Q&A Webinar from May 27th, 2026

In this May 27th webinar, Tom opens with several announcements, including preparations for the upcoming New Biology Experience and the launch of the Cowan’s Community Corner.

Announcements:
-Today’s webinar will be shorter as the team prepares for the New Biology Experience next week.
-There will be no webinar next Wednesday while Tom is traveling, and possibly no webinar the following week.
-Tom shares excitement about the upcoming New Biology Experience, including music from Jude Roberts and Mike Merenda, talks from New Biology Clinic practitioners, good food, and community connection.
-The first general membership monthly meeting with Tom on Cowan’s Community Corner took place that morning, offering members a place to ask live questions and connect.
New Biology Experience link here.
Sign up for C3 here.

Questions discussed in this webinar include:
-How to get off Dovato, which is an HIV AIDS medicine.
-What is the best strategy for getting off prescription medicines safely?
-Why are people who are medication-naive often easier to support than those who have been on prescription drugs for years?
-What happens when people stop HIV medications abruptly?
-What is the actual mechanism behind drugs like Dovato?
-What is a “viral load” and what does it actually measure?
-What is a CD4 count and what does it actually show?
-Is scoliosis caused by vaccines?
-Is there another way to approach scoliosis besides rods and spinal stabilization?
-What role do movement, posture, barefoot activity, and flexibility play in spinal health?
-Why does Tom compare the spine to bamboo?
Throughout the webinar, Tom emphasizes gradual transitions when coming off prescription medicines, looking at the whole person rather than isolated diagnoses, and supporting strength and flexibility through movement, nourishment, and lifestyle.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, welcome everybody. Today is another Wednesday webinar. Today is May 27th, 2026. And thanks everybody for joining me. So uh just a few announcements. So, first of all, today is going to be a short webinar, half an hour. Um, we're all busy getting ready for the new biology experience and very excited for that next week. Um, and you can find the link to that. And because of that, uh there will be no webinar next Wednesday, and probably not the following week, although I may do a recap of the new biology experience of the following Wednesday, but definitely not. This coming Wednesday, the next week, a week from today, is I'll be traveling that day. And we're all very excited about that. And I just happened to see Jude Roberts and Mike Morenda, who are going to be the musicians, and so that's very exciting. And we talked, I talked to all the practitioners, and pretty much everybody's gonna be there. So you'll get to meet your uh practitioners at the new biology clinic, and we're gonna have a lot of uh interesting talks, meeting a lot of people, good food, great environment. And I hope to see as many of you there as possible. Uh that was the main thing. We had our first um meeting of the Cowans community this morning of the general membership. So that's something if you want to be part of that and want to be able to ask live questions, uh, that's the place to go. And we'll put a link in how to become a member of the Cowan Circle community or community circle. So that's the other exciting thing that's happening. Um I think that's it for announcements. Let me just check. Uh yeah. So I got a whole bunch of questions, so I just put a few that may be of general interest, uh, or maybe not. We'll see. Um just to do a short webinar today. So uh the first question was how to get off Dovato, which is an HIV AIDS medicine. And I would say I would try to generalize that by how to get off any prescription medicine that you've been prescribed or taking. And the person wanted to know my experience with that. Uh the the first thing is I would definitely be remiss in in not saying that this can be a very tricky problem. And so this is something that you want to work with an experienced practitioner who is well versed in taking people off prescription medicines, and pretty much everybody at the new biology clinic would fit that bill. And there's a lot of benefits from working with somebody who's actually had experience with this. Um because or maybe, yeah, I guess because or as as a consequence of working in San Francisco as a doctor for 17 years, I did see a fair amount of AIDS patients, although I would say that the AIDS patients in San Francisco, even though it was one of the epicenters of the AIDS situation, um tended not to be particularly interested in most so-called alternative or holistic medicine. They were definitely into some things, particularly like weight training and fitness stuff, but not so much into a different way of looking at the whole causation of AIDS um or anything to do with uh with how otherwise to treat it besides taking anti-AIDS drugs. In fact, I would say go so far as to say there was a bit of a stigma and a uh hostility towards anybody who didn't see the miracle of the uh AIDS drugs. My experience with this, which is true with a lot of other prescription medicines, I would say high blood pressure medicines, thyroid medicines, many heart medicines, uh immune system, so-called medicines, chronic antibiotic use, uh, and probably many others that I'm forgetting right now, um, was that people who were medication naive, in other words, never took any drugs, were way more easier to treat successfully and restore to normal health than the people who had taken the conventional drug treatment for whatever it is, the hypothyroidism, their Crohn's disease, their chronic infections, their AIDS or whatever it was, uh, and the longer they took their pharmaceutical medicine, the more difficult it was to get them off, and the more troublesome it was in the weaning process. So if you're somebody who's been on a prescription drug for more than say six months, even maybe three months, uh, you can expect to have a lot more difficult time than if you had never been on the drug uh ever. So again, and I've said this before, a person who came to me with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism based on symptoms and their laboratory results, which I would also question, but I'm not going to get into that right now, were way easier to bring back to normal, normal functioning and even normal uh laboratory tests than the person who'd been on either syntroid or armor uh thyroid or any of the so-called natural thyroid hormone replacements for 20 years, 10 years, or even six months. Way easier. And the same thing also went with my AIDS patients. The people who came to me with an AIDS diagnosis, uh, with either with symptoms andor laboratory tests that allegedly confirmed that they had HIV, who had never taken any of the AIDS drugs, you could almost always reliably predict and say that they would could be um sort of helped to regain normal function and regain a normal life. Whereas this was not the case with people who had been on their HIV drugs for six months or a year or even 10 years. So I would first of all keep that in mind uh when you're thinking about your course of action here and how likely you are to be successful. Uh generally speaking, uh, just to get into the practical details and then I'll get into a little bit about what this uh drug is, the the regimen that I used for most drugs uh was that whatever the dose that they were maintained on when they first came to me, uh I would half the drug along with the other recommendations that I would give them right off the bat, and then check them in a fairly short time, usually a week or maybe two weeks, depending on the situation. And that would be mostly a check in person and the question of how you're doing and what have you noticed as any changes. And that was way more important to me than doing any laboratory tests, although there were times when I would do laboratory tests in the follow-up period. But I would say well over 90% of it was how are you doing? And if they were doing fine, then I would continue on uh for another two weeks with half of that dose. So if they were on 100 milligrams of a drug, then I would have them go 50 for two weeks. And if all things were fine and they were doing well even better, then I would do 25. And sometimes this necessitated actually getting like a pill cutter and physically cutting the drugs in half. And I never worried that I got it exactly 25 or maybe 22 in some and 26 in another, but I didn't worry about that. Uh, and then I would go another two weeks, and then I would go to half of that, and then keep going for probably five to six rounds. Now, depending on how long the person had been on the drugs, um I would say at least half of the time, and maybe even up to say 80%, and some drugs worse than others, psychiatric drugs almost always, uh, the AIDS drugs almost always. You would go for uh two weeks, and the people would start having symptoms again, some of the same symptoms that originally brought them to medical attention. And then I wouldn't do the next two-week lowering. I would just keep it at that dose, even for another two weeks, another month, another six weeks, even up to another six months. Uh, there was times when I would wait even six months, and I would wait until their symptoms got better and they would equilibrate and feel sort of normal again, or even better than when they started, and that had the opportunity to let some of the other things that we were doing, diets and certain maybe other approaches, uh, to give them a chance to work. And so at the end of the day, it sometimes took up to a year or even sometimes longer to fully wean them off whatever drug they were on. And I never really worried about how long it took. Uh, I just worried about doing it safely and judiciously, meaning I would lower it, see how they did. If they were fine, I would keep lowering. If they weren't, I would let them equilibrate. And I also found that the lower the dose, so at the end of maybe the first cycle was usually pretty easy, and then you would lower it. At the second cycle, usually went well, and then it was the third, fourth, fifth, and sometimes sixth cycle of having the dose where you were almost with a very small number of milligrams or whatever the uh quantity was. That's when you would start to see more symptoms come back, and because the disease was not being suppressed as much. So those are the ones that I would typically string out. And so that was my general approach to pretty much uh getting off any prescription medicine, whether psychiatric medicine, hormones, antibiotics, uh, immune suppressant medicine, or these HIV drugs. Um I just wanted to make a comment on this drug called Dovato, which is a one of the standard, it's a two-drug, uh so-called anti-retroviral drug. Um and it can consists of two different chemicals that I'm sure I'm going to butcher the names of. So dilute gravir is the first one, and that's a so-called integrased strand transfer inhibitor. The second chemical is called limivudine, and that's a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor. So I took the opportunity to take a look at a paper that uh because what I did was asked this first drug, what is the proof that the mechanism of action of this uh chemical is inhibiting the integration strand transfer factor? So essentially what that means is the theory of these antiretroviral drugs is that they're a strand of RNA, like the coronavirus allegedly, and this strand has to is encapsulated in a protein, and somehow this encapsulated strand of RNA by some miracle is able to penetrate into the body of the cell, which is uh something that has also never been seen. I mean, the virus has never been seen in the first place, um, but that uh strains credulity a little bit, and then it goes from the cytoplasm, the body of the cell, and again, it somehow breaches the nuclear membrane of the nucleus of the cell, with no idea how that happens, and so that allows the RNA to be injected into the nucleus of the cell. Now, the virus then has a uh integration factor, so there's some uh chemical protein that the virus codes for and makes, and so that comes along with it into the nucleus and facilitates the integration of this RNA into the genome, the DNA first it uh converts it from RNA into DNA, that's the nucleoside reverse transcriptase enzyme. So that's the first thing in the nucleus, uh converts the RNA into DNA, and then this DNA is integrated into the genome, uh, the DNA of the host, where it convinces by some mechanism the host to make uh millions of copies of this newly integrated strand of DNA in the nucleus, and then it gets reconverted back into RNA and then uh reunites itself with the protein capsule or coating, buds off of the cell, and then you get a million new copies from just a few that entered the cell. So I went looking uh by uh putting in the into a search engine uh uh the evidence that this mechanism is actually how it works. And I didn't spend a whole lot of time on this, but let me show you what I found. So here is a paper. This is the first uh of the two of the chemicals found in this drug called Dovato. So it's an integrated strand transfer inhibitor for the treatment of HIV in adults. So here it is, and it says it goes through the HIV viral life cycle, consists of absorption of the virus into the host cell, then it integrates uh uh into the host RNA, reverse transcriptase to DNA via the reverse transcriptase enzyme, and integration into the nucleus via integrase enzyme. Then within the nucleus, uh proviral DNA is assembled and then transcribed to RNA. The RNA is translated into protein, assembled, and buds off from the host cell after budding. The virion matures via protease, is then considered infections. Uh so that's the so-called life cycle, and so any HIV treatment is to interrupt at some part of this. Uh so then they say how well they do, and here's the different types. So, how do you know that this happens? Um here's what they say: the efficacy of this medicine is measured by reduction of the HIV RNA known as viral load, and the increase in the CD4 cell count. Now, the interesting thing about those is those none of neither of those actually measure anything to do with what they just said. A viral load means that they take some tissue or blood of a person, they amplify it with the PCR process, so-called, and the more of these um pieces of RNA get amplified, that's called a viral load. Now, the problem with that is that the more the person is breaking down, in other words, the more sick they are, if we even believe that a PCR is amplifying anything, then the higher the viral load, and it has nothing to do with any evidence of any virus. All it has to do with, uh, according to in their own terms, is the amount of broken down or free pieces of RNA or DNA are in the tissue. So again, there's no part of that story that has anything to do with viruses. Uh so they make up the story to say that people who have more of these little pieces, not knowing the origin of these little pieces, that's those pieces must be from the virus. And so that's called a viral load. A CD4 count is a measure of a protein that is allegedly made by the person, and again, has nothing to do with proving any of this stuff about the integration or synthesis of any viral particles or even proving there's a virus. All it says is that there's certain non-specific antibody which is made, or uh protein, which is made more when you're really sick and less when you're not so sick, and there's no evidence, there's no uh like specificity in what the mechanism of sickness actually was from a CD4 count. So that's what they're measuring here. So they're not measuring or proving that any of this has anything to do with uh all this stuff about how a virus was made or what this integrase is. And then I looked further to see if there was anywhere in this paper where they actually tried to document uh this mechanism. And so here's another one. This drug inhibits the action of the viral enzyme integrase by binding and antagonizing the integrace active site. This prevents HIV from incorporating its DNA into the DNA of the host, thus blocking the strand transfer step of retroviral DNA integration. Um this is their proposed mechanism, and they have a reference, which then, if you look down at the reference, this is from the package insert. And so when I looked in there, there was no uh proof or evidence or even attempt to document that this was doing anything like what they say it's doing. So again, this is just a story, and they also talk about how when you put these drugs into a cell culture, the cell culture has less. Free DNR or DNA, less breakdown of the cell culture, which all that means is somehow this drug is inhibiting the breakdown of the cell culture, and there's no evidence that it's killing any virus, or no evidence that there's any virus as part of this. And so we're left with a wild story that's made up that we have that has no proof that it has anything to do with what they say it does. All they can say is when you take this drug, you're uh having less breakdown products in your blood, and some of the chemicals that they allege to have something to do with your immune system temporarily get better. Now, if you happen to stop this from one day to the next, the breakdown will be worse than ever, and you will have rapid decline, and you will have um even really bad outcomes can happen. I've seen that. So if you've been taking this for more than a few weeks, you cannot just stop this. It has nothing to do with the um recurrence of the so-called viral infection. And it's very difficult, uh maybe impossible for me to say, so what is this drug actually doing? I think it for sure has an anti-inflammatory effect, and it has to do with the uh energy dynamics of the person. And so when you stop it, it changes how your body makes energy, and that seems to have a dramatic rebound effect, and so the people who take this have to take it for life, except if they do the weaning technique and the uh type of things which we will help you with at the New Biology Clinic. So, to recap, uh, I gave a strategy for uh how to uh get off this drug or pretty much any other drug. Uh, the mechanism that they say it works, uh, as far as I can see is totally unproven and in fact uh can't possibly be because it all um emanates from or comes from the whole virus story, which we all know isn't true, and that you definitely see a rebound effect for people who stop this from one day to the next. So that's not something you want to do. What you want to do is integrate a whole other way of looking at this problem from both a physical and emotional and psychological and energetic and every other way you can look at this person's life. Because, as we say it in the clinic, you don't have a disease, you are the disease. And the question is not what you should take, but what you should do and how you should conceive of your life differently, and how you should act differently, and see the trajectory of your life in a different way, and that hopefully will lead you to be able to successfully wean off this and pretty much any other drug. Uh so I only have a few minutes left, and let me just jump to another one. Somebody asked about scoliosis and is this caused by vaccines, and uh is there some other way to treat it by with rods? And I had actually never heard a direct connection between vaccines and scoliosis. Scoliosis means a curvature, an abnormal curvature of the spine. Um but so I can imagine there's a number of factors that uh end up with this sort of usual sort of teenage onset scoliosis. And I would say I would I can't imagine a situation where I would have recommended never once did somebody to put a rod in to so-called stabilize it. I think the things you want to look at are uh overall the integrity of this musculoskeletal system, and in particular, to see this not so much as a problem of misalignment of the bones or the vertebral bodies of the spine. Those are like the if you can picture bamboo, bamboo is very much the picture in nature of the spine. Uh it has intervertebral discs and then vertebral bodies, and it keeps going up. And interestingly, bamboo is in other ways, not just physically the picture of the spine, but what you want your spine to be is uh strong and flexible. Uh if it's strong and rigid, that's a problem, and that's what happens when you put a rod in. And if it's not strong but flexible, that's also a problem because then you're too flexible and things will become out of alignment. And this strength and flexibility, which is sort of epitomized in nature as a by the bamboo, which is also, by the way, why bamboo can be a powerful medicine for treating uh weakness of the spine. Um, and I would use it as uh bamboo salts, and there's bamboo preparations, and bamboo is allegedly the highest in uh plant food in silica. So it's really a living quartz crystal, and a living quartz crystal is the picture of strength and flexibility. Um, it also has a lot to do with muscle tension, and if you have a chronic uh imbalance in the way your muscles are working, either because they're too weak or because your uh posture is off, or your balance is off, or you're moving in an abnormal way. And this has a lot to do with wearing shoes and not walking and not walking barefoot and all these things uh that naturally uh how humans live increase the strength and flexibility by constant input into how your spine, uh how the muscles that line your spine and create sort of tension, um, how they should be reacting to the uneven terrain and the movement of your feet. And all this is connected down into the earth. And as soon as we put ourselves in shoes and we do too much abnormal movement, like focus only on one activity, or do no activity, or only this kind of activity, or even the focus too early on only one sport, uh children should be moving, jumping, running, playing, uh, all kinds of movements, swimming, uh climbing rocks, climbing trees as much barefoot as possible. And that's how you create healthy uh in sort of uh muscle tone on both sides of the spine, which then pull in an even way, and they don't pull the spine out of alignment. So if none of that is happening, then the spine can get permanently or semi-permanently, uh, they say, fixed in this abnormal position. It's not permanently fixed. And the treatment is uh a combination of living silica like bamboo and movement, especially the primal movement and all those uh barefoot movement activities that I just said. Um, and also eating a diet that helps the integrity of your um bones and cartilage and soft tissue, and that would be something like nourishing traditions with lots of bone broths and other uh good food in it. So hopefully that will give you some idea of what you can how you can think about scoliosis, and the last thing I would ever do is fix the rigidity because then you have rigidity, strength without flexibility, and that's a huge problem. Okay, again, I uh wanted to do only a short video this time, and there won't be a video next week. Next week uh I will be traveling to the New Biology Experience, where I hope to see as many of you there as possible, and we're looking, we're hoping to have a great time and lots of learning and making friends and all the rest of it. So, again, thanks everybody for listening, and I will see you in a few weeks.