Court Opinion

ID: 9652640
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:29:29.658282+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:53.225672
License: Public Domain

HEALY, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
Although I agree that petitioner’s contention must be rejected, I think it is entitled to a little more adequate statement than has been given it.
Petitioner does not question the rule that the findings of the Commission, if supported by evidence, are. conclusive. She concedes that there is opinion evidence which supports the findings. Her position is that the Commission has no authority under the law to make an arbitrary choice between conflicting opinions of recognized schools of medicine. She says the rules of evidence require that “where different schools of thought exist, which are both practiced, and where the objective truth of neither can be scientifically demonstrated, the correctness of the claims of one school ought not to be passed upon by opinions of adherents to another school who are hostile to-it.”
If the case made before the Commission squarely presented the situation assumed, I think petitioner’s argument would have to be sustained; but as I read the record it does not in any realistic fashion disclose a conflict between opposing schools of practice or opinion.
Petitioner professes to be a disciple of the homeopathic school of medicine. Homeopathic doctors are said to prescribe according to principles worked out by Hahnemann and his followers a century ago. An important difference between the homeopathic and allopathic schools is said to be that the former school believes that like cures like, and that its adherents prescribe in small doses. The findings and order of the Commission can hardly be catalogued as a rejection of either of these two beliefs. Petitioner’s remedies, which she advertises under various names, contain usually numerous ingredients in minute quantities. There is no showing by homeopathic doctors generally that these alleged remedies, as put together by petitioner, have the support or endorsement of the homeopathic school. At most there is testimony by doctors of that school that some one or more of the ingredients used in several of the preparations are recognized as having therapeutic value. But on the whole, giving all due weight to the opinions of the homeopathic doctors, the record is not persuasive that the findings of the Commission are arbitrary in the sense argued, or that petitioner’s advertised claims are not substantially misleading. In short, petitioner’s theory of the case does not substantially fit the facts.