George McAndrews spent much of his 55-year legal career handling patent law, but he was most proud of his work on an antitrust case that paved the way for chiropractors to be treated as legitimate partners by hospitals and physicians.

“George was an attorney with great skill, who used science to make his legal case,” said retired Chicago Sun-Times medical reporter Howard Wolinsky, who authored “Contain and Eliminate,” a 2020 book about McAndrews and the chiropractor case. “He could often take the most boring detail about an obscure industrial product and spin a very human story about how the violation of a patent harmed an inventor and his family. He would have a juror in tears.”

McAndrews, 87, died of complications from non-small-cell lung cancer on April 7 at the Prairieview at the Garlands assisted living facility in Barrington, said his son, Matthew.

Born in Clinton, Iowa, McAndrews was the son of a chiropractor father and a mother who was a bookkeeper and later a homemaker. His first job was working at a root beer drive-through at age 10 for 20 cents an hour, and he later scrubbed macaroni pans in a local Italian restaurant the following year for 35 cents an hour.

At St. Mary’s High School in Clinton — now known as Prince of Peace Catholic School — McAndrews co-captained the school’s boys basketball team to victory in the 1953 Iowa state high school basketball championship.

McAndrews received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1959 and a law degree from the university three years later, having been editor-in-chief of the school’s law review.

McAndrews served in the Navy for two years during college and was deployed to the South Pacific atolls of Enewetak and Bikini, where he and his brother took part in a series of 17 nuclear detonations conducted at the two atolls, his son said.

McAndrews was a law clerk for two years for Judge Luther Swygert on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, then joined the Chicago intellectual property law firm of Bair, Freeman & Molinare. That firm’s name later changed several times, including to Allegretti, Newitt, Witcoff & McAndrews. In 1988, McAndrews formed the law firm McAndrews, Held & Malloy.

“He most enjoyed taking up the cause and protecting the interests of those who couldn’t do so for themselves,” his son said. “As a former athlete, he also enjoyed the competitive nature of litigation and, in particular, trial law. He often said that ‘athletes make great trial lawyers.’”

In 1976, five chiropractors sued the American Medical Association, alleging that the AMA and nearly a dozen other medical organizations, including the American Hospital Association, had violated federal antitrust laws and had sought to destroy chiropractic through anticompetitive practices. With little experience in antitrust law, McAndrews initially rebuffed the chiropractors when they asked him to represent them and advised them to hire a different lawyer.

However, after some prodding from his chiropractor brother, and recalling the impact the animosity between the chiropractic and medical professions had on his father, McAndrews agreed to represent the chiropractors as their lead attorney. McAndrews charged that organized medicine had viewed chiropractic as quackery — a charge not denied by the AMA, which asserted it was simply trying to protect patients — and was trying to stamp out the field of chiropractic medicine as a way to protect revenues.

“Most chiropractors were struggling for survival. To give you an example, the hospitals were closed to us, and so were the radiology laboratories,” said Lou Sportelli, a chiropractor and friend who published Wolinsky’s book. “That meant that every chiropractor including me had to buy an X-ray machine, which was very expensive back in the ‘60s. So that was an economic drain on the chiropractors, coupled with the fact that there was no reimbursement from insurance companies.”

In 1981, a jury found the AMA innocent of antitrust violations, but in 1983, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision, citing poor jury instructions, and sent the suit to another federal district judge’s courtroom.

After that, several defendants started settling the litigation and making peace with chiropractors. In 1985, the Illinois Medical Society settled and allowed its members to work with chiropractors on equal footing, while in 1987, the American Hospital Association agreed to settle the lawsuit suit and dropped its objections to chiropractors gaining staff privileges at member hospitals and making X-rays, laboratory tests and reports available to chiropractors.

However, the AMA and several other groups stood their ground, and in 1987, U.S. District Judge Susan Getzendanner ruled that the AMA, the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Radiology had conspired to destroy the nation’s chiropractic profession.

“I think George did a brilliant move,” Sportelli said. “He did a bench trial, and the judge was kind of surprised, but she was incredibly brilliant, and she saw right away that this was an economic boycott. The lawsuit really let the whole chiropractic profession out of jail, so to speak.”

“He brought … the mighty AMA and other major medical organizations to their knees,” Wolinsky said. “He accomplished this feat driven by a sense of justice, fairness and revenge for how his father and his father’s chiropractic profession had suffered at the hands of an AMA secret committee focused on a conspiracy to destroy chiropractic in the 1960s.”

McAndrews, four of whose children went into law, retired from his law firm in 2015, at age 80.

“For the four of us who followed Dad into the law and worked with him, we really enjoyed the extra time with him,” his son said. “Although not a lawyer, our youngest sister, Mary, made mom and dad just as proud. She became a chiropractor.”

In addition to his son, McAndrews is survived by his wife of almost 59 years, Kathy; two other sons, Peter and Paul; two daughters, Melissa and Mary; 20 grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a brother, Thomas.

Services were held.

Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

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