Published 2025-05-12 · Duration 5:32 · Video file(25 MB)
Robert Rowan shares his journey from conventional medicine to alternative therapies, focusing on his disillusionment with cancer treatments and his pursuit of holistic
Transcript
My name is Robert Rowan. I'm originally from the East Coast. I had always wanted to be a dentist, of all things, and after going to Johns Hopkins University and spending the summer at a science camp in West Virginia in the wilderness, I fell in love with nature and I decided I wanted a little bit more than dentistry. I thought it would be nice to be a physician. And actually what I wanted to do was to trade my services for chickens or vegetables or anything else to keep me going living out in the country and have a self-sufficient lifestyle. Things didn't really work out that way. I ended up graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins and went on to medical school at UC San Francisco and then took training in family practice afterwards and went into the Indian Health Service. UC San Francisco was a very high-powered school and considered one of the best in the world. And I was trained very rigidly in the scientific method of medicine, but somewhere along the third year of school I became depressed, thinking, what are we doing to patients? I saw patient after patient admitted to the hospital having workups and tests and procedures, many of which were invasive, and it didn't amount to much to help them. It was a big bill and a lot of them were hurt by it. And the cancer treatments that I saw were a disgrace, and they still are. I decided to stick with it even though I thought of getting out because I had thought, what am I going to do to really help people and I came to see that what we were doing to our patients was exactly the same thing as we are we were and still are doing to the planet a slow pollution type destruction of our planet and our people and that affects the body and the health and we just treat it with more pollution more chemical drugs instead of addressing causes but I wasn't well trained on how to address causes I was only trained on how to cover up symptoms with petrochemical pharmaceuticals but I kept an open mind and one thing led to another and finally by 1982 I attended an amazing conference on acupuncture where I saw all walks of life in healing homeopathy herbs chiropractic acupuncture nutrition among others and I got shaken down and I realized that there was another path I had to go and I put both feet across the screen and went with it. I saw that as I was trained to treat disease was essentially being in truth a pimp for the pharmaceutical industry peddling their wares and not really addressing the fundamental cause of disease which I came to realize were three main ones malnutrition, toxics, and, and a few other ones that fit in there that we would call lack of exercise, genetics, and perhaps a few other things. So I started blazing my own path after that in Alaska. I left the Indian Health Service realizing that I couldn't do that type of medicine in a government-run hospital that was edited by other medical doctors very close to such concepts. I started a private medical practice in Anchorage and just sucked up all the information that I could on alternative medicine, especially nutrition. And I saw that many of my colleagues were taken out by the establishment because they differed. They were doing what we would call alternative or complementary medicine, and it was not the standard of care, and they lost licenses. And I thought eventually it might come to Alaska. So in the years 1989 to 1990, I petitioned the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill protecting alternative medicine in this state, and we were successful in the first run. We were too late in 1989 in the session, and in 1990, with a monstrous, overwhelming support from the population of Alaska, we got a bill passed simply states that the Medical Board cannot find us incompetent for practicing unconventional or experimental medicine in the absence of demonstrable physical harm to a patient and we became the first state to get statutory protection for unconventional complementary or alternative medicine in the history of the country. Since that time I have expanded on what I do, I was already into a field called oxidation medicine and I have furthered that, I do ultraviolet blood irradiation therapy and teach that before national audiences and I also do ozone therapy and hydrogen peroxide chelation therapy nutrition and I try and remain abreast of all the latest things that's that are out there in the exploding field that we call complementary medicine and our medical center in fact is called complementary medicine, and our medical center, in fact, is called Complementary Medicine Center.
cancer curealternative medicineholistic healingRobert Rowan