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COM Outlook . Summer 2012
Osteopathic Medicine in 1958 and currently
serves as a NSU-COM clinical associate
professor of family medicine. “I couldn’t get
in touch with those teachers, so I had the
parents contact the teachers directly and told
them they better get familiar with the law be-
cause I was indeed a doctor. Consequently,
the forms were resubmitted and eventually
accepted without any problems.”
Dr. Melnick, the founding dean of South-
eastern College of Osteopathic Medicine
(now NSU-COM) who became a practicing
pediatrician in 1945, remembers an equally
distressing display of D.O. disparagement
that occurred in the early 1940s to a D.O.
colleague at Children’s Hospital of Philadel-
phia (CHOP) in Pennsylvania. “CHOP had
a highly regarded Friday clinical confer-
ence, held weekly and featuring interesting
and important in-house cases, with intense
discussion from one or more attending
staff members,” he recalled. “In addition to
residents, medical students, and CHOP staff
members, many community pediatricians
attended either regularly or on a sporadic
basis. So it was not unusual to find strange
faces in the audience.
“Leo Wagner, D.O., was one of the
leading osteopathic pediatricians in the
Philadelphia area at the time and an attend-
ing at Osteopathic Hospital of Philadelphia
who was highly regarded for his skills and
competence,” added Dr. Melnick. “One Fri-
day, before I interned at CHOP, Dr. Wagner
went into the CHOP auditorium and took a
seat. Shortly, the physician-in-chief of CHOP
approached him and said, ‘Sir, I’ll have to
ask you to leave. This conference is only for
pediatricians.’ Dr. Wagner replied, ‘But I am a
pediatrician. I’m an osteopathic pediatrician.’
The final blow came with the answer, ‘But this
is only for M.D.s. You’ll have to leave.’
“Dr. Wagner left, never to return, so one
may wonder why this happened,” Dr. Melnick
concluded. “There were no medical secrets,
not even trade secrets—only good, clear
medical information. Cynics might question
whether they were afraid someone would
learn something—something that might
eventually help patients. There was no logical
explanation except that, in that era, M.D.s did
not accept D.O.s as physicians—or as any
part of the health care team.”
The situation in Florida was just as
untenable for Dr. Neer, who graduated from
the Chicago College of Osteopathy in 1954
and completed an internship at Grandview
Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, before relocating
to South Florida in the late 1950s. “At that
time, the hospitals in Florida—both public
and private—did not admit D.O.s to the staff
for practice privileges,” he stated. “If patients
needed hospitalization, we simply sent them
to the emergency room. If I had a patient I
wished to send to a physician of a specific
specialty, I learned many of them simply
would not accept a patient from a D.O. Very
embarrassingly, I would have to tell the pa-
tient to go see a specific specialist, but not to
let him know that I, a D.O., had referred the
patient to him. This was about as humiliating
as things could get for a physician.”
Insurance/Pharmaceutical
Company Contention
During those tumultuous times, osteo-
pathic physicians were also enduring a pro-
tracted skirmish with both the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries, which patently re-
fused to acknowledge the merits of the D.O.
profession. “One of the biggest discrimination
practices was that we were unable to become
participating physicians in Blue Cross Blue
Shield, so as nonparticipating physicians,
we were only entitled to collect 70 percent of
whatever Blue Cross paid to M.D.s,” said Dr.
Levin, who served as president of the Dade
County Osteopathic Medical Association in
Osteopathic Trailblazers
: Pictured (from left) are Drs. William Levin, Arnold Melnick, and Howard Neer.
Dr. Levin in the 1960s.