DOs running them in ours
• Dr. Seffinger:  So all of your trainers in OB were DOs.
• Dr. Allen:  DOs, right. Because the residents that came out were residents out of the county osteopathic hospital.
• Dr. Seffinger:  of osteopathic unit?
• Dr. Allen:  Osteopathic unit yes. Anyway this was unique and later in my practice in Norwalk I spent 13 years as I did home deliveries and was a rare person to be doing that. The comfort of doing it came from having the training in school so we did all the services at county hospital being on surgery and obstetrics and infectious diseases and in those days polio was still a active disease so we had polio patients in the wards down in isolation and when the cure was discovered but it was mainly penicillin and sulfa and tetracycline had made it’s appearance but one of the early antibiotics that was really useful was streptomycin and in fact one of the frequently used was pen/strep a combination of penicillin and streptomycin and we learned that you had to be cautious on how much streptomycin you used on a patient due to possible injury to the auditory nerves. But it was a widely utilized antibiotic in the early days of my practice. And then at the county hospital while we were on the surgical ward, one of the big impressions was the unit that we had for our isolation and for general medicine, the old folks area on the 2nd floor and 5th floor was for obstetrics, the 6th floor was surgery and 7th for residents and interns quarters. Outside of the one large unit building were small buildings, relatively small buildings, they were tall probably 6 stories tall red brick and that had been were there was a TB hospital previously and these building were given to the osteopathic profession for their training for some of the long term residents what we now have in convalescent hospitals were housed in these building there were probably 3 or 4 of them on the grounds. And in 1955 a county bond issue was voted on by the public to build a new osteopathic county hospital. The bond issue passed, and I think it was in 1957 that they had the opening of the new osteopathic county hospital which was a tremendous advancement for the profession because it took down several old brick buildings to make room for the new unit which had been assigned to the DO’s. Which incidentally is now the women’s unit of county hospital. In the county hospitals we had separation; there were distinct rivalry between the two medical professions. The MDs had the big hospital up on the hilltop it was unit 1, our unit was 2 and the psychiatric unit was unit 3. So at the time I was going to graduate I wanted to get training in a private hospital. I learned from watching and listening to people that in treating county patients all they time you get rough edges and you don’t treat patients respectfully as you should in private practice so I chose to do an internship in Glendale Community Hospital which was an osteopathic hospital in Glendale, CA. And at this time I didn’t really feel any want to have close association with any MDs, they were the enemy you might say. They were restrictive in practices. Hospitals had to be built by DOs where DOs practiced in the DO’s hospital. And MDs run the whole show in the medical hospitals.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Can you give an example of what you felt as a student or intern in terms of restrictions of your trade or profession?
• Dr. Allen:  It existed in the county when unit 1 was run by the medical side and unit 2 was run by the osteopaths. We had very strong DOs in charge of the osteopathic units. We also had an old out patient clinic, therefore I was there. About 1955 a new clinic was built, from the one that I was in when I was a junior. It was doing a lot of good work. Dr. Andrews was a leader there on the rehabilitation of polio patients. It was on the corner of Griffin and Mission Road, just across the street from the county hospital. It was quite an advancement to have that new building. Patients that we had coming to the osteopathic clinic were just solid supporters of the osteopathic profession, usually unhappy with anything they had in the medical practice before. Students need to realize that prior to the 1900s there was not a lot of scientific medicine. I tend to say this when I speak to the freshmen class; that prior to 1900 there was not scientific medicine, and osteopathy actually started as a revolution against the standards and behaviors of the medical practice. Probably the 1st real recognition of anything scientific was the discovery of “foxglove” which was the source of digitalis. Then insulin to treat diabetes was discovered in 1920s and sulfa began to be used in 1930s and then penicillin was discovered in England in the 1940s and so the transition to scientific medicine was gradual over a period of time and the osteopathic profession was greatly enhanced during WWI when there was a severe influenza epidemic and a lot of people died and there’s the report that osteopathic care given to patients saved patients, and that the medical profession had a higher percentage of people dying than the osteopathic profession did. The osteopathic doctors would actually make house calls 2 or 3 times a day on some acutely ill patients with the flu, doing osteopathic treatments, and helped them survive. And so I kept aware of this as I was going through school. We had a distinctiveness and it was one that was to the benefit of patients.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Did you find yourself restricted as a student where you trained during rotation as well as an intern?
• Dr. Allen:  No there was enough variety and enough between our clinics and what were osteopathic hospitals. I never felt restricted, I never wanted to go MD. I was able to manage wherever I was.
• Dr. Seffinger:  You mentioned that the MDs were restrictive.
• Dr. Allen:  Well in the fact that you couldn’t go into a medical hospital and have privileges there. They wouldn’t accept any DOs on staff so I didn’t try. Of course Glendale was an osteopathic hospital, close by in Burbank was the Burbank osteopathic hospital. Dr. Norcross had his Doctor’s Hospital down near USC, just off Figueroa. His son was in my class. Belvedere Hospital part of city maternity was where the patients went for C-section if unsuccessful home delivery was expected. And there was an osteopathic hospital in Long Beach so when you began looking for internships many wanted to stay at county hospital. Sam Shepherd was a resident in county hospital and he had a notorious history later on. When I was there he was one of the 1st to do an osteopathic neuro residency. He was a neurosurgeon. Others that were leaders of the profession within Glendale, Dr. Duodani and Dr. Marsh, were obstetricians at Glendale Community Hospital. There were some strong DO’s for the profession in orthopedics. The name escapes me right now. And also the fellow who later married Dr. Marsh was on staff doing OB. Anyway I chose to do an internship in a private hospital for the purpose that I felt I’d be better suited for private practice. The guys that went through county hospital had to relearn bedside manner. They didn’t identify with patients very well. There are all kinds of diseases that we had to treat and I don’t think at any time that I felt that my training was substandard to manage the variety of diseases. One of the unique training was our pathology course. In the basic program for the pathology course was a study of about 60 diseases and the professor said if you learn backwards and forwards these 60 disease you will be very well prepared as a general practioner on taking care of patients and if you are on something extraordinary there’s consults out there that will help you. So we learned TB and CA of breast and brain tumor and strep throat and ovarian cancer and uterine cervical cancer and pulmonary embolus and others. I never felt that my training was inadequate on any way and our final in that course was to write on two assigned diseases. So diseases that got around like polio, we had to know.
• Dr. Seffinger:  When you wrote about those diseases and problem presentations did you have to show that you could apply osteopathic principles to patient care? Were you responsible to give an osteopathic approach to a patient? Was that ever defined to you what an osteopathic approach actually was?
• Dr. Allen:  I can‘t recall what it was though we had a fantastic EENT teacher, Dr. T.J. Ruddy, he’s osteopathic through and through. For several years he would hold luncheon seminars for the group of DOs that were in Hollywood area where they had the Hollywood luncheon club. He was pretty much the prime mover, he was able to take you through the digestive tract and talk about the whole osteopathic concept, and how a particle of food was digested and where it went and the whole process, great mind. And he innovated several ENT instruments. He really had a sequence of doctors that were trained by him. This was an interesting thing of the early profession that there were the pillars of a particular specialty like orthopedics, ENT, obstetricts and subsequently there would be 3 or 4 or half a dozen good quality residents that would come out from that one primary leader. Dr. Dooley was one for OB and Dr. McHenry was one for orthopedics so some of their trainees would end up in Long Beach or Glendale. Dr. Hopps was one of the orthopedics that was outstanding who was a succession to Dr. McHenry. One of the early ones in surgery was an interesting fellow, Dr. J Willoughby Howe. He was English and he even wore spats when he came to clinic. He was a brave guy, for those days. He actually would do chest and heart surgery long before it was done by other specialists in those days. And so the osteopathic profession was growing and I was not aware of what was going on in legislature; we didn’t have problems there. WWII had just ended and there was lots of need for medical care. When I finished internship I went to Norwalk and joined 2 DOs that had just recently moved to Norwalk from practices in Long Beach. One was a surgeon Dr. McDowell, Dr. Trendle was the pediatrician. They continued to go to county hospital almost weekly for doing clinics in pediatrics and surgery. Dr. McDowell would be the senior surgeon on call if they ran into a particularly complicated case in county he would go up there and participate as a trainer. So would Dr. Trendle he was an excellent pediatrician. So I entered practice as a general practitioner and since they came from Long Beach the hospital we went to was Magnolia Hospital which was a DO hospital. There was no hospital in Norwalk, there was a hospital in Whittier which was a small hospital that was privately owned by a lady treated with osteopathic care; so she was insistent that when she sold the hospital to medical doctors that it be “open staff” and that DOs would be on staff with her hospital and so this was one of my 1st chances of seeing the crossover of an “open staff” hospital. Dr. McDowell and Dr. Trendle began to get a movement in Norwalk to get a District Hospital. This was one of the ways the federal government was supporting the newly populated areas to get medical care and the District Hospital would be supported by federal funds (The Hill Burton Act). So, the DO’s formed a hospital district organized with a group of citizens in Norwalk to see about getting a hospital in Norwalk. The MDs never joined any part of it and resisted it because district hospital had to be “open staff” since the federal government was putting money in it and the pressure was meaningful enough from Congress that we were able to get equality between MDs and DOs where federal money was spent. So the draft for the proposal for District Hospital would be submitted each year and during the time it was initially started (around 1954) so by 1958 we had come from 30th place to 7th place in priority and this was making the MDs nervous; so there was movement to get a small community hospital built in Norwalk which would immediately blow apart the emphasis for a district hospital. But there could have been a district hospital probably of 100 to 150 beds built in Norwalk if it had been able to go through. But MD’s from downtown LA built a small 50 bed hospital in Norwalk and another medical group put a big sign where their office was announcing the inception of a hospital to be built on those grounds where they were. So this began to disintegrate the idea of a district hospital, it didn’t come to pass. So Norwalk patients of ours still had to go to Murphy Hospital, Whittier or Magnolia Hospital, Long Beach. Then there was a single doctor, Dr. Richards, who came from the Long Beach area built a small hospital, privately, known as St. Helen’s in Artesia so this was a step closer to Norwalk. And the DO’s joined, it was a DO hospital. Then a group of doctors in South Gate and Lynwood moved into the Downey area and build Rio Hondo Hospital which was a strictly osteopathic hospital and then a group from Whittier and Norwalk and out of Rio Hondo got together and built another hospital and that was the one that was most pleasant to use out of all the ones around there that was closest to Norwalk. I actually had a share in the ownership of La Mirada Hospital and it flourished very well, until the time of amalgamation came, so our practice grew rapidly. In consecutive years we took in new doctors that were finishing their internships at Long Beach, Magnolia Hospital. Dr. Miller and Dr. Barbour came in so we were developing a sizeable group there and had a well supported practice along with the MD groups that were there. Again there was the friction between patient and whether you went to DO or MD. And each had your own hospitals. I really was not participating in the California Osteopathic Association other than paying my dues. As to any of the meetings particularly, well they did have districts in those days for the osteopathic profession (COA) districts. So from Norwalk, since Dr. McDowell came from Long Beach, we tended to go to the district osteopathic meetings in Long Beach, as we were more acquainted with the doctors down there. Also Whittier had a district, and there were other districts, South Bay and Downey. So, anyways COA was district organized and had their monthly meetings. Early in my practice in Norwalk the doctors in Long Beach decided they wanted a bigger and better hospital and started fundraising, to build a new hospital. I helped in the fundraising but I never put any of my money into it for this specific hospital. It prospered well and it did okay. It became an intern training hospital too. Anyway, it wasn’t until the 1960s that we were getting reports from the COA about some groups that were having some ideas of merger. For a short time I had worked as a senior student with Dr. Scheidman in the area, East LA towards Montebello, and he had “MD” after his name, and so I was somewhat puzzled about that and found out later that in the late 30s and 40s there was a group of DOs that wanted to get the “MD” degree and they put together a paper college and went to school on Saturdays for a period of few months and gave themselves a MD degree and I don’t know if the COA ever took any action on these fellows that were putting the designation “MD” after their name.
• Dr. Seffinger:  yeah, they closed the school down in 1947-8 they made sure that it didn’t continue.
• Dr. Allen:  So anyway I didn’t know when he had gone to school but I didn’t have anything to do with it, I was in my senior year which would be 1950. But he had, on his business card, an “MD” after his name. That’s the first awareness that I had of the undercurrent that had been evolving over a period of time about a merger in California, getting the MD degree.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Did you know Dane Tasker?
• Dr. Allen:  Not other than that he was an author of a book.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Did you know Forest Gunnigen?
• Dr. Allen:  Yes.
• Dr. Seffinger:  How did you meet him and what was your relationship?
• Dr. Allen:  I think he was a urologist and he would come to the county clinic as one of the doctors that would see patients that needed urological help but his office was I think in downtown LA or toward Beverly Hills so I never had that much contact with him other than to know his name. And of course he turned out to be one of the leaders in the merger movement. All of my time that I knew Dr. Duodani and Dr. Marsh, I had no awareness of their merger feelings. Dr. Duodani was an obstetrician and he manipulated his patients, my wife was one of his patients. Dr. Duodani delivered four of my kids and Dr. Marsh delivered the 5th one. So he gave osteopathic care to his patients.
• Dr. Seffinger:  One of the things that was difficult to understand looking back at the history is you had people who seemed to have a very good life financially economically, generalists and specialists, it seemed you had a good training situation a lot of good hospitals you had a good camaraderie with a good group of people but there was a few people that wanted to be unrestricted in where they could practice and they wanted to have accepted by the MD profession and so they went through with this merger proposal and the history is pretty well documented about that however at the same time they practiced manipulation and osteopathic care of their patients. So they weren’t giving up on how they cared for their patients in fact they wanted to have manipulation investigated more deeply by the new institution, the college of medicine, so they didn’t give up on manipulation or osteopathic care but they gave up on the terminology of osteopathic of DO of using that osteopathic concept or philosophy they gave up what the MD asked them to give up in order to get accepted and free reign at educational opportunities as well as business opportunities so I wonder if you saw that as well or did you see it a little bit different. It’s kind of depressing to look at this whole thing retrospect for us so I think it would helpful for you to help us out with what was the actual experience like working with these people through the 1958 through 1962, four years was very tumultuous there was a lot of things going on at once.
• Dr. Allen:  Well most of it was not on the surface that I was aware of at all. In the early 1950s there was a recognition brought to both the MDs and DOs by Nettleship because Nettleship wrote the malpractice insurance policies for both professions.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Was Nettleship an insurance company?
• Dr. Allen:  Nettleship was a malpractice insurance company. And representatives from Nettleship came to the osteopathic profession and the medical profession to stop the inciting of malpractice suits against doctors, by saying discouraging or disparaging remarks to patients, I think it probably was more on the patients that went to the MD after they been to a DO that they would hear slurs telling them that they got bad treatment and so this was inciting malpractice suits, thus Nettleship, had came to both professions and said you’ve got to stop this. It’s not healthy, you’re raising your rates and so on. And so there was a committee formed with members appointed from the medical side and from the osteopathic side to stop this “bad mouthing”; and I think in time this committee for straightening out the malpractice situation became the merger committee, and they got involved with the merger leaders. The osteopathic doctors were not having any problems, as far as their practice, as far as having their hospitals and privileges, and being certified and all of that. I felt that in more their need for seeking the MD degree, was for prestige, in service clubs, in community, in arts, drama committees, and other things that were going on in communities. They always felt a little like second class citizens until they could get that MD degree behind their name. It had nothing to do as far as their financial welfare. So far as I saw it in Long Beach, there various social activities and the MDs would kind of rule the roost, and the DOs there felt like they were not on the same par socially.
• Dr. Seffinger:  You feel that they were tired of being discriminated against by other people, being labeled.
• Dr. Allen:  The MDs continued to belittle them, and call them for a long time in the literature as cults and so on. One of the doctors that hated the osteopathic profession, was Fishbein who was the CEO for many many years of the AMA the editor of their magazines. So he continued pouring out that stuff. Even when WWII began, December 7th, 1941, Dr. Eby and some of the other leaders of the osteopathic profession notified President Roosevelt immediately that the osteopathic physicians in California were ready to go into service. Dr. Eby got a report back from the national health officer that the DOs stay at home and take care of the population at home; and the MDs would be drafted and of course if the MDs were smart they would have let the DOs go to war and they would have stayed home. So they shot themselves in the foot, by insisting that the DOs not be accepted military as officers. Of course this didn’t change until after the Korean War. So, the osteopathic profession in California flourished partly because of the shortage of MDs and they were here to fill the void. So the osteopathic profession was very well accepted so in my mind the merger did not surface until 1961 and I never even been to the AOA House of Delegates until after 1962. There was a notice that came out mid 1961 that this merger “package” had been discovered, which had been denied of such existence in May of 1961 at COA House of Delegated. The COA had an operation similar to the AOA with delegates that would come to their House of Delegates annually for an annual meeting. I don’t remember how many districts there were for the Dos; but with the medical profession they had 40 districts (that were CMA) Anyway the officers had denied that there were merger talks or any ideas in the 1961House of Delegates of the COA. In September someone got hold of this “agreement” that was evolving toward the idea of a merger, and of course as soon as this got to AOA the officers of AOA came out and tried to demand it be taken back and annul the idea of a merger and all this and Evolith was the director of the AOA at that time and he came out here like an angry bull and what he did was to weld the persons who were considering merger and the body of the DOs in general. He offered very little more consideration and he was mainly throwing his weight around and snorting like an angry bull. Had he modified his behavior, I think it had been different, though it had been pretty well planned for many years; but he made the final closure of the body of people and the leaders. The doctors in general just wanted to practice their profession, don’t bother them, and they hadn’t join the leadership. As I saw it there was about 20% of the DOs in California at that time that were pushing for merger, there were about 20% that wanted no part of merger and the other 60% would sway with what they oughta do, who offered them the best package. I think if the AOA if they used a different package they could have built the “anti-merger group” with the body. But the way they came out and threatened and all of that they wielded the body with the merger group and this was the way it came out when the final vote was made, when about 80% went over and 20% didn’t go. We had about 2400 DOs in California at that time and about 400 stayed and didn’t buy the MD degree the other 2000 went over and bought the MD degree so in the final process the COP&S would be converted to a medical school and would give the MD degree, and the DOs paid $65 to get an MD degree and they would have to notify the Board of Osteopathic Examiners that they wanted to change their status to the California Board of Medical Examiners as opposed to Board of Osteopathic Examiners.
• Dr. Seffinger:  we’re talking about the years 1958 to 1962 where a group of California DOs became interested in merging with the California Medical Association and at the same time also influencing the school to change from a DO granting institution to a MD granting institution so that they would get accepted by the AMA and the granting bodies to be a medical school. The doctors who wanted the change to be part of the AMA they had to have an MD degree in order to do that. They worked on getting a mechanism to get them an MD degree so they could do that. What is difficult to understand that Dr. Allen will talk about is these people that were DOs at the time who wanted to become MDs and become part of the AMA there was so much to have as a DO in California there were so many good things going for you, why would you want to give all that up and for future generations also so they wouldn’t have the opportunity to become osteopathic doctors. They seem to want to get rid of the profession altogether. There were only a few people that wanted to keep the profession and keep our relation with the AOA and it seems to us looking back at history that these people were a little greedy looking to get more than what they had already but as far as we are concerned they had a pretty good deal so could you give us some insight Dr. Allen about how you saw the differences between these two groups of people, and what was the motivating factor, you mentioned previously that it was to get rid of the discriminatory feeling and environment so that they would be able to move freely within society without being castigated. You knew these people personally I wonder if you could tell me more about how you viewed the situation going through those 4 years of history.
• Dr. Allen:  My awareness of this turmoil that was going on behind the scene was only came to my attention in 1961 so what was going in 1958 and so on I was not particularly aware of except there was news coming out of the college that the faculty and the professors were not as many or as qualified or the best and so they put out a message to the membership to pay an extra hundred dollars of their dues each year of membership dues. The $100 to be turned over to the college to improve the quality of the college and they did that quite successfully over several years and actually the trust fund that was in the COA at the time of the merger amounted to over $500,000 and that’s the trust fund that went into the 41st and that money was initially requested in order to support the college and make the college have better faculty and better teaching quality and so on. So that was the early sign, the other news about the fracture happening started in September of 1961 and how the forces blended together I felt was largely on the behavior of the AOA officials when they came to California and as I indicated before there was 20% that were for merger and 20% that were anti-merger and the other bulk 60% were just going along to follow the group that they felt offered them the best future and so the AOA helped push the 60% non-committal at first towards the pro-merger group and of course the pro-merger group was seeking their support and asking them to be participants and so on and they had the numbers and they had the officers and they had the long history of participation with the body of the people again it was the younger ones who may not have been in the battle in prior years and the 20% that stayed anti-merger was the ones that I feel we’re in the battle during the early 20s and 30s when the profession was trying to grow and they felt more dislike and distrust and hatred of the medical profession and not trusting them. This I think was the big difference between the younger ones and more recent graduates due to a certain amount of trust in what their leaders told them what the medical profession would do and the older guys more mature and more experienced say no you can’t trust them, anything they say they’ll go back on. And that’s the way I saw it, the bulk of doctors, and this is not only true in our profession but I think it’s in a lot of organization, that the bulk of the people aren’t really involved in the day to day operation, or expect the leaders to do the right thing and something they’re led astray by leaders who have their own agenda and I think this certainly happened with the California osteopathic profession. Now, when they started to change the college to an MD school, the guy who was the chairman of the board, who was very DO minded had died, so there was a vacuum and the others could be more readily persuaded to go along with the idea to change the osteopathic college to a medical school along with President Henley who wanted to be president of a medical school. I can’t recall the name who the fellow was that died at the inappropriate time. Actually in the early times with Dr. Debreere and Dr. Eby we tried to setup a group of osteopathic physician loyal to OPSC that would file a suit to block the transition of the school to a medical school, hoping that our representation to the courts could be accepted as a substitute for the man that died. In other words as interested persons of the college we didn’t want to see this college go down, but the courts threw us out as “friends of the court”. And the CMA was supporting the whole thing, so the COA leadership spoke their piece, and we were just coming forth as disgruntled people and so our points were not heard and the courts turned against the idea of anyone else taking the place of someone we were trying to represent, the deceased. There came a time a vote had to be taken, in order to fulfill the whole merger agreement, there had to be a vote by the people of California to modify the Initiative enactment that put the osteopathic board into existence back in 1922. It was by a vote of the people by an Initiative that the Osteopathic Board was established and so the merger agreement had some verbage that indicated that the Osteopathic Act would have to be changed to make it acceptable. So there had to be vote of the people in 1962 in November in order to fulfill the whole merger agreement. It also indicated that the COA would support the public relations that was needed to get the transition of the school, also that they would use some of the money in the trust fund to help put out the public announcements and so on that would encourage the people toward passing proposition 22. So the merger wasn’t completed until Prop 22 was passed. During that summer (1962) all of the push and pull was going on, Dr. Marsh and other leaders were stomping the State indicating that if they didn’t go for this merger “Prop 22” agreement that they would lose their rights to practice in hospitals, Blue Cross would withdraw support of their patient’s insurance and so there were all kinds of threats to the DO’s in practice that if they didn’t go for this merger and have their patients vote that they wouldn’t practice as full physicians.
• Dr. Seffinger:  So you mean that the DOs that would become MDs and part of the CMA would work towards supporting the insurance companies for blocking out DOs for their work?
• Dr. Allen:  It didn’t go that far just became the fact that if they didn’t go over then their ability to practice in hospitals would fall by the wayside, it was being threatened.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Was there any indication that that was true, that it was to really happen, or were they just saying that as a political maneuver?
• Dr. Allen:  They were just saying that, as a political maneuver and this is where I arched my back and said that I am gonna stay as a DO because I own a part of La Mirada hospital and I defied them to try and keep me from being able to practice from my hospital. And so also it was promised the DO’s that were specialists would have the chance to become recognized as specialists by the AMA. And of course they were never able to deliver on that. In fact about 15 years later there was a supplemental suit that was brought to the front against the CMA and AMA. There were a number DOs that were surgeons, specialists, that sued the CMA for not fulfilling that part of the merger agreement but they didn’t recognize that AMA can’t speak for their individual specialty groups. It’s not like the AOA that speaks for all of their different specialty groups. Each of the individual specialties under the AMA have their own rules and regulations and pass their own acceptance for what they will do and won’t do. So the suit didn’t go anywhere. But it was announced and received headlines for a while on these guys that were in the merger groups that were suing to try and get the recognition as specialists; and really the specialists were the ones that were at the worst on the whole merger deal and of course, I don’t think the group as a whole recognized that they were selling out their birthright. I think that they just thought that was the way that their future would be the best.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Reading the COA house of delegate reports in those latter years of the during the 1950s and early 1960s they made statements that we can no longer exist separately and equally in California and the AOA doesn’t understand that that’s the reality. I couldn’t understand why they felt that way.
• Dr. Allen:  No, I think that’s just propaganda that they were just using to feed the troops to get them on their side. I don’t think there was any truth to it.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Especially in line of the fact that the AMA really stated that they were willing to accept DOs across the country and I don’t think the Californian DOs were told that. They came around in 1959 to accept DOs and they didn’t know the government was already accepting DOs in district and county hospitals.
• Dr. Allen:  Oh we know that.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Also the government began accepting DOs as officers in 1960s so these things were coming in the making and these people probably didn’t know that
• Dr. Allen:  Or it didn’t affect them in their time so it was not significant. No, we knew that the recognition of the osteopathic profession was ever increasing and when they were able to get officerships in the military. The average DO for the most part did not really enter into politics and one of the things that was really a factor, see when the merger agreement came up it had to be approved by the house of delegate in the COA and the house of delegates in the CMA and so at the particular meeting of each of the societies of the osteopathic profession were to send their delegates with instructions on how they were to vote. So each of the societies had a meeting during their monthly meetings, and were told how they were going to vote on the acceptance of merger, well as far as I know there was only 1 society that sent delegates that were instructed to oppose it. I mean they had so infiltrated and done their work that of all the societies in the COA. When they met to vote, and I think the one that voted against the merger was Eby’s society in Pomona, because he was doing his work over there. It wasn’t a matter they had a vote of each of the people, they had the vote of the majority of the delegates. I mean you could have had a hundred doctors in the Long Beach society and 51 of them were supported of the merger and the other 49 were opposed to the merger but the vote had to be the majority vote of the society.
• Dr. Seffinger:  I’m not sure it was the Pomona society that voted against the merger because they were the one’s that proposed the merger agreements to continue in 1960-61 before the house of delegates came to Pomona Valley osteopathicly to between the merger. Eby was able to convince them when the vote came.
• Dr. Allen:  Okay well then I’m not sure of it I do recall there was just one society that didn’t go so it was essentially 100% with all the of the COA society to have 2 delegates that carried the unanimous vote. It wasn’t a matter of having 2 delegates and they would carry a split vote, you had to have a majority vote. So anyway, I understand that as it came to a vote in the CMA that not all of the guys were perfectly happy with the merger idea and they had a lot of selling to do to get them to approve the merger. And I guess the final was that they said this was gonna be the way they were going to destroy the osteopathic profession and that’s the thing that finally carried the vote in the CMA. So then we came out and in my own practice all of the other associates of mine took their MD degree, bought it. I bought the degree but I never notified the board of osteopathic examiners to change. I stayed under their jurisdiction. And this is one of the points that is often missed, that the Board of Examiners did not cease to exist. They continued. The Board of Osteopathic Examiners continued to function through the necessary renewal of licenses, jurisdiction of misbehaving doctors, hearing patient complaints and all that for these 400 DOs that stayed as Dos. Actually 200 were in practice and the other 200 were old enough they were just honorary, supportive members that paid their dues, or out of state.
• Dr. Seffinger:  I think there were 175 active members at the time or something like that. This is the amazing situation here, you have a couple of thousand DOs that have decided to become MDs, you already have several thousand MDs in the state already that are against having osteopathic professions; and you have over 5 or 6 thousand let’s say doctors against having the osteopathic profession, and here you have less than 200 doctors that wanted to maintain the profession in the state. With only a handful for OPSC and yet start to work to reverse this decision somehow; and it’s just amazing to me that you were successful. The odds didn’t seem to be in your favor.
• Dr. Allen:  The odds were against us and the CMA and AMA did all they could to fight us so anyway the point I started to make was, I bought the degree so that no one could say that I was not qualified. So I paid my $65 and my name is there among the graduates. But by not notifying the Board of Examiners to switch me to the Board of Medical Examiners I continued as a DO. Each year I paid my dues to the State Board and the Board of Osteopathic Examiners continued to exist. They were stripped of their authority to examine and give new licenses, so the state was closed as far as any new DOs coming in, there was no way that a new DO could come in and get a license. That part was taken away, by a vote of the people in 1962, that was the essence of it. So the other points of the merger was that COP&S would become a medical school but it stayed at it’s present site, there next to the county hospital for 3 or 4 years, until the buildings were available at Irvine for it to move down there, they actually chiseled out the cement name of the osteopathic school in LA, they used I guess a chisel and hammer to rub out the “osteopathic” part of it on the school founding stone. So my other associates all went with the merger, they paid their $65, they notified the Board of Osteopathic Examiners, then transfered to the B.M.E.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Did you talk to them about why they did that?
• Dr. Allen:  No, I didn’t argue with them about it I just let them know where I was gonna be, I wasn’t changing and during the years that I was working with the osteopathic profession they were fully supportive of me. And when I asked for extra money to do things and they donated. In the early days, they contributed their $1000 to help start this new school and COMP, and were proud of it and very interested.
• Dr. Seffinger:  How do I understand that, could you explain that to me how somebody could personally give up their profession give up their degree but yet fund the restarting of the profession and degree.
• Dr. Allen:  Well their practice went on, they were successful, maintained their income. None of them wanted to change beyond their hospital; so it made no difference what their degree was to them.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Well they had the opportunity to give back their MD degree, they could have been a DO.
• Dr. Allen:  No the door was closed, they could never return. That was part of the stipulation, once you went through the door it was closed. For the AMA and COA and AOA. This was the law of the state, once you took the MD degree it was unethical for you to show the DO degree. So they all changed their designation after their name to MD but they never did participate in any medical organization, in fact to continue the discrimination, the CMA formed the 41st medical society which was the medical society that all the former DOs were to become members in. And as far as I know it existed in name only, I don’t know of anyone that ever had any election of officers or any participation in it. There was a bunch of money, it’s kind of their money, and is still a “trust fund” from the 41st is still in the papers every once in a while that grants have been given from it and so on for research. But as far as their actual practice there was no difference except the last two letters of their name change and I never had any problem with Blue Cross, I never had any problem with my staff membership, they all recognized me.
• Dr. Seffinger:  All the things they threatened you with didn’t really happen.
• Dr. Allen:  Right, and the main thing that I said was the guys that were recognized as specialists by the AOA never were recognized so they began to lose some practice because as the osteopathic hospitals now became MD hospitals, the MD would join the staff and they would use their own specialists, the DOs would continue to use the specialists that were DOs the way they had before but some of them dropped out of staff and new medical doctors came on with the MDs siding with their own group. This is in the central metropolitan area that I had experienced. What happened out in the smaller areas like in Bakersfield and so on, some of the like Dr. Art Moore was up there at Bakersfield, he stayed as a DO, a strong advocate of it. I’m sure he was pretty much limited to a office practice. Because I don’t know how much hospital work he did. He was a guy that did most of his manipulations so he was happy just to do his manipulation in his office and so a lot of DOs that stayed as DOs gained in their practice because all the other guys all of a sudden they were MDs. People that come from out of state and wanted an osteopath, they looked for a DO. In the general practice, some of the converts didn’t have as busy a practice I don’t think for a while as they could have had. So anyway, I got started then with Dr. Eby and Dr. Dobreer, Dr. Lindon, and Dr. Art Moore was active in there, and a Dr. Stronberg, Dr. Frymann of course, Dr. Enda Lay. Dr. Duodani and all the ones at Glendale hospital had switched except Dr. Eby. Dr. Eby became the 1st president of OPSC and he’s the only one that was excommunicated. In the COA there was a code of ethics that if you did something that was adverse to the profession they could excommunicate you or something like that, and he’s the only DO that was ever excommunicated by the COA. So that’s when the AOA affiliated with OPSC to be their recognized affiliate in California. So 250 of us were strong enough to band together to form the group that was going to do what we could to restore California with the osteopathic profession. So the AOA did come out and spend money in some of the early battles to prevent the college from being converted and they had some bad legal advice from Chicago and they spent more money out here than was not beneficial at all; and so they were very reluctant to help us when we got hold of Alex Tobin attorney and began to try and fight our way back and so Dr. Dobreer and Linden antagonized the House of Delegates in challenging for money help. The word came from the House that we needed somebody that was not so bombastic to get back there so I got into that role along with Dr. Lay and Dr. Frymann who went back several times too. Dr. Frymann is she’s a very articulate lady and was president in the early days too for the 1st time.
• Dr. Seffinger:  I think you and Dr. Frymann were president three times each for OPSC during that time period.
• Dr. Allen:  Well, I was 4 because ’62 to ’84 well we would turn the wheel and see whose turn would come up next to be president.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Did that many people in OPSC support this. How many people did you have in OPSC during that time.
• Dr. Allen:  We still had above 200 and then we also had an associate member level in which persons who were out of state that had gained their license in California we appealed to them to continue to renew their licenses and to support us and so we had lots of support from the associate membership list.
• Dr. Seffinger:  So one of the merger agreements or the issue with the California state board with that insight, if the number of active licensed DOs would fall to less than 40 then the board would be dissolved but that never happened, that never came close to 40 did it?
• Dr. Allen:  No, and when the legislation was initially passed, they had a deadline that it was supposed to be done by, say March of 1964 or something like that, they gave them a couple of years. And then Dr. Dobreer and Linden got fed up with OPSC and they actually went over and took their MD later.
• Dr. Seffinger:  They gave up the fight?
• Dr. Allen:  They gave up the fight. Then I guess they couldn’t go back and harangue the AOA. So anyway, Dr. Linden began to help us considerable in the legislature and we tried to get some bills through the legislature to try and correct this thing and get new DOs licensed. Well Dr. Stephen Teale was a DO that was in southern California and being a DO, then he took his MD, so any bill in the legislature that had anything to with health or the health professions, it was by his position that he could say ‘aye’ or ‘nay’ on it and so when our small group were up there lobbying trying to get some reversal of this merger. They would say ‘what’s Dr. Teal’s position on this?’ well, Dr. Teale’s position was ‘oppose’ and so we never got anywhere. We could hardly get into offices to talk about anything that was right, just, and so on, as far as our profession was considered. So in 1967 we were able to get the legislature to recommend a study about the osteopathic profession and so Tobin was kind of the one to help engineer that and so the next year we put together a plan to really take it to Superior Court. Members of the profession outside the state had been sending in requests to get a license in California and so it got to Board of Osteopathic Examiners. The Board of Osteopathic Examiners answered them and said they couldn’t do anything about getting them a license because of Proposition 22 in 1962 and the medical board would write them back and say ‘you’re a DO, there’s no way to get a license either from the medical board or the osteopathic board.’ And so we selected 7 people who were representatives of DOs who had grown up out of state but gone to an osteopathic college. The court case was known as “D’Amico et al” and the et al included 6 other DOs who were representatives of each of the colleges because once we lost the California college we were down to five osteopathic colleges in the U.S. and so we had their representation, they were residents who had grown up in California, residents who been outside of California and would like to move to California and also each of the armed services were represented in those 7 people. And it was put into the courts as a “class action suit” so that when you won you covered the other arena of osteopathic doctors to be representatives of one of the schools to be representatives of the armed services to be representatives of California residents and non-California residents. So it was truly a “class action suit”. And at this time in the history of the United States, class action suits were en vogue. So the courts case was filed in 1968 and it proceeded in the courts up until 1974. The CMA was fighting us every step of the way, they would put in a needless brief in opposition to what the suit was. The AMA would also do it. Particularly an associate of Dr. Tobin was a Mr. Gasner and I think he was really the brains behind the progress of the suit. Tobin was the front man that did the arguing in court so anyway we went from Superior Court, we were defeated there, so we appealed the Appellate Court and we lost there and so we appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said you got a good case but there’s not enough evidence, and sent it back down to Superior Court so the next time we went to Superior Court we won. Then I think it went to the Appellate Court by the other side, we won again, and then it finally went to the Supreme Court for a second time for a hearing.
• Dr. Seffinger:  So you gathered more evidence.
• Dr. Allen:  Yeah, we were getting more evidence to prove that the Board of Medical Examiners was trying to come to get legislation passed that anyone with a degree could apply to B.M.E. to get a license to practice. Well that bill never got through the legislature. So that was the one that we had the hardest battle with, when they were trying to indicate that they could accept applications from DOs.
• Dr. Seffinger:  After the fact that they had sent letters that they could do that and would do that to these 7 people.
• Dr. Allen:  Well more but those were the 7 that we chose.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Tobin had a statement made in one of his speeches, I have a copy of one his speeches that was printed out about this time, he had mentioned that he had interviewed members of the California Medical Board of Examiners and they were largely unaware of a lot of things that were going on. Apparently the attorney general of California had spoke on their behalf but he would say things that were contradictory to what the people on the board actually said, Tobin felt that was important incriminating piece of evidence that he was able to report that there was the right hand and left hand didn’t know what they were doing. There were people that were apparently masterminded the information that was coming to the California legislature and so I think he took it all apart and who was really in charge here who was really giving information and whether it was true information or not. It showed that the California board of medical examiners concluded that this whole thing was setup was not constitutional in the way it was setup and he was able to prove that it was unconstitutional to strip California Osteopathic Medical Licensing Board of its powers and I don’t have the actual court papers so all the details that we have to further look into those papers but did you understand why it was unconstitutional?
• Dr. Allen:  well mainly it was on the class action suit that a person that has a legitimate profession should have the right to be licensed in California and so this was a denial of civil rights. That was the main argument, the basic gist of it. And finally on March 19, 1974 the Supreme Court said action sustained, which meant we had won. I think the documents made a stack of papers about this high (36”) for the 4 or 6 years that this was in the court case, about 3 feet high stack of papers with all the arguments. And the answer was on a postcard that said “Action sustained”. So March 19, 1974 was a red letter day.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Wow, now you could have had a school started in that interim if you wanted to. There was no law against having a school that gave out a DO degree yet after this action happened, after 1974 there seemed to be all of a sudden an interest in starting a school again. Why wasn’t there an interest before that?
• Dr. Allen:  We wouldn’t have had the manpower to make a building and so we knew what the AOA requirements were for a DO school, you had to have a half million dollars in the bank and property and almost within a week after the Supreme Court decision and Mrs. Stotenberg started a campaign to start a new school. Dr. and Mrs. Stotenberg are the ones who started a college campaign fund and so we began to move on this as quickly as we could to get a new school started because that’s the birthright of your profession is to have a school and the fact that there had been a school in the state once before we used as an argument to have the school again but you had to have a “Feasibility Study” and turn it into the AOA and show them what you were going to do and have them accept it. So there were 4 years of preparation you might say, at least 3 years because it was ’77 when we got our 1st incorporation papers.
• Dr. Seffinger:  There was a school that had been here before and they had a faculty and had a curriculum, did you consider using that? I mean there were the faculty that had not been working for several years, now they went to the AOA and attempted to have their school revamped and restarted as COP&S. Did you know about that?
• Dr. Allen:  We never knew about that.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Well, so you thought in starting a new school or working towards that did you ever consider using the curriculum that you had as a student?
• Dr. Allen:  I never got to that part in the planning. We began fulfilling the requirements for starting a new school period, and started raising some money for the new school and so I was strongly involved in that and Dr. Rappel came out to help, he was one of the early ones that came out and got their licenses so as soon as the state was open we had over a hundred applicants that had been pending to come to California and take their tests and so the Memorial Day holiday of 1974 the BOE examined about 125 new DOs and their picture is somewhere on the walls in the buildings here in COMP of that 1st group of new licenses on the State Capital grounds (because the examinations were held in Sacramento) and we had a special picture of the 1st group of 125 that showed up in California to take their new license so from then on about every 3 or 4 months they have a licensing section because the applicants were coming. So when it began to move ahead and OPSC as a state association began to grow, and right then in the early days Matt Weyeuker, was one of the persons that came on board and was absolutely fantastic. He had a lot of experience in Sacramento and working things through the legislature and one of the turnabouts that really was surprising was when we started moving through the halls of the legislature and asked to have an audience with some of the legislatures, ‘why were you the ones that won that Supreme Court decision?’, ‘yes’, ‘well, congratulations, come in and tell us what you have to say’. It was like winning the Oscar for the movies, to win a Supreme Court decision. It just turned around a whole acceptance even though we were such a small group.
• Dr. Seffinger:  So Senator Teale was a State Senator? He was no longer around?
• Dr. Allen:  Yes, he was a state senator. He died by then, I think his wife and one of his kids had been killed in an auto accident up there in Sacramento.
• Dr. Seffinger:  His wife and children were killed in an automobile accident but he continued to stay in office through July ’72.
• Dr. Allen:  Okay well he was out of office by ’74 anyway so he was not a factor anymore. I didn’t know when he quit but I know the deaths were totally devastating.
• Dr. Seffinger:  When you were looking for funds, you had to raise funds to start a new college, who did you find that wanted to support you.
• Dr. Allen:  Okay, a group in Sacramento, or just outside, I forget their exact location, had an osteopathic hospital and when they sold the hospital, they put about $400,000 into a fund that was to promote osteopathic institutions and during the years some of the out-of-state schools applied and got funds but when they became aware, and I think it was mainly Dr. Rappel that got a line on this, they would put up a $100,000 and if the profession would match it, then they would turn over the $100,000 to help the fund get started. So I figured well this is how we’re going to work it. We’ll raise half of it in the state of California so I began writing letters to the former DOs and asking them to be participants in the new college and we would honor them by putting them on the founders board.
• Dr. Seffinger:  You didn’t feel that being involved with people that had already given up the degree would be a problem.
• Dr. Allen:  No, like in my own group, oh yeah, a lot of them had decided that the osteopathic profession had a right to exist and were supporting the beginning of the new school.
• Dr. Seffinger:  By this time, they began to realize that there was a lot of things that happened that they didn’t understand.
• Dr. Allen:  That’s right, and so then we had decided that we needed all the Western States to be a part of it so that meant $50,000 to be raised so there’s about 500 DOs in all of western states so I used the formula that if each of the states would raise $100 for each of the DOs in their state that this would come up to the other $50,000 that we needed to match the $100,000 and also then to larger states, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, and Arizona, that if they would come forth with the funds in that amount we would include a member of that state on our college board cause we would have to be a regional school because we had no teaching facilities here. Oregon, Washington, New Mexico were where the osteopathic hospitals still were that we could have training sites.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Your previous training sites like Glendale, even L.A. county, these were no longer open to you?
• Dr. Allen:  They wouldn’t have been. Couldn’t count on them. So anyway, Arizona never came through, they had about 350 members so I expected $35,000 from them. New Mexico came through in a minute, they had about 90 members, $9,000 came from them. Nevada came through quickly, Oregon and Washington came through so we had representative from Oregon, Washington, New Mexico and we still needed Arizona, but it was interesting, Arizona has a divided state between Tucson and Phoenix. Tucson looks to Kirksville and Phoenix was looking west to California but their director would never challenge the bipartisanship over there to try and raise money to give to California so we said, ‘we’ll need your hospitals over there too, we’ll accept a member from Arizona to be a representative on our board of directors and so we raised the $100,000 we got the other $100,000 in escrow. Then we applied to the federal government for funds for starting new college. There were funds available to start new osteopathic colleges. We wrote the grant and it was accepted, we got about $1.5 million from the federal government on this grant. They liked two things about our college that put our grant ahead of some of the others. One, we were a regional school, we had representatives on our boards from Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington besides California. Second, we turned out mainly family doctors. So those two things put us ahead of some others on getting the grants. So we got $1.5 million of start up money from the federal government so we were on our way.
• Dr. Seffinger:  You remained a member of the board of trustees since the beginning?
• Dr. Allen:  Right, and to the present time. So Dr. Dilworth and I were the ones that went back to Chicago to talk to Dr. Pumerantz about joining the college, flying to California and becoming the President of this school.
• Dr. Seffinger:  And you felt comfortable with Dr. Pumerantz because of his background?
• Dr. Allen:  Yeah, I mean we looked around and we had a committee meeting and decided among other things, choosing a name for the college, and we found some other support when we did that, but anyway the decision was who’s the most adequate person in the whole country to start a new school. Well, Pumerantz was head of the college bureau in Chicago, so we said well, Dr. Pumerantz.
• Dr. Seffinger:  He was director of education there, he was setting up colleges of osteopathic medicine in other states as well.
• Dr. Allen:  So anyway, his name came to the top as the one that’s most likely so we went back to persuade him to come and so he came and it’s all history from then on.
• Dr. Seffinger:  So the problem that you had with the AOA in getting support back in the 1960s and 1970s perhaps, that had all dissolved, you had now decided to embrace the AOA.
• Dr. Allen:  We had no problems with the AOA when we became OPSC and I would go back to the house of delegates and I’d ask for money and at first they were very hesitant to support Tobin because they have had their fill of lawyers out here but I was able to persuade them that we were putting out money, in fact all of the DOs for that 10 years set their own due structure. Our state dues was whatever you decide to give, so many of the DOs were giving $1000 a year to state dues to support the legislative work so we needed about $20,000 a year to support the suit so the AOA for several years matched us for the $20,000. As long as we were doing some, they were willing to come up with some. Of course the bills we had were nothing compared to what they had already spent out here before, I mean they were in the hundred of thousand dollars in the early days and so each year I go back and also encourage the members to hold on to their associate membership and send out the $100 which was for the associate membership and they maintain their licenses if they had a California license so we had that coming in. And as you noted that in the legislative act that said when the number got down to below 40 that they would all go over to the board of medical examiners and they could never figure why the number didn’t go down below 40 and a couple of successive years they extended the deadline of when you had to make the switch over and at the present time it’s still open, I mean if tomorrow I sent in my application to the board of osteopathic examiners and asked to be transferred to the board of medical examiners, I could practice as an MD.
• Dr. Seffinger:  I don’t know, are you sure about that?
• Dr. Allen:  I’m pretty sure it’s still open to make the transfer.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Because in 1984 there was a law passed that, because there were some DOs that wanted to do that
• Dr. Allen:  They were coming out of state though
• Dr. Seffinger:  Oh, I see so they didn’t go to an accredited MD school and get a degree, you could not change your degree.
• Dr. Allen:  As far as I know the bill set the deadline was finally extended open ended. Maybe something else was enacted since then.
• Dr. Seffinger:  I think so.
• Dr. Allen:  To try and get more people and get the forty, it never worked.
• Dr. Seffinger:  There are a couple of points I would like you to address, one is that the support for the osteopathic profession in California didn’t really come from a small group of DOs, there was a large group of patients who were advocates for the profession. I would like you to talk about those patients that supported the DOs through that 1962-1974 time period and then also starting the school up. And then once the school was begun, Dr. Allen and some other people like Dr. Gabriel and Dr. Frymann promoted the osteopathic concepts and philosophies in practice and helped educate students in the hospital, in the clinic, and in the schools, along with other people of course. I would like you to talk about those people and those instances, how did they rebuild the profession and the understanding of how to apply osteopathic principles and practice through the next 25 years. Finally, Dr. Allen, if you could address the future of osteopathy in California, and where you think it’s going and what you think students should do to help it progress and advance into this next century.
• Dr. Allen:  It was recognized as a small profession, we needed to put some kind of pressure on the legislature to try and get some legislative enactment that would help support and in time lead to the restoration of the profession so Dr. Frymann had a patient who was actually a physical therapist that agreed to organize a group known as “Friends of Osteopathy”. Ruth Kelley was her name, she was a dynamo of energy and of course she was enormously helped by Dr. Frymann in her own health and so she was an organizer and patients of DOs were reached and encouraged to become members of “Friends of Osteopathy”. Her office was in down in La Jolla and they did fund raising and put on educational programs and went to some of the colleges that had students who would look into osteopathy profession and even helped get some students to go to some colleges outside of California for the osteopathic profession and when it was necessary to have some letters written to legislators supporting osteopathic bills, that was the group that could be called upon to write letters or boosting people in Sacremento. It was a fine acting group probably had a membership at one time of close to a thousand people, I’m not sure, but anyway it did help and it also raised some money later to help start the school. A couple of things I should add about the osteopathic legislative work, immediately when the Supreme Court decision was made we had access to more legislative benefits, one of the cardinal bills that was passed was anti-discrimination bill. Preamble to that bill is as beautiful as the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. It reads that “it is the policy of the state of California that there should be no discrimination between physician and surgeon DO and physician and surgeon MD.” And in essence that all of the efforts will be supported by the state to make sure that discrimination does not happen but actually the DOs are named first in the preamble as compared to the MDs. And we’ve used this legislative enactment to help in instances where there has been discrimnation. Even though it was a bill in the legislature some of the hospitals and some of the other doctors didn’t know about it. I had a personal incident happen in Whittier in which a DO, newly on the staff there had scheduled a patient for a tonsillectomy when the MD, house surgeon, came in and saw the DO listed to do his tonsillectomy, he said immediately that no DO is going to be doing a tonsillectomy at Whittier hospital, so the DO called me and I said well I’ll call Sacramento and I’ll also call the hospital and advise them that this is discrimination and that the state of California does not allow discrimination between doctors. And so within 24 hours the situation had been corrected and within 2 days the tonsillectomy was back on schedule. When we pointed out that the bill was written in the legislature and that there was to be no discrimination. Other instances that this had been used, and down through the years, more and more armor plate has been put on the legislative strength and protection of the profession and one of them which Dr. Seffinger just brought to me was the bill in 1982 which indicated that osteopathic graduates can only be licensed by the osteopathic board and this was put on to ensure that an osteopathic doctor trying to apply to the board of medical examiners trying to get his license could not do it, because there was some rumors that the medical board was going to accept osteopathic doctors and license them and this would be another route to which they could use the designation MD after their name because it currently exists in the medical practice act that a person licensed by the medical board can and will use the designation MD after their name and this bill initially was put into the legislature in order to help foreign medical graduates because schools outside the USA don’t necessarily designate the medical degree by MD after their the person’s name. So in order to help those foreign graduates set up their offices they were permitted to use the degree MD after their name which puts them of course in the realm of medical doctors and so in order to prevent DOs from trying to get their MD degree by that route, this bill was enacted by the legislature and there was no real big fight about it either. The other thing about our continuing to use and help train the students in COMP in osteopathic philosophy and osteopathic practice, some of our 1st rotations were happening and the 3rd year students were going to their rotations, the report came back to the university and Dr. Gabriel was of course the Dean at that time, “what’s going on, these kids don’t know anything about manipulation.” So Dr. Gabriel and I started Saturday volunteer classes with the students to have them spend some extra time with us teaching the high velocity particularly techniques of manipulation, and Dr. Gabriel unfortunately had a early death a couple of years ago and I continued to carry on the work that he and I started together of extra time on Saturday mornings of doing practice and teaching of high velocity techniques. The matter of rebuilding the osteopathic profession in California, our early students were taught their academics by professors that were of course specialties in the particular field of anatomy or microbiology or whatever, but when they got into their rotations, the 1st rotations were through former DOs and a lot of the former DOs even though they took the MD degree still did osteopathic type practice, believed in the osteopathic profession, some of them would go out of state to osteopathic hospitals in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Washington and Oregon and we depended on the strength of those osteopathic hospitals to be teaching sites for our schools until we gradually began to get some of our own hospitals. The 1st hospitals to come on board were the ones that had been former osteopathic hospitals on the periphery we never touched downtown county but Long Beach Pacific Hospital came on board early as a teaching site and there’s still was a good representation of former DOs on that staff, Rio Hondo hospital came in fairly early to reinstitute their intern and resident training program and again there’s still a number of osteopathic doctors there that had taken the MD degree and of course I helped both Downey and Rio Hondo hospital, La Mirada hospital is no longer, well it had never got into having residents or interns or students. And now what for the future, well I still believe that the osteopathic profession understands the musculo-skeletal system and the autonomic system as it is related to the spine, superior to what any other profession out there does and particularly the medical schools; And I feel as long as our skills and our knowledge of the musculo-skeletal system, the spine, is ignored, not utilized, I think the osteopathic profession has a need to exist and I think our philosophy and our approach to the whole person is still a necessity for the best health care people. And I think on down the road it may actually come to the front. Now we’re talking about alternatives of medicine and there’s an enormous publicity of herbs and other modalities that are not scientific and so the osteopathic profession may stand as a vehicle that’s between the medics who are so rigid in what they want all scientific and the humanitarianism of the osteopathic profession which I think is what the public wants the most. And one specific instance I like to use in matters of scientific medicine is in regard to one of the first drugs that was used and it began to be used because somebody saw that foxglove helped people who were in heart failure and of course the active ingredient in foxglove is digitalis. In the early days when I first got into practice, a physician writing for digitalis for a patient in congestive heart failure was digitalis whole leaf and that’s the way it was prepared so a cardiologist teacher suggested a patient stay with the same pharmacy company so if you wrote for whole leaf digitalis 100mg and it was furnished by Lily, they should stay with Lily, if it was Park-Davis, stay with Park-Davis, because there would be uniformity in the preparation. Today we know the active ingredient is digoxin or lanoxin and now we write in the order of 0.125 mg as a dosage as compared to when it was whole leave and it was 100mg and so let’s find what the active ingredient is in plants and herbs and isolate that and let it be specific medicine as used in activity of foxglove as premier of that. And this is my argument about marijuana, there’s probably 40 different compounds in marijuana leaf and let scientists discover which are the active ingredients that will do which and not just turn it loose and let people have “pot” because it had medical value for people that have glaucoma or nausea after chemotherapy. Let’s find what the active ingredients are: Isolate that and just utilize the representative part of the medication for the diagnose or the treatment that you want. That’s my belief.
• Dr. Seffinger:  In regards to the science behind manipulation, a lot of MDs are putting the DOs to the test in saying, “do you know what the specific result is with a particular treatment, have you investigated manipulative procedures and there being a general harm to the body or helping the body do you know exactly what to do and when are they indicated, where are they contraindicated, and the DOs have to respond and try to be more specific with their contraindication, indication, and what each step is designed to do, just like they do with the medications, like they are proposing. Do you feel that there needs to be more attention paid to what manipulations can actually do for the patient?
• Dr. Allen:  Well, down through the history of the osteopathic profession in treating the public, the public is aware that we have something above and beyond what is currently available through just the medical profession and as I say nobody out there understands the relationship between the autonomic nervous system, which is what really gets us well, as completely, dependent on the well being of the articular spine. And I say what we do as osteopathic physicians nobody has contraindicated that we can’t perfect the autonomic system by manipulation and so I think that is an area that can be studied and the AOA is anxious to setup more scientific studies and invest several million dollars now available to continue doing some research. When you have a patient that comes in that has strained their back and the only way to get them back on their feet out in the office in a short period of time is high velocity manipulative technique. The patient knows something’s happened in their back, the doctors that did the manipulation knows there’s been a corrective measure. Some of this is so minute that there’s no pictures or monograms or CT scans or MRIs that can show this minuteness of this disturbance and so until there’s some improved measurement techniques available, it may have to wait a while. The specifics of it in patient function are well documented.
• Dr. Seffinger:  In conclusion is there anything that you particularly want to say to future DOs of the California school here, we have another school in San Francisco but what you perceive as osteopathy in California and where it needs to go and what these people should to do ensure this profession continues in this state?
• Dr. Allen:  Well, this is a tough assignment but I feel that you need to stay in touch with your colleagues, you need to stay in touch with the leadership that you have and realize that our right to practice is going to last only as long as the legislature sees us as having a purpose to serve and a place to serve. So you need to be supportive of your state association and the national association because they are watching how the health care dollars are being spent and to whom they are to be given and so I still think that we have a unique place in the overall management of patients and health care, and a unique philosophy of the management and approach to wellness.
• Dr. Seffinger:  Thank you so much for your time.
• Dr. Allen:  By the way, did you know that there is a plaque on a wall at the American Osteopathic Association building in Chicago, IL that displays the names of Wayne Dooley, DO, Vincent Carroll, DO, and Forest Grunigen, DO as AOA Board of Trustees members from 1944-48?
• Dr. Seffinger:  No, I didn’t know that.