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Interview with Tom Cowan, M.D., author of The Fourold Path to Healing |
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Tuesday, 14 August 2007 |
My guest on July 5, 2007 on Beyond the Measuring Cup was, Dr. Tom Cowan who is an MD with a private practice in anthroposophical medicine. He has served as vice president of the Physicians Association for Anthroposophical Medicine and is a founding board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation. He is the principal author of the book, The Fourfold Path to Healing, recently published by New Trends Publishing. He writes the “Ask the Doctor” column in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the Foundation’s quarterly magazine, and has lectured throughout the United States and Canada. He publishes a free bimonthly Fourfold Path to Healing newsletter. His website: http://www.fourfoldhealing.com/
Dr. Cowan started out with "nonconformist" tendencies. He decided to
go to medical school after an experience in the Peace Corps where he
was introduced to the works of Rudolph Steiner and Weston a Price. He
realized at that point that he could practice medicine in a way that
would feel congruent with his own feelings about how the body heals.
He has worked for 10 years as an emergency physician and now has a
practice in the San Francisco area.
He has developed a way of looking at the body that he calls the Fourfold
Path. The four parts to healing include, nutrition, therapeutics
(which includes other things that you ingest that will assist healing),
movement and meditation.
He pointed out that most of the time diseases that we refer to as acute
are actually the bodies own response to healing a chronic condition.
Inflammation in arthritis is a classic example. Rather than trying to
decrease the inflammatory response of the body he suggests that a more
helpful way would be to enhance the effectiveness of the inflammatory
response. The body is simply trying to dissolve the deposit of calcium
and other things in the joints through the use of heat. Bronchitis in
a smoker is a similar process. A couple of times a year the body tries
to cleanse itself of the debris that is left by smoking. Bronchitis is
a way of creating mucous to help get the debris out of the body. We
cannot heal if we are suppressing the body's own response to heal
itself. Dr. Cowan talked about research that was done by Rosalind
Wulzen in 1943. She put rats on a low fat diet and created arthritis.
She then fed them raw unheated butter and cream and the arthritis was
reversed. She called the unknown factor in the raw cream and butter
the Wulzen factor.
Dr. Weston A Price, Albert Schweitzer and many other observers of so
called primitive societies found that there was no symptoms of caner or
heart disease or arthritis. The diet that these people consumed was
rich in animal fats, local organic produce, fermented vegetables, and a
wide variety of foods, in most cases.
Nutrition is simply one part of the four fold path to healing. It also
includes Therapeutics which may be other things that we ingest or use
to make us more healthy, Movement (as taught by Jaimen McMillan), and
Meditation to heal the mental body. Find many more details about the
Four Fold Path to Healing either by getting the book or going to Dr.
Cowan's website. http://www.fourfoldhealing.com/
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 05 September 2007 )
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