DOs are fully trained doctors that happen to have gone to medical schools affiliated with osteopathy. A previous commenter related osteopathy to Catholicism via Georgetown; that sounds about right. People choose medical schools for a variety of reasons (cost, admissions, locations). One of the practitioners at my primary care doctor's office is a DO, and does not believe in pseudoscience.

I think what happened here is that you overreached; you claimed that chiropractors could prescribe drugs, were corrected, and then scrambled to recover your argument instead of just admitting you were wrong. Now we're in a totally pointless and, from what I can tell, one-sided discussion about the legitimacy of DOs, despite the total irrelevance of osteopathy to the thread we're on.

>I think what happened here is that you overreached; you claimed that chiropractors could prescribe drugs, were corrected, and then scrambled to recover your argument instead of just admitting you were wrong.

It's a good hypothesis, but for the purposes of updating your model, I should inform you that your guess is wrong. This is a position I've given a lot of thought to. I know that a lot of people disagree with it, so I chose chiropractic for my argument, as it would have been a less controversial and more clear cut example - had I not been mistaken about their ability to write prescriptions. That was sloppy of me.

The difference between OMM and Catholicism is that Catholicism does not purport to be medicine and is not part of the medical curriculum. If it were a Pentecostal school and they taught all of real medicine, but also taught faith healing, then I would feel very similarly about that to how I feel about DOs.

Here's a test: ask the DO at your primary care office if he thinks that OMM is a valid medical practice.

You should submit a story to HN about the problems of osteopathy; that would make this an interesting discussion.

But here, it's just a sideshow. Your point was that being able to prescribe medicine is not a big deal. Whatever you may think of the philosophy of osteopathy, being a DO is a big deal; DO's are doctors, licensed by the state to practice medicine. It is approximately as hard to become a licensed DO as it is to be an MD. DO's are not like chiropractors. Chiropractors don't go to med school.

You were wrong, obviously wrong, and it is clear that no matter what your underlying feelings about osteopathy are, this subthread is irrelevant. In fact, you're doing your opinions about osteopathy a disservice by hitching them to to this particular argument!

To be fair, the one DO I know is a DO rather than an MD because he couldn't get into a normal medical school (schools of osteopathy are not as selective in general).

Though I suppose that also may not be something you'd want to know about your doctor. But as far as I know the academic rigor of his medical program was no less than that of any MD school, minus the inclusion of osteopathy itself. I wouldn't have any issues going to him as a primary care doctor.