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| Hpathy Ezine - November, 2008 | |||||
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Dr. Richard Moskowitz<-- Interviewed by Gina Tyler |
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GT: Greetings Dr. Moskowitz and welcome to Hpathy. We're honored to have you with us today. Let me start by asking about vaccine injury. When I’ve reported my vaccine injury cases, other homeopaths ask me "How can you be sure it’s the vaccines?" I can see a direct link by repertory analysis. Are there clear cut cases you can cite where damage occurred directly after vaccination?
RM: The question is a good one, and I certainly have lots of experience
with it. But, as will be apparent from reading my article, how I
know and can be sure that the vaccine was implicated has almost
nothing to do with the homeopathic analysis of the case. Look at
the case of renal failure following the MMR that serves as an intro
to the whole article. This is as clear-cut a demonstration as you'll
ever see of a cause-and-effect relationship, and even after the
second How then do I know? Mainly I know for sure after the subsequent dose. Typically the patient presented with some common pediatric illness --ear infection, sinusitis, asthma, eczema, ADD, autism, "behavioral problems," or whatever, you name it -- and the parent doesn't particularly suspect anything like foul play, because either the kid had it slightly before, or the bad episode didn't occur for two weeks or more after the shot. Then we do remedies, and the kid clears up beautifully, such that the parents are thrilled, and even the pediatrician is delighted, until it's time for the booster dose. And then it happens again, only much faster and even worse than the first time, and suddenly the parent, usually the mother, has a revelation. And so do I. So this brings me to the main point of my essay, which most people still don't get, no matter how much I blab about it. That is precisely to the point of your question, how do we know? The difficulty with knowing has to do with 4 obscuring factors: 1) Rather than making something happen out of nothing, the vaccines most often intensify or exaggerate what's already there: the kid merely gets what all the other kids are getting (including some who aren't vaccinated). 2) Rather than putting the kid in the hospital within minutes or hours of the shot, it happens more gradually over a period of days and weeks, so the pediatrician and even the parents don't suspect the vaccine at first. 3) Each kid tends to react in his own somewhat unique fashion, even to two or more vaccines. 4) We're looking for the smoking gun in terms of what this or that vaccine does to many kids, ie., the specific effect of each particular vaccine. Nobody seems to ask or be interested in the non-specific effect of the vaccination process per se, which is what most of my article is really about. I would also add a 5th factor: 5) The Rx's these kids need are most often are the same ones as unvaccinated kids with similar totalities of symptoms, i.e., the same ones we already know and love.
GT: Could you give us your thoughts on Gardasil, the new vaccine for Human Papilloma Virus? RM: This vaccine is the first to target young girls as they approach the age of first sexual contact. For that reason it brings up another important issue, namely, the right of the state or federal government to interfere with the parent-child relationship about the most intimate possible issues, concerning the right of every person to make decisions respecting his or her own body. In that respect I am very skeptical that the vaccine will do any good in the long run, since the effect of giving it on a large scale will very likely alter the microbiology of cervical cancer. Right now, it is usually associated with a few serotypes, but mass vaccination is very likely to favor new serotypes not represented in the vaccine and thus less affected by its action. This has already happened with the HiB vaccine, for example, where the prevalence of non-vaccine serotypes, which was widely predicted by microbiologists both here and abroad, has now taken place. This will require new vaccines to be developed, and will undoubtedly promote the spread of still other strains. In short, we're chasing our tails. On the other hand, a pubescent child's immune system is fully formed, so if she decides she wants the vaccine, and there's as yet no flagrant or serious downside to it, there's no reason why she should not be allowed to have it. I'm merely taking a pro-choice decision on vaccines. I'm saying that until a smarter and wiser kind of research is developed, the vaccines should be made available to those who want them, that the individual and his or her parents are the ones best qualified to decide that issue in each case, rather than some across-the-board requirement that makes no allowance for individual choice, hypersensitivity, and the like. I'm not saying that they are always bad and should be prohibited, but only that they all carry an important downside that most people are not aware of, and that few doctors bother to take seriously. By the way, these arguments all apply to boys as well, since sexual contact is the vector by which HPV and cervical cancer are communicable. It is not a problem of girls only.
RM: I covered this topic toward the end of my article. I advise my patients to obey the law, which varies a good deal from state to state. About half of the states have a religious or philosophical exemption, which allows parents to refuse to have their kids vaccinated if they have a strong philosophical or religious conviction against it. In Massachusetts, for example, the law reads "religious," but the courts have interpreted it to cover any deeply-held personal conviction; it does not require membership in some formal religious denomination, as is usually meant by other states like California, in which the word "philosophical" is used. The problem is that this is an across-the-board belief regarding the concept of vaccination per se. That is, such an exemption protects your right to be a kook or a deviant, to refuse all vaccinations. It does not authorize you to make an intelligent medical decision for your child, to decide, for example, that you want tetanus toxoid and polio, but not the others. There are committees active in many states that promote such pro-choice legislation, but no state has as yet enacted such a law. In California and a few other places, vaccines are still legally mandatory, but the law is not strictly enforced, so that in practice most parents are more or less free to write their own ticket. A similar development is gradually taking place in other states too, and I believe it is only a question of time before the California precedent is accepted nation-wide. On the other hand, some states, such as New York, are especially strict about exemptions. There are cases on record where the state Health Department has taken temporary custody of kids and forcibly vaccinated them against the wishes of their parents. Also, divorce cases are pending in many jurisdictions, where one parent's refusal to vaccinate has been invoked in custody disputes. Usually it is the father suing his ex-wife for increased or sole custody based on the mother's refusal to vaccinate, as a form of "child endangerment," even though in most cases the father "got religion," so to speak, only after the couple separated, and was perfectly content to have the mother take the kids to the doctor. How these cases will turn out is anybody's guess, but will probably
vary widely from place to place, depending on the judge, and is
certainly overshadowed by the quasi-religious veneration that surrounds
the concept of vaccination, like a kind of halo and is bestowed
on it by doctors and parents alike. So this dispute remains
RM: The best way to prevent adverse reactions obviously, is simply not to vaccinate, which more and more parents are opting for. Failing that, a good second-best option is simply to stall them off as long as possible, to wait until there's good evidence that the child's immune system is developing normally. Practically speaking, that means that the kid is learning how to respond acutely and vigorously to infection, namely, with fever, first of all, and then is allowed to come through these fever illnesses with the help of homeopathic or other natural remedies, or at least without aborting or shortcutting that process with antibiotics. In my experience, the age of three years is a good time to begin thinking about, say, tetanus and polio, which are the two most popular vaccines in my population. By then, if the kid is developing normally, as above, there is very little danger from giving these two, and 3yrs old is an age where kids are motoring around under their own power, at times out of sight of the parent, and thus more likely to get into trouble (e.g., a puncture wound). It's one thing to give an otherwise healthy three year old tetanus toxoid and IPV, but quite another to bombard a brand-new infant with a whole battery of vaccines, as in effect their very first immunological experiences. As I argue in the article, that is a reckless policy that to me borders on the criminal. It involves essentially reprogramming the immune system to respond chronically rather than acutely to things, by giving the vaccines easy access to the major immune organs, and making sure that they remain there for years, with no obvious way of getting rid of them. I am convinced that that is a very reckless thing to do on such a scale, and for so little reason, and I have a lot of case material to back up that claim. Once an adverse reaction does occur, the best approach is to treat the child holistically, as a unique individual, with his or her own peculiar way of responding. I do this with homeopathic medicines. Other holistically-minded colleagues do it by identifying systemic allergies and giving vitamins and various herbs and nutritional supplements. My experience suggests that the vaccines act by exaggerating and making more chronic the latent disease tendencies already existing in each child, such that he or she is reacting not so much to this or that vaccine as to the vaccination process per se, so that a particular child may react in more or less the same way to two or more vaccines. This is one of the main reasons why such reactions are not suspected by parents or doctors until the kid essentially recovers, but then relapses soon after the next shot, whatever it happens to be. This pattern I see over and over, but nobody else seems to want to pay attention to it: that's why I called my article "Hidden in Plain Sight." GT: Thank you Dr. Moskowitz for sharing your valued opinion with our audience! --------------------------------- Dr. Richard Moskowitz received his B.A. from Harvard, an M.D. from New York University and did a Graduate Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He’s practiced general family medicine since 1967. Dr. Moskowitz has practiced homeopathic medicine since 1974, studying with George Vithoulkas, Rajan Sankaran, and others. In addition to lecturing and teaching he’s authored “Homeopathic Medicines for Pregnancy and Childbirth” and “Resonance: The Homeopathic Point of View”. His other writings include "Plain Doctoring," "An Introduction to Homeopathy," "The Case against Immunizations," "The Fundamentalist Controversy" (download as an MS Word document), "Bioterrorism and Homeopathy," "Vaccination: a Sacrament of Modern Medicine," "Beyond the Malpractice Crisis," "Childhood Ear Infections," "Why I Became a Homeopath".
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