The attorney who represented the chiropractic establishment in its antitrust lawsuit against the AMA has died.
His obituary appeared in today’s Chicago Tribune.
The case “… paved the way for chiropractors to be treated as legitimate partners by hospitals and physicians.” It’s too long ago for me to remember the details, but I attended a meeting at which a lawyer who represented the AMA in the case admitted that they made serious errors that cost them the decision.
I’m sharing the relevant parts of the text since the paper’s online edition is available only to subscribers:
George McAndrews spent much of his 55-year legal career handling patent law, but he was most proud of his work on an antitrust case that paved the way for chiropractors to be treated as legitimate partners by hospitals and physicians.
… McAndrews was the son of a chiropractor father…
In 1976, five chiropractors sued the American Medical Association, alleging that the AMA and nearly a dozen other medical organizations, including the American Hospital Association, had violated federal antitrust laws and had sought to destroy chiropractic through anticompetitive practices. With little experience in antitrust law, McAndrews initially rebuffed the chiropractors when they asked him to represent them and advised them to hire a different lawyer.
However, after some prodding from his chiropractor brother, and recalling the impact the animosity between the chiropractic and medical professions had on his father, McAndrews agreed to represent the chiropractors as their lead attorney. McAndrews charged that organized medicine had viewed chiropractic as quackery — a charge not denied by the AMA, which asserted it was simply trying to protect patients — and was trying to stamp out the field of chiropractic medicine as a way to protect revenues.
“Most chiropractors were struggling for survival. To give you an example, the hospitals were closed to us, and so were the radiology laboratories,” said Lou Sportelli, a chiropractor and friend ... “That meant that every chiropractor including me had to buy an X-ray machine, which was very expensive back in the ‘60s. So that was an economic drain on the chiropractors, coupled with the fact that there was no reimbursement from insurance companies.”
In 1981, a jury found the AMA innocent of antitrust violations, but in 1983, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision, citing poor jury instructions, and sent the suit to another federal district judge’s courtroom.
After that, several defendants started settling the litigation and making peace with chiropractors. In 1985, the Illinois Medical Society settled and allowed its members to work with chiropractors on equal footing, while in 1987, the American Hospital Association agreed to settle the lawsuit suit and dropped its objections to chiropractors gaining staff privileges at member hospitals and making X-rays, laboratory tests and reports available to chiropractors.
However, the AMA and several other groups stood their ground, and in 1987, U.S. District Judge Susan Getzendanner ruled that the AMA, the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Radiology had conspired to destroy the nation’s chiropractic profession.
“I think George did a brilliant move,” Sportelli said. “He did a bench trial, and the judge was kind of surprised, but she was incredibly brilliant, and she saw right away that this was an economic boycott. The lawsuit really let the whole chiropractic profession out of jail, so to speak.”
“He brought ... the mighty AMA and other major medical organizations to their knees,” Wolinsky said. “He accomplished this feat driven by a sense of justice, fairness and revenge for how his father and his father’s chiropractic profession had suffered at the hands of an AMA secret committee focused on a conspiracy to destroy chiropractic in the 1960s.”
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