Nick Nossaman, MD, DABHM: An Appreciation

Nicholas Nossaman, MD, DABHM, known for his wide, flamboyant ties, lent his quiet presence to organizational homeopathy for many years and in many ways. He has also served as president of our two major national homeopathic associations in the United States of America. He served as our very able President of the American Institute of Homeopathy from 1988 to1990. Prior to that, he had been president of the National Center for Homeopathy from 1980 to 1981. As is traditional with each of these national organizations, he served in several positions on each Board before and after his terms as president. Caught up in the AFH/NCH matter of that time, he resigned from the latter when his efforts at peacemaking failed.

Putting into action his belief in the concept of certification, he has been a Diplomate of the American Board of Homeotherapeutics (ABHt), recently retitled the American Board of Homeopathic Medicine (ABHM), since his successful qualification in 1986. From 2019 until the present, he has been serving as ABHM Treasurer.

In further search of the truths of homeopathy, Nick participated with fellow west coast homeopath physicians, Drs. Jennifer Jacobs, Dean Crothers, Bob Schore, and Jackie Wilson, in the Rhus tox Study Group, an international initiative of Belgium’s Dr. Jacques Imberechts.

During his AIH Presidency, the American Institute of Homeopathy, the oldest extant medical professional association in the United States founded in New York City in 1844, held its sesquicentennial honoring conference in that city in 1994. Nick served as Program Director for that auspicious conference.

In the year 2000, the AIH held its Rededication and Celebration Conference in Washington, DC. The meeting was held at a hotel within walking distance of our stately monument to our revered founder, German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann. At the celebratory occasion at the monument, attempts were made to have the event reflect some of the pomp and circumstance that marked its dedication in 1900 with US President McKinley and other government dignitaries there, as well as the President’s Own Marine Corps Band. While we did not have President Clinton there, we did have an Armed Forces Color Guard and the Marine Band Brass Quintet. On that once in a lifetime occasion, Nick was asked to read a poem by William Tod Helmuth, MD, NY, Ode to Hahnemann that Dr. Helmuth had read at the original dedication of the monument in June 1900.

Nick was born in Denver, Colorado, where he practiced medicine for 51 years, homeopathy for 43 years, retiring in 2019. He was reared there and on the western slope of Colorado, in Cedaredge and Durango. Working in a city run health delivery program for low-income people in Denver eight years after receiving his medical degree, he became discouraged with the superficiality of his practice, not feeling he was even close to reaching the basis for illness in his patients. Oddly enough, he was Introduced to homeopathy at a party and his interest was immediately piqued. In further conversation with the lady who had introduced the idea and later with Dr. Dick Moskowitz in Santa Fe, to whom he was introduced through the courtesy of a colleague from the Indian Health Service, Nick was inspired to take the first steps. He bought some of the basic books and remedies and began to prescribe homeopathy for acute and first aid cases.

Dr. Nossaman states that he is eternally grateful to Drs. Maesimund Panos, Henry Williams, Ruth Rogers, Frank Stockton, and to Harris Coulter, PhD, and others for carrying the coals of homeopathic professionalism through lean times and kindling the fire in him and others of his generation.

During the years of his homeopathic practice, he saw people of all ages, having originally come from the family practice model. As his years of homeopathic practice unfolded, he performed fewer annual exams than before, but did serve as primary care physician to those who desired it.

Feeling mighty proud of his adult children, Nick happily shares their current achievements in life. Married twice, Nick has two daughters by his first wife, Karen: Wende, his eldest, who lives in Denver and works for Microsoft, and Aason, next in line, who works with her ex-husband Eric and lives in Pasadena. Their two teenaged children, Brayden and Ava, are recently attending the New School in New York and starting college at the University of Colorado, respectively. He and his second wife, Teresa, have been married for 29 years. She was formerly employed at the central office of the NCH and AIH in Washington, DC. Together, they operated their homeopathic practice in downtown Denver and later in their home office for a total of 28 years. He has two stepchildren: Bianca, who works in accounting and is married to Dan Connolly, who works in property management, and Casey, who is a commercial real estate broker and has a 6-year-old son, Henry, with his ex-wife Nicole, who is an event planner.

Nick relates that he has a great interest in Jungian psychology and its practical application in everyday life. For other fun, he writes poetry, enjoys photography, music, watercolor and pantomime. T . his author can say that she had the enviable opportunity to see Nick perform pantomime at our meeting in Washington, DC, in June 2000, to honor the centennial of our beautiful Hahnemann Monument.

Nick has an impressive four-and-a-half-page curriculum vitae that lists his various professional memberships, his teacherships, his committee memberships, his staff appointments, and his expansive catalogue of publications, including those published in the American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine, Simillimum, and the New England Journal of Homeopathy. Additionally, it lists several of his presented papers, including “’Both…And’: a Paradigm for Our Consideration” presented at the AIH-hosted Rededication and Celebration conference held June 2000 in Washington, DC; “Homeopathy and Public Health: How Do We Actually Fit In?” presented at the 52nd Congress of the Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis held in Seattle, Washington, and “Topics From the Organon of Medicine” presented at the 65th Congress of the Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis held in Redondo Beach, California.

We in homeopathic medicine are fortunate to call Nicholas Nossaman, MD, DABHM, a colleague. I am fortunate also to call him a friend.

– Sandra Chase, MD, DHt

About the author: Sandra M. Chase, MD, DHt, now retired from her private practice of classical homeopathic family medicine of over 40 years, is a past President of the American Institute of Homeopathy (AIH) and a past (first woman) President of the Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis (LMHI). She is President of the AIH Foundation, a member of the Council of Past Presidents of the LMHI, President of Honor for LMHI.