An Interview with Dr. Harris Coulter

by Tedd Koren, D.C.

TK: How did you get interested in medical history?
HC: Through homoeopathy.  I knew from personal experience that homoeopathy was highly effective; in fact my research revealed that homoeopaths are as good or better than today’s best allopathic or orthodox medical physicians.  They were certainly superior to 19th century physicians who used bloodletting and mercurial cathartics.  Yet my medical friends called homoeopathy quackery and the AMA tried to destroy it!  I wondered: ‘If homoeopathy works so well, why was it being attacked?  Why was it disappearing?  Why wasn’t orthodox medicine disappearing?
I studied the allopathic criticisms.  My background as a political scientist enabled me see the attacks on homoeopathy as simply propaganda, the same that every special interest group uses against competition.  In fact, I thought homoeopathy was about to disappear completely and Divided Legacy would be its epitaph.  Happily, however, it helped signal its rebirth. 

TK:  What is Divided Legacy about?
HC:  I realized the fight between homoeopathy and allopathy was the modern version of a much wider war, that between two completely different healing philosophies: Vitalism, to which chiropractic, homoeopathy, and acupuncture (among others) subscribe, and Mechanism, the philosophy of orthodox medicine.  This clash has existed from the earliest times (circa 400 BC) to today.

TK: Would you explain “Vitalism” and “Mechanism?”
HC: Vitalism, also called Empiricism, is a recognition that the laws governing the living organism differ from those of lifeless matter.  For example, living organisms’ functions cannot be entirely explained by the laws of physics, chemistry and mechanics.  Further, organic beings are reactive, intelligently adapting to their environment.  Collections of chemicals cannot do that.
Mechanism or Rationalism sees the body as a machine made up of lifeless chemicals, passive before life’s assaults, and unable to defend itself.   From this perspective all symptoms are bad and should be suppressed.  The body’s inherent self-healing ability is essentially ignored.
In practice theVitalists are interested in treating the person, the Mechanists are interested in treating the condition.  Mechanists are very interested in naming, describing, diagnosing and treating the condition they believe the person has, rather than trying to understand the unique person who has a condition.  Individuality is ignored.
Vitalism has never been disproved by biochemical or biophysical experimentation; even less can it be refuted by arguments.  It can be confirmed or disproved only by treating patients.
Vitalist theory holds that the innate laws of the body’s reaction to environmental stress (sickness) and recovery become revealed in practice.

TK: How is Divided Legacy different from other histories of medicine?
HC: Other histories discuss discoveries in anatomy, physiology, and the like, but have always ignored therapeutics and disregarded theory.  Divided Legacy attempts to restore therapeutics to a central position, the position it has historically occupied.  It is not a dry discussion but a story of drama, politics and intrigue, heroes, villains and fools.  Divided Legacy is the most comprehensive history of medicine which has been written in this century.  It really does not have any competition.

TK:  Can chiropractors benefit from reading Divided Legacy?
HC:  Oh yes!  This same Vitalism/Mechanism clash exists in your profession between the traditional faction and the more medical faction.  A knowledge of the history of other such clashes will help chiropractors develop tolerance for one another and avoid the destructive internal clash that nearly destroyed homoeopathy and doomed it to a marginal existence from 1910 to 1970.
If chiropractic is to survive it should study the history of homoeopathy and osteopathy to avoid the mistakes they made, namely, allowing themselves to be co-opted by the medical model and exist as a separate profession in name only.  This is of course described in Volume IV of Divided Legacy.  Fortunately, chiropractors are fighters, and I don’t think they will be as short-sighted as the above two groups.

TK: What is it about chiropractic that makes it Vitalistic?
HC: Its respect for the wisdom of the body; that the body behaves purposively; that symptoms are part of the curative process, are meaningful and not to be suppressed; and that sickness is a reaction or struggle, which leads to reliance on the patient’s power of resistance. In general, chiropractic’s emphasis on unblocking the flow of nervous energy makes it, in my view, a vitalist doctrine.

TK:  Why do you say that Vitalism is more scientific than Mechanism?
HC:  Because it is a science of one individual.  As Aristotle said more than 2,000 years ago, “Medicine is not about mankind but about a particular man.”  Allopathy sees a patient as representing a larger group¾one person with lung cancer, for example, is not much different from someone else with lung cancer, even though they have different minds, body chemistry, etc., they are treated pretty much the same.  A discipline which cannot adjust treatment to the needs of the individual cannot be scientific.

TK: Why does allopathy always pollute the vitalist healing arts?
HC: The short answer is as follows.  (1) As Empirical movements grow larger and larger, they become organizationally structured, and those doctors that are more interested in bureaucratic management than in healing patients rise to the top and gradually take over; then these people become sympathetic to the Rationalist mentality and stop defending Empiricism.  (2)  As Empirical movements grow larger, the Rationalists steal their materials.  This happened in homoeopathy and appears to be happening in chiropractic as physical therapists, orthopedists and others are attracted to spinal care.

TK:  What has been the reaction to Divided Legacy?
HC:  Exactly what I expected from the beginning¾a slow and steady acceptance.  Even in allopathic medicine there is a more far-sighted minority, and Divided Legacy obviously appealed to them.  One prominent allopathic physician has told me that his colleagues ask one another if they have “discovered” Coulter yet.   My reviews, even in the allopathic journals, have been uniformly good, except for the very first one in the JAMA in 1974 where the reviewer complained that I used “concepts which are unfamiliar to most medical historians.”  I took that as a compliment.
Sales go up every year, and I think it is only a matter of time, perhaps a generation, before Divided Legacy gains a very large acceptance.

TK:  Did you think that DPT: A Shot in the Dark would be so successful?
HC:  When Barbara Loe Fisher and I started to work on this book, we thought the pertussis vaccine had some shortcomings but that, all in all, it was probably a good vaccine. But the more we studied it, the more dangerous we realized it was, and the dishonesty of the government scientists and bureaucrats who developed and kept defending it was revealed.  Eventually we hoped that our book would put an end to the pertussis vaccination program completely.  That hasn’t happened yet, but I believe it’s just a matter of time.  The book has sparked a grass-roots movement which will not soon die down.  Barbara went on to found the National Vaccine Information Center (in Vienna, Virginia) which is helping groups get organized.

TK:  Why did you write Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality?
HC:  As a result of the work we did creating DPT I realized that certain information we uncovered needed a book of its own.  We realized that childhood vaccination was causing a low-grade encephalitis in infants on a much wider scale than public health authorities were willing to admit, about 15-20% of all children.  Just look at the sequelae of encephalitis: autism, learning disabilities, minimal and not-so-minimal brain damage, seizures, epilepsy, sleeping and eating disorders, sexual disorders, asthma, crib death, diabetes, obesity, and impulsive violence¾they are precisely the disorders which afflict contemporary society. These conditions, many of which were formerly relatively rare, have become more and more common as the childhood vaccination programs have expanded.  It is acknowledged that vaccines cause encephalitis, in fact, pertussis toxoid is used to create encephalitis in lab animals. 

TK:  What is Controlled Clinical Trial about?
HC:  This is a critique of the so-called “controlled clinical trial” which I am tempted to liken to the “Holy Roman Empire” which was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire. The allopaths talk pompously about this so-called “gold standard” of medicine, whereas no “controlled clinical trial” matching the textbook definition has ever been performed. 

TK:  Why do you say that?
HC:  Because the theoretical requirements are unrealistic and unscientific.  How can you test a drug on 12 or 100 or 1,000 identical or “homogenous” people all with the same thing wrong with them?  Allopaths can’t even find five homogenous patients.  You’ll always find things that are different between people, because we are all chemically, physically, structurally, and emotionally unique.  The CCT can never tell a doctor how a given patient will react to a given drug at any given time.  The findings from the so-called controlled clinical trial are useless in one-on-one doctor patient interactions.  

TK:  Why has the CCT become so popular?
HC:  Politics.  It’s used as a stick to beat alternative medicine with¾for failing to perform these trials.  Since these trials are very expensive¾it costs about $200 million today to get a new drug on the market¾the controlled clinical trial is really an instrument for limiting competition in medicine, and for raising the costs of medicines to the public (which may be a good idea, since these drugs are, by and large, highly poisonous).   In my book I delve into the history of the CCT, and its politics as well as the “science” behind it.  As with all of my books, Controlled Clinical Trial is based 99% on the medical literature, making it a difficult argument to refute.

TK:  There are those who feel that chiropractic needs controlled clinical trials in order to be “scientific.”
HC:  That’s a ridiculous assumption.  Measuring is designed to classify the individual into a pre-existing category.  You say: ‘here is a disease or condition with the following parameters,’ and then you try to fit the patient into an existing disease class.  Empirically there is no disease class, every illness is a unique occurrence.  I think in chiropractic every subluxation is unique, I’d venture to assume that a subluxation complex in one person is different from that in another.  So trying to put unique people into general categories is not possible.  If every person is sick in his own unique way what is the purpose of measuring?  Remember, the purpose of measurement is to establish a disease category.  If you assume that each patient is different from every other one, as vitalist sciences such as homoeopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture do, then disease categories are not needed and impossible to construct since every patient is different.

TK: Tell us about AIDS and Syphilis: The Hidden Link.
HC: This book makes the point that the so-called HIV or AIDS virus is not the “cause” of AIDS.  When relatively healthy people are infected with HIV they develop nothing more than mono-like symptoms for a few days.  The true cause of AIDS is immune system weakening or collapse brought about in two ways: 1) through previous infection with the syphilis spirochete, known to be an immune-system weakener and/or 2) through excessive use of drugs¾marijuana, cocaine, antibiotics and other medicinal drugs, nitrous oxide, LSD, uppers, downers and immune-suppressing practices, such as anal intercourse (semen is immunosuppressive).  All this can weaken and damage the immune system.  This thesis is borne out epidemiologically: AIDS remains stubbornly confined to male homosexuals and drug addicts.  AIDS has not, and will not, “break out” into the general heterosexual population, nor affect most gays. 
But perhaps most telling is the fact that when AIDS sufferers were treated for syphilis, their AIDS disappeared!  The HIV hypothesis has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry and has yet to produce one cure.

TK:  Why isn’t the syphilis connection investigated?
HC:  For some of the same reasons childhood vaccination is not critically appraised: many political, professional and personal fortunes and reputations are at stake.  Also you have to realize that syphilis is a low-rent disease, no class, no prestige.  Allopaths have been messing with it for centuries and still can’t cure it.
Gays, on the whole, don’t like the syphilis theory because syphilis has a stigma attached.  If you have HIV infection you are an innocent victim, (why, I’m not sure),  but if you get syphilis it’s hard to be innocent. Also, as I discuss in my book, it costs a few hundred dollars a year to treat syphilis while one year of AZT, which doesn’t even work, costs $10,000.  And of course, MDs don’t like to hear that their drugs, such as antibiotics, weaken the immune system.
You have to understand that the medical establishment, as an interest group in society, follows the sociological rules which govern any interest group, namely 1) it is never at fault under any circumstances, and 2) someone else (the patient) is always at fault.  An example of the medical profession’s unwillingness ever to admit fault is seen in the history of bloodletting.  Phlebotomy was phased out slowly in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, but it was never stated to have been an error; indeed, the medical profession held, in the late 19th century, that the “nature of diseases” had changed from earlier times, that bloodletting was justified then, but was no longer needed in the new circumstances.

TK: Why is it that you have such a different outlook among medical historians?
HC: Because my first introduction to medicine was through homoeopathy.  I think it is much more scientifically tenable.  Also the fact that I had training as a political scientist makes me much more suspicious of self-serving statements; I can spot them a mile away.  Allopathy is full of such statements and I was able to see through the hype that most historians get lost in.

TK: Do you have any final message for chiropractors?
HC: Study history.  Just as the Vitalist disciplines have always stressed the unique life story of each patient as the key to understanding their care, so I have tried to unearth the history of the Empirical disciplines as the key to understanding their “health” and survival.  A philosopher said, “Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it,” and this is valid for chiropractic.  Study the history, struggles and mistakes of homoeopathy and osteopathy in order to preserve your wonderful profession, so it may thrive, flourish, and continue to benefit mankind.

Harris Coulter Ph.D., is perhaps the premier medical historian of our time.  His four volume magnum opus, Divided Legacy: A History of the Schism in Medical Thought, was completed over a 30 year period.  Bold and sweeping in its undertaking, it explores the past 2,500 years of therapeutics.   In Volume IV he discusses chiropractic, homoeopathy, acupuncture and osteopathy and gives these vitalistic healing arts the ammunition to take on the mechanistic medical monolith. Coulter’s other works are equally groundbreaking¾ DPT: A Shot in the Dark (written with Barbara Loe Fisher) has been credited for beginning the modern anti-vaccination movement.  It is among the most revealing explorations of childhood vaccinations ever written.   Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality reveals the long term effects of vaccine damage (including allergies, autism, learning disorders, ADD, hyperactivity, asthma, diabetes, weight and vision problems) as a post-encephalitic syndrome. Coulter claims that 15-20% of all American children are neurologically damaged by vaccination.  AIDS and Syphilis, The Hidden Link reveals AIDS to be the result of a drug and lifestyle-damaged immune system laid waste by syphilis, not HIV.  The Controlled Clinical Trial reveals the weaknesses of this “gold standard.”
Dr. Coulter lives in Washington D.C. “Near the National Library of Medicine,” he  adds, “the best medical library in the world.”  I interviewed Dr. Coulter in a restaurant in Philadelphia.

Dr. Harris Coulter’s books, Divided Legacy Vol 1V (hardcover, $50.00), DPT: A Shot in the Dark (paperback $10.95), Controlled Clinical Trial (paperback $12.00) and AIDS and Syphilis:  The Hidden Link (paperback $8.95) are available from Koren Publications.  By special arrangement 5 audio tapes of Dr. Coulter speaking on Vitalism and Mechanism, vaccination, and Divided Legacy  are also available exclusively from Koren Publications at 1-800-537-3001.  Koren Publications offers a complete refund if these materials don’t forever change your thinking.