How the American Medical Association Got Rich

The following is an excerpt from "The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy" (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2007) by Dana Ullman, MPH.

History reveals that the AMA was dictatorially led for the first half of the twentieth century by George H. Simmons, MD (1852-1937) and his protégé, Morris Fishbein, MD (1889-1976). Simmons and Fishbein both served as general manager of the organization and as editor of its journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). While these two leaders provided substantial benefit to the organization and to medical doctors, their methods of doing so have been severely criticized, with some historians referring to them as "medical Mussolinis."

When George H. Simmons began in 1899 what became a twenty-five-year reign as head of the AMA, it was a weak organization with little money and little respect from the general public. The advertising revenue from the medical journal was a paltry $34,000 per year. Simmons came up with the idea to transform the AMA into a big business by granting the AMA's "seal of approval" to certain drug companies that placed large and frequent ads in JAMA and its various affiliate publications. By 1903, advertising revenue increased substantially, to $89,000, and by 1909, JAMA was making $150,000 per year. In 1900, the AMA had only 8,000 members, but by 1910, it had more than 70,000. This substantial increase in advertising revenue and membership was not the result of new effective medical treatments, for there were virtually no medical treatments from this era that were effective enough to be used by doctors today or even just a couple of decades later.

Some critics of the AMA have called their seal-of-approval program a form of extortion because the AMA did no testing of any products. When George Abbott, owner of a large drug company, Abbott Biologicals (known today as Abbott Laboratories), did not provide "blackmail" money to the AMA and when none of his products were granted AMA approval, Abbott went on the offensive. He arranged for an investigation of the AMA president that revealed that Simmons had no credible medical credentials, that he worked primarily as an abortion doctor for many years, and that he had had sex charges brought by some of his patients as well as charges of negligence in the deaths of others. After this meeting, the drugs made by Abbott Laboratories were regularly approved, and the company was not required to place any ads.

Simmons was shrewd enough to have the AMA establish a Council on Medical Education in 1904. This council's mission was to upgrade medical education -- a worthy goal. The formation of the council seemed a good idea to homeopaths because surveys in JAMA itself had consistently shown that the graduates of the conventional medical schools failed the medical board examinations at almost twice the rate of graduates of homeopathic colleges. However, the AMA developed guidelines to give lower ratings to homeopathic colleges. For instance, just having the word "homeopathic" in the name of a school had an effect on the rating because the AMA asserted that such schools taught "an exclusive dogma."

In 1910, the same year that the Flexner report was published, the AMA published "Essentials of an Acceptable Medical College", which echoed similar criteria for medical education and a disdain for non-conventional medical study. In fact, the AMA's head of the Council on Medical Education traveled with Abraham Flexner as they evaluated medical schools. The medical sociologist Paul Starr wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book: "The AMA Council became a national accrediting agency for medical schools, as an increasing number of states adopted its judgments of unacceptable institutions." Further, he noted: "Even though no legislative body ever set up ... the AMA Council on Medical Education, their decisions came to have the force of law". With the AMA grading the various medical colleges, it became predictable that the homeopathic colleges, even the large and respected ones, would eventually be forced to stop teaching homeopathy or die.