Interviews

Dr. Richard Moskowitz is interviewed by Katja Schütt

Written by Katja Schuett

Dr. Richard Moskowitz is interviewed by Katja Schütt. He shares his views on homeopathy, the allopathic model, chronic diseases, vaccines and much more.

Dr. Richard Moskowitz got his B.A. from Harvard, and M.D. from New York University and has practiced family medicine since 1967. He has practiced homeopathy since 1974, studying with Vithoulkas, Sankaran, and others. He writings include: “Homeopathic Medicines for Pregnancy and Childbirth”, “Resonance: The Homeopathic Point of View”,  “Plain Doctoring,” “The Case against Immunizations,” “The Fundamentalist Controversy”, “Vaccination: a Sacrament of Modern Medicine,” “Why I Became a Homeopath”.

KS: Welcome to Hpathy, Dr. Moskowitz! I feel blessed to have you with us today and look forward to you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with us.

You have practiced medicine for more than 50 years. But let’s start at the very beginning. In your school days you felt no particular calling to heal the sick. What led you to pursue a medical career?

RM:  I’m not sure, but I think it may have had to do with my grandfather’s death when I was 6, and I realized that I too was destined to die, that it was a certainty. So, I guess I had the idea I should learn about it!  Which may also explain my ambivalence about it, which was always part of the package.

KS: But you did not go right into practice after finishing your medical studies. What kept you from practicing medicine?

RM: I was so disillusioned, disgusted, and morally compromised by my training — its animal experiments, its taking advantage of indigent people to experiment on them, its search for medical and surgical treatments that could force the body to behave the way we wanted it to, necessarily involving deadly force, its metaphors of war and combat — that I knew I couldn’t bring myself to practice that way, and assumed that’s all there was.  So, I decided to study philosophy, to try to make sense of it.

After 3 years in philosophy, I lost my student deferment from military service –it was the Vietnam era — and was reassigned to be drafted into the Army; but I disapproved of our involvement there, and miraculously obtained a deferment as “physically, mentally, or morally unfit for service, except in the time of a national emergency,” which was my thinking exactly.

So, at that point I decided to do my internship, after all, and actually rather enjoyed it; but I still had the same reservations about practicing in the way I was trained.  So, I saw my role as helping to guide people through the medical system without being hurt too badly, making the diagnosis, of course, but then putting it on the shelf, and hoping that each patient’s individual situation would suggest a non-invasive strategy that would fit their particular needs.

Then I helped a woman give birth at home, helping her to do what her body was already doing, which was my first glimpse of something affirmative that I could do.

KS: You described your first home birth experience as a beautiful and almost religious experience. Please tell us how this turned around your whole notion of what medicine and healing were all about.

RM: At that point I saw my role as helping people navigate through the medical system without being hurt too badly, an important priority that has stayed with me ever since; but I had almost nothing of an affirmative nature to offer them when they got worse, and had to hand them over in the end; it was rock-bottom for me.

Then a woman I hardly knew asked if I’d help her give birth at home, which none of the local OB’s would touch with a 10-foot pole.  I’d never heard of anybody doing such a crazy thing, or even wanting to, and also felt more than a little hesitant with no hospital to back me up and no nurses to hand me instruments and make me look good.  But in the depths of my depression, it hit me that here at last was something useful I could do as a physician without forcing their bodies into submission or telling people how to live.

When she went into labor and I arrived at the house, I wanted to do a vaginal exam right away, to see how the labor was progressing.  But I realized that that was a routine procedure I’d been trained to do, rather than something she needed or was asking for.

After much soul-searching, I decided that if anything went wrong, I needed to learn to trust myself to figure out what needed to be done at the time, and that the best thing to do at that moment was to sit down, be quiet, and pay attention, just as everyone else was doing.

Dorothy taught me pretty much the whole course that day, without saying a word; and I’d still like to know when and how she figured it out, since Erica, her firstborn, had been delivered under general anesthesia nine years before.

Adam was born at dawn, enveloped in a soft halo of light; and when she held him up to nurse, the tableau was like a Madonna of Raphael. We all saw it, gazing intently at them and each other, as even our earliest ancestors must surely have done.

In no way uncanny, strange, or outside the realm of natural law, Adam’s birth was a miracle in precisely the opposite sense, of something happening in full awareness, which only our customary inattention would need to single out, and only our remembering what no other animal has ever forgotten bespoke a real deliverance.

With a flair for the dramatic, Erica announced she was taking the placenta to school; but when her classmates arrived, they were grossed out at the sight, and tried their best to dissuade her; so she wrapped it in a plastic bag and left with it stuffed under her coat, like a reluctant conspirator carrying an oversized bomb.

Less than an hour later, the school nurse telephoned in a panic and I agreed to stop by and fetch it on my way home.  She wasn’t against “this sort of thing,” she assured me; the problem was, they didn’t have refrigeration for it, and she’d have had to ask the principal, who was out of town: she could lose her job.

I wish I’d had the presence of mind to ask what she thought about a state of affairs in which she could in fact lose her job for talking to a bunch of schoolchildren about giving birth to a baby, or indeed what her job was, if not that.  But I didn’t.

Still in a euphoric state, I put the holy relic on a plate and paraded with it around the CU campus, showing it to everyone I met, after which it lay in state on my coffee table for a week, without the slightest odor or trace of putrefaction, like the dead bodies of certain saints and gurus according to popular legend.

Adam’s birth was a priceless gift to me, my first glimpse of a medical practice that I could follow with pride; and it served me well for 50 years, by simply trying my best to live up to it.  While even the most enlightened hospitals need to make rules for its patients, and to act as if they know what’s best for them, even better than they do themselves, as a guest in Phil and Dorothy’s home it felt inappropriate and unnecessary for me to tell them what to do or how to live.

Rather than doing anything in particular, my role was that of a midwife, to be there for them in whatever way seemed useful at the time, to help them make whatever decisions they needed to make, and to complete the natural process that was already under way.

KS: Drawing on your vast experience as a homeopath and of attending about 800 home births you wrote the manual Homeopathic Medicines for Pregnancy and Childbirth”. This book grew out of two important revivals, the homebirth movement and classical homeopathy. Do they have anything in common?

RM: A great deal in common.  Mainly, they’re both patient-centered: that was the key point for me. I was helping these women do what their bodies were already programmed to do and were in the process of doing, rather than forcing them into compliance with the doubtless worthy priorities of the medical profession, using surgical manipulation and potent drugs to correct any abnormalities.

This model thus prepared me to discover first energy medicine and then homeopathy, both of which likewise helped the body to heal itself, rather than forcing it to behave in the specific ways we thought it should.

KS: Hahnemann bemoaned the intellectual inability of the materialists of the old school to free themselves from material concepts when considering and assessing illness and cure. How did you make it from being interested in biochemistry to adopting the concepts of energy medicine and homeopathy?

RM: My formal introduction to energy medicine was studying acupuncture with a Japanese master, who taught me pulse diagnosis to give a unique reading of the total energy picture of each patient, rather than an abstract pathological diagnosis of the sort I’d been trained to give.

Immediately I seized upon that idea, because it provided me with a recipe for approaching each individual patient as an integrated energy system, rather than our Cartesian jumble of ideas, perceptions, and emotions on the one hand, set against the equally confusing perspective of cells, molecules, and organs on the other.  But it still felt too alien culturally for me to be willing to devote my life to mastering it, which was obviously what it would require.

It was at that precise juncture that I took my first course in homeopathy, and I knew immediately that it was exactly what I needed, to provide both a theory and a method to teach me how to practice in the way that my gut instinct, my study of philosophy, and my introduction to Japanese medicine were already preparing me for and leading me into.

KS: With your background in philosophy, in what way did the philosophy of the homeopathic healing art appeal to you?

RM: First, it validated my focus on the concrete, here-and-now individuality of the patient, rather than the abstract pathological diagnosis shared with others. Second, the whole process of case-taking, remedy selection, and follow-up were conducted in the ordinary language of the patient, rather than the technical language of abnormalities that doctors have go to school for, so that it was entirely accessible to the patient all the way through.

Third, the medicines were taken from nature for the most part, administered in submolecular doses, and chosen for their close correspondence to the unique totality of the patient’s signs and symptoms, so that they acted if and only if the patient was exquisitely sensitive to them by virtue of that correspondence, a crucial safety feature.

Fourth, as I learned later, that close matching made possible a level of genuine healing that was far superior to merely correcting the target abnormality with overwhelming chemical force.  And fifth, the sheer richness of the materia medica, encompassing plant, animal, and mineral remedies of every description, thrilled me with pleasure as a study of the natural world that was beautiful as well as useful and required at least several lifetimes to do justice to.

KS: For you, much of the fascination and excitement of studying homeopathy lies in the detailed knowledge of remedies and the actual experience of using them. With the ever-increasing number of remedies this seems to be a mammoth task. Do you use mainly the remedies of the “old days” that have been proven by the old masters, or did you expand your arsenal of remedies beyond them?

RM:  Well, both.  There were already so many more of the old ones than I could possibly master that I needed help organizing my study. So, I tended to study the ones that came up in my clinical work, which necessarily included the ones that were most similar to the ones I wound up choosing.

Like everybody else, I especially loved those times when I got to use remedies for the first time, often remedies I’d never heard of, until they came up in the case, usually quite strongly, or I would never have thought of them.  Often, they would involve strange, rare, and peculiar sensations, like one very chilly woman who often got bronchitis from being out in cold weather, when she felt the inspired air ice-cold all the way down into her lungs, an oddball symptom that not only led me to Cistus canadensis, the rock rose, but made me feel confident that it would work, which indeed it did.

Then I’d take a seminar with somebody, and they’d talk about some remedy that was new to me, and soon I’d have an occasion to try it.  In a few cases they’d be new remedies that weren’t even written up in the books, like Nancy Herrick’s milk remedies, which was how I first learned about Lac equinum, mare’s milk.

Yet I have to confess, the only time I ever used it wasn’t on account of her teaching. It was a woman with several benign fibroadenomas of the breast, and no repertorizable symptoms to speak of, but the patient kept talking about loving horses and riding them since a small child, imagining herself an Indian brave, and loving to eat lumps of sugar, which then led me to notice her very long neck, and two big buck teeth protruding in front. So I’m almost ashamed to tell you that Lac equinum 200 worked like a charm.

Now that’s “Signatures,” not homeopathy, and I’m far from recommending that anybody should make a point of practicing that way. But another thing I love about medicine in general and homeopathy in particular is that, unlike philosophy, where you never quite know what is true, or even what you’ve said, they’re both eminently practical, so that you always have a simple, binary, up-or-down criterion to work with and fall back on, namely, DOES IT WORK?

Is your patient better, or not?  She was not only better, but — dare I say — cured!  So, I just got lucky this time. All I really meant was that I’m open to trying new remedies as well as the old ones.

KS: You opine that the relationship with your patients is by far the most precious gift that you as a homeopath can offer the medical community. Where does the enormous power of the doctor-patient relationship originate in?

RM: It lies in the fact that it’s based on mutual trust.  The patient needs your guidance. What makes that work is your service on his or her behalf.  For me as a physician, that means that I’ve learned to trust that what they tell me is their existential truth as they live it, whether right or wrong, until something convinces me that they’re lying, which very seldom happens.

For me as a homeopath, that lived truth is also wholly and precisely what I need to select the proper treatment.  That is why they’re likely to come back even if the remedy doesn’t work all that well. They appreciate being given the opportunity to tell their story in its entirety, rather than simply being categorized as a specimen of this or that abstract pathological entity.

That is the magic that unlocks secrets that would be impenetrable otherwise.  In today’s medicine, we’re taught that randomized clinical trials are needed to establish causality, so that individual cases, however brilliant, are merely “anecdotal,” without statistical significance, which is true in that extremely limited sense, provided you know what to measure.

But it would never have occurred to me that vaccine-injured children were reacting adversely to the vaccination process per se, rather than this or that particular vaccine, had it not been for a large number of cases where the vaccine made worse what was already there, and the reaction was peculiar to that child, such that any vaccine would do, and the child might react in exactly the same way to two or more different vaccines.  The genius of the clinical perspective then makes it possible to design clinical trials on the basis of it.  So, it’s a win-win all the way around.

KS: When you first came to homeopathy, it seemed “almost moribund, so out to lunch and so far beyond the pale, that it required a special, quirky sort of mentality to be drawn to it”, as you write. What does homeopathy mean to you today, after having used it exclusively in your practice for so many years?

RM: I think the homeopathic paradigm is if anything even more relevant today than when Hahnemann first thought it up over two hundred years ago, a durability in pointed contrast to the system that almost killed it, which gorges itself on a high-powered diet of rapid and constant change.

Within a generation after his death, the orthodox medicine he quarreled with had evolved into something that he would scarcely have recognized, while since World War II it has risen to become the dominant form of medicine and indeed the model of healthcare throughout the world.

That’s why I think homeopaths make a huge mistake in attributing our second-class status to allopathic persecution, our own internal divisions, and the public’s inability to grasp or unwillingness to accept the heart of our message, however relevant these factors may have been.

The elephant in the room that dwarfs them all is the mighty revolution in human thought that created medical science as we know it today, a transformation so stunning in its impact and so radical in its implications that “conventional medicine,” our own tame, sanitized, and condescending term for it, is a mere euphemism for trivializing that achievement, if not the exact opposite of the truth.

I didn’t become a homeopath because of any dramatic cure that I witnessed or benefited from, but rather in response to glaring inconsistencies in my medical training that troubled me on an intuitive level long before I could identify and articulate them.

Homeopathy was a life-saver for me, because it gave me a path back into medicine that I finally felt comfortable with, a coherent system of theory and practice that still works and makes sense to me.

The simple fact that the philosophy and method have survived intact for so long and attracted qualified doctors from almost everywhere at a time when allopathic medicine has become the dominant model throughout the world, represents a major historical achievement in its own right, and argues persuasively for the authenticity of the homeopathic phenomenon and all that follows from it, the validity of the Law of Similars, the efficacy of our infinitesimal doses, and a whole lot more.

Whatever method of treatment we use, all physicians must live by the bottom-line reality that our reputations and livelihoods depend on the extent to which our patients are benefited by our efforts on their behalf.  As to whether homeopathy works, my best answer is that it worked well enough, even in my own far from expert hands, to sustain me in the practice of family medicine for 46 years, with never a cause for regret; and I can say with some assurance that the vast majority of my colleagues both here and abroad would say the same.

So, when critics insist that our medicines are merely placebos, I’m of course deeply flattered by the implication that we must be healing our patients by casting some sort of shamanic spell over them unawares.  But my experience has taught me that the medicines work just as well in unconscious and comatose patients, for whom the influence of suggestion is presumably negligible, and that the “placebo effect,” that starved and tattered remnant of the natural self-healing capacity, is an essential component of all healing, even with pharmaceuticals, just by no means the whole of it.

Far from believing that pharmaceutical drugs have no value, I often referred patients I couldn’t help to my allopathic brethren, and was truly grateful for their help.  I began practicing homeopathy because I wanted to try a gentler and safer approach first, whenever possible.

My experience soon added a more compelling reason, that matching the treatment to the individuality of the patient allows and encourages a deeper and more comprehensive level of healing than is possible with drugs that merely counteract a specific symptom or correct a particular abnormality by applying superior chemical force at that strategic point.

Although this kind of talk undoubtedly causes many to roll their eyes as if it were some hippie fantasy, or mere wishful thinking that’s too good to be true, each of us who devote ourselves to the practice tend to keep our own trove of stories handy to answer them.

One of my favorites is that of a 34-year-old R.N., plagued with severe endometriosis since her teens, who had undergone four surgeries to remove large, blood-filled cysts from her bladder and pelvic organs, as well as several courses of male hormones to suppress the condition.

Abandoning any hopes of having children on the advice of her gynecologists, she consulted me solely to restore the integrity of her menstrual cycle, with periods that were intensely painful in her teens, but became progressively more irregular, infrequent, dark-brown, and “dead,” as she described them, from so many years of aggressive treatment.

After trying a few homeopathic medicines, her periods did indeed become fuller and richer; and within six months she was pregnant. By the next time I saw her for a different ailment nearly eight years later, she had given birth to two healthy children after uncomplicated pregnancies and normal, vaginal births, and had remained in good health ever since.

Like all the others, her story is merely an anecdote, with no statistical significance whatever, nor can its happy outcome be attributed to a homeopathic medicine or indeed to any other agency in precise, linear, unequivocal fashion.

But my patient has never stopped thanking me for it, which is reason enough to be grateful for a method and style of healing that is gentle, spontaneous, and catalytic in nature, rather than a technical correction achieved by the application of overriding and irresistible chemical force.

KS: You’ve been teaching homeopathy in Cuba, one of the few countries where homeopathy has been recognized by the Ministry of Public Health as a form of alternative therapy and is used for primary health care. How was your experience?

RM: I’ve never had better students. They were all MD’s, many with white coats and stethoscopes around their necks, or in other words, “straight doctors,” not hippies or renegades, like a lot of us were.  We were warned in advance to steer clear of Hahnemann’s most controversial stuff, like miasms and such, and emphasize the scientific aspects; but they loved homeopathy, and everything about it, and were thoroughly fascinated by miasms, families, sensations, and the rest.

I think what really turned them on the most was the fact that they could make their own remedies, since the US embargo had damaged their economy to the point that they had no money to buy the heavy artillery they learned about in school.

In the big general hospital in downtown Havana, where our classes met, they couldn’t even afford toilet paper, and were using Granma, the ruling Party newspaper, for that purpose.  What they did have was not only intelligence and enthusiasm, but also the total support of the Cuban government, which was a lot more than we visitors ever had.

KS: Your recently published books on “Doctoring” contain a collection of selected writings. What do you hope readers will gain from reading these two volumes?

RM:  The book Plain Doctoring is a collection of my basic theoretical and philosophical writings, including samplings from the pregnancy book and Resonance, the treatise on homeopathy.

More Doctoring is a miscellany, including case reports, obituaries, political statements, and the like, the “nuts and bolts” of homeopathy, you might say.

KS: In your book Resonance you explain homeopathy to the public, describing how homeopaths think about health, illness and cure, and examining the most important aspects. Why is it that homeopathic theory has changed little since Samuel Hahnemann postulated homeopathy?

RM:  Homeopathy may be the only methodology for any learned profession that was conceived and brought forth fully-formed from a single human brain, and has continued to grow and develop while remaining essentially intact for two hundred years.

I also know of no other profession in which those who carry on its work are proud to make light of their greatest achievements as just footnotes to the books he wrote and the principles he enunciated so long ago.

This longevity also helps us appreciate the gulf that separates the homeopathic point of view from that of conventional medicine, which prides itself on its readiness to change, it’s astounding capacity to remake itself on short notice. The Law of Similars, the “Vital Force,” the Totality of Symptoms, the Single Remedy, the Minimum Dose, and other basic principles remain as fresh and timeless today as when the Master first proclaimed them.

The uniqueness of Hahnemann’s achievement is partly that it contains two radically different projects in a single package, each closely bound up with the other. To the public, it is best known as a set of techniques for healing the sick, a methodology that includes detailed instructions for interviewing patients and for preparing, investigating, selecting, and administering medicinal agents.

This technical level is where Hahnemann continued to experiment throughout his career, and where homeopathy has always seemed utterly strange and even improbable to most people, and thus controversial and vulnerable to its many detractors as well.  And it is here, too, that its practitioners are most grateful to him at that moment of truth when we get to place a tiny bit of fairy dust on a patient’s tongue and to savor that look of incredulity that precedes the miracle to come.

But to those of us who practice it, homeopathy is also a philosophy, not only in the ordinary sense of a set of ideas and opinions about health and disease, but also as a coherent system of principles that follow logically from a few axiomatic premises that cannot themselves be proved, quite in the spirit of Bertrand Russell’s whimsical definition:

“. . . the point of philosophy is to start with something so obvious as not to seem worth stating, and to end up with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

The Law of Similars, the Materia medica, the single remedy, the minimum dose, the “Laws of Cure,” and the other cardinal principles of homeopathy all seem to follow inevitably from the concept of the “vital force” and the “totality of symptoms,” its clinical aspect, and make very little sense without them.

Homeopathy owes its peculiar longevity to this happy conjunction of both philosophy and method. Gifted thinkers have always left behind enduring philosophies that still speak to us across the centuries, but without a practical method of applying them in the world they survive only as ideal possibilities as yet unrealized.

Conversely, modern physicians and scientists have contributed a wealth of technical innovations that have transformed medical knowledge and practice, and engendered new operating principles to keep pace with them; but without an underlying philosophy they will soon be replaced by newer and better ones.

Only homeopathy has managed to sustain itself without fundamental change, because it is both philosophy and method, such that even its practical applications, while reflecting and keeping abreast of technical progress, remain firmly grounded in principles that still generate relevant and valid conclusions, and are therefore still operative to that extent.

It doesn’t qualify as “hard science” like physics and chemistry, because the “Vital Force” and the “Totality of Symptoms” are basic, self-evident truisms that aren’t amenable to experimental proof or disproof as scientific hypotheses must be.

Yet it remains thoroughly scientific in its attitude and its subject matter, and is entirely amenable to objective, scientific, and even experimental corroboration as to the consistency, accuracy, relevance, and predictive value of the system as a whole.

KS: The existence of God has always been a subject of debate in philosophy and a powerful motivating force for Hahnemann. Does any concept of God play a role in your life?

RM:  Like Einstein, Spinoza, and others, the divinity I pay homage to is identical with the universe, i.e., Nature, the vanishingly improbable fact that it’s real and all here, the earth, the stars, the planets, and the laws that we can never wholly understand, but must nevertheless obey, governing existence and non-existence, space and time, birth and death, evolution and change.

I don’t think of divinity as personal, in the sense of someone with a specific interest in whether I’m good or bad, happy or miserable, and am not a devout Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, or anything else.  But I’m interested in all of them, and have profound respect for the religious instinct, the desire to comprehend what is so much vaster and more powerful than we are.

I also believe that prayer can help us understand what’s most important for us, and I admire people whose religious instincts and temperament have resulted in a way of life that is wholesome, inspiring, and worthy to follow.

KS: You have devoted a considerable part of your career trying to clarify the rationale of vaccines. When did you start to feel a growing compunction against giving routine vaccinations to children?

RM: From first going into practice, I felt uneasy about routine mass vaccination of all children, especially for diseases that were mild or on the decline, and above all without parental consent.  At first it was just a gut feeling.  But as I began to see vaccine injuries and studied the subject more carefully, I realized that these agents posed a risk to every recipient that was largely unrecognized, and found I could no longer give the shots even when parents asked me to.

KS: If there is one lesson that I draw from studying vaccination literature, it certainly is that nothing can beat natural immunity. Why is herd immunity, the stated goal of vaccines, an illusion that vaccination cannot achieve?

RM:  Natural immunity has three parts.  First, it’s specific, in the obvious sense that those who come down with and recover from the natural infection will never get it again, or in the case of influenza, a virus that mutates very rapidly, is much less likely to reinfect.

Second, it’s also nonspecific, in that the co-ordinated response of the immune system as a whole, primes it to respond in the same way to whatever other foreign organisms it may encounter in the future.  Involving several different mechanisms, the end result of the process is the expulsion of the invading organism from the body.  Most people don’t realize that coming down with and recovering from acute febrile illnesses as children confers significant protection against developing chronic diseases and cancer later in life.

And third, when a sufficient percentage of the population has recovered from such a disease, roughly 80% in the case of measles, for example, the virus or bacterium is thereby rendered incapable of mounting large outbreaks in the future: this is natural “herd” Immunity.

Vaccines, on the other hand, are designed in order to avoid the acute illness, by stimulating antibody synthesis over a long period of time to prevent it.  But without the acute illness, there is no general activation of the cellular immune system and its various mechanisms, and thus no way of expelling the vaccine organism from the blood.

Quite the contrary, to produce antibodies over time, it must remain in the body for long periods; so, it is said that 95% must be vaccinated in order to attain a facsimile of herd immunity.  But the immunity it provides to the individual recipient is temporary, partial, and associated with hidden health risks of its own that are not acknowledged.  So, the herd immunity that vaccines provide, if it exists at all, is defective and illusory.

KS: You even argue that eliminating childhood diseases is not desirable. Where do you see the benefit of getting them?

RM: Many studies have shown that children who come down with and recover from ordinary acute childhood illnesses with fever, such as measles, mumps, chicken pox, and influenza, are significantly less likely to develop chronic diseases and cancer later in life than those who are merely vaccinated against them, and that this protection is more or less directly proportional to the number of acute febrile illnesses experienced.

KS: In your book “Vaccines: A Reappraisal” you challenge almost every possible argument by which vaccines have been justified and propose a debate based on objective scientific research. What does the research cited to prove that vaccines are safe and effective fall short of?

RM: First, it narrowly measures only one variable, and omits the context required to evaluate it properly.  Second, it is funded and micromanaged by the drug industry, and often exaggerates or even falsifies these results.

My clinical work demonstrated that all vaccines exacerbate or reactivate whatever chronic diseases are already present, or precipitate those which were previously latent; that these reactions are caused not by this or that vaccine, but rather by something in the nature of the vaccination process per se; and that they are not rare, idiosyncratic aberrations in hypersensitive individuals, but are rather built into their design, as part of how they work and are intended to work.

The safety trials routinely miss these reactions for several reasons. First, because they don’t include unvaccinated people for comparison, using instead people given the chemical adjuvants alone, all of which are highly toxic by themselves, or else another vaccine for comparison, typically one known to be more toxic and often no longer marketed for that reason.

Second, they record only adverse reactions that occur within 2 weeks of the shot, thus completely ignoring the chronic dimension within which most of them occur, and include only the few adverse effects previously recognized and asked about, so that those involving other complaints volunteered by the subjects are dismissed as coincidental or not vaccine-related.  And third, the lead investigator has absolute authority to decide whether or not a given reaction is vaccine-related, based on criteria which are never specified.

Similarly, as to effectiveness, vaccines are deemed effective if they reduce the incidence of the corresponding natural disease, and if the recipients demonstrate a significant level of specific antibodies in their serum for considerable periods of time.

But even when these conditions are satisfied, they leave unmentioned the diseases that were already dying out because of improved sanitation, the diseases that were never serious to begin with, and above all the natural emergence of mutant strains, a process which is further accelerated by vaccination and indeed promote resistant strains simply by natural selection.

Also unmentioned is the fact that the level of circulating antibodies is a very poor measure of immune status. In the normal process of coming down with and recovering from acute diseases with fever, the ones we vaccinate against, the antibodies merely finish the job, as part of the concerted response of the cellular immune mechanism, whereby the foreign organism is eaten, digested, and expelled from the body.  At that point, the immune system retains a memory of the infection encrypted within the immunocompetent cells, so the antibodies are no longer needed.

With vaccination, on the other hand, there is no acute disease, no general outpouring of the immune system, and thus no way of getting rid of the invader.  Quite the contrary, the whole point of vaccinating is to replace all that: to keep producing antibodies, the vaccine or at least the genetic information it conveys must remain inside the body more or less permanently, and the partial, temporary simulation of immunity that they confer is a poor counterfeit of the real thing.  In short, vaccination, by definition, is a chronic phenomenon.

Another way to say it is that the natural immunity we acquire by coming down with and recovering from the acute febrile disease not only prevents us from getting it again, no matter how many times we’re re-exposed, but also primes the system to respond acutely and vigorously to whatever other foreign micro-organisms we encounter in the future.

It turns out that experiencing these diseases as children actually protects us from developing chronic diseases and cancer later in life, when compared to those merely vaccinated against them.

So, the antibody level doesn’t actually measure anything useful.   A lawyer once hired me to write a report in support of a young lab tech who claimed to have been disabled by the Hep B vaccine, which she was required to receive as part of her training.  After the second of her 3 shots, she developed a severe cough that lasted for months, but eventually subsided.

After 4 years, after getting her first job, her new employer tested her and found no antibodies, which he naturally interpreted to mean she was still susceptible, and so insisted on a second series, after which she developed autoimmune thyroiditis and a host of nasty chronic complaints requiring frequent, long-term medical care.

Conversely, an outbreak of measles in a highly-vaccinated community included a number of mild cases with no fever and very few acute symptoms.  These turned out to be primarily in vaccinated kids with no antibodies, whereas the typical acute cases occurred in the few unvaccinated kids, as expected, but also in quite a few of the vaccinated with high and supposedly immune levels of antibody. The problem is that the antibody level is the only variable we know or care to measure.

KS: Research needs to be done properly before launching vaccine campaigns and attacking human rights in the name of saving mankind. But this is easier said than done in a world in which private industries profit from large-scale crises. Surely, this must be a thorn in the flesh of a progressive Democrat?

RM: I have long believed that the corruption and malfeasance of the drug industry should be a signature issue for progressives, and indeed it is, when it comes to price-gouging and the like.  But when it comes to vaccines, these same people are utterly clueless and regard vaccines as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

That is partly because they believe what their doctors are telling them, as they should be able to.  But it’s also because their political opponents distrust not only vaccinations, but also medical science in general, as well as all types of government intervention on behalf of the poor, handicapped, and uninsured.

So, I feel quite desperate about this at the moment, because most of the people I need and want to convince regard me as a conspiracy theorist, and most of the people who agree with me would hate the CDC and FDA even more if they were actually doing the job they were created to do, to regulate and restrain the drug industry that now controls them.

However, I’m so desperate about the urgent threat to our whole democratic way of life at this moment, and indeed to all human life on the planet, that even the certainty of more and more vaccines and more and more chronic disease in their wake recedes into the background as the integral part of our lives that they have already long since become.

KS: During the current pandemic (Covid 19), the unvaccinated have been blamed for being responsible for spreading the virus and prolonging the outbreak. But there’s plenty of evidence that quite the opposite is true…

RM: To begin with, the CDC had been forced to admit that none of the COVID vaccines do what vaccines are supposed to do, namely, stopping infection and transmission.  In addition, eminent virologists such as Luc Montagnier have warned, seemingly in vain, that the vaccines are inevitably accelerating the development of resistant strains — “variants” — by natural selection, as has the prolonged lockdown and discrediting of effective treatments to force the population to wait for the vaccines, all of which has greatly prolonged the outbreak.

If we had handled the outbreak in the usual way, allowing the virus to spread through the schoolchildren, with nearly zero mortality, making good antiviral treatments available, and protecting the most vulnerable, the elderly, and the chronically ill, several noted epidemiologists have said that the outbreak would have been over 2 years ago, and caused many fewer deaths.

In addition, several Canadian virologists have found that the most popular mRNA vaccines force continual synthesis of the spike protein, which is highly toxic all by itself, and spreads throughout the blood, attacking vital organs.  Not to mention doing what all vaccines do, namely, making worse what’s already there, which in this case includes the COVID illness itself.

Finally, the COVID itself behaves in many respects like a chronic disease, not only in cases of the “long COVID,” which is so common, but also because many people get it again months or years later, suggesting the possibility of it persisting subclinically and then reactivating, rather than a true reinfection.  But either way, the later episodes are presumably just as transmissible as the original.

KS: After two years of the global pandemic and an ever-increasing number of incidences and vaccine-side-effects it is hard to believe that many still believe that vaccines are safe and effective, and that those who actually made an informed decision are being bullied and outlawed during this pandemic! With many of the spoken and unspoken rules, the pandemic seems to show humanity at its worst. And when it comes to dying, it is not only during the pandemic that dying in peace with loved ones has become an exception. What really matters at the end of life?

RM: Just what you said: being at home, if possible, and in the company of relatives and friends, hopefully with farewells to be said, and homeopathic or other natural medicines on hand as needed to ease the passage.

KS: Apart from a few countries like Cuba and India, homeopaths have not yet been invited to help with the pandemic despite homeopathy’s well-documented effectiveness in preventing and treating epidemics. Do you have any recommendations as a homeopath to come through the pandemic with more ease?

RM: Absolutely.  Homeopathic treatment has been wonderfully effective in treating the COVID, even in advanced cases in nursing homes.  Andre Saine gave a webinar of his extensive experience that is posted on the American Institute of Homeopathy’s website, and AIH member Nick Nossaman, M.D., has collected and posted the experience of other members on the website as well.

Dr. Brownstein, a well-known holistic medicine physician in Michigan, has posted his own experience with over 500 COVID patients so far, using high doses of Vitamins A, C, D, and iodine, also with excellent results. There are also quite a few studies showing good results with standard prescription medications, notably hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and colchicine, although many of them have been taken down after having been supposedly disproved by other studies sponsored by the industry; and the CDC has discouraged their use, to the point that they are difficult to obtain.

KS: Random Controlled Trials are the current standard of the effectiveness for allopathic drugs and hardly applicable to homeopathy due to its individualistic and holistic approach to treatment. You propose a very different mode for clinical research that is suitable for homeopathic as well as allopathic medicine. Please tell us more.

RM:  The main problem with RCT’s is that they are designed to outperform the natural self-healing process by which all living organisms are constantly repairing themselves.  Thus, the control groups consist of untreated individuals who are further handicapped by not being told that the medicines they receive are placebos; the so-called “placebo effect” against which the experimental drug is to be measured is thus merely the starved, tattered remnant of that innate ability.  So, the most effective drugs are simply the most potent, those with the most chemical power to overpower the placebo effect.

In contrast, homeopathic medicines are chosen for their ability to resonate with and thereby enhance the self-healing capacity, which is ironically and indeed decisively involved in all healing, even with drugs, and especially from surgery. In short, the ancient vis medicatrix naturæ is the missing link in modern medicine, and precisely what needs to be studied.

A related problem is that RCT’s tend to emphasize the immediate or “acute” effects of drugs, and to neglect the chronic effects, which often begin insidiously and reach their full or distinctive form only after long periods of time.  These are especially likely to be neglected or written off as coincidence or hypersensitivity.

So, it occurs to me that we could and should focus our attention on self-healing by redesigning clinical trials so that homeopathic cures would at last become visible, and allopathic medicines would be subjected to a truer, more comprehensive evaluation.

To that end, as a supplement to the RCT, I propose a friendly competition between pharmaceuticals and natural medicines — homeopathic, herbal, Ayurvedic, or otherwise — to measure the extent to which any type of medicinal agent assists and enhances the natural healing process that all patients with every illness are already by definition engaged in:

1) Nobody is blinded: everyone knows which kind of medicine they’re receiving, having chosen it beforehand because of their interest, belief, or faith in it.

2) Nobody gets placebo: everyone gets the treatment they want, and the doctors administering it are matched to them by their beliefs, and expected to use whatever form of persuasion or encouragement they or their subjects believe will most effectively assist them on their healing path.

In other words, each group will serve as the control group of the other. If a particular disease is being studied, the homeopathic groups will of course have their individual cases taken and medicines selected on that basis.

3) Using the totality of signs and symptoms over time, including subjective and objective criteria, reports of family, friends, teachers, employers, and the like, both groups will be followed for several months or years, depending on the condition being studied, but long enough to include a significant chronic dimension.

4) Both groups will then be evaluated as to how well or badly they are measuring up in their own lives, according to their own standards, those prevailing in their own community, as well as to appropriate clinical and pathological criteria.

5) Qualified, impartial judges not exclusively committed to either point of view will then ascertain which form of treatment proves more beneficial in which respects, and will publish the results in a friendly, independent, and unbiased journal of good repute, to be selected and agreed upon in advance.

In other words, rather than focusing narrowly on the specific abnormality used to define the disease in question, the efficacy and safety of each form of treatment will be measured by approximating the total health picture of each individual subject and following how it changes over a substantial period of time.

KS: The exaggeration and fanaticism that surround the subject of vaccinations corresponds to the sycotic miasm and even shows traits of the syphilitic miasm with its destructive impulses and processes. Do you use Hahnemann’s miasm concept in clinical prescribing?

RM: Yes, I do, to some extent, just as I do with plant, animal, and mineral remedy families, and with Sankaran’s sensations. I use them when they present themselves, when the patient spontaneously volunteers these characteristics; I don’t interrogate on the basis of them, or need or expect them to be there in order for me to prescribe properly.

Sometimes, if I’ve pretty much decided on the remedy, I may use one or more of these schemata to confirm it. I use Sankaran’s expanded concept of miasms — acute, psoric, typhoid, ringworm, sycotic, malarial, leprous, tubercular, and syphilitic — rather than Hahnemann’s original, tripartite version; and I like the way he thinks about them.  But for me it’s in the background, not center stage.

KS: Affecting mainly the old and chronically ill, the pandemic has shown that our general state of health and the chronic diseases we suffer from pave the way for acute diseases. Especially the increase of chronic diseases in children is alarming, as they should be the healthiest of all age groups. What might be fuelling the dramatic increase in chronic diseases?

RM:  This is the most important question, because chronic disease is really the main event in public health today, especially in the developed world, with the US at the very top of even that list. In 2008, the CDC surveyed diabetes, cardiovascular disease, COPD, asthma, cancer, and arthritis, and found that:

60% of all adults had been diagnosed with 1 or more of them, as had
78% of those 55 and older, and
85.6% of those 65 and older,
and that
40% of all adults had been diagnosed with 2 or more, as had
47% of those 55 and older, and
56% of those 65 and older.

More recently, the commonest ones, taken Individually, are

asthma, COPD, and chronic lung disease    –       15% of all adults
arthritis                                                               –        23%
hypertension                                                      –        33% of all adults,  76% of age 75-84
obesity                                                                 –         42% of all adults
diabetes                                                               –         10% of all adults
chronic kidney disease                                     –         15%
dementia                                                             –          14% by age 71
some form of cancer                                         –          50% of males, 33% of females (lifetime)

Although these figures have been steadily increasing throughout the industrialized world, the United States leads all other countries by a considerable margin, with by far the lowest life expectancy, despite spending the most per capita on health care.

The figures are even more striking in children, presumably our healthiest demographic.  In 2008, a study of 91,000 children found that 43% of them suffered from at least 1 of the 20 chronic diseases surveyed, and that adding obesity and neuropsychiatric disturbances to the list raised the total to a shocking 54.1% of all children afflicted with some form of chronic disease.

 The most dramatic increases that I witnessed in my practice fall under the general heading of brain dysfunction: ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and sensory, motor, learning, and developmental disabilities, all of them relatively uncommon when I began practicing in the late 1960’s, and only slightly less so in the 1970’s.

By 2017 the National Center for Learning Disabilities reported that one-fifth of all children ages 3-17 were struggling with some form of learning disability, and those enrolled in Special Ed ranged from 9.2% in Texas to 19.2% in New York, or 13.7% overall.

Even though our government still prefers to ignore them, many factors are known to be contributing to this genuine pandemic of modern life:

1) pesticides, herbicides, petrochemicals, endocrine disruptors, PFA’s, and         other toxins that pollute our air, water, soil, and food;
2) electromagnetic emissions and ionizing radiations from our machines and devices;
3) the pathophysiology of our fast-paced and stressful way of life; and
4) poverty, war, racism, oppression, incarceration, and homelessness,

all of which are likewise more prevalent in the United States than in any other wealthy, industrialized country.

Only vaccines still fly under the radar for the most part, because of our official government policy, dictated by the drug industry, that they are wonderfully safe and effective, such that it’s not only okay but indeed desirable to pile on as many as we can and to repeat them as often as we wish. This despite the fact that a growing number of physicians like me have found them to precipitate, reactivate, and exacerbate a wide variety of chronic diseases, and a number of studies along the same lines are unread or ignored.

KS: Considering that vaccinations interfere with the delicate mechanism of our immune system, what diseases are likely to develop in those who have been vaccinated?

RM: Any and all chronic diseases, including autoimmune diseases and cancer.  That is because these are nonspecific effects of the vaccination process per se, essentially making worse what’s already there, exacerbating the diseases that are already overt, reactivating the diseases that continue to exist subclinically, and precipitating those that are still only latent tendencies.

So any disease is fair game, any that we see clinically, and doubtless also new ones that we’ve never seen before.  A number of studies show that the risk of developing overt disease has much less to do with this or that particular vaccine, and is directly proportional to the total vaccine load, both the number of individual vaccine components given simultaneously at the same visit, and the total number accumulated over the lifetime.

KS: Fear and uncertainty are a huge part of what this pandemic is about. According to the insights of existentialism, the awareness of death and confrontation with our own mortality can inspire us to rearrange our priorities. What do you think these can or should be in our current society and time?

RM:  Realizing at age 6 that I too was destined to die not only influenced me to become a physician but left me with the truth that our lives hang by a thread in any case, so that it’s part of our task to live courageously and find our joy in each moment of this precious life, pandemic or no pandemic.

At the same time, our realization that the COVID vaccines, and indeed vaccines in general, are both ineffective and a serious cause of chronic disease should be enough for us all to insist upon a truly independent investigation of these agents, and to develop a more wholesome paradigm of health and illness, such as the homeopathic point of view, to free our misnamed health-care system from the theoretical and practical domination of the huge industries that profit obscenely from it.

KS: The limitations and disadvantages of conventional treatment induce people to look for alternative approaches like homeopathy. What can be a starting point in healing the current medical system?

RM:  Universal health education, beginning in elementary school, with a self-healing orientation, teaching fitness, nutrition, and simple spiritual exercises, and continuing throughout life, reserving the heavy artillery of drugs and surgery for desperate cases where nothing else has worked, but making gentler methods like homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture, osteopathy, and mental- health counselling more widely available for everything else.

Mounting clinical trials comparing these gentler modalities with drugs and surgery, such as I’ve described, following the totality of symptoms and the all-cause chronic morbidity over time in both groups, and thus keeping a self-healing orientation at the center of the new system, and at all levels of chronicity and severity.

Reaffirming health care as a basic human right, not a commodity for sale. Making government agencies independent of the industries they’re meant to regulate.

KS: At your current age, you certainly have some advice on how to stay healthy and live life to the fullest?

RM: It’s easy to give good advice, but less easy to follow it:
Be curious, and learn about the world.
Try to find regular work that’s skilful and fulfilling.
Develop a pastime that’s creative, stimulates the imagination, and brings you joy.
Give back to your family and community.
Stay active socially, and find good friends who will take you for who you really are.
Eat well and healthy; stay active and fit; walk a lot.
Find doctors and health professionals whom you trust.
Allow lots of emotions, good and bad, without being too attached to them.
Try to make the world a better place.

KS: Thank you very much for this fascinating, thought-provoking interview. I am sure it will inspire the reader to learn more about homeopathy and vaccines and not to stop questioning!

The interview was conducted by Katja Schütt, (MBA, HP, CAM journalist) for Homeopathy for Everyone – Hpathy.com

 

Richard Moskowitz, M. D.

 Age: 83.

Education and Training.

  1. A. Harvard, 1959, Biochemical Sciences, Phi Beta Kappa.

M.D. New York University School of Medicine, 1963.

Graduate Fellowship in Philosophy, University of Colorado, 1963-1965.

General Medicine Internship, St. Anthony’s Hospital, Denver, 1966-67.

Licensure.

Colorado, 1967-74; New York, 1969; New Mexico, 1975-82.

Massachusetts, 1983-2020.

Medical Practice.

Family practice, 1967-2020.

Attended over 600 home births, 1969-82.

Specialized in homeopathic medicine, 1974-2020.

Books.

Homeopathic Medicines for Pregnancy and Childbirth, 1992.

Resonance: the Homeopathic Point of View, 2001.

Plain Doctoring: Selected Writings, 1983-2013.

More Doctoring: Selected Writings, Vol.2, 1977-2014.

Vaccines: a Reappraisal, 2017.

Articles.

“Homeopathic Reasoning,” 1980.

“The Case Against Immunizations,” 1983.

“Some Thoughts on the Malpractice Crisis,” 1988.

“Vaccination: a Sacrament of Modern Medicine,” 1992.

“Childhood Ear Infections, 1993.

“Why I Became a Homeopath,” 1995.

“The Fundamentalist Controversy,” 2004.

“Hidden in Plain Sight: the Role of Vaccines in Chronic Disease,” 2005. “Diagnosis,” 2009.

“Vaccines, Drugs, and Other Causes: a Homeopath Looks at the Medical System,” 2010.

About the author

Katja Schuett

Katja Schutt, Msc, HP, DHM, PGHom, DVetHom, has studied homeopathy with several schools, amongst which David Little’s advanced course stands out as it offers a really deep insight into homeopathic philosophy and materia medica (simillimum.com). Her current focus lies in working with animals and studying history, the old masters, and research.

2 Comments

  • Thank you Katja and Dr. Richard Moskowitz for this marvelous interview. Richard has an ability to share experiences in a very personal and human way. He has a lifetime of adventures and learning that connect with everyone.

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