Those Were The Days, My Friends

The Times, They Are A-Changin’

I was recently informed by Jonathan Collin, founder, and publisher of this beloved and wonderful journal, that there is no longer enough financial support to continue the print version of the Townsend Letter. I (and, until the last few years, Bob and I) have been contributors for nearly three decades. Quite a blow! And, my Facebook feed today, greeted me with a rendition of “Those Were The Days, My Friend” by Mary Hopkins, 1968. I happened to be studying in France that year. I remember it well… the famous Paris student strikes, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I had no words to explain that to Europeans in any language.

Our Bastyr graduating class of NDs (1983) is about to celebrate its 40^th anniversary—four decades in practice! Some of us will see each other again for the first time since graduation! After being on tenterhooks for a number of years, the FDA has recently released its report on homeopathic remedies to the White House. There is much concern, alarm, and speculation on what might happen to their availability. Big Pharma has long wanted to cash in the marketing of our remedies. They have been extremely affordable up to this point. We sold our self-care kits, until the manufacturer was unwilling to continue making them several years ago, for about $100 for fifty remedies, which had no expiration date! Since a dose is five to ten tiny pellets, they rarely ran out, except for Arnica, which was easily replaced. Think about it for a minute: a homeopathic kit for life that costs next to nothing! Imagine the cost of pharmaceuticals, either over-the-counter or prescription, that would have been needed to treat all of those conditions!

The FDA wants to require that each individual homeopathic remedy (worldwide there are currently 8000+ individual ones) be considered a unique medicine, requiring extensive and expensive testing prior to approval. This would bankrupt the manufacturers and vendors of homeopathic medicines. I have heard that homeopathic infants’ teething tablets, manufactured for decades by Hyland’s, were bought out, the formula changed, and the price hiked way up.

On a personal level, I recently celebrated my 75^th birthday (February 10^th)! Bob and I, after enjoying a bicontinental life in two wonderful places, have just put our southern Chilean paradise on the market. Rarely does a month go by, at this age, when there isn’t some news of a friend’s, or colleague’s, or acquaintance’s illness or passing. My parents lived nearly to 90 and I am far healthier than they were, but seven and a half decades is already a good run! I hope that you loyal readers will indulge me with sharing some nostalgia, rather than presenting a homeopathic case.

The Beginning of Bastyr

I moved to the Pacific Northwest back in 1973, almost fifty years ago. Seattle was a friendly, easy-to-live, and easy-to-love place back then. As a 25-year-old, peace-loving, meditating, vegetarian backpacker, I felt right at home. Nearly everyone I knew shopped at PCC (Puget Consumer’s Coop), which had begun as a food-buying club of fifteen Seattle families in 1953. (REI, Recreational Equipment, headquartered in Seattle, had a similar beginning.) When I arrived in Seattle, there was only one PCC, in Ravenna. It took an hour to do my shopping because I would run into so many friends! PCC now has over 58,000 members, fifteen locations, and is the largest consumer-owned food cooperative in the United States. The popular Sunlight Café on Roosevelt Avenue, founded in 1976, which is still around, began with food-sampling gatherings at some close friends’ home in Wallingford. I do believe the recipe for their famous lemon tahini dressing is mine, though I couldn’t swear to it. I rented a tiny, one-bedroom house with a veggie garden in Kirkland for $95/month. Massage training became popular (we had to get fingerprinted for licensure in order to make sure we were aboveboard). Mother Morgan’s Gumbo Factory served up dirty rice on Capitol Hill, and life was good. I got my MSW in psychiatric social work at the UW and the famous “Ave” was still a safe and delightful place, in contrast to recent years.

It was in 1978, a few years later, that I went to a gathering of about fifteen to twenty folks on Roosevelt Avenue, where the founders announced the upcoming opening of John Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine. I enjoyed working with psychiatric patients, but I was deeply disturbed by the debilitating side effects of the meds of the time. I felt chills up my spine at that gathering, and I decided immediately to embark on a new, pioneering career. Having been treated by Dr. Bastyr for a stubborn cough upon arriving in Seattle (I can still hear his deep, sweet voice telling me, “Why, that’s a Rumex cough”), I recognized destiny calling.

After slogging through a year of chemistry prerequisites, I joined the second class of Bastyr in the fall of 1979. Some of the classes were great and others mediocre, at best, but we did learn botanical medicine (from the wonderful Bill Mitchell, ND), nature cure (from the inimitable Esteban Ryciak), and, my favorite (not surprisingly): homeopathy (from Dean Crothers, who became my first mentor as well as turning me on to golden retrievers). We were young, enthusiastic, curious, idealistic, and dedicated. The term “naturopathic medicine” was pretty much unknown in Seattle at the time, but that was soon to change.

Those Were the Days

I taught classes in stress management, raw foods, fasting, and “Healthy Foods for the Backpacker” at the UW Experimental College. That is also where Rick Steves got his start, around the same time, offering classes on cheap European travel. Seattle traffic wasn’t bad and Green Lake wasn’t crowded for walking or running.  I had bought my first house in the Central District (CD) for $36,000 (it had sold a couple of years before for 18K). My mortgage was a little over $300/month. Two roommates and I split the mortgage three ways till Bob moved in. At the end of the first year, I called the mortgage company puzzled, as to why my principal hadn’t gone down. We were all pretty naïve! I ran in the mornings in the Arboretum with my dog, Habiba, never worrying for a moment about my safety. Food was cheap, too. I still have the menu for The Golden Temple vegetarian restaurant on Sandpoint Way. It is worth a good laugh to see that the main dishes were under $2, and smoothies about 50 cents! Seattle was a fun, cheap, safe, great place to live!

I graduated from Bastyr in ’83. Our class had doubled in size due to the bankruptcy of a naturopathic college in Northern California. After my practicing in another ND’s office for a year or two, Bob and I opened the Northwest Center for Naturopathic Medicine in the U District near Roosevelt, in a beautiful vintage home. Besides us, we had a chiropractor, a couple of MDs, counselors, colonic and massage therapists, and a public hot tub. We rented out the living room in the evenings and weekends for public events. Bob and I wrote a natural health column for The New Times. We also studied Ayurveda, and we made a number of pilgrimages to India and were quite dedicated to our spiritual paths. During that initial phase of our practice, we did quite a bit of counseling of various sorts, and hypnotherapy, as well as homeopathy.

A Rebirth of Homeopathy

The 1970s heralded a rebirth of homeopathy in the US, after having been underground since the Flexner Report of 1910! George Vithoulkas’ (a Greek engineer enamored with homeopathy) courses were going strong. He provided a dire warning in The Science of Homeopathy (published in 1984) about what would happen if our society continued in the direction of conventional medicine, lifestyle, and drugs. How right he turned out to be! I remember a room full of us homeopaths in Edmonds gathered together, hanging onto his every word. I even remember the question I asked him…. about when to prescribe a 200C remedy!

Bob and I were instructors at International Foundation for Homeopathy (IFH) in Seattle. Our classes were pretty much the only game in the country for homeopathic training for health professionals, outside of the two naturopathic colleges. We drew students from across the US, hosted the instructors at our Edmonds home (along with other wonderful teachers like Vasant Ladd, the famous Ayurvedic doctor with whom we had studied). We were on the board (I eventually became President) of the IFH, and I was also vice president of the Homeopathic Academy of Naturopathic Physicians. We were fervently committed to homeopathic practice and teaching. Our IFH clinical case conferences were excellent and attracted homeopaths from across the country. The IFH publication, Resonance, was one of the most highly respected sources for cured homeopathic cases. Bob and I started writing our Townsend Letter column around 30 years ago.  Blue Cross ran a pilot program for natural medicine just as we moved our clinic from the U District to Edmonds, and we changed the name of our clinic to The Northwest Center for Homeopathic Medicine. Ironically, we continued to practice just a block away from Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door for nearly 25 years.

In 1993 we discovered our teacher, homeopathic doctor Rajan Sankaran. That led to a dramatic change in our professional lives. In January 1994, about a dozen of us from the US and Europe attended Rajan’s first foreigner’s course in Mumbai, India. We were humbled and inspired—enough to change our practice style dramatically and to begin writing what eventually turned out to be nine books (eight on homeopathy). We faced opposition and derision from some of our self-appointed “Hahnemanian” homeopathic colleagues, who found Rajan’s methodology heretical. But we witnessed amazing results among our patients as well as the hundreds of videoed cases of our Indian colleagues.

Ritalin-Free Kids struck a nerve with the public as an alternative to Big Pharma for ADD, and we were invited to give seminars across the US and abroad. We treated adults and countless numbers of kids whose parents were searching for an alternative to stimulant medication. Devastatingly, it was just the beginning of the “autism epidemic,” and we began to attract a growing number of children on the spectrum. It is a trend that, personally, I still find way beyond tragic.

As naturopathic medicine became more mainstream, many NDs wanted to prescribe conventional drugs. This made no sense to us. It reminded me of what George Vithoulkas had warned against. Bob and I were among a small minority of NDs in Washington who did not opt to get certified to prescribe conventional medications. With our education and armamentarium in natural medicine, why, we asked, walk down the path of conventional medicine and Big Pharma? But we were the minority. I believe fewer than 20 of us among 100+ NDs waived the option to prescribe drugs.

Now, Nearly Forty Years Later

Many of our friends and colleagues have retired and others have left this earthly realm. The practice and availability of homeopathic medicine and nutritional supplements has been limited, and in danger in Europe and the US. There are current endeavors to promote homeopathy: the film at introducinghomeopathy.com and a concerted effort on the part of Americans for Homeopathy Choice. Now, more than ever, we need to do everything possible to ensure that homeopathic remedies continue to be available in the US. Please take action NOW: https://homeopathychoice.org/insider19/.  Homeopathic care is no longer covered by the national health care system in the UK, nor is homeopathy taught at the medical and veterinary colleges in Spain.

From the grapevine, I hear that both Bastyr and NCNM (now called National University of Natural Medicine) took a hard hit during the pandemic and are struggling financially. Bob and I drove by my old house in the Seattle Central District (CD) five or six years ago, on the way to have lunch at the inimitable Café Flora. The house, along with the decades-old cherry tree whose bounty we had picked from the roof, had been recently razed to make room for yet another townhouse. Everything seems to be adrift. Not to even mention global climate change, which we have been able to experience firsthand on two continents!

I want to express my deep admiration and gratitude to Jonathan, and to all of you who have worked closely with him to produce this valuable material for so long. These include the authors, researchers, clinicians, and contributors as well as, of course, you readers and supporters. We have all been so tremendously fortunate and blessed to have the freedom and destiny to help others heal through natural medicines and therapies. I believe that it is more vital now than ever before to promote and practice methods of healing that honor and support our beloved, beleaguered planet. I hold the firm conviction that natural medicine and homeopathy are needed more than ever! That was affirmed recently by a new patient and his son, who had been raised from infancy using our book, Homeopathic Self Care. Knowing that surely warmed my heart and made it all seem worthwhile. Change is inevitable, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier.

Published May 20, 2023