Court Opinion

ID: 9677788
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:59:48.307514+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:58.405811
License: Public Domain

McCORMICK, Justice
(dissenting).
I would overrule State v. Boston, 226 Iowa 429, 278 N.W. 291 (1938), aff’d on rehearing, 284 N.W. 143 (1939). I believe the case was wrongly decided and do not believe we are precluded from correcting the mistake.
I. The merits of the Boston holding. The court in Boston was confronted with an issue concerning a chiropractor’s right to employ certain treatment modalities. In holding that the chiropractor was barred from using them, the court relied on a portion of the statutory classification of persons deemed to be engaged in chiropractic: “Persons who treat human ailments by the adjustment by hand of the articulations of the spine or by other incidental adjustments.” § 2555(2), The Code 1935; Boston, 226 Iowa at 431, 278 N.W. at 292. The court read this provision as a prohibition of any other form of chiropractic treatment. It did so despite a separate statutory provision setting out prohibited practices: “A license to practice chiropractic shall not authorize the licensee to practice operative surgery, osteopathy, nor administer or prescribe any drug or medicine included in materia medica.” § 2559, The Code 1935.
The flaw in the court’s approach is readily apparent when the chiropractic practice act is compared with others. For example, the corresponding classification of medicine and surgery included: “Persons who prescribe or prescribe and furnish medicine for human ailments or treat the same by surgery.” § 2538, The Code 1935. This provision also appears in the present Code. See § 148.1(2). If this provision also constitutes a prohibition of other forms of medical or surgical treatment, those physicians who employ orthopedic devices, or psychiatry, or pychotherapy, or radiology, or ultrasound or myriad other forms of common medical di*607agnosis and treatment exceed the scope of their licenses. Moreover, nothing in the statutes then or now purports to give either chiropractors or physicians any right to withdraw blood or prescribe diet. Nor is either profession authorized to use acupuncture, unless acupuncture is “surgery” and thus permitted to physicians and barred to chiropractors. Cf. Acupuncture Society of Kansas v. Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, 226 Kan. 639, 602 P.2d 1311 (1979) (holding chiropractors may employ acupuncture despite prohibition against surgery in practice act).
The fact is, as this court held before Boston, the classification in the medical practice act did not purport to delineate lawful and unlawful modes of treatment:
The statutes do not attempt to discriminate between different schools of medicine or systems for the cure of disease. No method of attempting to heal the sick, however occult, is prohibited. All that the law exacts is that, whatever the system, the practitioner shall be possessed of a certificate from the State Board of Medical Examiners, and shall exercise such reasonable skill and care as are usually possessed by practitioners in good standing of that system in the vicinity where they practice. This excludes no one from the profession, but requires all to attain reasonable proficiency in certain subjects essential to the appreciation of physical conditions to be affected by treatment. The object is not to make any particular mode of effecting a cure unlawful, but simply to protect the community from the evils of empiricism.
State v. Heath, 125 Iowa 585, 589, 101 N.W. 429, 431 (1904). The court in Boston had no basis for a different analysis of the chiropractic practice act, except when the express prohibitions in section 2559 might apply. Those prohibitions now appear in section 151.5.
A similar statutory scheme is followed in other health field practice acts. See, e.g., chapter 149 (podiatry); chapter 150 (osteopathy); chapter 150A (osteopathic medicine and surgery); chapter 153 (dentistry); chapter 154 (optometry). The practice acts recognize various fields of health care and subject practitioners to licensing requirements. The object is to assure that persons who are licensed are qualified by education and training in the particular field. It is left to the examining boards for each profession to determine an individual’s qualifications. See chapter 147. Statutory definitions of the profession do not freeze the methods of diagnosis and treatment to those existing at the time of the enactment. If the General Assembly wishes to prohibit particular methods of care within a particular field, it knows how to do so. See, e.g., §§ 149.5, 150.8 and 151.5. No statutory basis exists for holding as the court did in Boston that only physicians are free to employ new methods of diagnosis and treatment without explicit legislative permission.
II. The court’s right to overrule Boston. I do not think the court’s hands are tied by the fact the legislature has, by the 1974 amendment to section 151.1(2), only partially overruled the Boston holding. The court is always free to correct its own mistakes, and legislative inaction is not a bar to doing so. See 2A Statutes and Statutory Construction § 49.10 (4th ed. C. Sands 1973).
This court was confronted with an analogous situation when the demand-waiver rule relating to statutory speedy trial rights was challenged in State v. Gorham, 206 N.W.2d 908 (Iowa 1973). The court had interpreted section 140024, The Code 1939, as requiring a demand for speedy trial as a condition to an accused’s statutory right to speedy trial in Pines v. District Court, 233 Iowa 1284, 10 N.W.2d 574 (1943). Subsequently the legislature amended the statute to make it applicable without a demand to an accused in jail and not represented by counsel. See State v. Long, 256 Iowa 1304, 130 N.W.2d 663 (1964). This court, nevertheless, overruled Pines, quoting with approval a statement from Girouard v. United States, 328 U.S. 61, 69-70, 66 S.Ct. 826, 830, 90 L.Ed. 1084, 1090 (1946):
It is at best treacherous to find in Congressional silence alone the adoption *608of a controlling rule of law. We do not think under the circumstances of this legislative history that we can properly place on the shoulders of Congress the burden of the Court’s own error. . . . The silence of Congress and its inaction are as consistent with a desire to leave the problem fluid as they are with an adoption by silence of the rule of those cases.
See 206 N.W.2d at 913. In accordance with the example in Gorham, I would hold that the legislature’s failure to repudiate the Boston decision does not prevent this court from doing so.
Because I would overrule Boston, I would also hold that the trial court erred in sustaining the motion for summary judgment.
LARSON, J., joins this dissent.