Decoding Cancer: What It Means For You

Thomas Cowan, MD

It is okay. Glad to be here.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

For all the listeners out there, Doctor Tom Cohen 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 bestselling books, including The Contagion Myth, coauthored by Sally Fallon Morell; Cancer and the New Biology of Water; Human Heart and Cosmic Heart Vaccines; Autoimmunity and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness; The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care, coauthored by Sally Fallon Morell; and The Fourfold Path to Healing with Sally Fallon and Jaimen Macmillan. From 1985 until 2019, Dr. Cowan had a general medical practice, first in upstate New York, then for 17 years in Petersburg, New Hampshire, and for 17 years in San Francisco until his recent retirement from active practice. He’s a founding board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation and continues to serve as its vice president. In the past five years, he has launched two businesses along with his wife and two sons, including the first, Dr. Cowan’s Garden, for high-quality vegetable powders and kitchen staples. The second, Dr. Cowan, LLC, distributes information, hosts his popular webinar series, and offers many of the products he uses personally and in his practice. Dr. Cowan attended Duke University, graduated in 1977, and then served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, Africa, from 1977 to 1980. Dr. Cowan lives with his wife Linda on rural farmland in upstate New York with three children, one stepson, and six thriving grandchildren. This is going to be amazing. I am so excited to chat with you about cancer. I know that when we met briefly at one of the conferences, you mentioned that you have a completely different take on what that is. I am curious to see what that is.

Thomas Cowan, MD

Okay.  Do you want me to just launch into it?

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Let’s do it. I’ve asked a lot of our participants. What is cancer? Because they’re people with so much experience and have dwelled on that subject so much, they all have their take. There are a lot of commonalities, but please launch into them. What is cancer, in your view?

Thomas Cowan, MD

The first thing I would say is the way I look at the world, and I do not think this is just common sense. Assumptions are everything. I can give you an example: Recently, a person I knew published an article about the difference between vaccine immunity and natural immunity, to quote COVID. I asked her. Because all the studies she referred to looked at the difference in chemicals in the blood between people who were injected with something and people who just got sick. I said, “So how does this prove that a virus is immune?” She responded, “Well, they wrote the paper, assuming there was a virus.” So it was everything I could do to not respond. If I assume I can fly, it is okay to jump off a building. The problem is that if your assumption is incorrect, everything that follows is also incorrect. If you look at cancer, which is the question here, and you say, “What are the assumptions made about cancer?” Now let’s start at the most basic, and I think it would probably work the best if I said what I think cancer is, at least conventionally, and then you told me whether you disagreed in any way with what I said.

I am going to start with the most basic. You have a body. That is, the body has organs, tissues, nerves, muscles, and blood vessels. then it so happens that in one of the tissues, some of the cells, or maybe even one of the cells or a clone of the cells, something happens to it. It starts growing faster than the normal cells in that tissue. If we’re talking about a breast, you have normal breast tissue and normal breast cells, and then some of the cells, for whatever reason, have a mutation, a genetic defect, or something that happens to the immune system or whatever. The bottom line is this: Those cells start growing faster than normal cells. They grow, forming a tumor. Sometimes they grow and then spread through the blood and lymphatic system to other organs. That’s called metastases. then sometimes that can kill you. That’s the basic theory of cancer that every conventional doctor, every conventional oncologist, and every alternative oncologist or doctor uses. Do you agree with that?

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, so far I am right there with you.

Thomas Cowan, MD

The interesting thing about assumptions is that there’s often a situation where, because of how bamboozled we all are by, quote, science, we do not even realize that we’re making assumptions. If you say, “What are the assumptions in that theory that I just said?” Most people would say, “Well, there aren’t any. Those are the facts.” But here’s the basic assumption: The tissues or organs that make up a living being, including a person, are made of cells. That is an assumption. I can tell you that no other system of medicine besides conventional medicine believes that. That assumption was created or hypothesized by, like most assumptions, a guy. His name was Rudolf Virchow, 1858. He sees an onion cell under a microscope, and he comes up with the theory that all living tissue is made of cells. Therefore, frogs and salamanders are also made of cells because onions have cells. Now, what’s interesting about most theories is that there was a lot of disagreement at the time. People said this was nonsense. Living beings are made of protoplasm, which is essentially what we now call something like organized water with minerals, proteins, and stuff in it, not cells. There is no reason why the liver should break up its tissue into little compartments, like some office workers say, “That’s ridiculous. It is inefficient.” So what happens is that they said, and my new Chinese medicine is you, that nobody talked about cells. The other thing I would point out is that nobody has seen a cell in a living tissue intact in the organism since. You can take a tissue out of a liver and stain it, and then you will see liver cells. But you have to ask the question, “How do you know that staining and killing the liver tissue does not create these compartments that we call cells?” Here are some of the obvious problems with that theory.

One: When you look at an ultrasound or an X-ray, you do not see cells because they’re too small. What you see is homogenous tissue. Now we know there are approximately 188 different tissues in the body, like the ovaries, livers, kidneys, and spleens. It is confirmed that 44 of them are what are called syncytium, which means no cells like the lens of your eye. Why would you break the lens of your eye into compartments? Because then you’d see it like a grid. Like burr cells, where there’s no cell. These are cellular protoplasm or organized water called syncytium. In the other 144, we see cells like the liver, for instance. They tend to be at the periphery of the liver, not the body of the liver. When you remove them, kill them, stain them, and shine a high-powered microscope light on them, then you see compartments. Here is the other problem with this cancer theory: when you talk about being made of cells, the cells are dividing too fast. Division: We are told mitosis is because we have chromosomes. The chromosomes, we’re told, contain the DNA, which I can tell you isn’t true, and I’ll tell you how I know that. But the chromosomes are like this, then they divide, and then they get pulled apart by the spindle. Then there’s a division in the middle, and then you get two cells out of one. Then they tell us that. These cells are formed at the periphery of the liver. The body of the liver seems to be homogenous tissue, and then at the edges, you get these little compartments with the chromosomes in them. then, with cancer, there are more and more of these compartments. But now the chromosomes are regular. They’re all mixed up. applied. They have different numbers, and they’re broken and fuzed together, etc. The shape of the cell is not the right shape. They clump together. They do not respect the boundaries. If I told you, “Okay, Michael, I got this car, and it is all smashed to hell, and the engine’s in three pieces, and the steering wheels are in the trunk, and somebody cut the brake cords,” and you say, “Yes, how does it run?” “Oh, it runs great. Three times better than a normal car. You would say?” And you say, “I do not think so. This car probably does not work.” How does a spindle separate a chromosome when it’s all broken into pieces? This means there’s no way that the cell is dividing and growing. In this case the whole theory of oncology and alternative oncology, which is, to kill the fast-growing cells, either by chemo, radiation, or surgery, you remove them, and then in the alternative, doctors use tumor picks to kill the fast-growing cells. Help your immune system, or vitamin C, kill the fast-growing cells. Those cells are not dividing. They’re too sick, weird, and dysfunctional. There is no way nobody has ever seen them divide. What you see is more of them. Then they say that these weird cells swim through your blood, and then they go from your breast to your liver. It is called metastasis. Ever seen all these weird cells in your blood? Never.

Once you go to the oncologist, “I think you have metastases.” Or can you look in my blood and see if you see them swimming through? No, we do not do that. Why not? You said they were swimming through the blood to go to the next organ. Well, yes, but you can’t find them there. Why not? There are all these thousands—millions—swimming through the blood. Well, then just take a blood sample and find them. No, we can’t do that.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

There are so many questions, but yes, I do not want to interrupt too much, so I’m just going back to the cells. all the different organelles, all the different things that they see, the mitochondria, all the components that are within the cell. Do they exist then, or do they not exist?

Thomas Cowan, MD

The only thing you can see under a light microscope with minimal staining is a thin cell membrane. The protoplasm or organized water, a nucleus that is shaped like a dome, and mitochondria. That’s it. Receptors on cell membranes, lipid bilayers, GOLGI apparatus, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, and lysosomes—all those are 100% sure are artifacts. They do not exist.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

They don’t exist.

Thomas Cowan, MD

It was proven by a guy named Harold Hellman, who took a cellular tissue and got the exact picture of the ribosome. There are just gas bubbles in the dying stuff; the endoplasmic reticulum fractures in organized water. You can take jello and get an endoplasmic reticulum. That is why they made this stuff up.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

The staining, what does it do? Because they’re staining it, and then all of a sudden, you get dead tissue; you’re taking a piece of, let’s say, the liver, kidney, or whatever. then you stain it, and then they homogenize it.

Thomas Cowan, MD

Then they homogenize it. They put it in a blender, freeze it to 150 degrees below zero centigrade, and then put heavy metal stains on it because what you see in an electron microscope is not the thing; it is the metal stain. Even if you do so-called transmission EMF, that’s just a freeze-fracture at 150 degrees; you evaporate the water with the high-intensity electron beam—the whole thing. Every image under an electron microscope is an artifact. Nothing that you see there could be what it looks like in real life. A prime example is that every ribosome is a perfect circle on an electron, and that means it would have been a sphere in real life. I just asked people, “You take an orange and you put it in a blender; that’s a sphere. What are the chances that every picture of that will be a perfect circle?” The answer is zero, and so these things do not make sense in basic geometry. They say I made that crack about the chromosomes that supposedly have the DNA. I am an undergraduate at Duke. I was invited into this high-level biology class by a guy who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine and in biology for discovering how DNA folds up into chromosomes. He was Teacher of the Year, a brilliant teacher. He’s going to show us how the long strand of DNA folds up into these chromosomes. You see the staining. He sets up a string around the outside of the room with stanchions, wiring a string around about ten times, and then he has a thimble about this big, and he says, “I am going to fold the string into the thimble.” By the way, if it were real life, it would be like 100 times around. The DNA is so long. He starts folding, and then he has a stick, and he’s stopping it in a thimble. He gets about one time around, and then he can’t fit anymore in the thimble. He says the miracle of life is that the live body knows how to put this DNA into this thimble. Everybody in the class—about 20 of them—stands up and cheers. It is amazing. I am sitting there, thinking to myself, What the hell? He just proved that this does not work. This is nonsense. They can put that amount of stuff on that little chromosome. There is no way. In this case, to this day, I do not know what’s in those chromosomes, but it is not DNA. Unfold it and get it back in there. My point is that if there’s no cell and so what’s happening here, you have homogenous tissue, which is organized water. It is like Jell-O. Jell-O has this mitochondrion. It has proteins that are like the skeleton of Jell-O. Just like when you make Jell-O, you put proteins, then you put water and nothing happens, and then you heat it and the proteins unfold. Then the water sticks to it. then, when you cool it, it forms Jell-O. The same thing happens to us, except we do not have a heating system. Instead, we have something called ATP, which has nothing to do with energy. All the people who talk about ketogenic diets and mitochondria making ATP to generate energy are hooey. It is hooey because there is no energy from ATP, and Gilbert Laing proved that 30 years ago.

But what it does is hook onto the ends of the proteins and unfold them like heat, and then the water sticks to them and then forms the gel. That’s what the liver is made of. Every organ has different proteins and different minerals, different fats, different pigments, etc. That’s why it looks different. then normally the liver dies just turnover here, and it puts out that debris in the form of what we call cells on the outside. It is like taking out the garbage. You take out the garbage, make a new liver, and then it just goes on. If you poison your liver, i.e., put more garbage in your house, you make more garbage cans. That is why you see increased cell growth. If it is stinky garbage, the garbage in the garbage can start stinking. That’s like weird cells. Stinky garbage, stinky poisons, all kinds—you can EMF poisons, glyphosate, and there are thousands of different kinds of poison, even internally generated poisons. Then it starts making more and more garbage cans. That is just normal. Then it forms a tumor because you have to keep the garbage cans in a certain place. You do not want them all over the house. then so that’s your tumor, and then when it gets more even, you can’t even hold it in the garbage can. It goes to the next place, which is the liver. It does not swim through the bloodstream to get to the left, as some have said.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

When they do a biopsy, let’s say somebody has colorectal cancer, and then they go and do a biopsy on the liver and say, “Oh, this is from the colorectal cancer.” How do they determine that?

Thomas Cowan, MD

They look at the chromosomes, and then they do assays for proteins.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

So, do the chromosomes exist or not?

Thomas Cowan, MD

Yes. The chromosome does exist. They’re just not DNA; they’re just broken pieces of antennas. Chromosomes have nothing to do with protein synthesis like we’re told, nor does DNA, which is why that whole model of you has a mutation. that creates abnormal protein growth. It turns out that the proteins do not even come from the DNA. They’re not coded for by genes. How do I know that? They say that every protein has a gene. That is what they say. One gene makes one protein. Then they do the human genome project: 200,000 proteins and 20,000 genes. That means there are 180,000 that are unaccounted for by a code. It seems like modern doctors and biologists can’t do arithmetic because if they could, they would say that this does not work. There is something else, quote, coding for the protein because 90% of them do not even have any code. We’ve never seen a gene make mRNA and then make a protein. 

Besides, ribosomes do not exist. There’s nowhere for the mRNA to be made into protein anyway. Besides that, we know that the nucleus has a membrane around it, which allows hydrogen to be impermeable to hydrogen ions. For the mRNA, there’s no way it can get in and out of that nuclear membrane because it is a thousand times bigger than hydrogen ions, which it is impermeable to. Then they invent a whirligig that attaches to the mRNA and then spins around and deposits it. then if you say, Let me see a picture of the whirligig, because I do not believe it is there. No, you can’t see a picture, or they show you a computer-generated image of some graphic art guy who decided to make a picture of the whirligig; it is like the sodium-potassium pump. There is no pump. They didn’t prove that because he measured the sodium and potassium inside and outside, then stripped the membrane off by stripping the membrane off the same sodium and potassium. 40 years ago, when he did this, he said, Look, there’s no pump.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

He said the voltage difference the other day was like 80 millivolts or whatever between the outside membrane and the inside. What is that?

Thomas Cowan, MD

It is outside the tissue and inside the tissue. That is because the sodium is pushed to the outside and the potassium collects on the inside, not because of a pump but because of the organization of the gel. The protoplasm is amazingly organized. It is like a mash that exactly fits potassium, and sodium does not fit, so it gets excluded. so there’s no energy. It is a beautiful system for pushing something out and collecting something else. The difference in the ions creates the charge, which is life. All you have to do is have healthy water gels, and then you’re fine, your voltage is fine, and you’re full of life. If you poison your gel and scramble it and make it so it is, the mesh isn’t right. You lose the sodium-potassium differential, and then you do not have a voltage, and then you’re dead, and we call that cancer. then the tissue tries to excrete this by increasing the debris stuff, which is called cells. Then you get more cells. Now I can tell you, if you think like this, every single intervention that works makes sense. Why do you detoxify? Because you’re being poisoned. If you stop being poisoned, you make fewer cells. Why do saunas work? Hypothermia. Sweat lodges? Because then you get rid of the debris in your water. You sweat it out. Everything you want to call the Gerson diet in fasting. You get rid of the poison, then you make fewer cells. There is no cell growth; there is an abnormally mutated cell. They’re just debris.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Help me also understand, and let’s say because we talk about how a cancer cell produces energy differently than a normal cell. They go into the fermentation of things like glutamine and sugar, and then you can see this in cancer which needs more sugar to be able to survive.

Thomas Cowan, MD

There are no cells.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Just debunk me at the end. You’re seeing the fermentation, and that’s when you produce lactate and all of that, and then you prove that in a way through pet scans, where sugar is then accumulated in the areas where tumors exist because they burn more sugar. Help me understand that component. If it is just toxic debris versus metabolically active tissue,

Thomas Cowan, MD

What’s happening is that you’ve dominantly poisoned your mitochondria. But mitochondria are allegedly old bacteria. Antibiotics or anything that kills life—radiation, etc.—will poison your mitochondria, and then you can’t respire and you have to ferment. So then you ferment and start using sugar, and those will collect in the tissue, and you’ll see increased sugar in these particular parts, which are the debris.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

How does it get there so quickly? You infuse that die with the sugar solution, and boom, it is there, and you do the image.

Thomas Cowan, MD

Because they’re because they’re, it is not a normal tissue with normal boundaries and normal water. It’ll just permeate right in.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I know that in physics they have an observation and then they create particles and name particles to be able to explain the anomalies that they see. then they just kind of build on that, and they obviously can’t debunk what has happened in the past, because that would mean that you would bring a high-esteem scientist down to the ground, saying that his research was not valued. Instead, you have to kind of build on the same and come up with a new subatomic particle to be able to explain the phenomenon that you’re seeing. It kind of sounds like that’s been happening in biology as well.

Thomas Cowan, MD

Yes, there are no particles. That’s a model. You hear that all the time. It is all about the method section when you go looking. I hear people talk about quantum this, quantum that, and quantum by location. Or things that are particles and waves at the same time. You hear that all the time. But I do not buy it because my experience of life is that things are not in the same place. In different places at the same time, I couldn’t get into the actual experiment that showed it, but it was wonky as hell. There were so many assumptions in the wire and the measurement, and they do not use proper controls, and the whole thing with all these subatomic particles that they hypothesize exists.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes.

Thomas Cowan, MD

It is this; it is model after model, and they have to maintain the model because otherwise they would admit the whole thing is based on me; I am just making flawed assumptions. When you look, what can you prove? As I said, you can prove organized water protoplasm and the energy field coming from the outside in the sun, electromagnetic waves, earth energy, thoughts, emotions, and feelings, all of which impact the structure of the water and work together to create life. If you put an abnormal electromagnetic field like five G single frequency or very few frequencies, high-intensity waves, you create an abnormal structure, and the body will try to get rid of that. The way it does that is to create these garbage cans, which we call cells. We think, therefore, that the cells are normal and that they’re metabolizing and growing. But what they are, they answer quit. They’re just leaky with sugar. It’s similar to garbage cans with holes in them. so that stuff collects in the garbage cans, and whenever anybody is thinking about it, is this guy crazy? Just think about how every therapy that’s worked has to do with changing the water, cleaning your tissues, and changing your emotional field the way you see this because those are the things that are real. Killing cells. I’ve looked it up—that killing cell therapy. Chemotherapy has approximately a 2% benefit; according to the Australian Government in a study in 2003, after 50 years and trillions of dollars, they get approximately a 2% benefit, which even that is controlled versus the placebo effect of, well, we think this is going to help you. People think maybe it will. You think you at least get 3% out of that, but they do not. They get 2%.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

What are we seeing, then? Let’s say somebody is doing chemo or radiation, and then they see these tumors. This is garbage. Big garbage cans are shrinking. But what are we seeing, then?

Thomas Cowan, MD

Some of these questions are hard to answer, but radiation is burning them and vaporizing them. Chemotherapy is probably poisoning the cells of the tissue. It poisons, and it breaks down and gets taken away by the body. But then what happens? It is like giving an antibiotic or something or prednisone. When you’re sick, you can’t make mucous. You think you’re better because you’re not able to get rid of the mucus or the stuff in your lungs. If you poison the tissue now, it can’t even make cells. It just starts dying internally, so to speak. it can. This cancer process is a therapeutic one. The cancer is the therapy. 

It is not the disease. That’s the problem with killing cancer cells, whether it is by stimulating the immune system or anything else. You’re confused between the therapy and the disease. Modern medicine is the art of making it so your body can’t heal. That’s the whole strategy of modern medicine. You’re trying to get mucous; you put debris in your lungs, so then you cough it up and call it bronchitis. Modern medicine is just stuff that’s back in your lungs, and you look into Kohli’s therapy; he gave people stuff to make them have a fever, and then they get rid of it when the person dies, and they’re rife with changing the electromagnetic field. These are all perfectly in line with what I am saying. This other method is purely fictitious.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. That’s it, and I agree with you. In the medical field, what they’re doing is shutting down normal physiological functions. kind of take over what the body would do naturally. then you think you are better. Like the fever is gone, but the function of the fever did not get to do what it wanted to do, which was to burn up whatever junk it needed to burn up.

Thomas Cowan, MD

With every therapy that works in conventional medicine, you end up sicker.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I am just kind of stuck with the tumors. From your point of view, what it seems like is that you are poisoning that garbage. It is like you’re blasting those garbage cans even further. Does this not mean that they stop existing? It just means that the body will then reformulate elsewhere.

Thomas Cowan, MD

Yes, it just breaks them apart. Irradiation vaporizes them. Then you get the debris all over yourself, and then you’re even sicker, which is why you feel the way you do when you get chemo and radiation. You feel like you’re poisoned.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes.  According to the research, you can expect a 2% to 3% improvement. then other studies show that the length of life with all of these therapies is like three months, two to three months, it increases longevity.

Thomas Cowan, MD

People have to realize that when oncologists say, “Oh, the therapy was successful.” So you have a tumor in your breast or your liver, and they measure it four centimeters or whatever, and they give you radiation, it shrinks down to half a centimeter. That’s what’s successful. then the person otherwise would have died in six months. Now they will die in three months. But that’s still a success because we measured it by the tumor’s growth. It is a bit like the best example to see this you treat depression, which isn’t a disease. Of course, someone comes in. I am depressed; I am not getting along with my wife; my job isn’t going well; and I am having financial trouble. “Oh, so here’s some Prozac coming back in a month. How are you feeling?” “Much better.” “Do not feel as depressed. How did you like it?” “Well, I got fired. My wife left me, and I went bankrupt, and I gained 40 pounds.” What makes you think, “I do not feel bad at all?” “Great. You do not feel it. You’re just good. That is only due to people. You got rid of your tumor. What’s your problem?”

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. What’s your problem? I know you died of malnourishment. Yes, we’ve put your guts out there.

Thomas Cowan, MD

See the x-ray? It shrank and vaporized it.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes.

Thomas Cowan, MD

We poisoned it and said it broke down in a million pieces, went all over the place, and you felt like crap for the rest of your life. That is the way it works, buddy. Not only that, but anybody who tells you differently is a quack. If they tell you, you could do something about this. We do not do anything about anything. It is not what the business world does; we do not heal even asthma or eczema. You manage it. You give people asthma medications for the rest of your life. Get over it.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. What is your point of view? What if a person comes to you with cancer? What is your strategy? It sounds like breathing fresh air, drinking clean water, and sweating those types of things. What is your strategy?

Thomas Cowan, MD

First of all, we have to realize that this categorization of diseases like cancer, etc., is bogus. It is meaningless. Everybody has a story. My story was that I was fine. Then I decided to dye my hair every three weeks with this toxic dye. The next thing I got was brain cancer. They do not have brain cancer. They have toxic dye absorption in their head area. In that case, being the genius that I am, I say quit doing that. That guy is idiotic. I do not say that. That is why I had to stop practicing because I was getting ready to start saying that to people. I figured it was time to retire.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, it is, but only up to a certain limit. You can go, and then after that, yes. You’re tired. Yes.

Thomas Cowan, MD

That is one story. The next story is that you see a lot of people, especially women, with sexual and emotional trauma, and they’re energetically constricted in their genital organs. What I developed was a system of getting people into their so-called right brain, or intuitive way of speaking. Because my theory is that everybody knows what happened to them. You just have to ask the right way. After 35 years of working on how to ask people they would tell me, here’s what happened to me. I knew I was right when, at some point, they started either laughing or crying. that told me that we had hit upon the real story. Now, it may not be the whole story, but it was the beginning. Then, whatever it was, I started there. I didn’t treat cancer because it does not exist. The cancer is the garbage coming out. You gotta know it is like getting a splinter in your finger and then making pus. I didn’t give people antibiotics for pus. I took the splinter out, and then the pus went away. You do not have to worry about the tumor or the pus. You just have to take the splinter out. The question is: What was this person’s splinter hair dye? It could be anything, but I decided to only eat dried fruit for six months. Next thing you’re sick. Why did you do that? I didn’t ask why, but that’s a whole different story, so I didn’t. There is no answer to how you treat it generically because there’s no generic disease. There are individual stories. Whatever the story was, I interacted with it. It is hair dye. Stop the hair dye. You try to figure out something that gets rid of the hair dye in your brain.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

In your mind, it sounded like, yes, some people do that ketogenic, and they get better. Some people do the grass, and they get better; some people do just plant-based, and they do better for a while, and then all of a sudden they do not do as well. In your mind, what would be a good diet for an individual who’s battling cancer?

Thomas Cowan, MD

It depends on their story. There is no, and one of the fallacies of this is that everybody’s out there trying to say this is because the assumption is there’s a disease. The cells are metabolized. They’re using too much sugar, and that’s the problem. So you cut away all the sugar, and sometimes that works, and sometimes it does not, because the fundamental assumption is that it is growing cells that are using more sugar. That is the wrong part. So if you get away from that and just think of how this person would be better nourished and have a healthier, more coherent structure of their protoplasm and their water, you will probably be able to find out the answer. That might lead you to think about how that person should eat. Of course, I have ideas. I am not a raw food guy, and I am not a plant-based guy. I tend to be more in the Western and ketogenic sort of mode because that’s where most people end up having trouble. They had sugar nonstop from day one until the day they came to my office.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. People who have success talk about cancer drivers, and they use different pharmaceuticals like doxycycline, different statins, and metformin—all of these different things. Then, to try to shut down cancer drivers, do cancer drivers exist? other than just toxins.

Thomas Cowan, MD

That is, to me, total nonsense. Give somebody a statin drug that inhibits your energy flow in your tissues to treat an energetically deficient C situation. You have to be kidding.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it.

Thomas Cowan, MD

With doxycycline, that same mitochondrial inflammation poison you see you got all these especially alternative doctors are often the worst they think “Oh, I got to get rid of the inflammation.’ The inflammation is the trouble. How are you supposed to get rid of something? If not by inflammation, it all comes from this position. You have a stupid body. It is causing inflammation, and it is getting chronic. Well, the reason it is chronic is because there’s so much stuff that it has to get rid of. You have so many splitters that you make so much pus. Second of all, because you keep trying to give them anti-inflammatories, it never will work, which is exactly what happens.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

The studies and I am sure you’re aware of this, where they just bring in things like aspirin, for instance, and they see that people live longer. Yes, their cancer; that group is less likely to get cancer.

Thomas Cowan, MD

I doubt it. But I’d have to see that study, and I would dissect the hell out of that study.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. 

Thomas Cowan, MD

I do not know the percentage, but in a high percentage of medical studies, when you look at them, you see there are so many assumptions about the type of cancer and the stage. You go back and look at it. I remember reading a study of melanoma. They gave 20 slides of melanoma to the top ten melanomas. Pathologists in the world say whether melanoma or not. They agreed about 51% of the time, which is the same as my cat would because it is a yes-or-no question. It turns out some of the pathologists tended to say they were all melanoma, and some of them said it. None of them were valid. Oh, and some were in the middle. So the whole thing is like this for COVID. Well, you have to define what COVID is first, and nobody can. This works for ovarian cancer. What’s the definition of that? You get into so many problems and mess with the foundation of these studies that it ends up being almost uncontrolled assumption-based nonsense.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

In your mind, then, what is the definition of ovarian versus breast versus liver? Is it just chromosomes that they’re looking at, or what are they looking at?

Thomas Cowan, MD

That is, they’re looking at chromosomes. That is what a pathologist looks at.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes.

Thomas Cowan, MD

They look at the configuration of the chromosome. Cancer, by definition, is an aneuploidy or not-normal chromosome situation. Again, I only ask people to think about whether the whole basis of cell division is pulling apart normal chromosomes or if they’ve got abnormal chromosomes. How does cell division happen?

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

It is a good question. Where can people go to learn more about this if there’s something that intrigues them? Is this one of your books?

Thomas Cowan, MD

Well, right now, what we did was start something called the New Biology Curriculum, because what I am saying here is that the main poison we’re faced with in the world right now is our so-called mental poison based on misconceptions, based on what I would call the old biology. Here is the way life works: Here is what we’re made of, and all of it is nonsense. It is a little arrogant, but I came up with a new biology, and we have a curriculum, and you can go to our website. drtomcowan.com, we’re doing courses. you get with a cohort, you study virology, cancer, and heart disease, the heart does not pump, and the blocked arteries do not cause heart attacks. Viruses do not exist. Bacteria do not cause disease. Nerves do not have synapses. There are no neurotransmitters. There is no immune system. There are no receptors on cell membranes. It is all an unsubstantiated, disproven hypothesis. So once you get that, you can do medicine based on what’s real, which is the experience of the patient, what they’re relating to, what they’re feeling, and what things in the world and nature support that process. That’s what I would do.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

It is like burning down the building.

Thomas Cowan, MD

Then burn down the building. The building is sick.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. Well, Dr. Cowan, this has been fun. My head is spinning. Yes, I have to follow up on what you’re talking about. At the end of the day, you have theories and you create models, but do the models work? That is right. Yes.  I tell my patients, as you did, the apple fell, so there was something that made it fall. Yes, whatever that is.

Thomas Cowan, MD

I just want to be clear on this. I do not have a theory. I am debunking their claims, and at the end of the day, I say, “Here’s what you see.” You see water, you see a membrane, and you see a nucleus. You see mitochondria. That is it. Deal with it. They are the ones with the theories? I am debunking their claims because if you claim they’re something, you better be willing to prove it. I am willing to go to the person who first said there was a ribosome. What was the evidence? I mean, you go. One of the things I do, I’ll finish here. You go and look at Watson and Crick’s original paper in nature, showing that DNA is a double helix. A double helix is a structure defined by a rotation. So they said that every ten turns, you go back to the same place. That is what you mean. You read right there. I could read it to you, but I’d have to find it. They said we assumed a rotational angle of such and such. I remember reading what they said, but how they didn’t measure it. They just said it was a double helix. Therefore, it has to do that in order to make the double helix. No, but they didn’t measure anything. They just made it up and got a Nobel Prize, and then we’re stuck with it. That is how it works.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, Dr. Cowen. It has been fascinating. I love it. Yes, it is. As a practitioner, it is about understanding what works, what kind of mindset, and what kind of therapies work. What makes people better? I, and from a holistic point of view, you are solidly in that holistic point of view where it is not poisoning the body, supporting normal physiology, supporting the health of the body, whatever that is. Then it seems like with chemo and radiation from your point of view, you’re literally yes, you’re nuking whatever that garbage can is. But it does not mean that the garbage has disappeared. I got to recollect somewhere, and you have just added that the total of garbage within the whole system has increased, which means that there has to be, in the end, more garbage cans, which will then translate into more tumors or whatever.

Thomas Cowan, MD

That is exactly what you see. It exactly predicts what it is that you see.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. If you look at a system as a whole, then you just have an influx of more junk. Yes, so awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Cowan; this was great.

Thomas Cowan, MD

Okay. All right, take care.