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My name is Robert Rowen and I am originally from the East Coast. I had always wanted to be a dentist, of
all things. After going to Johns Hopkins University to spend the summer attending a
science camp in West Virginia wilderness, I fell in love with nature. I decided I wanted a
little more than dentistry. I thought it would be nice to be a physician and actually what I wanted to do was to trade my services for chickens or vegetables or anything else to keep me going, living
out in the country and have a self-sufficient lifestyle. Things didn’t really work out that way. I ended up graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins and went to medical school at UC
San Francisco and then took training in family practice afterwards and went into Indian Health Services.
UC San Francisco was a very high-powered school and considered one of the best in the world and I was trained very rigidly in the scientific method of
medicine. Somewhere along the third-year of school, I became depressed, thinking, “What are we doing to patients?”
I saw patient after patient admitted to the hospital having workups and tests and procedures, many of which were invasive. And, it didn't amount to much
to help them. It was a big bill. A lot of them were hurt by it. And, the cancer treatments I saw
were a disgrace and they still are. I decided to stick with it even though I thought of getting
out because I had thought, “What am I going to do to really help people?” I came to see that
what we were doing to our patients was exactly the same thing we were and still are doing to our planet…a slow pollution-type destruction of our planet and our people. And, that affects the body and
the health. And, we just treat it with more pollution, more chemical drugs instead of addressing causes.
But, I wasn’t well-trained on how to address causes. I was only trained how to cover-up symptoms with petrochemical pharmaceuticals.
But, I kept an open-minded one thing led to another and finally by 1982 I attended an amazing conference on acupuncture where I saw all walks of life in
healing: homeopathy, herbs, chiropractic, acupuncture, nutrition among others. And, I got shaken
down and I realized there was another path I had to go…when I put both feet across the stream and went with it.
I saw that, as I was trained to treat disease, I was essentially being, in truth, a pimp for the pharmaceutical’s industry, peddling their wares and not
really addressing the fundamental causes of disease...which I came to realize were three main ones:
- Malnutrition
- Toxics
- Stress
And a few other ones that fit in there we would call:
- Lack of exercise
- Genetics
- And perhaps a few other things
So, I started blazing my own path after that in Alaska. I left the Indian Health Service, realizing
that I could not do that type of medicine in a government-run hospital that was edited by other medical doctors who were closed to such concepts.
I started a private medical practice in Anchorage and just sucked up all the information that I could on alternative medicine, especially nutrition.
And, I saw that many of my colleagues were taken out by the establishment because they differed. They were doing what we would call alternative or complementary medicine and it was not the standard of
care and they lost licenses. And, I thought it eventually might come to Alaska. So, in the
years 1989 to 1990 I petitioned the Alaskan legislature to pass a bill protecting alternative medicine in the state. And, we were successful in the first run. We were too late in 89 in the session. In
1990 there was a monstrous overwhelming support from the population of Alaska. We got a bill passed that simply states that the medical board can not find us
incompetent for practicing unconventional or experimental medicine in the absence of demonstrable physical harm to a patient.
We became the first state to give statutory protection for unconventional and complementary or alternative medicine in the history of the country.
Since that time, I have expanded on what I do. I was already into the field called oxidative medicine.
I furthered that by doing ultraviolet blood irradiation therapy and teach that before national audiences. I also do ozone therapy, hydrogen peroxide,
chelation therapy, nutrition and I try to remain abreast of all the latest things that are out there in the exploding field that we call complementary medicine.
My medical Center is called Complementary Medicine Center. |