The AMA and
Albert
Abrams
The American Medical
Association (AMA) never did take Dr. Albert Abrams' claims seriously. No formal
investigation of Abrams' methods was ever undertaken by the AMA.
The AMA believed Abrams' methods and claims were ridiculous on the face of it,
and that it therefore wasn't worth the time and money to investigate it. The AMA
commented on Dr. Abrams and the E.R.A. in their two periodicals: Journal of the
American Medical Association (JAMA), and Hygeia (changed to Today's
Health in 1950), the latter being a magazine on health issues for the
general public. Dr. Morris Fishbein edited both during the 1920s and 1930s.
Fishbein also wrote numerous articles for various popular level magazines on
quackery. These were published in book form in 1925 as The Medical Follies.
The New Medical Follies followed this in 1927 and both were combined and updated
in 1932 as Fads and Quackery in Healing.
JAMA began commenting on Dr. Albert Abrams and the E.R.A. in response to readers' letters, beginning with their March 25, 1922, issue. This and following articles appeared in "The Propaganda for Reform" section of the Journal that dealt with quackery. The articles mainly presented some of the clearly ridiculous claims and experiments that Dr. Abrams made with the ERA, such as carrying around on one's person a cut potato for curative and diagnostic purposes, his claim that numbers and vowels have a "sex," experiments with determining the outcome of a chicken's sex before it is born, determining the religion and present location of a patient from a drop of blood or handwriting sample, etc. The following pamphlet about Albert Abrams and the E.R.A. was published by the AMA:
A couple JAMA articles dealt with Medical Associations that made the decision to either charge MDs that used Abrams' oscilloclast with "unethical conduct" for promoting and using quackery, or expelling from their society those who used it. Some JAMA articles recounted tests by others of ERA practitioners' diagnostic ability by sending them blood samples in the mail as requested. In one case, a blood sample from a fictitious "Miss Bell" and another from a fictitious "Mrs. Jones" were actually blood samples of a male guinea pig. "Miss Bell" was diagnosed as having various ailments including a streptococcus infection of the "the left [fallopian] tube". Another article presented the results of a similar test of an ERA practitioner who was sent the blood of a rooster. The "innocent" and apparently virtuous rooster was diagnosed as having a venereal disease! JAMA also noted that the California State Journal of Medicine invited Dr. Abrams to participate in a scientific test to see how accurate his ERA tests were in diagnosing diseases. Abrams refused.
Many Hygeia articles in the 1920s and 1930s on quackery mentioned Abrams or recounted his story.[17] As late as 1939 they printed a full-length article on Abrams' life and quackery. Most of the Hygeia articles, like the JAMA articles, ridiculed Abram's bizarre experiments, instruments, and claims, such as his "Reflexaphone" device which allowed him to diagnose and even treat patients over the phone. The successor to Hygeia was Today's Health. It also printed many articles on fads and quackery in medicine during the 1960s. Some of these were still pointing back to Abrams, his theories and devices, as these were still being used by Chiropractors and others in updated versions as late as the 1960s.
British medical journals also mentioned Abrams and the E.R.A. much in the same vein as the AMA including ridiculing Dr. Abrams' bizarre claims, experiments and gadgets. One of the gadgets mentioned, the "sphygmobiometer", was used by Abrams in court to determine the father of a child in a paternity case based on the "vibrations" of a blood sample!