Issue 10 - July2004

Louisiana: the final struggle for licensure

Chiropractors endured decades of persecution from the allopathic political machine in Louisiana, where the practice of chiropractic was considered the practice of medicine before the state finally legalized the profession in 1974.

The state medical society had succeeded in passing statutes that required an individual to graduate from a school recognized by the American Medical Association (AMA) in order to practice chiropractic. When chiropractors ignored these laws, they practiced at their peril, never knowing when a knock at the door might signal an arrest and incarceration.

In the late 1950s, Palmer graduate Jerry England, DC, (president of the Louisiana Chiropractors Association and chairman of the Louisiana Veterans Affairs Committee for the ICA) and several others engaged Lafayette attorney J. Minos Simon to bring suit against the board of medical examiners in an effort to break the stranglehold on licensure and practice.

The case wound in and out of various state and federal courts, but final judicial relief was later sought in federal district court. When the magistrate granted an injunction barring further prosecutions of chiropractors until the legal issues were decided, doctors of chiropractic could breathe a sigh of relief, at least temporarily.

Chronicled in Chiropractic Economics, the ICA Review, ACA Journal of Chiropractic and numerous state and college journals, the “England Case” became a favored cause for chiropractors throughout the nation.

By 1965 the scene of action was a federal courtroom, where chiropractic college presidents William D. Harper, DC, MA, of the Texas Chiropractic College and Joseph Janse, DC, ND, of the National College of Chiropractic, offered testimony in defense of their healing art.

Chiropractors sought to place the best spin possible on the proceedings, noting the dramatic and authoritative testimony provided by each of these chiro-scholars. The truth was somewhat less cheery. The two men were “raked over the coals” by counsel for the medical establishment, who hammered away at the lack of federal recognition for chiropractic education.

Janse reportedly left Louisiana determined to establish accreditation for National College “or leave the profession.”

‘Louisiana’s shame’
Meanwhile, chiropractors in Louisiana found their injunction gone and prosecutions for unlicensed practice recommenced. Leading the persecution against the chiropractors was AMA official and former Louisiana State Medical Society president Joseph A. Sabatier, MD, who would become well known to chiropractors for his chairmanship of AMA’s Committee on Quackery.

To meet the renewed harassment, several chiropractors sought and won seats in the state legislature. The state association mounted a massive publicity campaign: Visitors to Louisiana were greeted by road signs declaring “Louisiana’s Shame: the Only State That Has Failed to License Chiropractors.”

Their persistence paid off in 1974, when Gov. Edwin Edwards signed the state’s first chiropractic statute into law. Louisiana was the 50th and final state to license DCs.

In a final irony to the seven-decade struggle for licensure by chiropractors, two chiropractors in Caddo Parish were incarcerated after the chiropractic bill was passed. Like generations of chiropractors before them, after their arrest and release on bail, they returned to their clinics and continued to serve their patients.

Drs. B.D. Mooring and E.J. Nosser angered Judge Jack Fant so much that he ordered their re-arrest, placed them behind bars and fined them for their defiance. However, as though to reenact the decades old pattern of chiropractic resistance, they were freed after the sheriff’s office was inundated with outraged patients who jammed the switchboard with calls complaining of the jailing and seeking justice for their doctors. With their release, the profession’s long ordeal was finally over.