Adam Torres and Dr. Tom Cowan discuss viruses.
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Show Notes:
Are viruses real? Can anyone prove that they are real? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Dr. Tom Cowan, Author, Speaker, Influencer at Dr. Tom Cowan LLC, explore Tom’s research and work around viruses and other theories.
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About Dr. Tom Cowan
Dr. Thomas Cowan is a well-known alternative medicine doctor, author and speaker, with a common-sense, holistic approach to health and wellness. He has given countless lectures and workshops throughout the U.S. on a variety of subjects in health and medicine, and is the author of six best-selling books, including “The Contagion Myth” co-authored by Sally Fallon Morell, “Cancer and the New Biology of Water,” “Human Heart, Cosmic Heart,” “Vaccines, Autoimmunity and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness,” “The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care” co-authored by Sally Fallon Morell, and “The Fourfold Path to Healing” (with Sally Fallon and Jaimen McMillan).
From 1985 until 2019, Dr. Cowan had a general-medical practice, first in upstate New York, then for 17 years in Peterborough, N.H., and for 17 years in San Francisco, until his recent retirement from active practice. He was a founding board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation and continues to serve as its vice president.
In the past decade, he launched four companies in the health food and alternative health and wellness industries, along with his wife and two sons. The first, Dr. Cowan’s Garden, offers beyond organic vegetable powders, pantry items such as grains, legumes, olive oils, granolas and nut butters, and pasture products like ghee, pastured meat boxes and tallow skincare. The second, DrTomCowan.com (this website) distributes information, hosts his popular webinar series, and offers many of the products he has used personally and in his practice. The third, New Biology Clinic, offers membership-based health consults and a full suite of wellness enrichment services. The fourth, New Biology Curriculum, is dedicated to offering premium online learning opportunities to practitioners and others.
Dr. Cowan attended Duke University, graduating in 1977 Summa Cum Laude with a degree in biology. He then served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, Africa, from 1977 to 1980, teaching gardening in a secondary school. It was in Swaziland where he encountered the work of Weston A. Price and Rudolf Steiner, two of the greatest influences on his career. After the Peace Corps, he attended medical school in his home state of Michigan at the Michigan State College of Human Medicine, graduating in 1984.
Dr. Cowan lives with his wife, Lynda, on rural farmland in Upstate New York. He has three children, one stepson and seven thriving grandchildren. He is an avid gardener, and recently added several sheep and barn kittens to his growing farmstead.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Dr. Tom Cowan, and he’s an author, speaker and influencer over at Dr.
Tom Cowan, LLC. Tom, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. Good to meet you. All right. So we got a lot to talk about today. I want to get into your work. I want to get into, you know, how you got started and a whole lot more, but just to get us kicked off, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So Tom at mission matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Tom, what mission matters to you? It’s a good question. I think right now my mission is I. See that we’re living in a culture where people are basically scientifically illiterate, including the doctors and scientists or so called scientists.
And my mission is to try to help them understand how to think logically, rationally, and scientifically. It’s great. It’s great having you on the show. And before we get into your work, maybe talk a little bit more about your background and how you got started, maybe in medicine. So, you know, sort of usual upbringing with the idea that I should be a doctor.
A lot of people, my family knew my father and grandfather were dentists. I didn’t really like it. So I tried to join the, I joined the Peace Corps and taught gardening. I learned there that there was another way to be a doctor than what I had learned. So that allowed me to go into medicine. And then I did that, did some family medicine and worked in emergency room.
And basically my whole career, I tried to figure out what in what I learned and in medicine was actually true. And what was just a story that is not true. I wrote a bunch of books on that. The heart doesn’t pump the blood blocked. Arteries don’t cause heart attacks. Cancer has nothing to do with genetics.
Vaccines are. Neither safe nor effective and then viruses aren’t real and on and on Did you always have that curiosity from like a younger age? I’m always like did you have that curiosity in you would you say about how the world works or otherwise? Yep, I never believed in what I was told. I don’t know why Yeah, my mother used to remark on that.
And I don’t know where that came from. I actually think it’s an interesting thing. I’ve heard this from Mr. Rogers once because I actually had a difficult time with my father, which means that I didn’t believe in authority, right? He’s the authority figure in my life. And I had all these doctors in my life who were authority figures and I didn’t believe what they were saying.
And so I learned at an early age. That authority isn’t what it was cracked up to be. Yeah. So when you were going through like your, your studies and like things like that at school, especially in your advanced education, that had to be a little tricky, right? Like you’re reading things and do you, do you have like that extra layer on your, in your mind or something?
That’s like, okay, I hear this, but is this true? Like, do you have that? I did. And I went through medical school, essentially telling them the right answers, but not so they would say, so what’s the treatment for strep throat. And I would say, pen VK two 50 QID for 10 days. That’s it. And they would say, you don’t seem very enthusiastic about that.
And I would say, that’s the right answer. You asked me a question. I gave you the answer. That’s all I needed to do. So it was obviously that’s the recall memory and all the other things that you’re able to do to figure out what they had there. When did that? I was good in school. Yeah, well, obviously to do the work and to crank out the books and to do everything else you’re doing.
I didn’t think that you had any problem with that. I was just curious about the way that you think, because especially as we go further into like the topic and what you propose in your work. I feel like that had to have been a thing. theme throughout. And so I’m curious if it was kind of a build up or was there a moment when, when you decided, you know, I have to do something about this.
I have to, because you’re really, and I’m using these words, not you. So correct me if you would, if you would propose it differently. But from my vantage point, it’s like you’re on a crusade to really educate people about a lot of maybe miseducation or thing or things or concepts that they feel are true that may not be true.
Like, was there, so was there a moment or was that like a progression? Like, like, how did that, was there a tipping point? Like, help me there. Yeah. I don’t know that there was a tipping point. It was always something I was interested in, but the real turning point for me came when I started to understand.
That, and this, I actually heard about later, was a, is a kind of Hindu spiritual path, which I didn’t know about. Yeah. That you don’t have to worry about what is true, just focus on what isn’t true. Hmm. And when I really that a second. I’ve never heard that. So could you say that one more time? I want to really, I want to really hear that, what you just said, please.
Yeah, and I can give you an example. So I decided, and actually interestingly, when I decided to go to medical school, I read all the works of Sherlock Holmes and this is what he did. He said, just look at the facts and throw out what isn’t true and what you’ll be left with must be the truth. So let me give you an example of how and that that is the essence of scientific thinking if something can’t be falsified.
It’s a belief system and so science is the process of investigating claims. Not debating which theory is correct. So let me give you an example. So you’re listening. So I, people, I’ll understand too. Yeah. So I’ll say there’s no evidence that viruses have been shown to exist. Right. So the claim is chickenpox is a special, is certain illness caused by a thing called a virus, right?
That’s the claim I say, prove to me that there is a virus. Now, most doctors, most people, most scientists We’ll respond to that by saying, so what causes chicken pox? And it’s like, here’s the example, guys, 18, he’s Asian. His parents are Caucasian. He always wondered about that. Then he rummages through his parents closet.
He finds adoption papers. He goes to his parents, says, are you, you know, I just found out I was adopted. Is it true? Yes, it’s true. We didn’t wait, wait, tell you, et cetera. So it’s very clear. He was adopted, goes to his best friend. He says, yeah, I just found out I was adopted. I’m a little shook up. His friend says, so who are your real parents?
He says, I don’t know. You know, I just found out as he says, until you tell me who your real parents are, I don’t believe you are adopted. That is ridiculous. That’s so tell me what causes chickenpox. Yeah. COVID there’s no evidence. There’s a virus called SARS CoV 2 period. So instead of saying, okay, let’s look at the evidence, right?
That’s the issue. They say, so what causes, COVID or what cause, et cetera. What, in other words, who are your real parents? And I can tell you once I got the hang of thinking like that, then I could really think and really understand the heart does not pump the blood. Period. I didn’t know what moves the blood at that point, but I knew that there’s no way the heart could pump the blood.
Everybody thinks the heart pumps the blood, the cardiologist, the internist, the scientist, total nonsense. Easy to prove. And eventually then if you’re willing to stay in that unknowing phase, right? You just, you know, like there’s this sort of fear or, or where am I, or what’s right, or how does the world work?
You just stay there. Then you start learning actually how it does work. But if you can’t stay in that sort of cognitive dissonance, Then you never learn anything. And once I got the hang of that, that I could figure these things out. And so how do, how do ideas, let’s just, I mean, pick, pick one of them, like the chicken pots, let’s say like, how does, how do those ideas carry on?
Like, is it a marketing campaign? Is it just people generally accept it? So then like, like, how do you think those things get like planted? And then they just become, I won’t say common knowledge, but accept it. Well, you have to go back and say, you know, how did they you see, here’s the problem and why I say, unfortunately, what I learned is that the doctors and scientists are scientifically illiterate.
I go back and say, okay, let’s start at the beginning, right? Let’s start with the question. Do sick people make well people sick, right? That’s behind chicken pox, the flu, etc. So, that’s, you, so, here’s the first thing. If you get sick and then somebody else gets sick, in other words, and I can ask you this question.
Is it true that if two or more people have the same symptoms at the same time in the same place, that means somebody caught something from somebody else? Is that true? Yeah, it could be. Yes. From a person. Is it necessarily true? No, not necessarily. Because like you put 10 rats in a basement and then you put rat poison.
And the next day, all 10 rats bleed to death, same symptoms, same time, same place, but the clearly they didn’t catch it from somebody, another exactly. Yeah. Here’s my point. You can’t tell by observation, whether there was something passed from one person to another. Just like the rats, right? So you have to do an experiment within controls.
You have to put 10 people with chickenpox with 10 children who don’t have chickenpox and put them in the same room, et cetera, and then put 10 people who don’t have, et cetera. So me and my friends have looked at the entire medical literature for the last 150 years. There is not one scientific paper that demonstrates using true science that sick people make well, people sick, and there’s at least 200 studies that show that doesn’t happen.
Now, how does that happen? Let me just say one thing. Anybody who says, Oh, that can’t be because I got sick from Uncle Harry and etcetera. No, show me the paper that shows it. We’ve asked hundreds of scientists. Nobody can come up with a paper. So, why do they believe it? Yeah, that’s the way to say it. Like, how does this happen?
Like, why do they like, is it like, like layers of, let’s just say, work being done on layers of work and you accept the previous work and then they didn’t go far enough back to like actually question the original like, like thesis or question like you just did? Right. I mean, so here’s another one.
Everybody knows about polio. They say, ah, we’ve got rid of polio. It’s infectious disease caused by a virus and it’s spread from one person to the next. There’s about 50 papers showing there’s no transmission. of polio from one person to another. So I asked doctors and scientists, what was the paper that showed that polio was caused by transmissible agent?
Yeah, they don’t know. Yeah, but I know they took a, a child who died, this is 1908. who died of polio, took h up in a blender, injected two monkeys, didn’t injec or anything else. One mon They say that proves polio is caused by transmissible virus. Wow. Now that’s ridiculous. And that’s the accepted like thing.
And it’s from 1908, 1908. Ever since then, the fact dogma polio, they say polio has been proved. There’s a virus. Then if you say, okay, can you show me the virus? They’ll take the ground up spine and show you these pictures on the electron microscope. But then there’s at least 10 papers in the medical literature of taking ground up spine from people who don’t have polio doing the same process, exact same pictures.
Proving that those pictures are just what happens When you grind up the spine and stain it and freeze it and dehydrate it. Yeah. Proving right. Yeah. They did HIV. They took the lip, the T lymphocytes. That’s the, the white blood cells that are infected. So called with this HIV, this virus, they ground it up.
Got the proteins from it. 28 proteins, right? So those are the HIV proteins. Then they did somebody who had T lymphocytes who couldn’t possibly have AIDS, got the same proteins that proves there is no thing that’s different in that lymphocyte from a person with AIDS versus a person. Not, but, but here’s the problem.
And to answer your question, Doctors, they don’t know those studies. I didn’t know those. Nobody ever told me. Go look into it. Go find out the original paper. They just said, this is a fact. Boom. Yeah. Use these drugs. It’ll kill the HIV. Nobody rose there. Hey, can you tell me how there was an HIV study?
Discovered yeah, nobody knew that. Mm hmm. I mean, but it’s not just viruses They you know, you’ve heard of like autoimmune disease, right? Mm hmm caused by your immune system your antibodies Killing your body, right? You would think there’s at least one paper in the medical literature where somebody took antibodies, right?
That’s the causative agent Injected those into a normal person or animal And show did cause disease, right? That’s how you would show it. You know how many papers there are that show that zero interesting. And if you don’t believe me, anybody listening out there, send me the paper. And I’ll tell you why it’s that doesn’t show that.
So Tom, one of the things that’s just extremely fascinating to me about this is, well, obviously the facts that you’re, you’re mentioning, but there’s not a paper, there’s not a paper. Like you can’t refute that. Like what you just like as using your logic, you can’t refute this. There’s not in terms of there’s not a pro if there’s not a paper, there’s not something proving it or, or show you.
So in my mind, I know that you’re, you’re, you’re a hand raiser from the everybody’s going to come do an interview and be and go counter to what is generally accepted. But what I’m really curious about is, and I guess you could put, and I don’t mean the, it doesn’t have to be about the individual per se, cause I’m not asking you that.
Cause I know you don’t necessarily, you don’t know them and some of these might be very old, right. But or, but I’m just talking about the individuals as a whole. How, like these papers that are disproving something, even if we were just to pull one of them that you mentioned, the polio thing. So are the polio paper and like, and all of those papers that disprove what became commonly accepted, you know, accepted knowledge, I’ll say for most like there’s people behind that.
Like, how do the people behind who disproved something, like, how do they, how do they deal with that? They’re like, wait a minute, this isn’t right. Everybody thinks that, but it’s not right because they obviously know the opposite is true because they’re the ones doing the research and it’s not like they’re in a bubble.
They’re, you know what I mean? They’re fighting for their ideas. I would imagine, like, and they’re disproving, like, what happens to those people? So let me give you an example. So here we are nine early 1950s. Nobody had, they now have an electron microscope, so they can quote, see viruses, but they, they admitted they could never see a virus in any sick person, not in chicken pox, not in rabies, not smallpox.
They said that. So they said, we got to figure out another way to quote, isolate or find a virus. Okay. Yeah. So now a guy named John Franklin Enders came up with a way. Here’s what he did. He took a child with measles. He took snot from their nose. He didn’t purify. It didn’t filter. It didn’t do anything. He put that on growing cell culture.
Like monkey kidney cells. Mm-hmm . And then he added antibiotics which are poisonous to kidneys. Mm-hmm . He added tripsin a chemical. He added a fetal bovine serum, which is blood sucked out of the heart of a cow. Mm-hmm . And a few other chemicals. And then three or four days later, the cells died. In the, in the culture.
And he said that proves the existence of the virus in the snot. And then, and so here’s, what’s really key because to answer your question, he did the whole thing again, but he didn’t add any snot, he just did the bovine and the trips and, and you know what happened? He said it broke down identically to the first.
Wow. Now, that means that there was nothing in the snot that broke down the, it was either the antibiotics or whatever, right? Something else. That’s what he said. I can show it to you. The quote in the paper, somehow that became the way that we isolate, i. e. find viruses. And he was given a Nobel prize in medicine.
But it didn’t work. But it didn’t work. So how does that happen? He said, well, you give him a prize. I don’t know. He was because they then to this day, every single virus that has been found has been using that enders technique. Even though we’ve proven there’s At least we did the experiment ourselves. We did the whole thing without adding anything from a person even.
Now, why did Enders end up saying this is the way that proves it, when he clearly knew that it didn’t? Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah, he got a Nobel prize, but then all the people like the Nobel prize committee, the, this, the, that, I mean, we’re, now that we’re talking about like that level, there’s hundreds of people, there’s also a scientific community that like what you just said, a layman who’s, you know, me, I’m not I’m not a scientist.
Like I can understand that. Like I can’t understand it. And there was it there. We can show you 10 papers that were done in the next five or so years. That repeated his experiment, right? Cause they said, this is bullshit. You know, like he just proved this isn’t work and they published it. And, and so those 10 people are 10 teams.
Let’s say 10 teams. Like what happens to them? How does that get like, just not remembered? Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s remembered by people like me and, and 12 of my friends. I’ll give you my theory because this is one of the things that I would know. I’m going to give you my theory because there’s no paper on this and you can prove me wrong.
It’s fine. I’m not, I’m okay with it, but this is my theory. And I think it’s thematic of across many things across our society. And what it comes down to is when we, if we’re going back far enough. The, the media channels were always held in a, there was very limited amount of media channels, so they were always held in a, you know, a small handful of, a small handful of people, whether it’s networks, whether it’s whatever it is, doesn’t matter now with social media, with a little bit more of this democratizing of platforms, like even this, like a podcast, like if somebody was to do that exact experiment that you’re talking about, and if they were to come on to even a channel like this, And if they were to propose something as simple as what you just mentioned, like that, that somebody won a Nobel prize for that one had snot, one didn’t both had the same result, but obviously the snot was the one that caused the, but it’s like, then a YouTube viewer would literally, that’s what That that video, if it had any reach, would have so many comments in the comment section saying, did anybody watch this video?
This makes no sense. What are you talking about? Not just from the scientific community, but from anybody could understand what you just said. Yeah. So the democratizing of these channels of being able to Like, put out different types of content about it. And otherwise, I think that is going to, I’m not talking about scientific process.
I’m not that like, I’m not that versed in it to be just quite frank, but in a lot of different ideas and concepts that are out, it’d be, I would feel like it’d get harder. Who knows? That’s just my thought. I’m like, and that’s just from my side of the brain. Like, because otherwise to me, Okay. I can’t, it doesn’t just doesn’t make sense.
So there’s 10 papers right after that say, this is BS. And there’s probably you, you give me the number. I don’t know, at least 10, 10, 10 teams working on this. I’m guessing. And all of those are disproving it, but yet they go forward and people just start accepting it. And it became the way that we isolate and prove viruses.
So here’s, here’s another. This is something I can’t prove. So it’s not science, but here’s a, here’s my take on why this is happening. Please. So I’m going to get, I’m going to tell you mine. I was like, yeah, mine yours. Cause you’ve obviously been thinking about this longer than me. Go ahead. So I have this cat.
I didn’t used to like animals, but I moved to this place and somebody gave me a cat and then the cat crawled into my heart. Right? Yeah. So his name is pumpkin. So pumpkin comes in and out and there’s woods and bears and coyotes and all kinds of hawks and mice. So whenever he goes out, he sits on the desk on the deck and he looks around and he sniffs the air And he wiggles his ears back and forth and he wags his tail, which I think he’s sensing the world Before he decides where to go, right?
And then he, he, he’s, I think, looking for danger and looking for food. Right now, imagine you told pumpkin and he believed you pumpkin. There’s a danger out there. And it could kill you or do you great harm, but you can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t sense it. You can’t taste it. You don’t know whether it’s there or not.
What would pumpkin do? Not going out. You’re not going out hiding under the bed. Yeah. Trying to smell whether or sniff or sense what this thing is, but he couldn’t do it. right? Because he has no sensory experience. Next thing you know, he’s not going out. He’s not eating. He’s getting sick. His cat friends say, you see, that thing you can’t smell is, is that’s getting you.
Yeah. The thing is getting you. So everything in pumpkin’s life is now based on fear, right? Yeah. And he’s very easily controllable. Because he doesn’t know from his own experience what the danger is, where his food is. He stops eating, goes to experts to tell him what’s wrong because he doesn’t have any sense.
And I’m here to tell anybody listening. If you believe in viruses and a whole lot of other things, you’re like pumpkin under the bed. Yeah. And that’s why when they tell you to go home and wear a mask and inject poison into your arm, yeah, and close your business and don’t see your friends and don’t have fun and don’t, you know, make money and don’t do this, You do it because it’s all based on fear.
And if you’re interested in controlling a population, that’s the way to do it. It’s all about fear. And so what I was talking about to be something that pumpkin can’t. He can’t assess himself. And so what I was talking about in the, in the media and the distribution, that’s probably a little bit more on the, in the, in the sliver of the control mechanism of the control mechanism.
And in the past, the control mechanism was held in a very small group of hands. So that, and especially if we’re going back to 1908, right? Like that’s, and then, and then you give somebody an award and that, that’s like the stamp right there, especially you give them, you give them the reward. Then it’s kind of, then it’s too much at risk to go the other way.
I get it. And there’s a lot at risk for these people. Yeah. Yeah. They’re a biologist and that’s all, you know, in life. And this guy proves to you, you know, it’s like I think it was Upton Sinclair said, never try to convince somebody they’re wrong about something who makes their living believing the opposite.
Oh, man. You’re full of these, Tom. This is good. I like it. And it’s true. It is, yeah. That makes sense. Imagine a virologist going in, you know, you know, head of virology, Bob. I don’t think this thing exists. Yeah, I don’t think this is all BS, you know. But you’ve spent your entire Your entire life on it. And oh my gosh.
Yeah. Yeah. And you go home to your wife and say, well, how was your day at work? Yeah. I told the boss the whole thing is bullshit and he fired me. So how are you going to pay for my Ferrari then? At one point in time, you have to imagine there was like this happened. So at one point in time, there was some guy whose job it was.
to prove that the world was flat and that’s what he went around preaching about and talking about and mapping out. And when that concept changed, like that would have been the guy that was stuck if depending on his age, right, depending on his age, it’s similar. It’s an out there example, but depending on his age, right?
Yeah. I mean, we have all these doctors who are, you know, 300, 000 in debt. They can’t start their own practice because they can’t make any money. They don’t know enough to do it. They have to work for a hospital or something, health firm. And if they don’t do the protocols, they’re out and how are they going to live?
How are they going to pay their debts? And so it’s, it’s all this unseen fear, right? If you don’t do what you’re told now, I never worked for anybody. I started my own thing because I didn’t believe. Okay. You know, I was going to figure it out for myself. And, and so I never had all those pressures and anyways.
I often joke that I tried to not tell the truth once and I got so confused by what I was saying that I didn’t know what I was talking about. And I thought, I’m never going to do that again. Oh, well, Tom, man, this has been a lot of fun. And and I learned a lot and I, and I learned a lot about different ways to think.
And also I know we, I know there’s a whole lot more in your books, your books that, so you have one out the truth about contagion. You also have it, which is. free resource. And then you have your books as well. The truth about contagion, exploring theories on how disease spreads. And I know you have more books out actually.
That being said, how do people follow up? How do they follow your work? How do they connect? Like, how do they continue to educate themselves and go further than this conversation took them? So we have the main website is dr tom collin dot com and We have a clinic where our doctors who are neurologists and plastic surgeon and psychiatrists and general medicine, we treat people based on reality, not on theory of that are actually disproven.
And every week I do a webinar and talk about viruses yesterday. I, I went through the proof that we don’t, we don’t breathe oxygen from the air. That’s a myth. Easily proven. And, and so I just go through one thing after another with medicine and, and some other things. What is real because you can’t make a healthy life or a healthy society.
lies. It’s great. And leave that website one more time. So people can go there. Tom Cowan dot com. Fantastic. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’re gonna well, we’ll put the website in the show notes and all that good stuff. So you can just click on it and head right on over. And speaking of the listeners, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, you Hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your path as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow and Tom really appreciate you coming on and take some time for us. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Adam.