Interview with Dr. Thomas Cowan
From Medical Heresy to the New Biology: A Journey Beyond Conventional Medicine
When I first encountered Dr. Thomas Cowan's work while investigating childhood vaccination, I discovered something rare: a physician who could explain complex medical heresy with the clarity that only comes from deep understanding. His journey from a young medical student who couldn't help but laugh when a patient astutely questioned why only she had a cough from the "bad air" to becoming one of medicine's most compelling critics represents more than personal transformation—it reveals how the entire medical system is built on unexamined assumptions. Through his books on water, cancer, and the heart, Cowan demonstrates that what we call "disease" is the body's intelligent response to poisoning, that tumors function as the body's waste management system, and that bacteria arrive to remediate damaged tissue rather than cause it. After 45 years of practice, he's arrived at a simple yet revolutionary principle: every symptom has meaning, and the body's processes we call illness are actually attempts at healing.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Cowan dismantles the foundational myths of modern medicine with the precision of someone who has tested these ideas on thousands of patients. From explaining why viruses have never been properly isolated to revealing how schools are designed to prevent actual learning, from the mechanism of heredity beyond DNA to the role of water as consciousness's interface with matter, he presents a coherent worldview where nothing is random and everything connects. What emerges is not just criticism but a complete reimagining of health, illness, and human potential—one where children scream after vaccines not because they're "difficult" but because they're trying to communicate the only way they can, where antibiotics "work" by stopping the body's regeneration process rather than curing infection, and where the choice between the "Adam" of conscious creation and the "atom" of meaningless particles defines our entire approach to life. I feel both grateful and honored to have created this interview with someone whose work has so profoundly influenced my understanding, as Cowan's New Biology offers a path forward for those ready to reclaim their agency from a system designed to remove it.
With thanks to Dr. Thomas Cowan.
Question 1: Dr. Cowan, you've traveled quite a remarkable path from conventional family practice to becoming one of the most prominent voices challenging medical orthodoxy. Can you share what key moments or realizations led you to question the fundamental assumptions of modern medicine?
Dr. Cowan: There's a little bit of a wrong premise in there. I never was a conventional family doctor. In fact, it was clear to me growing up that I quote "should be a doctor," but I didn't really like it, and I tried to do anything but be a doctor. I just knew there was something wrong with the way they did doctoring.
So I joined the Peace Corps and taught gardening, did whatever I could to not be a doctor. But when I went to the Peace Corps, I actually learned that there was a different way to be a doctor. That opened the floodgates for me, because then I realized I was actually very interested in the subject, just not the usual way.
By medical school, I already knew there was no way I was doing conventional medicine. Now I did work as an ER doctor while building my practice, mostly to make money. So I was trained in conventional medicine and practiced it to a certain extent, but from day one of medical school I knew I was doing something else.
Now, if you want to know why that happened, I don't know. I grew up with a circle of doctors who were very well known. The guy who started laser surgery for gynecology was one of our good friends, and he delivered me. The head of oncology for the biggest hospital in Detroit - played golf with him almost every Sunday. The guy who started immunotherapy for cancer was a friend of ours until they put him in prison for Medicare fraud.
I remember when I was 16 and I was following one of these doctors. I still remember this. He sees this big black woman come in with a cough, and he says, "Oh, you got a cough, you need this inhaler." She says, "Why do I have a cough?" He says, "It's the bad air." She looks at him and says, "How come you don't have a cough?" And I started laughing, which pissed him off. But I knew it was all bullshit. I didn't know why. I didn't know anything.
Follow-up: What was it about the Peace Corps that gave you that clue that something wasn't right?
Dr. Cowan: Well, one was, somebody gave me a book - Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. I read it, and I'd already become a health food eater. I started that when I was 19. I realized that the way people ate and the way people took care of themselves determined their health. And I knew that medical doctors didn't have anything to do with that.
I was also introduced to Steiner, who - even though I think differently about it now - showed me there was another way to look at the world. I didn't know that was possible. So from day one I just tried to figure out what's real here.
Question 2: In your recent parenting book, you describe children's behavioral issues as communication strategies when parents aren't listening. Beyond the food autonomy examples you've shared, what deeper patterns have you observed about how children's symptoms - whether physical or behavioral - serve to awaken consciousness in their parents?
Dr. Cowan: I've spent 45 years of medical practice trying to figure out why people get sick and how to help them get better. I learned pretty early on what I call the rule: that everything a person does, every symptom has a meaning, and it's the body's way of communicating something. That's what I started with as a kind of hypothesis.
So I asked myself the question: If you're a one-day-old and you come into the world, excited, your parents gave you life, and then they stab you with a needle and inject poison in you, what are you going to do?
Well, you could sit them down and say, "Look, I don't think you should do this. Do the research on the Hep B shot. Even if it's allegedly sexually transmitted, I don't plan on having sex for a while, so there's no reason to do this." But you obviously can't, because you can't even talk. So you scream.
Sometimes that gets the parents' attention because nobody likes their baby screaming. It's unpleasant. If you've been a parent, you can't sleep, you're worried about everything. They go to the doctor and say, "What's the matter with them?" And some of the parents will say, "This isn't right."
Not most, but some will. That's a brilliant communication strategy. Now, most won't. So you say, "Okay, they're not listening," and you're good for a while. Then at two months they do it again. They stab you three times, more poison. You start screaming again, and sometimes they'll wake up and figure out that this isn't good, but you may have to up the ante.
So you start wheezing, or acting goofy, or pooping all over the place. Mind you, there's also the poison that you have to deal with. So you've got two problems. I wasn't as successful as I'd hoped at getting rid of the poison. It didn't work as well as I'd hoped. So I had to consider that there was something more to this.
Then I had examples like full-blown autistic children - children who couldn't pay attention, couldn't do anything. They were just ripping up my room. I would explain that they're just trying to talk to you. Sometimes while I was talking, they would stop doing that. That really got my attention, because I realized that as soon as you take the onus off them, they don't really have a problem. They have a problem because you poisoned them, but they also have a strategy.
Once you realize that, it really helps you help them get better. To the point where every time I had a child - and every child was in some variation of that - I would say to the child when I was alone with them, "Let me talk to the parents. You don't have to scream to get their attention. I'll tell them that they can't do this anymore." And it helped. They're willing to sacrifice themselves to wake up their parents, partly because it impacts them. But I also thought maybe it's for love of their parents - they're doing the same thing. They're getting flu shots and living stupid lives.
Commonsense Childrearing: Unconventional Wisdom for a Nourished Childhood: Cowan MD, Thomas
Question 3: You've written extensively about how schools teach children "how to be schooled" rather than how to learn. When children are raised completely outside of institutional education, what happens to the human spirit? What potentials or capacities emerge that schooled children might never develop?
Dr. Cowan: This is a larger issue. To me, one of the biggest transitions one can make in one's life is to realize - you hear a lot of talk about the schools are failing. The schools aren't successful. We need to give them more money, or better curriculums, or whatever. None of that's true. The schools aren't failing. They were set up to keep people from being educated, and they're good at it. They've been doing it for over a hundred years, and they've perfected the techniques. They're doing exactly what they're intended to do.
Just like the government was set up to make people's lives miserable - and they're good at it. They have all kinds of ways of doing that. The medical profession is set up to make people sick. They're good at it. So if you think, "Oh my God, why aren't they educating my child better?" - that's the wrong question, because that's not the point of school.
Even if you go back to the original philosophers of school like Thomas Dewey and all that crowd, they said our goal is to create people who accept being cogs in an industrial machine. That was the goal. So they worked on how to do that. The last thing you want is for people to think for themselves.
To me, thinking, being rational, and guiding your life through logic and rational thinking is what makes us human. If you're going to base your life on what you're told and superstition and emotional reactions, you're actually giving up your essential humanity. That's where we are today. That was the function of school - not just school. The governments and the medical profession had a hand in that, certainly, but school was the way to keep people from learning to think, which they will do naturally.
Now there may be times when other people have to help them and say, "Well, how about this?" That's fine. But children who aren't schooled will ask you, "What do you think about this?" And you just tell them. You don't try to teach them. In fact, if you watch healthy groups of children, they don't teach each other. That would be a horrible social thing to do, because as soon as somebody comes with teaching energy, it's like, "I'm out of here."
But you do say, "How do you catch a ball? Well, you do it like this," or "I do it like this." Or "How do you spell frog?" You just tell them. They go from one thing to another, and they learn what they're interested in. As far as I can see, I don't learn things I'm not interested in. Why would I? I'm not interested.
That's what children do. As soon as you stop restricting what they are meant to learn, they have huge interests. They have all kinds, and some have very specific ones, like they want to play the violin.
Follow-up: Before we move on, could you talk a little bit about victim consciousness and how schools directly or indirectly create that?
Dr. Cowan: The medical profession creates victim consciousness. In fact, the only thing you have to learn in medical school is: it's not the patient's fault. No matter what happens to them, it's not because of the way they eat or the way they don't move, or think, or their relations, or the house they live in, or they hate their wife, they hate their job, they hate their food. It's none of that - except smoking. If you smoke, you're a dumbass, and you get what you deserve. Somehow that got a bug up their ass. But everything else is just genes, germs, bad luck and stress, whatever that is. It's all over the culture.
Even more so in school. Now, if you can't learn, it's not that you're dumb, or that you don't try or you're not interested. You have some sort of cleverly worded condition. If you never learned to toilet train, you're not damaged and injured and ill. You're neurodiverse. So it's nothing to do with you. I mean, you were poisoned - that's different in a way. You were a victim, in a sense, but the real spiritual question here - if you want to use that word, I don't really like that word so much - but the question is: nothing happens to you that you don't agree with.
Now that's tricky, because children and animals certainly seem to have things happen to them that they didn't consciously agree with. I get that. But there's some sort of contract that we make. Once you see that and take ownership for what happens to you, that changes everything. And that is the last thing the powers that be in this culture want people to do - take ownership of their life and the environment they live in.
Government exists to take responsibility from individuals and put it onto a collective. Same with corporations, which are government-sponsored entities. If DuPont poisons your water, you can't go to the head of DuPont and say, "We're gonna do something to you," or "We're going to stop you." He's shielded. The government people are shielded. That's how you create tyranny. It's the same with school, in a way. Nobody's responsible for anything.
I love it when they say, "Oh, we need to teach critical thinking." They don't have a teacher in the public school who has any clue what actual critical thinking is. They have nobody to teach it anymore. Besides, you don't need to teach it. You just need to get out of children's way, and they will find it.
I've worked with lots of children. People used to come in all the time: "I'm worried. My child won't read." I used to say, "Okay, do whatever you can to not get them to read and come back when they're 15, and see if they've figured out how to read." It won't work. The only way you can get a child to not read is to teach them when they're not interested, and then they do it deliberately to spite you. Or to teach you that that's not the way to treat another human being - to force them to do stuff they're not interested in. You don't like it. I don't like it.
If somebody does that who has power over me, I have to find creative ways of getting back at them or explaining to them. So one of the ways is failing in school. Because then your parents freak out, they get all worried, they spend a lot of money that they don't have giving you tutors, and they have to drive you all over the place. You're harassing them because they tried to force you to read some stupid book that you had no interest in.
When I would work with a child, I would say, "You know what? Let me tell the parents to back off. Because it's ruining their life too. They're having to spend all this time with tutors." But in a way it's a good strategy. It's just very unproductive.
Question 4: You've thoroughly demonstrated that viruses have never been properly isolated. Yet we do observe apparent "contagion" patterns, especially in closed environments like cruise ships or nursing homes. If it's not viral transmission, what do you think is actually happening when groups of people develop similar symptoms at similar times?
Dr. Cowan: Right, it's like the main sticking point. "Well, my child got chickenpox, and then the next child, and then the next." So let's dissect that. First thing to say is, there are children in that situation who don't get chickenpox or the flu. So how do you account for that? Then they give you the whole immunology BS.
But one of my main things is to ask people over and over again: What do you actually see? Not what you think is right or wrong, or your theory. What you see is two or more people or animals who have the same symptoms at the same time, in the same place. That's what you see. You don't see transmission. You don't see viruses. You don't see bacteria. You see two or more people getting the same symptoms, same time, same place.
So does that prove transmission or a virus? My usual example is: you put a hundred rats in the basement. Somebody puts rat poison, they all die with bleeding the next day. Same symptom, same time, same place. Are you saying that rat poison is a transmission? No. So in other words, you can't tell. That observation doesn't even tell you that it's transmission, let alone anything about a virus. The virus doesn't enter into it. There's no observation that's relevant to whether it's a virus. You still haven't figured out the transmission part.
To sort that out, you have to do actual studies where the only variable is sick people with well people. Everything else - the room is the same, the lighting is the same, the astronomical time is the same, the outgassing is the same. Everything is the same except for that one difference. As far as I know, no such study has ever proved transmission of any illness. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be wrong. I just want to see the study where the independent variable is the sick people making the well people sick.
Now, scientifically speaking, that means person-to-person transmission hasn't been proven. Yet people do observe groups getting sick at the same time. There are studies that show people can influence others. People menstruate at the same time, people laugh at the same time, people vomit at the same time. People feel happy at the same time. So there are lots of ways that living beings communicate with each other, including maybe it's time to have an elimination reaction, which we unfortunately call being sick. That's certainly possible.
I don't know exactly how it works, except I know there are seen and unseen - mostly unseen - things communicated between people which are powerful. There are even studies that show you can make people sick by telling them the person they're exposed to is sick. Then they get sick. When you tell them, "Oh, it turns out he wasn't sick," they get better. So you can work with a lot of parameters of what's communicated between people.
But at this point, we don't really know, or at least I don't know. I just know that living beings communicate with each other in many, many ways known and unknown. Some of them may end up being what we call symptoms of disease. But that has nothing to do with a virus. You'd have to prove transmission, and then prove that the agent of transmission was the virus. That's a whole different experiment. That's so fundamental to reasonable thinking. It's amazing that people don't get that, but they don't.
Question 5: When virologists claim to see "viral replication" in cell cultures, or when electron microscopes capture images of particles they call viruses, what do you think they're actually observing? What are these particles and where do they come from?
Dr. Cowan: It's very clear what they're observing. So you have to start with what's the definition of a virus, which is a physical particle. It's not an idea or an emotion or a thought - it's a physical particle. It has a protein coat. It has either DNA - so-called genetic material - or RNA inside. It uses the host's cell to replicate, and then it bursts out of the cell and goes to the next person and causes disease. That's what they say: self-replicating, but using the host machinery. It has a protein coat, DNA or RNA on the inside, and the way it causes disease is when it lyses or bursts out of the cell.
So then you say, "Okay, what happens in a cell culture?" That's how they claim to see viruses. They take a culture of monkey kidney cells. They put unpurified material on it - meaning not an isolated virus - like mucus or bronchial fluid or feces, something they haven't actually checked for a virus. They add that to the culture along with fetal bovine serum and trypsin, and they take away the nutrients. Then the culture breaks down and they see a bunch of particles. That's what happens. Then they claim that those particles are the viruses, and that they replicated, which is why you see so many of them.
The problem with that claim is that if you start with no sample from anybody who's sick that could have a virus, and you do all the other steps - kidney culture, take away the nutrients, put in the antibiotics, put in the chemicals, the serums - it also breaks down. And you see the same particles, proving that those particles didn't replicate and that the pictures of those particles are not viral particles. They're the normal breakdown of monkey kidney cell culture given those conditions.
And there have been paper after paper showing with SARS-CoV-2, they take pictures of it showing it budding off the cells, which is what they call replication. So you see cell membranes, and you see these particles - you don't see them emerging because that would be a dynamic, that would be a video. You just see them attached to the cell membrane. And then they show you the same from kidney biopsies from the 1990s from kidney cancer - same pictures, same budding off the membrane, exact same pictures, same spike proteins and everything. And nobody can tell the difference.
So these are not proof that they're viruses. They're just what happens when various tissues die. And because they don't do proper controls, they miss it.
Follow-up: Could you talk a little bit about exosomes, which takes us sort of outside of cellular debris and into cellular communication?
Dr. Cowan: I mean, some people think they're real. I think it's just debris. I think the exosome thing was something that we went down that path as a "Well, it's got to be something." But it's not. All you see is cell cultures breaking down. Or you do a biopsy of a lung cancer, and you see cancer tissue breaking down, and you see these particles. All you see is debris. You don't see anything communicating. I don't buy that anymore.
That was to make us feel better. "It can't be just total bullshit." But it is. It's total bullshit.
Question 6: You've mentioned that improving the terrain naturally shifts the microbiome without needing probiotic supplements. Can you elaborate on pleomorphism - are bacteria literally changing form based on conditions, or is it more about different organisms arising from the same terrain? What observations or evidence convinced you this is real?
Dr. Cowan: The essence of the question is: we're told that bacteria are separate species, right? You got strep, and it's always strep, and staph, and it's always staph, and enterococcus is a different one, and they don't change, and they don't become fungus, and they don't become somatids or anything like that. And a number of people using good microscopes have seen that that's not the case. They've seen them changing one into another.
And they've done good enough experiments to convince me that there was no fungus in this culture or in this thing they were observing, and it had to have been a transformation from the bacteria. Now that is very heretical, because in normal science - it's like, "Tom, are you saying giraffes become monkeys?" Well, no, but caterpillars become butterflies, and tadpoles become frogs. So it's not that unusual for species to have different forms. And we misinterpret that as thinking these are separate species with no connection.
So why do you get a different form? You get a different form because the conditions where that organism is living gives rise to a different form. Different food, different pH, oxidation levels - I don't know - different energetic environment, whatever it is. And that has been observed.
So that's why I came to that conclusion. And then that explains a lot of things, because then it makes sense that if you have certain conditions in your bowel, you will form the kind of bacteria that try to remediate that situation. I mean, they're not trying to remediate anything. They're just living where their food is. And so they essentially evolve in that direction or transform in that direction. And then you have a different population living there.
So you don't need to put new bacteria in. I eat probiotic food, and I think people should do that just to give yourself a range of different possibilities. Then your body will determine what grows and what takes hold based on whatever the conditions are. And those organisms are there to live, just like anything is there to live. What is a cat doing? It's there to live. It'll find its food and its place that's warm and feels safe. Same with the bacteria.
It so happens, and I don't think this is an accident, that when the bacteria do that, they are living off dead and dying tissue in you, and therefore helping you heal. That's the sort of magic of the microbes in us. And if you have a fungus, that's because you have really deteriorating dying tissue, and that's the condition that fungus like to live in. And they're bioremediating your gut or your nose. And unfortunately, we think we should kill them.
Follow-up: My son does Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and one of the common conditions in the jiu-jitsu rooms is ringworm. How would you think about ringworm fungus and "catching it" through a terrain/pleomorphism model?
Dr. Cowan: First of all, I don't actually like to use the word "terrain" anymore, because the reality is, everybody believes in the terrain. Even the virologists say, "Well, yeah, it's got to do with your immune system and all that." So that becomes a meaningless word.
So let's dissect this. Number one, if we think it's a fungus that causes ringworm - that's what we're told. The surprising thing is, these things are easy to sort out. If you think strep causes sore throats, you take only strep, you spray it on a bunch of people who don't have a sore throat, and you see if they get sick. If you want to see if hammers knock in nails, you hit the nail with a hammer, and then you try to knock it in without the hammer, and it doesn't work. So it's the hammer, and you don't hit it with the toolbox.
So you take the ringworm fungus, spray it on people and see if they get ringworm. As far as I know, no study has confirmed that, and I don't think it works like that. In other words, that's the proof that it's not the fungus that causes the problem.
But there is a fungus - you can scrape it and see it. Yeah. So what's happening there? I would think: okay, sweat on probably rubber mats with lots of chemicals impregnated in the mats. The people are rolling around in people's sweat that's sweating out all kinds of stuff, probably degrading the rubber, vaporizing it, getting it on your skin. The skin breaks down, and the fungus lives there.
And again, I had the benefit that most people don't have. How many people get to test their theory on a hundred patients? But I've had a hundred people where I said, "Here, do this: no antifungal creams, don't roll around on stinky toxic mats in other people's sweat, and don't eat a bunch of sugar - because that's how you transform bacteria into fungus - and tell me in six weeks what happens." And it goes away.
So I had the benefit, just because of my career, of checking myself to see if I was right. And I never once had to give somebody antifungal medicine for treating ringworm.
Question 7: From a terrain medicine perspective, when antibiotics appear to "work" and symptoms resolve, what's actually happening? Are the organisms adapting through pleomorphism, is the terrain shifting, or is there another mechanism at play?
Dr. Cowan: I remember Doc Malik - he's this big guy - and he had this whole thing like, "How do you explain that I stabbed myself in my knee, got a big swollen knee, and then the antibiotics worked?" So that's what they call proof of bacterial infection.
Now, the obvious test would be to inject just bacteria into your knee and see if you get an infection. As far as I know, it doesn't work like that. There's no study that shows that. So they avoid the obvious proof.
For antibiotics to prove that bacteria are the cause, amongst other things, you would have to prove that antibiotics have only one effect, which is to kill that bacteria. And that has been disproven. Antibiotics affect metal enzymes, they affect inflammation, they affect a whole bunch of other things that could impact this. So it's not just killing the bacteria. And in fact, even killing the bacteria has only been shown in cultures, which is different than in living systems. So that cannot be a reasonable proof of infection.
So what's happening? The hypothesis I'm working on is you have dead tissue in your tonsils, or your ear, or your knee, and the bacteria come to digest that and bioremediate the situation. You can kill them with that chemical, and then that bioremediation will stop, and you'll be left with dead tissue there that won't recycle. Your symptoms will be better because the symptoms come from the recycling, the bioremediation process.
And how do you know which is true? Well, my prediction, which I used to tell people all the time: "If you take this antibiotic for your strep throat, this will stop the process, and you will get another strep throat," which is what happened. And if you let it go till completion, and you don't do whatever provoked the dead and dying tissue in the first place, you don't get it again.
You can choose which of those two paths you want. And even this Malik guy, my prediction is his knee will give him problems later. And he won't remember that the antibiotic stopped the healing process because doctors never remember. "Oh, you got lymphoma after 10 rounds of antibiotics. Never mind - that had nothing to do with that. It's just genetic." Bad luck, genetics - maybe you smoked and you're a dumbass. It's got nothing to do with the fact that you kept building up more and more toxic dead debris tissue which your body tried to recycle with the bacteria. I stopped them. And this is what you get.
So that explains why the symptoms get better. It does hurt, it immobilizes you, it makes you rest, and you conserve your energy. All that's what we call being sick, which is a good thing. Then you get better, and you're truly better. You've resolved that problem. Never have it again unless you do the same thing.
There's nothing in conventional medicine that's about healing. It's just stopping the body's regeneration processes. It's all they know how to do. That's all they can do, that's all they believe in, that's all they know how to do.
Question 8: You've described tumors as the body's waste management system - like lily pads forming to contain toxins. What specifically triggers the body to stop eliminating toxins through normal channels and resort to tumor formation? Is it purely volume of toxins, or are there other factors?
Dr. Cowan: I don't really know, but I think it's a combination of volume and some sort of meaning on some level. There's the phenomena of being in a situation where you can't breathe. And I mean that in a metaphorical sense - like a toxic relationship or prison or something like that. And so that area becomes - I don't even know if it becomes weak - it becomes the battlefield for the issue.
So when there are too many toxins, that also creates a kind of toxic situation. You breathe in stuff, you inject stuff - mostly inject stuff - eat stuff, and then your body puts it in that area, because that's the meaningful place for this situation to play out. So it's partly a volume thing, but partly a meaning thing. All illness has meaning. There's something about the prostate for you, or the breast for you, or the lungs for you. And that's where this drama plays out. So it's a combination of the two.
Question 9: Why do some people who've had extensive medical interventions - vaccines, medications, surgeries - never develop cancer, while others with minimal medical exposure do? What determines these individual differences in cancer susceptibility?
Dr. Cowan: I don't really know. If I had to guess - one of the things we're finding with people in our clinic now who are really getting into these stories. I've been getting into these stories myself for 20-30 years, but now we have six people who are getting it. So there's a lot more stories.
And one of the things we're finding - it's a little bit surprising, although not that much - is that a person who gets a vaccine, for instance, who has no conflict about whether it's the right thing, they seem to do better than the people who know they shouldn't do this.
Now, I'm not saying that's for sure, or that's the ultimate determining factor, because they're both being poisoned. But over and over again we hear the stories from cancer patients: "I knew I shouldn't have done those 10 rounds of antibiotics for Lyme disease," and "I knew I shouldn't have had that shot," and "My mother told me not to do it, and sent me all these articles, and I had to do it for my job." Those just seem to be the people who really get nailed. Whereas the people who are more or less oblivious have a different thing happen to them. That's not so good either - they just get dumber and dumber. But they don't seem to get the horrible physical manifestations.
And I'm not saying that's for sure, and I'm not saying that's the only determining factor. I think some of it has to do with batches and stuff like that. I think they used a lot of placebos. If we're talking about vaccines, if I was them, I would give 90% of the people nothing. "You see, my friend, he didn't get anything. Nobody in our family got anything. See? It's safe." If you're going to give that crap to 100% of the people, somebody's going to catch on.
Same reason why they don't give everybody measles shots in August. They could do that. They give it based on your age, so it's staggered. If they gave the flu shot to everybody on August 1st, and next thing you know August 7th half the people are sick, somebody would say, "Wait a minute. Something happened here on August 1st." So they're smart. They don't do that.
And there's a whole lot of other factors that go into this that I don't know about. The people who have the conflicts but do it anyway - anytime you go against what you really believe is right and true, that's where the problem comes. That's a bad mistake. We all do it sometimes. But boy, if you do it, it's a problem.
Question 10: Beyond the determinism of genetics and germ theory, what other forms of deterministic thinking in modern medicine concern you most? Are there other ways the medical system removes agency from individuals that we haven't fully recognized yet?
Dr. Cowan: They like that. They see everything as genetic. That's an exaggeration, but every explanation is genetic. I mean - why did you get a heart attack? It's genetic. Why do you have high blood pressure? It's genetic.
I had a goat the other day who had kidney stones, and one of them got stuck in his penis. They had to - I hated doing it - they called the vet, and he cuts the end of his penis off. It's horrible. But we were talking about it - it's the second time Buster got kidney stones and got one stuck. And I think it was because we fed them a different hay that has too much protein in it, the alfalfa. That seems to give goats kidney stones. Anyways, I said, "Well, what do you think we should do to prevent this from happening?" He said, "He's just genetically predisposed."
I said, "What does that mean?" "Well, he's genetically programmed to get kidney stones, especially if you castrate them and feed them alfalfa." But those are the only goats who get kidney stones. He's not genetically predisposed. He was castrated because you can't really have an uncastrated male goat hanging around. It doesn't work. And we stupidly fed them too much alfalfa.
So I don't know. Are there other forms of determinism? I can't think of any. Genetics is certainly the big one. It's like gravity. Everything is because of gravity. Everything is genetics. And when you ask them, "What's the gene that causes a goat to get kidney stones?" "I don't know." "What's the gene that causes schizophrenia?" "I don't know." Have you ever seen anybody isolate the gene or show that this person who has this gene gets schizophrenic, while the other one with everything else the same but without that gene doesn't? None of it. It's all just pseudoscience. There are so many things about the genetic line of thinking that just make no sense at all. It's actually a disproven hypothesis.
It sort of makes sense in its own world. They construct a world that has a kind of internal logic. And as long as you keep anything from the outside - so like the whole story: DNA makes RNA and goes to the ribosomes and gets translated into proteins. So you get all these proteins. You see this so-called RNA. You see this DNA, and that all makes sense. You just apply that to all the proteins. Then you say, "Well, how come there's 200,000 proteins and supposedly 20,000 genes? That doesn't make any sense." They just don't think about that.
Or you say, "Okay, the DNA makes the RNA in the nucleus." They say that, right? "How does the RNA get out of the nucleus?" Because the nucleus supposedly has a membrane around it, and the pH is different in the nucleus and in the cytoplasm. So the hydrogen ions, which determine the pH, can't equilibrate across the membrane, right? Otherwise they would have the same pH. And an RNA is a million times bigger than a hydrogen ion. So how does the RNA get across the membrane without letting the hydrogen ions go through? It's like, "How do you build a door that lets the elephants out and keeps the mosquitoes from getting in?" And the answer is, you can't.
So they say, "Well, that's because you have this nuclear pore that has a whirligig in it. It binds to the elephant, then whirligigs the elephant and spits it out on the other side. And it doesn't bind to the mosquitoes because they don't know how to get through the whirligig." "Can you show me a picture of the whirligig?" "No." "Well, how do you know it's there?" "Well, how else did the elephants get out?"
Then they changed the whirligig. Now it's the endoplasmic reticulum, which is like a tube that's stuck on the nuclear membrane, and the RNA goes down the tube. But it still has to have a hole to get out somewhere. Because how does it get out of the tube? And then they tell you that the tube attaches the nuclear membrane to the cell membrane - and there are hundreds of them, these tubes like strings. And then you see the nuclear membrane doing 360s. How come the strings don't get all tangled up? Well...
Question 11: How do you explain observable hereditary patterns - like the case you mentioned of the mother who lost fingers in an accident while pregnant, and her daughter was born with the same fingers missing? If DNA isn't the mechanism, what is transmitting these patterns across generations?
Dr. Cowan: Well, DNA is clearly not the mechanism, because you can't change the DNA by cutting off somebody's finger. At least, that's what they say. And I have an annoying habit of speaking like my father, which drives me crazy. That's supposedly genetic, right? I don't know which gene it is. So there's definitely heredity, but nobody has proven that it's got to do with a gene.
Anyways, they haven't even started the proof of how a gene makes a protein. They haven't even got to how a gene makes RNA and RNA gets out of the nucleus. And they haven't even proven that ribosomes exist so that there's even any place to make a protein. So that whole thing is just a story.
Now, once you get out of that story and you say, "Well, how does this happen?" - I heard Rupert Sheldrake talking about some morphogenic field. There's some energetic field that we tap into, where these hereditary principles, whatever that means, sort of reside. Is that right? I don't know.
But the whole problem with all this comes down to conventional medicine's theory that everything to do with an organism is in that organism. I use the example of - I was driving in a car with a three-year-old friend of mine, and an interview with me came up on the radio, and he said, "Tom, how'd you get in that little box?" Obviously I wasn't in the box. But what modern science is doing is dissecting the radio down to alleged molecules to find where the sound is coming from. And no matter how minute they get, they can't find the origin of the sound, because it's not in the radio. It's from the radio station. And their argument would be, "No, we don't see anything coming into the radio."
Right? You don't see it, you don't feel it, you don't smell it. You don't even hear it until you have a receiver to convert that energy field into music or sound. And that's what we're doing. We're transmuting the energy field of the world around us, including, it seems, the energy field of our ancestors. How that works, I have no idea.
But we make that into our life. The word is a kind of energy, right? It's a vibration or a frequency. How does it become flesh? I don't know. But that seems to be what happens. And that would explain why the energy fields may be common for a species, and then there may be individual variations. That's probably complicated. I don't know how it works, but that seems to make the most sense to me. And I know it's not DNA. That's disproven.
The point is, you don't have to make up a story. I just made up a story that it's like a radio. But that story may not be true. What I know is it's not the DNA story or the monkey story and all that.
Question 12: Given your work on structured water and understanding the body as a receiver/transmitter of energy, what's your current thinking on how consciousness actually interfaces with physical matter? How does intention or awareness affect our biology?
Dr. Cowan: There seem to be different electromagnetic or wave frequencies or energy frequencies. I don't really know how that all works. The interface or the mechanism - downloading is probably the wrong word - is through water.
The reason I think that is because people are starting to do experiments with water where they put different intentions, different thoughts, different feelings, different words, and the water creates something that clearly has meaning. In scriptural work, they talk about the living water. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's certainly interesting. And since we're basically seen to be a living water crystal, that seems to be a good place to look.
The purity of our crystal determines how well we can receive the impulses from the electromagnetic field that we live in. If you poison it and pollute it and misshape it and abuse it, then you get distorted perceptions. That's called modern science or the modern way of thinking. They literally can't see properly, because the mechanism of perceiving has been altered.
I think that happens through education. It happens through beliefs - the belief that we need a government, that we need the medical profession. All these beliefs distort who you are, and then you don't perceive right. This goes along with a lot of ancient healing practices that use energy to essentially purify the water in us, so that we perceive what's true around us. And again, how that all works is hard to know.
Question 13: Looking at the broader sweep of history, why do you think humanity collectively chose to adopt mechanistic, reductionist medicine? What purpose has this detour from traditional understanding served in human evolution or consciousness?
Dr. Cowan: To me it's all about freedom. It's like - if you're forced to marry somebody, that's a different phenomenon than "I choose you. I, as an independent being with agency in my own life, choose to be with you. I choose to eat this food. I choose to live in a certain way. I choose these morals." So whenever things are given to you or forced upon you, that's an infringement on what we're trying to do, which is essentially become more free.
When you think about that - maybe there were times in our history when this more correct way of seeing the world was simply given to us. That was fine, and maybe it was even a wonderful life, but we didn't really choose it. So we were affected by people with interesting motivations. But one of the motivations might have been to wake up humanity so that they have the choice between freedom or enslavement. Because unless you have the choice, it doesn't mean as much.
They did everything they could - and I'm not saying they were conscious of this - but their intention was to enslave the world and control the world. In a sense, that gives us the possibility of saying, "No, we're not going down that way." And if we choose that way of freedom, of sovereignty, then we've really got something that nobody will ever be able to take away. Whereas if you just get it handed to you, it's not really yours.
That's the story I tell myself. So in a way, the quote "bad guys" are actually part of the awakening process. A lot of us have seen that. When I think back to 2019 and all the stupid things I thought then that I've realized aren't true, and just the different way of seeing the world - I mean, you say, "Thank God for COVID." Really - that whole nonsense. Of course people got hurt. Lots of tragic stuff, right? That's also true. But also a lot of people began to reclaim their freedom and their sovereignty and their direction in life in a way they never would have otherwise.
Question 14: As the New Biology gains momentum and more people question conventional medicine, what aspect of this new paradigm do you think will be most difficult for people to accept - even among those already skeptical of mainstream narratives?
Dr. Cowan: So there are certain things like the virus thing that are difficult for people to accept. But that's not really what we're talking about. One of the ways I've explained it recently is we're talking about Adam versus Atom.
There are two atoms out there, and it's a bit of a shorthand. The one is the Adam of the Bible, right? Human beings and all of creation is conscious creation by something, by some energetic principle that's called God sometimes - bigger than us, for purpose, meaning. We're basically made out of earth, air, water and fire, with consciousness or the ether organizing it all. That's how this realm is organized.
Then there's another atom out there, A-T-O-M. And no, it's none of that. It's just billiard balls bouncing around. Nothing means anything. It's all chance. The reason you're who you are is because a bunch of billiard balls happened to collide together, and then you got a nose, and just get over it. There's nothing here, there's no meaning.
That's the other story. And interestingly, they named it atom as a sort of mockery. They knew what they were doing, just like they named ribosome - the proteins are allegedly what we're built out of, so they named the place that makes the proteins "ribosome." What does ribosome mean? Rib of the body. You've heard that - woman was created from the rib of the body of Adam. Ha ha! You were created from the rib of the body. Do you get the joke? It's like MAHA, which is otherwise known as "ha ha!" The joke's on you if you believe this. They're all atomists.
The difficult part for them to get is there are no atoms. They made that story up. Therefore, there are no nuclear weapons, because if there's no atom to split, there can't be. It's such a ridiculous story. You get this thing that's a billionth the size of a pinhead, and you break it, and you blow up Hiroshima. I mean, seriously? I don't think so.
So that's the part - to give up that worldview. Everything downstream from there: the viruses and the DNA and economics, politics. It's all downstream from "You gotta learn about atoms. Get over it. It's just chance. It's just billiard balls." Then they tell you, "Well, it's not really billiard balls. It's just probabilities."
Then they tell you you can't know the speed and the location at the same time. I know cops who can tell you the speed and the location of your vehicle when they give you a ticket. You were going too fast right there. But apparently when you get an electron, you can't know the speed and the location. So everything is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It's all uncertain.
I love that thing about quantum bilocation. Things are in two places at the same time. Right, like your dog. "No, not your dog, dumbass. Your dog's too big." "Okay, how about a mosquito?" "No, it's too big." "How about a bacteria?" "No, too big." "Well, when does it get small enough?" It gets small enough when it's invisible. "Well, how do you know it's in two places if you can't see it?"
Yeah, you need a few PhDs to answer that question.
That's like my favorite Ivan Illich quote: The purpose of school is to get people to consume more and more school. If you do well in school, you get the privilege of being allowed to consume more school until you've consumed so much school that the only people left you can talk to are people who've consumed a similar amount of school. Nobody else understands what you're talking about.
Follow-up: How did you stumble on the "viruses/virology is bullshit" story?
Dr. Cowan: Back in the late '80s, I was involved in a meeting where one of the few doctors I think I learned stuff from - he was adamant that there were no viruses, and it was particularly around HIV. "No, there's no HIV. It's all bullshit, and they're just covering this up."
So I learned early in the '90s that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. So I was very familiar with it, although I would say I didn't know what virology - I never really looked into it. I just knew that HIV didn't cause AIDS. But I was absolutely primed that there was some other way to look at it.
And then I heard Stefan Lanka, and we spent hours going over this in detail. The way I do it is if I hear something I'm interested in, I have the person explain it to me, and then I repeat it back to them. And I ask them to correct me if I got it wrong. And we did that for hours until I got it, and then I could go to the literature and read it for myself. And that's when I got it.
Question 15: What are you most excited about with your New Biology Clinic and educational programs? How can people who resonate with these ideas best engage with your work and continue their own journey of understanding?
Dr. Cowan: It wasn't my idea. It was my son's. But when you go to a doctor, he's treating you based on disproven hypotheses. "You have an autoimmune disease," "You have a genetic condition" - and we want realistic medicine. I think we're the only group in the world that's really offering that. What does that really mean? We don't know. We're working it out.
But if people want to work with healthcare people who are trying to understand why people really get sick - I mean, we're not the only ones, but in a medical doctor type of situation - that's the New Biology Clinic. Hopefully it will be the model for how people do medicine in the future. I don't think like that. I just do what I do, and whatever happens, happens.
We're getting more and more people, doctors and others. We have real conversations because we don't know. We're learning. How does this work? What happened to this person? How do you get them better? What worked? What didn't work? So it's gone from just me with my people to now there's six of us, seven of us, eight of us, with a whole lot of people and a whole lot of problems. We’re figuring out how all this works together.
New Biology Clinic
For those of you looking for practitioners who actually understand terrain medicine and the principles we explore here, I want to share something valuable. Dr. Tom Cowan—whose books and podcasts have shaped much of my own thinking about health—has created the New Biology Clinic, a virtual practice staffed by wellness specialists who operate from the same foundational understanding. This isn’t about symptom suppression or the conventional model. It’s about personalized guidance rooted in how living systems actually work. The clinic offers individual and family memberships that include not just private consults, but group sessions covering movement, nutrition, breathwork, biofield tuning, and more. Everything is virtual, making it accessible wherever you are. If you’ve been searching for practitioners who won’t look at you blankly when you mention structured water or the importance of the extracellular matrix, this is worth exploring. Use discount code “Unbekoming” to get $100 off the member activation fee. You can learn more and sign up at newbiologyclinic.com.
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Amazing interview! I am wholly impressed with Cowan's ability to sometimes say, "I don't know." I love both his brilliance AND his humility.
Thank you so much for this. I love Dr Tom abd watch any interview and all his Wednesday
webinairs on Rumble. But reading his interview with you was the best. He makes me laugh does Dr Tom, but I value this written interview as now I can bookmark it and read it whenever I need to to clarify something.
Great work
Thanks🙏👍