Osteopathic treatments for pertussis … what next?

Pertussis (whooping-cough) is a serious condition. Today, we have vaccinations and antibiotics against it and therefore it is rarely a fatal disease. A century or so, the situation was different. Then all sorts of quacks claimed to be able to treat pertussis and many patients, particularly children, died.

This article starts with this amazing introduction: Osteopathic physicians may want to consider using osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) as an adjunctive treatment modality for pertussis; however, suitable OMT techniques are not specified in the research literature.

For the paper, the author then searched the historical osteopathic literature to identify OMT techniques that were used in the management of pertussis in the pre-antibiotic era. The 24 identified sources included 8 articles and 16 book contributions from the years 1886 to 1958. Most sources were published within the first quarter of the 20th century. Commonly identified OMT techniques included mobilization techniques, lymphatic pump techniques, and other manipulative techniques predominantly in the cervical and thoracic regions.

The author concluded that the wealth of OMT techniques for patients with pertussis that were identified suggests that pertussis was commonly treated by early osteopaths. Further research is necessary to identify or establish the evidence base for these techniques so that in case of favorable outcomes, their use by osteopathic physicians is justified as adjunctive modalities when encountering a patient with pertussis.

I found it hard to decide whether to laugh or to cry after reading this. One could easily have a good giggle about the silliness of the idea to revive obsolete techniques for treating a potentially serious infection. One the other hand, I cannot help but ask myself:

• Is there any suggestion at all that OMT was successful in treating pertussis?
• If the answer is negative (and I fear it is), why would anyone spend considerable resources to establish the evidence base for these techniques?
• Do osteopaths believe in progress at all?
• Do they really think that there is even a remote chance that mobilization techniques, lymphatic pump techniques, and other manipulative techniques will, one day, come back as adjunctive therapies for pertussis?
• Do they not believe in a rational approach to prioritising medical research such that scarce resources are spent ethically and wisely?

You may think that none of this really matters. The author of this paper is just a lone loon! That may well be so, but even lone loons can do a lot of harm, if they convince consumers of their bizarre ideas.

But surely, the profession of osteopathy would not tolerate this, you say. I am not convinced. The article was published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. This seems significant to me. It is comparable to the JAMA or the BMJ publishing an article calling for a programme of research into the possible benefits of blood-letting as a treatment of pneumonia!