Conscientious Objector – Why I Became A Homeopath

I retired in 2020, after 53 years of family practice, 46 of them devoted almost entirely to homeopathy.  With so many questions, doubts, and scruples about my training, I never felt comfortable with fighting the endless war against disease, and deploying the latest and most powerful chemical and surgical weapons against abnormalities, whenever, wherever, and however they showed themselves. I wound up doing graduate work in philosophy before interning and going into practice.  But even then, other than drugs and surgery for acutes and emergencies, I had little to offer my patients beyond education and advice when their illnesses became chronic and got worse. 

I finally glimpsed a way out of that dilemma, thanks to a woman who wanted a home birth, and was asking me to help her do what her body was already doing.  Once the word was out that I was willing to help other women that way, I was as busy as I could be, doing home births, and beginning to explore gentler methods of healing, like herbal medicine. That experience helped me remember the obvious truth that my training had taught me to forget, that the signs and symptoms of illness and disease are similarly the concerted effort of our organism to heal itself.  In Colorado, I attended about 150 home births over a period of 3 years, and by some miracle I never missed a birth, lost a baby, or even had to take anyone to the hospital.

Then I moved to Santa Fe to study acupuncture, and opened an office for the first time, hired a receptionist, a nurse to help with the home births, joined the hospital staff, and began seeing my full share of complications like everyone else.  But my study of acupuncture introduced me to energy medicine, to seeing the patient as a complete bioenergetic system, and indeed a unique individual, rather than a mere specimen of various abstract disease entities.  Even though it was too alien culturally for me to build my practice around it, it was the ideal preparation for homeopathy, which I discovered synchronistically at that precise juncture.  It was at that point, as I learned to pay careful attention to the individuality of the patient, and match it with the individuality of the medicine as closely as possible, that practicing medicine became interesting and rewarding enough for me to enjoy practicing it for so many years without a cause for regret.

This memoir of my training and early years in practice concludes with stories from my years of practice in Santa Fe and subsequent move to Boston.  The remainder of the book is given over to three short treatises on the subjects that particularly engaged me, namely, homeopathic medicine, which I practiced more or less exclusively for 46 years; the medical system I was trained in, my questions and doubts about which led me to study philosophy before going into practice; and the vaccination process, which my long experience treating children showed to be a major cause of chronic disease, although largely overlooked and indeed kept hidden from the general public and even most physicians.  A brief concluding chapter searches for the common threads that run through these various phases and subjects of my career.

At first, it will probably appeal mostly to health professionals and laypeople who already have experience of or interest in midwifery, pediatrics, homeopathy, and natural medicine, many of whom face similar dilemmas. But my chief purpose in writing it is to reflect more broadly on health, illness, and healing, matters of lifelong concern to everyone, in a manner that will hopefully be relevant and useful to a general audience.