Why I Became a Homeopath: Part 2

Richard Moskowitz, MD, DHt
(continued from a prior issue of the journal)

For a long time I treasured the memory of that experience like a precious jewel in a secret box: it never occurred to me that anybody else would think to try it again. Moving back to New York in search of new directions, I took a full-time position on the medical staff of a neighborhood health clinic in Brooklyn that was created as a subunit of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” With a mainly poor, black clientele that lived in the slums of Red Hook, our spanking-new facility was incongruously located in upscale Brooklyn Heights and included a fleet of reconditioned taxis to ferry our patients from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder to the top and back again.

Gratified that our budget at least provided for home visits, one day I was sent to the projects to see an old man in his nineties who was too ill to travel. As I entered the bedroom, he spotted my silvery moustache and rose smartly to attention, saluting me as if I were General Pershing, his commanding officer in the First World War. But before I could play along, he doubled over in pain, with his right hand protecting his ribs, and while easing him back into bed I could feel the vast bulk of his liver, studded with hard, metastatic nodules in an obviously terminal state. Confiding to his wife that he had cancer and would undoubtedly die soon, I offered to find her a housekeeper to make them both more comfortable in the brief time remaining, but she was over eighty herself, with major health problems of her own, and wouldn’t hear of him dying in that wretched little apartment, insisting that we admit him to the hospital and care for him there as best we could.

As a satellite of the vast Kings County Medical Center, our clinic was required to admit all inpatients to Long Island College Hospital, its local affiliate, and to surrender all authority over their care to the interns and residents in training there. Determined at least to meet and talk with them first, I argued that, since the diagnosis and the outcome were already certain, the most humane and sensible alternative was to give him plenty of morphine, make him as comfortable as possible, and let him die in peace. But the house staff looked down on me, the “local MD,” as if I were relic from the Stone Age. Just as I’d feared, they were determined to perform a liver biopsy and begin chemotherapy, purely as a training exercise, well aware that the drugs were highly toxic, debilitating, and of no lasting benefit, and that the procedure itself would very likely result in pneumonia and a miserable death, as in fact it did.

By the summer of 1970, I’d had enough of the big city, and once again sought refuge out West, renting a cabin high in Ward, Colorado, a semi-deserted old mining town 9000 feet up in the Rockies above Boulder. But no sooner had I arrived than women began calling me to help out with their home births, and before long I was as busy as I could be, attending maybe 40 or so by spring, and about 150 in the three years I lived there, long enough to watch Dorothy’s far-out idea catch on and spread like a prairie fire through the subculture. Without an office, nurse, appointments, or even a telephone at first, I was totally available to my patients if they could find me, an arrangement that, while clearly unsuitable for some, fit in quite well with the flourishing grapevine and frontier ethos of that time and place.

The way it worked was that patients made it their business to know or find out where I was at all times, while I taught them the basics of emergency childbirth in case I didn’t make it and would drop in on anyone close to term whenever I came to town, a journey of twenty miles over rough mountain roads that in winter became an arduous and sometimes thrilling adventure. But the best part was what happened when I got there, whether finding the labor already in progress or being treated like an honorary member of the family for a while, or at least being rewarded with a hot meal, good company, and a warm bed for the night.

In any case, I never missed a birth, lost a baby, or needed to take anyone to the hospital in those days, a record that I can’t explain and never came close to in later years, when I opened an office, hired nurses and receptionists, hospitalized people when I had to, and witnessed my full share of  complications like everyone else. Only in retrospect can I fully appreciate how fortunate and indeed in a state of grace I must have been, as if blessed by the vision that Dorothy had entrusted to me, and I determined to do everything in my power to be worthy of it. Whatever the reason, it cannot have been any particular skill or affinity on my part, since I had only a rudimentary knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth, felt even more keenly than my patients my unworthiness to supervise this most womanly activity, and could only justify it as an anomaly of medical history, which the home birth movement itself would and did eventually rectify.

Several of those births still remind me of the wide-open, experimental atmosphere and flair for self-discovery that seemed so characteristic of that era. Bored with successful careers in the New York theater and art scene, one newly married couple set out on their honeymoon in an old school bus that they had transformed into a romantic bower of velvet hangings, silk brocades, and other offerings of beauty and magic to the new life they dreamed of. Aiming for California like so many others, they never made it past the mountains, where they ran out of cash, discovered they were pregnant and fell under the sway of Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche, the charismatic Tibetan master who lived and taught nearby.

Taking advantage of electric and water hookups at a friend’s house in town, they continued to live and hold court in the bus, where we met to prepare for the birth. As the labor began one raw November morning, dozens of friends and well-wishers gathered in the house and began carousing and drinking heavily to celebrate the event, as if it had already taken place. By nightfall, Maggie was tired and panting rapidly, but her cervix was still only minimally dilated, and all the patience and encouragement I could muster failed to help her over this seemingly huge and insurmountable obstacle. With her labor at a standstill, I went back into the house and solemnly announced that she needed the collective energy and moral support of everyone there, without any clear idea of what practical help they could actually provide. As if on cue, they filed out into what had become an icy drizzle, lined up alongside the bus, and began chanting the sacred syllable in a loud, insistent drone that sounded as if it meant to continue until something pretty impressive would happen.

Thus summoned to what would become perhaps the greatest performance of her career, the former actress quickly revived in the presence of her audience, inviting everyone inside the bus, passing out candles, and no longer in any doubt about what to do next. Opening the I Ching at random, I remember reading aloud from the first hexagram I turned to; and although I have no memory of the actual passage, it elicited a chorus of nods and murmurs as if cosmically appropriate to the occasion. Taking hold of two ropes that her husband Don had hung from the ceiling for just this purpose, Maggie pulled herself up to a squatting position on the bed and began bellowing like a heifer with each contraction, although she was still by no means fully dilated, felt no definite urge to push, and taught herself by sheer force of will how to recognize and direct an instinct that still lay hidden deep inside her. When her daughter finally emerged, weighing almost eleven pounds, her prodigious size made the physical and moral difficulties of her birth seem almost legendary in Maggie’s heroic mastery of them.

These early experiences also taught me to respect my patients’ life choices even when I disagreed with them, questioning and at times arguing when I felt strongly, but in the end giving them the say about the kind of health care they wanted. With no past experience to guide me, I fretted a lot about the nutritional state of a macrobiotic couple who held forth as if they exemplified the highest moral virtue through their spiritual understanding of food, but I did enjoy the dinner they set before me well enough to persuade me to work with them. As it happened, the labor and the birth went off perfectly; and although the baby was smaller than average, as I’ve since come to expect, she grew to be as strong and healthy as anyone could wish.

Over the next twelve years I attended somewhat more than six hundred home births, and the model of doctor-patient relationships that emerged from them is as relevant today in my office practice as it was then in the field. I feel as proud as of anything else I have ever done to have helped these families come together and bear their children in a manner and setting of their own choosing, and in spite of the generally lackluster support and at times active opposition of the medical community.

Through its gentle, family-centered atmosphere, home birth also promoted and left ample room for self-healing in other ways and encouraged me to explore subtler and less aggressive modes of treatment in my medical practice as well. With my background and interest in biochemistry, I naturally gravitated to the study of plant and folk remedies, and soon began combing through old herbals, learned to identify various local species, made infusions, poultices, ointments, and suppositories, and tried them on myself and my patients. In these investigations a principal mentor was Hanna Kroger, an old German woman who had emigrated to the States after the War, owned a health food store in town, and had a large, devoted following that included young and old alike. Bothered by a broad range of ailments, the customers she knew and trusted would follow her into a small back room, where she often dowsed with a pendulum for a variety of energy disturbances, and prescribed a variety of naturopathic treatments that she specifically tailored to fit them, consisting of vitamins, herbs, supplements, and even homeopathic remedies, which I first heard of in her shop. At times she would also send saliva and hair samples to an even more aged colleague in Albuquerque, who claimed that she could detect trace amounts of toxic wastes, parasites, and other pathological residues by using some kind of radionic or magnetic device known only to herself.

Although most of what Hanna did seemed like hocus-pocus to me at the time, she also introduced me to the whole realm of esoteric phenomena that intuitively I knew must exist but had never directly witnessed or experienced myself. Often when I tagged along with her, she would show me things that I couldn’t believe or understand, but nevertheless stimulated me to imagine what the world would have to be like if they were true.

About two months after giving birth, one of my patients called late at night because of severe abdominal pain that had developed that afternoon, after returning from a long trip to her in-laws to show off the baby. On pelvic examination, I felt a taut, bulging mass the size of a tennis ball in the area of her right ovary, which clearly needed to be removed surgically without delay; but before agreeing to go to the hospital she begged me to call Hanna, who actually worshiped doctors and only agreed to come after some serious coaxing on my part.

Upon entering the room, she went straight to the bedside, knelt by the left side of my patient, and began to pray, placing the palm of her left hand gently on the abdomen over the cyst, and allowing her right arm to dangle by her side. After a few minutes, Hanna’s body began to shake convulsively, and I somehow sensed or imagined a current of energy passing up her left arm, across her chest, down her right arm, and out her free hand. Proceeding methodically to the other side of the bed, she then placed her right index and middle fingers on the right pubic ramus, a pressure point for the right ovary, as she later told me, and pressed down firmly on it, eliciting a scream of pain from my patient that almost levitated her out of bed, but then gave way to quiet moaning and whimpering for about fifteen seconds, after which she fell silent. Similar pressure on various other points elicited no more than a brief wince or two, after which Hanna rose and left, prescribing nothing more complicated than a molasses douche and a day in bed.

Re-examining her immediately afterward, I was amazed to discover that both the pain and the cyst had completely disappeared, and I can vouch for the fact that they never came back in the two years I kept track of this woman and her baby before I left the area. Since then, I’ve seen ovarian cysts dissolve in a few days with remedies, but never an instantaneous cure of a surgical emergency to rival this one, which taught me that healing is possible even when we least expect it, have no idea what form it will take, and can never adequately explain it by any doctrine, concept, or method, however scientific it may be.

In 1973, I moved to New Mexico to study acupuncture with Sensei Masahilo Nakazono, a Japanese master who also taught aikido and practiced Shinto, the ancient religion of his country, by chanting what he called “the sacred sounds,” whereby our protohuman ancestors were said to have expressed and communicated their feelings directly, without the mediation of spoken or written language. While beginning to train a few Western students, he had been chosen to preside over the newly created State Board of Acupuncture after curing a number of legislators of serious ailments. Although his religious practice and authoritarian style remained foreign to me, and I never got used to seeing patients one, two, or several times a week for months at a time, I revered him as a teacher and healer, and was often in awe of his skill and charismatic power to heal patients who were seriously or gravely ill.

I have the deepest respect and admiration for Oriental medicine on account of its systematic philosophy of the organism as a unitary life energy principle, operating prior to any subdivision of it into thoughts and emotions on the one hand, and organs, cells, and molecules on the other. By learning to palpate subtle variations in the radial pulses, using nine positions on each side, a skilled practitioner can assess the energy state of the internal organs based on the condition of the “meridians” or longitudinal energy currents on the body surface that are thought to correspond to them. Thereby avoiding the Western “mind-body problem” entirely, acupuncture diagnoses and treats illness uniquely and globally in each patient as a unified energy system, and can relieve pain and suffering, cure illness, and restore and promote health on a deeper level and with subtler methods than Western medicine, with all of its heavy artillery, seems capable of or even very interested in. As my introduction to energy medicine, acupuncture opened up new paths in my thought and practice, and I will always be grateful to the Sensei and honor his memory for sharing his truths so generously with me.

Not long after that, I stumbled into homeopathy. After poring over an old text I found in a used bookstore, I got no further than wanting to try Apis mellifica, the honeybee, for a patient who was highly sensitive to bee stings, and telephoned an aged homeopath I’d heard of back East to ask if that would be an appropriate prescription. “Well, sonny boy,” he replied in his gruff Vermontese, “I think you’d better come to our summer school!” I decided to give it a try, but neither the backwoods state college where the course was held nor the advanced age and semi-retired status of the doctors who taught it  seemed to augur well for the future of the method. Few of them were still earning a living from practicing what they were teaching, as if the whole generation of active, full-time practitioners that should have preceded us had never materialized. The course itself lasted only two weeks, after which they turned us loose to practice what we had learned. With no full-time schools, clinics, or teaching hospitals to its name, and very few retail pharmacies to send patients to, it was a stretch to imagine that American homeopathy could survive much longer.

Yet from the moment I entered that class, I knew that it was exactly the kind of thing I’d been hoping and searching for, and that I could happily devote the rest of my professional life to studying and practicing it. Long before I’d taken remedies myself or seen them work in a patient, it made sense to me as both a philosophy, a coherent body of thought with basic assumptions that rang true, and a detailed, systematic methodology that followed from them. It even showed me a better way of doing what I was already trying to do: making the diagnosis, and then putting it aside, allowing the distinctive patterns of my patients’ illnesses to suggest proper treatments for them. Reframing illness as the attempt of the organism to overcome whatever is keeping it off balance, homeopaths identify the individualizing features of each patient’s symptom-picture, and administer ultradilute doses of the medicine that most closely matches it to strengthen and resonate with the process of self-healing that is already under way.

Far from repudiating allopathic medicine because of it, I chose homeopathy especially because it charted a clear path through the hidden risks and self-imposed obstacles that had kept me from practicing medicine at all for such a long time. As to whether it really works, I offer the whole of my career since then in evidence that it does, having used it more or less exclusively for forty-six years with never a cause to regret it. My first patient was myself, waking from a concussion after a head-on collision with a drunk driver, bleeding from a scalp laceration, and in considerable pain from several rib fractures. Sitting erect in the ambulance, I felt dazed but otherwise tolerably OK until we arrived at the ER and the tech laid me on a Gurney, flat on my back, helpless, and immobile, the slightest change in position sending stabs of pain through my chest that sapped my strength and will to recover. When my nurse arrived to take me home, I took a powder of Arnica montana 200C on my tongue, and within a few seconds was able to lift my bloody shirt over my head and take it off by myself—an incredible feat under the circumstances—felt no more pain for days, and recovered without further incident.

That first winter, I saw mostly acute illnesses; i.e., colds, flu, Strep throats, bronchitis, and other incidental complaints of pregnant women and their families, who formed the backbone of my practice at that time. Whenever a patient needed medicine, I rummaged around in my books until I found one that seemed suitable, and both of us were often quite pleasantly surprised at how quickly and effectively it worked both to relieve pain and suffering, and to impart a feeling of strength and well-being that helped cut short the natural course of the illness. Soon I began trying remedies at births, too, with similar results: at times none, often good, and sometimes miraculous.

One such was the experience of a twenty-year-old woman, pregnant for the first time, who gave birth to a girl after a prolonged second stage of labor. Although well-formed and weighing over eight pounds, the baby was covered with thick meconium, took one gasp, and then breathed no more. When brisk suctioning of the nose and mouth produced only more of the same, I tried and failed to intubate or even visualize the trachea, while the child lay pale, limp, and motionless, with a heartbeat of only 40 per minute, responding feebly to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but still unable to breathe on her own. I put a tiny powder of Arsenicum album 200C on her tongue, and almost instantaneously she awoke with a jolt, crying and flailing, her heart beating vigorously at 140 per minute, and her skin glowing pink with the flame of new life. Experiences like these are inscribed for life in every practitioner’s mind.

Since 1974, I have practiced homeopathy more or less exclusively, and according to the classical method, prescribing only one medicine at a time for the whole patient. Those I fail to help I refer to another homeopath if possible, and for more drastic treatment when indicated. If practiced conscientiously, the method poses minimal risk of harm and allows me to develop my skills through experience and to learn and grow at my own pace. Since I can see only as many people as I can see, and learn only as fast as I can learn, most of my patients understand and forgive the fact that expertise is acquired little by little, and at the cost of numerous mistakes and failures. On the other hand, I have also been able to help people in ways and situations that would have been inconceivable to me before.

I’m thinking in particular of a 34-year-old woman who came to see me in Boston, long after I’d stopped going to births, with a history of severe and often painful endometriosis since her teens. Already a veteran of four surgeries to remove large, blood-filled cysts from her bladder and ovaries, and several courses of male hormones to try to correct the hormone imbalance, she hoped mainly to restore her menstrual cycle, having long since abandoned any hope of childbearing. While intensely painful in her teens and twenties, her periods had become scanty, “dead,” and dark brown as a result of so many  operations and years of hormones and oral contraceptives in the past; but with homeopathic treatment they became fuller and richer, and within six months she was pregnant. When I next saw her for a different ailment eight years later, she had produced two healthy children after uncomplicated pregnancies and normal, vaginal births and had remained in good health ever since. While no one can ascribe such an outcome to a remedy or any other agency in precise, linear fashion, my patient has never stopped thanking me for it, reason enough to be grateful for a healing process by its very nature persuasive and catalytic rather than forcible or compulsory.

I can readily understand the skepticism and incredulity in the eyes of my patients after the long interview, when I put a little bit of “fairy dust” on their tongue and ask them to come back six weeks later. What we call the “Law of Similars” has never attained general acceptance in medicine, and remains mysterious even to those of us who use it every day. Nor has anyone ever satisfactorily explained how a medicinal substance diluted beyond the molecular limit of Avogadro’s number could possibly have any effect on a patient, let alone a curative one.

But the standard argument that homeopathic remedies are merely placebos cuts both ways. For quite apart from how they do it, the extent to which people are able to heal themselves without drugs or surgery, whether through acupuncture, homeopathy, placebos, faith healing, or the laying-on of hands, correspondingly reduces the need for costlier and more drastic methods and deflates the extravagant promotional claims made for them.

I do not believe and have never taught that homeopathy is the only way to heal people or the best way for everyone. By no means a panacea for all ills, it has substantial limitations of its own, some of them inherent and others that will need to be reassessed in the light of a new science of energy medicine that is still in its infancy. I practice it mainly because it is the philosophy and method best suited to my own history and personal style. Even when it is better understood, I doubt that it will ever become the dominant mode of treatment for this or any other society, and indeed if it did, I might possibly lose interest in it. What I mean is that nobody has all the answers, that everybody has some of them, and that it makes the most sense for all of us to work together, discovering our several truths wherever we find them, and celebrating beauty for its own sake.

About the Author: Richard Moskowitz, MD, practices classical homeopathy in Watertown, Massachusetts (Boston area). He previously served as President of the NCH and taught at their Summer School. He is the author of the books “Homeopathic Medicines for Pregnancy and Childbirth”, “Resonance:The Homeopathic Point of View,” “Plain Doctoring: Selected Writings, 1983-2013,” and “More Doctoring: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1977-2014.”