Allopathy

Modern medicine, as practiced in the United States, has evolved to include licensure for the unlimited scope and practice of medicine to two types of recognized physicians, allopathic (MD) and osteopathic (DO). The terms allopath, allopathy, and allopathic are used to describe a system of medicine in which the use of drugs is directed to producing effects in the body that will directly oppose and so alleviate the symptoms of a disease. These terms are often inaccurate, misleading, and archaic.

Allopath and allopathy were actually coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, and were used in a pejorative manner in regard to the conventional practice of “heroic” medicine of the 18th and 19th centuries. Medical treatments often considered standard for the day have long since fallen out of favor as fanciful at best and deadly at worst. Some treatments were based on the humoral theories of phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood. Symptoms were treated without regard for the cause or the natural healing processes inherent to the patient.

Fevers, regardless of the etiology, were seen as an overabundance of blood. Patients were treated by phlebotomy, or blood letting. Often, this left the patient more vulnerable or weakened to the point that death followed. Surgeons needed to perform rapidly because there were few effective anesthetics, and more often than not, the procedures involved amputation. With the lack of knowledge of or disdain of the germ theory, “laudable” pus was thought to be a sign of healing when, in fact, it indicated microbe invasion. The pharmacopoeia of the 18th and 19th centuries included poisons such as arsenic, mercury, and strychnine, and heavy metals and addictive components such as opium, belladonna, and alcohol.

Allopathic and its derivatives have passed into common usage to mean regular medicine, the traditional form of medical practice. There is sentiment among some MDs that the term allopath and its derivatives are limiting as descriptors of the nature of their practices. They note that these terms have only persisted in the lexicography as a convenient means of distinguishing the system of medicine practiced by MDs from that practiced by osteopathic physicians, who are also licensed for the unlimited scope and practice of medicine as well as for other systems that have either been assimilated with the allopathic profession (i.e., hydropathy and eclecticism) or may remain limited to licensed practitioners in parts of the United States (i.e., naturopathy and homeopathy).