'The Voice of Irish Doom' and his victory against the AMA and Who's Who of American medicine
George McAndrews, 87, dies from prostate and lung cancers
(Editor’s note: Now for something completely different. This story only touches on prostate cancer, but I feel compelled to share it. It’s very personal, about a man I came to know well. He changed millions of lives, possibly yours, in a landmark legal decision against the American Medical Association. He died from prostate cancer and lung cancer.)
By Howard Wolinsky
Occasionally, on the City Desk at the Chicago Sun-Times, I’d get a call with a booming baritone announcing: “This is the Voice of Irish Doom.”
I knew I was going to get a scoop—and some laughs.
“Doom” was my own version of “Deep Throat,” the insider who guided the Washington Post’s legendary investigative reporting duo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to “follow the money” and take down a president, Richard Nixon, on August 8, 1974.
“Doom” let me know what was happening in what turned out to be a landmark anti-trust suit, Wilk et al. vs. AMA et al., which exposed the conspiracy led by the American Medical Association starting in the mid-1960s to destroy chiropractic.
Chiropractic was a rival health system using “adjustments” of the joints to treat health issues such as back pain. They were the little guys.
Doom, lead attorney in the Wilk case, explained to me that when things got rough for China, it would invade Tibet. The same principle applied to the Chicago-based American Medical Association, the nation's most powerful medical group. It would attack a smaller rival, chiropractic.
The AMA failed in the mid-1960s to defeat the introduction of Medicare—the health insurance program that improved the lives of so many seniors and, by the way, made physicians a wealthy class. So the MD organization launched a secret campaign to eliminate chiropractic to try regain its waning prestige, power, and membership.
I started covering the Wilk case in December 1980 through its finish in 1994. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision finding that the AMA and its brethren had engaged in a conspiracy to prevent chiropractors from making referrals to medical doctors and vice versa, stopping DCs and MDs from teaching in each other’s colleges, blocking chiropractic’s efforts to obtain federal funds to conduct research on how its method helped patients.
It’s unusual for a reporter to cover a case for 14 years. We usually flit in and out of stories. This case was special.
(George P. McAndrews, “The Voice of Irish Doom.”)
“Doom” was George P. McAndrews, a Chicago patent lawyer, who reluctantly took on the Wilk case after the top law firms in Chicago and Washington, D.C. declined to accept the chiropractors as clients. They preferred the deep pockets of Big Medicine and Big Pharma.
McAndrews took on the case reluctantly. He was an engineer and patient lawyer. He was not an anti-trust expert.
But at the urging of his brother Jerome McAndrews, DC, a leading chiropractor, George took on the Wilk case. Jerry said, if George didn’t, their chiropractor father would emerge from his tomb and haunt George.
McAndrews, 87, died April 7 in a hospice in the Chicago suburbs. He had been in memory care for the past 1 ½ years.
He had painful metastases in his bones that left him screaming in pain. The source of the mets is unknown. He had Stage IV prostate cancer, a recurrence in his later years from a disease he treated many years ago with radiation seeds.
He also had lung cancer apparently linked to his military service as a sailor in the 1950s. The government recognized him as an “Atomic Veteran.” During a two-year break in undergraduate studies, he and his brother, Tom, enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
A star basketball player on the underdog “Fighting Irish” team from St. Mary’s, George led his small-town team to the Iowa state basketball championship in 1953—”like the movie Hoosiers, but better,” the locals still say." He and his brother played for the Blue Jackets basketball team at Great Lakes Naval Training Center.
As part of their deployment, the brothers McAndrews participated in Operation Redwing, a series of 17 nuclear detonations conducted at the Enewetak and Bikini atolls in the South Pacific. They witnessed the first airborne test of an airborne hydrogen bomb. It obliterated a small island called Namu, one of 26 islands of the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
The sailors aboard the USS Estes, “a floating hotel for admirals and generals,” as George described it, were to told sit on the deck aft and face towards the stern, the opposite direction from the bombing site. “At H-5 minutes, they told us to bury our faces in the elbow pocket of our arms with our eyes closed ...Right as the man counted zero, the explosion happened. I could see right through my arm like an X-ray,” said Tom.
A bright ball of gas turned from white to pink to purple to orange in quick succession. “The whole sea was lighted up as far as we could see, and it still was supposed to be nighttime...After about five minutes, the mushroom cloud started to take shape,” recalled Tom.
(H-bomb explosion at Bikini atoll.)
Growing up, George often witnessed his father Patrick, a chiropractor, abused by the local MD community. He recalled his father being in tears after being called a quack, who refused a formal referral of a patient with colon cancer. The memory stuck. As did the need for revenge.
McAndrews got engineering and law degrees from the University of Notre Dame. He became a young partner in a major patent law firm in Chicago.
Along came Chester Wilk, DC, a feisty Chicago chiropractor, who believed the AMA was conducting a conspiracy against the DCs based on the fact he couldn’t refer his patients to MDs and because he was not allowed to have his patients X-rayed at a local hospital even though the machine was purchased with federal funds.
Wilk, who died April 21, 2022 at age 91, tried to drum up interest in an anti-trust suit. But he encountered strong resistance from the leaders of chiropractic, who feared the AMA, until a shadowy figure appeared known as “Sore Throat,” a take-off on “Deep Throat,” first the title of a porn movie and then the nickname of “Woodstein’s” secret source in the Watergate scandal.
Back in 1975, the AMA was going broke, borrowing from banks to meet payroll. Sore Throat, AKA “Dr. Throat,” claimed to be a former AMA physician staffer who was laid off in what was known as the “May Massacre” at the AMA.
He leaked internal memos to the media showing wrongdoing on the part of the AMA, including postal fraud and payoffs to politicians. His whistle-blowing led to 14 Congressional investigations of the AMA, which faced a threat of losing its nonprofit status and owed more than $20 million in back taxes.
Then, in fall of 1975, Throat leaked documents to Wilk showing the AMA had a secret group known as the Committee on Quackery, whose goal was to “contain and eliminate” chiropractic. The Committee said that “AMA’s hand must not show.”
Dr. Throat blew the whistle, but he did not blow his cover.
My book, “Contain and Eliminate: The AMA’s Conspiracy to Destroy Chiropractic” (Sportelli, 2020), reveals that Dr. Throat was actually an agent of the Church of Scientology’s Guardians, a group within the church that used dirty tricks and spycraft to attack the church’s enemies.
Nixon had his “enemies list.” So did L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer turned founder of the Church of Scientology and proponent of the mind-body approach, “Dianetics.” In the 1950s, Hubbard put out a vendetta against the AMA--which had ridiculed Scientology as quackery--and other perceived enemies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Department of Justice, and Coast Guard Intelligence. Hubbard had run-ins with them all.
In the early and mid-1970s, Scientology agents finally infiltrated the AMA in search of documentation that the AMA was trying to destroy Scientology. They posed as journalists writing a book against chiropractic and raided files. And then, three Scientologists got on the staff of the AMA, including in the CEO’s office.
The spies found little about Scientology in AMA records. But they hit the motherlode on an AMA conspiracy against chiropractic.
They used similar techniques on the CIA and other agencies. They even bugged the conference room of the general counsel of the IRS. The CIA could’ve used them.
In a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend, Scientology agents tried to embarrass and attack the AMA under the cloak of Dr. Throat in a wide-ranging political and public relations campaign. Dr. Throat and his band of Scientology spies and propagandists outmaneuvered and outwitted the mighty AMA.
The chiropractors were unsuspecting players in this game of spy vs. spy. The Scientologists were spying on the AMA and the U.S. government, while the AMA was spying on the chiropractors. The chiropractors only fielded “truth squads” to counter the AMA.
My book is part courtroom drama, part spy novel, and part biography of Wilk and McAndrews. It covers the infiltrations and break-ins, how Scientology’s spies were caught by a nervous law librarian, the biggest FBI raid in history in which tons of Scientology files were carted away in (presumably sanitized) garbage trucks, and how a turncoat Scientology spy nailed L. Ron Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue. Ten Scientologists went to prison. Hubbard and Joe Lisa, one of two men who played “Sore Throat,” were unindicted co-conspirators.
I was a reporter for American Medical News, the AMA’s usually straight-shooting weekly newspaper, in 1980. I was the new guy left behind to mind the store while the rest of the crew covered the AMA mid-year meeting in San Francisco. At the last minute, my boss called me frantically, saying that I needed to cover the “chiropractic trial” at the federal courthouse. STAT.
I knew nothing about the suit or chiropractic. So I quickly prepared and sprinted one mile south to the Dirksen Federal Courthouse for what would be a two-month trial.
I met Max Wildman, a famed bulldog, take-no-prisoners Chicago attorney representing the AMA. He was hired in part for his superior legal strategy but also to scare and intimidate lesser attorneys.
Wildman was solicitous to me. After all, I was the “AMA reporter.”
I also met McAndrews, AKA “The Voice of Irish Doom,” who was polite, though no doubt a bit skeptical.
It was a spectacle, with the McAndrews leading his band of about four attorneys and aides and the AMA Army filling the courtroom with about 50 attorneys. It was a David vs. Goliath battle.
(George McAndrews, AKA “Irish Doom,” was a quipster. From my book presentation.)
I covered the trial “straight.” In other words, I filed weekly reports objectively. I reported on what I saw and heard. Nothing more.
About six weeks into the trial, my balanced and objective reporting was enough to get me in deep trouble with “the boys downstairs,” the AMA’s CEO Dr. James Sammons and other top execs, who were grumbling about my reporting. The AMA assistant general counsel and the editor of American Medical News called me on the carpet and expressed their bosses’ displeasure. No doubt I was in trouble.
But the AMA made its case in the final weeks. I reported on that. Straight. The jury found against Wilk et al. in January 1981. Days later, Judge Nicholas Bua urged McAndrews to appeal. The attorney had already begun the process.
Bua had given the jury wrong instructions based on the AMA’s position that it had free speech rights under the First Amendment to attack chiropractic and protect public health and safety from chiropractors. One member of the Committee on Quackery described Dcs as “nice people who were rabid dogs and killed patients.”
McAndrews had a different strategy. He made the argument that Wilk et al. was an anti-trust case, not a First Amendment case. He brought in economists to prove the AMA and its cronies had created a monopoly. He even showed that an AMA board member had proven in a study that soldiers in World War II who were treated by chiropractors returned to the battlefield more quickly than those treated by medical doctors.
I left the AMA newspaper in March 1980 and started a 26-year run as a medical reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. My first story there hit the front page. It was about the assassination attempt on President Reagan. I managed to come up with new angles that got the White House pissed off at me—just doing my job.
I covered the AMA. I did some exposes on financial and ethical scandals at the AMA. This would lead to the firing of three AMA CEOs, including, as it happens, the aforementioned Dr. Sammons, who was unhappy with my coverage of the Wilk trial, and seven other top execs, including the general counsel.
The Sun-Times nominated this work twice for the Pulitzer Prize. Close, but no cigar. The Harvard Business School wrote a case study on this work. I spoke about AMA ethics to Harvard grad students five times over the years.
I also co-authored with my Sun-Times colleague, Tom Brune, the 1993 book entitled “The Serpent on the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of the AMA.”
I spent a lot of time with McAndrews on a chapter about the Wilk case. He confessed that he used to clip my articles from the AMA newspaper during the Wilk trial to keep interested parties apprised of what happened in the courtroom in the first trial.
In the intervening years, “Doom” (McAndrews) would call me at the Sun-Times with updates on the Wilk case as it worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2018, “The Voice of Irish Doom” called me at home. We hadn’t spoken in a few years. He told me a friend of his wondered if I was still around and asked whether I would be willing to talk to him. McAndrews said he didn’t know what it was about.
His friend, Lou Sportelli, DC, one of the behind-the-scenes managers of the Wilk case, got on the phone and asked if I would be available to write a book about the Wilk trial. He said there would be restrictions on what I wrote. He only wanted the truth.
He had tried twice previously in the past 20 years to sponsor a book on the case but did not achieve his goal. He first approached a historian of chiropractic, who died before he could finish his book. Then he hired a team of chiropractors who were historians. He felt the product was good but too academic.
Sportelli told me to tell the tale as if it were “a Tom Clancy novel.” I did my best.
I uncovered untold stories that neither Wilk nor McAndrews knew.
Sportelli’s instincts were right. I couldn’t have waited much longer as memories were fading and the cast of characters was dying off.
In the end, George McAdrews avenged his father and his father’s profession along with helping other holistic practitioners, including acupuncturists and massage therapists, and millions of patients.
The chiropractic profession in those days saw the Wilk case as being comparable to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Leaders gave McAndrews a copy of this powerful Norman Rockwell illustration of U.S. Marshals leading a black student to class. They also gave him a statue of the “Man of La Mancha,” dreaming the impossible dream.
He changed my life as I spent time with him over the past 40 years. I’ll miss but will never forget “The Voice of Irish Doom.”
(Former Chicago Sun-Times photographer Rich Chapman caught me under the “L” in Chicago.)
For anyone interested in the book—no pressure, OK?
By Howard Wolinsky
I did not intend this as a hard sell for my book, “Contain and Eliminate: The American Medical Association’s Conspiracy to Destroy Chiropractic” (Sportelli, 2020).
But if you are interested in a signed copy, write to me at howard.wolinsky@gmail.com. Ebooks and (unsigned) hardcovers are available at: https://www2.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/o2.php?f_id=34
No pressure.
FYI, a review and some blurbs:
Jon Hamilton, Science Correspondent, NPR News—
“Forget Marcus Welby. Contain and Eliminate reveals the dark underbelly of the nation’s largest doctor group, the American Medical Association, as it plotted to crush a competing profession, chiropractic medicine. It’s a rollicking tale of unlikely spies, feisty underdogs, fierce politics, and courtroom drama. And it’s told by a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter whose frequent revelations about the AMA so rankled its leadership that they labeled him “the Snake.”
Thomas Maier, "Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson”—
"Howard Wolinsky is one of America's most talented and insightful medical writers, which he makes abundantly clear in 'Contain and Eliminate.' This real-life story involving medical doctors, chiropractors and the Church of Scientology is both appalling and funny and must be read by all concerned with health care in this country. Any detective-like story with a 'mole' source named "Sore Throat" has got to be a sure winner!"
Michael Sean Comerford, author of “American OZ”—
“Contain and Eliminate is a triumph! It is the best kind of legal drama with heroes, villains, surprises, high stakes, and a dramatic conclusion. Yet it is even better reporting by one of Chicago's preeminent journalists.
“Howard Wolinsky sets the scenes with the weather, local architecture, and history. He makes us care about the book's heroes by going into their family histories and drawing vivid personal portraits.
“It is a story about chiropractors suing the American Medical Association but Wolinsky turns the courtroom dramatics into a personal battle with far-reaching impacts.
“It is said that readers have to like the hero, the main one here being attorney George McAndrews who guided the landmark legal case Wilk et al. v. AMA et al. to its monumental conclusion.
“McAndrews, who was fond of calling himself "The Voice of Irish Doom," came from a family of chiropractors. He represented the chiropractors fighting for the ability to practice their profession in hospitals, use hospital equipment, and the right to have doctors give patients referrals to chiropractors.
“In a bizarre twist, the Church of Scientology infiltrates the AMA with secretaries and clerical workers. They find documents, among them from the Committee on Quackery, that outline a conspiracy to "contain and eliminate" the chiropractic profession. The Scientology spies thought the AMA was after them, but then shared the detailed records of the conspiracy with McAndrews and the chiropractors.
Jason Young, D.C., at-large director National Board of Chiropractic Examiners—
“They say that truth is stranger than fiction. Well, this book must be the truth because it is so strange. I thought that I already knew about the Wilk vs. AMA case that allowed the chiropractic profession to grow into what it is today. I found out that I knew nothing! The book literally made me laugh out loud as I read about covert ops run by 'Sore Throat' and the Church of Scientology against the American Medical Association. I cheered for attorney George McAndrews, a small-town hero with a vendetta to settle. I was inspired by the courage and perseverance of chiropractors who dared to stand up to impossible odds. The story is outrageous but important for every chiropractor to understand and appreciate how far we’ve come.”