The Contagion Question: What If We’ve Been Wrong About “Germs”

What if some of the most fundamental assumptions in modern medicine were never truly proven?

In this eye-opening episode of Beyond The Pills, I sit down with Dr. Tom Cowan, a physician known for challenging medical dogma and asking the kinds of questions most people are afraid to ask. From germ theory to viruses, from cancer to symptoms themselves, this conversation invites you to pause and think.

Not react.

Not argue.

But investigate.

Dr. Cowan approaches medicine like a Sherlock Holmes mystery: instead of asking “What do we assume is true?” he asks “What can actually be proven false?”

In this conversation, he explores:

1. Why science advances through falsification, not consensus
2. How certain medical narratives became dominant without being rigorously tested
3. Why symptoms may not be the enemy—but part of the body’s intelligence
4. The difference between treating with a “hammer” versus understanding the whole system
5. How agency quietly disappears when we outsource thinking about our own health

This isn’t about telling you what to believe.

It’s about showing you how to think.

If you’ve ever felt:

1. Confused by conflicting health advice
2. Disconnected from your own body
3. Dependent on systems that don’t fully explain themselves
4. Or quietly skeptical, but unsure how to voice it

This episode will resonate deeply.

You’ll come away with a new framework for evaluating health claims, a renewed respect for the body’s design, and a stronger sense of personal responsibility without fear, shame, or blind rebellion.

This is the heart of Beyond The Pills: Moving from passive consumption to conscious participation in your own well-being.

Listen now and decide for yourself what holds up under thoughtful inquiry.

If this conversation challenges you, share it with someone who’s ready for deeper dialogue—not easy answers.

And if you believe healthcare should empower people, not replace their thinking, make sure to follow Beyond The Pills for weekly conversations that question, explore, and elevate how we understand health, healing, and human potential.

Connect With Tom & Support His Work!

https://drtomcowan.com

https://www.drcowansgarden.com

https://newbiologyclinic.com

https://newbiologycurriculum.com

https://www.facebook.com/DrTomCowan

https://twitter.com/drtomcowan

https://www.instagram.com/talkinturkeywithtom

115_Tom_Cowan

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Join me and other practitioners as we guide you towards vibrant health, body, mind, and spirit, and move beyond symptom management into true healing. Hello everybody. Welcome back to Beyond the Pills. I'm your host, Josh Rimini, pharmacist turned healer, and today we have, uh. An interesting guest. He's a physician, he's an author, he's a speaker, and he is a longtime advocate for common sense, holistic approach to health and medicine.

His work challenges conventional medical narratives and invites a deeper exploration into the biology, energy, terrain, and the nature of health itself. Dr. Callen continues to lecture internationally and share his research through his websites, which we will go through, um, and give guys links to. But he now, he currently lives with his wife Linda, on a rural farmland in upstate New York.

Dr. Tom: I. I mean, I grew up in a family and there was a lot of doctors around us. My father and grandfather were dentists, uh, e even some pretty famous doctors. The guy who started, um, laser surgery and gynecology actually delivered me. He was a good friend of our family, uh, guy who started immunotherapy for cancer before they put him in jail for Medicare fraud.

Or what I thought. And so that allowed me to actually 'cause like UNRs bursting a dam. So I realized I was actually very interested in the subject. So I actually went to medical school knowing I wasn't going to do conventional medicine. Wow. Or, or I wouldn't have gone.

Josh: I, I love it from the very beginning.

You were testing the waters, but you wanted to learn more. That's amazing.

So I would, so I wrote, ended up writing books. You know, they say the heart pumps the blood, right? That's what everybody says, and turns out it's not true. They say blocked arteries cause heart attacks. Turns out it's not true. They say cancer has to do with genetics. DNA is a double helix. Turns out it's not true.

Now, I didn't know like why people had heart attacks. But I didn't, I wasn't starting with that question. I was science and Sherlock Holmes was investigation of claims. Falsifying claims. And that's what I've been doing my whole career.

Josh: Expand on that a little bit 'cause I, I think people are kind of.

The way I look, I've looked at it in my own career and life too, is like questions that deserve more questions and asking questions not to get the answer, but to ask more questions, you know?

Dr. Tom: Yeah. I'm talking about something a little different and I can ease, I can, I think I can ask you some questions and you'll see Exactly, and everybody listening will see exactly what I mean by that.

They went there. That's why you never saw a picture of your mother pregnant, et cetera, et cetera. Right? You with me? Yep. You go to your parents and say, is this true? And they say, yep, we didn't wanna tell you 'cause you know, we didn't wanna worry you, et cetera, but you were. And that clears up why he looks so different.

So he goes to his best friend and says, you know, I'm a little shook up. I just found out I was adopted. You know, it's a little rough. And the friend says, oh, so who are your real parents? And the guy says, I don't know. They got me from this orphanage in China. His friend says, until you tell me who your real parents are, I don't believe you're adopted.

Uh, but the process of si there is a claim, there is a thing called a virus. Heart pumps, the blood blocked arteries cause heart attacks, DNA is a double helix. So you go and try to falsify the claim. Like, are you adopted or not? You don't have to know like what causes, you know, heart attacks or what causes the alleged disease called chicken pox.

Josh: It's, it goes down the place. It's almost part of the, the, the biology of belief, right? In moving, moving people into this space where you have a, a perception, which is your reality, right? It's your perception of it and having that minded approach. Um, I know that you've had some controversy around that virus.

Um. Speech, you know, and looking at it from that perspective, can you give people a little bit more in depth thought process around that? Because I think their, their, their mind is spinning a little bit right now with that. And I think it's a great, I think it's a great conversation to have because talk to people a little bit about that process because they think that's where people are at.

They're like, it's that causal effect. It's like this versus that, this then that, you know.

It's not a mental image. It's a physical particle. That's a, that's the claim. And the physical particle has certain characteristics. It has protein, it has a DNA or RNA, the DNA or RNA code for the proteins. It often has a lipid X shell and it infects cells and makes them sick. That's what they say. So you say, okay, how did they prove that that particle exists?

They won't know. It's a stumping question. So, so here, so here's how, what people say, they say, well, I was, I got sick and then my wife got sick and so that proves it's a virus. Or, my daughter went to a party and she got chickenpox, and then her friend got chickenpox, allegedly. And so that proves it's a virus Now.

That's what you see. Do you agree with that?

Josh: Sure. Yeah.

Dr. Tom: Yeah. It's obvious you didn't see a virus, you didn't see contagion, you didn't see anything passed. So the principle, if two or more people or animals get sick, same symptoms, same time, same place. Does that mean the sick people made the well people sick?

So when you can't tell by looking or observing, you have to do a, a science, which means you have to do a controlled experiment, put some sick people with well people, and then put the same how same conditions, same emotional, everything, and then prove that it's the sick people that make the well people sick.

Okay, so now we know that sick people don't make well people sick. Now, how did they d prove that there was a virus? So here's one example. 'cause my guess is you, you can't answer that question, which is interesting. Maybe you can, but, um, let's take polio, right? One of the most famous viruses, so. They said polio means para sick.

And I read that and I said, excuse my French here, but like, what the heck? And they did this for like a hundred thousand monkeys over the next 50 years. To prove the isolation, right? There's no virus. Nobody looked for a virus. Nobody saw a virus, nothing. So then somebody decided to inject healthy spine into two monkey's brain.

Here's what he did. He took a child allegedly with measles, although they couldn't prove it, uh, took some of their mucus. Uh, GRA grounded up in a blender with horse serum calf serum f fetal bovine serum. They put, uh, kidney poison antibiotics. They took away the nutrients, inoculated that on growing monkey kidney cells, put some other chemicals and the kidney cells three days later died.

You know what happened? They died and he said it was indistinguishable. To this day, Josh, that is how they isolate and prove the existence of Ebola chickenpox, sars, cov two, mumps, smallpox, you name it. All the viruses. That is the way they isolate a virus. Hmm. It's nonsense. Josh.

And

Dr. Tom: yeah. Who are your real parents?

Josh: Well, yeah, like when and what are, what are we talking about? Because the world just came through CVID and all these things happened, and then like, there's this, so do you, do you feel it's a, people get sick because of belief or because they're, what? What, what's your, what's your process now when you're looking at it from your lens now?

Hmm. I'm not saying people didn't get sick. I'm not saying people don't die, but I'm saying that you can abs here. Here's an analogy, if you wanna say hammers, knock nails into walls, right? So what do you do? First of all, you don't, and you don't know whether there's hammers or not. You make a definition of what a hammer is.

It's just your arm waving. That makes the hammer go in the nail go, and you might even just think. Nail go in, but the nail doesn't go in it. Only when you hit it with the hammer, you can then say, I have shown there is such a thing as a hammer and it makes nails go in when you hit them, right? What if I said, Josh, uh, I don't need to do that.

For any virus causing any condition directly in any fluid or tissue of any sick person, right? Can you go to a pond and show me a frog? Can you go to a toolbox and show me a hammer? And all 220 of 'em said There is no paper demonstrating that that cannot be done. Now when I read that, I don't know about you.

Until people can start thinking like that. Once you do, I know it's not that, then we can start talking about, because if I start making claims, well, you get sick because you're delusional or 'cause you're poisoned, which is probably true, and I've given countless lectures on why people get sick, but. The, the re the point is I realize it does no good.

They start thinking, is that right? You know, et cetera. We have to focus right now on, we've been told lie after lie after lie about reality and life and what actually exists and makes people sick. And until you clear that out, Sherlock Holmes said, you'll never figure out who killed the guy. You have to get rid of that lies first.

Josh: Well, I think that's, that's a lot of where, where I think humanity is going and consciousness and moving some of these things into these new paradigms of, you know, getting out of the realm of. Linear thinking or Newtonian physics and moving towards things like quantum health and, and, and observing that a particle in a wave is the same thing.

It's just how you observe it and all these things. No, that's not true. Well,

Dr. Tom: how do you, how do you know? How do but see? I, 'cause I've investigated that claim and. You know, it's like, it's like the clay quantum physics they say, they talk about let's do an easier one. They talk about quantum by location.

Right. You've heard about that?

Josh: Yeah.

And I ran that by a physicist and he said, man, Tom, you're such an idiot. The house is obviously too big. It can't be at both places at the same time. So I said, how about my dog? No, too big. How about a fly? No. Too big. How about a bacteria that's pretty small. He said, no, it's too big. How about a nanoparticle?

It doesn't prove that at all. There's no way they could prove that it's, it's metaphysics, it's, or somebody said this is philosophy and actually lousy philosophy. 'cause doesn't even make sense. So what, what has happened is they have convinced you about things, uh, that you have no. Ability to understand or sense or observe yourself, which by the way, a guy named Albert Einstein, you've probably heard of him, uh, otherwise known as First Stone or Foundation Stone.

Josh: is, is it your thought around this in, in different ways? These are great conversations to have as if you can't see it, that it doesn't exist?

Dr. Tom: No. You can think things. You can feel things. And what, what? And what our whole clinic and approach to medicine is, you see when you go to a doctor, so what, why is this even relevant? Yeah. When you go to

Josh: a, that some people are thinking right now, right?

Dr. Tom: Yeah. So you go to a doctor, conventional doctor, or even a holistic or so-called functional doctor and is, in my opinion, they're treating you a with theories like the germ theory or hormone theory or vitamin theory.

In other words, you don't know what happened to you. You are a victim of this nasty virus. And so the Great God doctor has to help you prevent this from happening by stimulating your quote immune system, which is basically a joke because they say, what is the immune system based on antibodies? So in other words, you get a virus like measles and you make antibodies.

1984, I'm walking down the street. That's the year I graduated medical school. A guy named Robert Gallo gets on the television, says, I found the cause of aids, it's HIV. How do I know? Because some of the people with AIDS have antibodies and antibodies mean the virus is gonna kill you. And I looked at my friend and said, wait a minute, wait a minute.

I spent four years learning that antibodies mean I'm protected. This guy without any evidence at all says antibodies mean they're gonna kill you.

Right there on the top. It's all red and swollen. You can see it. So does she do that every day? Yes, she does that every day. What do you think the problem is? Do you think I have osteoarthritis or tendonitis? And I would say, no. You have wife hits you in the foot with a hammer syndrome. So if you don't wanna have that.

Uh, figure out why your wife is hitting you and stop it works a hundred percent of the time.

Josh: Well, that's, I guess that's the, the mo is that, is that the modern definition of root cause medicine? Right?

They said he had guion bere, and then he had some sort of paralysis. So I said, so what happened? He said, I was fine. Captain of the soccer team, you know, working my dad's machine shop. I ate everything I want. My mother took me in, I got a flu shot. What happened after that? Next, a week later, I was paralyzed from the waist down and I've been paralyzed for the last five years.

Then he went to six neurologists, all who told him they had nothing to do with the flu shot. And he said, so Tom, what do you think happened? So what I do, it did. I don't do it anymore. 'cause, uh, I told this story back to him. So, here's what happened. You were fine. You were soccer, et cetera. Your mother took you to a flu shot.

Because if you don't, I'm going somewhere else.

Josh: That's a pretty direct question.

Dr. Tom: Yeah. And that's what I would've said. And so I said, yeah, I think I do here, do this. You know, there's certain components in it in these injections, which are. Poisonous to the nerves do this, and six weeks later he was basically fine.

If you don't take the responsibility off the patient. In other words, if the patient says, what did I do to bring this on? You can't be a doctor. It's germs, bad genes, bad luck. Get over it.

Anything that, well, is it how I ate or what I think, or my wife, I hate my, my husband or whatever. No, none of that. It's just bad luck and yeah, I, I'm gonna fix it. 'cause you don't have any agency here.

It's like taking your agency back. Taking yeah. Taking control of your health in a way that's resonates you. Right. I think we all have agency, and I think that's part of the, the, the conversations we're having now around, let's call it modern day medicine, but big pharma. Food, whatever you wanna say is there's this conditioning around something on the outside and somebody on the outside telling you what's wrong with you and prescribing something to fix you, which literally manages the symptom.

And I think what you're, what you're talking about and what we've been having conversation around is the kind of the difference between disease management and taking away something to make you better versus restoring balance. And moving people towards that.

Dr. Tom: But here's the, here's the ma. Here's the main takeaway that I learned.

You go to the doctor, he says you have bronchitis, so he gives you drugs to keep it in your body. Next thing you know that happens twice a year for 20 years. And then you've got a bag of debris in your lungs, which they say, oh, now you got lung cancer. Uh, why did that happen? A, because you breathed in stuff in your lungs.

B, when your body tried to get it out, you stupidly thwarted it. And that even gets into what is cancer. Cancer is not as. Disease. It's like if somebody puts garbage in your house, you put it in a bag and take it to the curb. Somebody puts garbage in your body, you put it in a bag that's called cancer, and then you hopefully take it out like pooping it or sweating it, et cetera.

Josh: Well, I think that's a lot of the, the, the, what I feel is sort of this new, new, new way of thinking, right? Is like the absence of something is different than the body giving signals.

Right? And so what you're saying is kind of in that space you did, you wrote a, a book, cancer and the new biology of water. Um, let's, let's, let's unpack that a little bit. 'cause you know, there's, so how does water not genes become central to understanding health and cancer?

Dr. Tom: So, first of all, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate the existence of a gene.

Ribosomes, by the way, means rib of the body, which means they're mocking the Bible because that's where a human being is created. According to modern science, the rib of the body like get the joke anyways. Uh, so then they come. Then the ribosomes, you make the proteins now, then they tell us one pro, one gene makes one protein.

Anyways, the whole thing is basically nonsense. Um, so can't be jeans because we don't even know. I, I went to the original paper by, uh, Watson. I think it was either Watson or Crick. On that everybody links to, to show that that genes code for proteins and the first line of the paper, this is what they're referring to as the paper that proved this, that everybody followed up with.

You can prove that. And how do I know that? So they tell us that water exists in three, or all things exist in three phases, right? Solid liquid gas. Ice water, steam. So I asked myself years ago, I was an ER doctor a while ago, which phase of water is the water in our tissues? Well, it's not ice, right? It's not steam.

So it's gotta be liquid water, which is weird 'cause it doesn't feel like there's a bunch of liquid water floating around in our bodies. I saw people who were bayonetted and shot. You know, I was an ER doctor for a while to make money. Um, you know how many people I saw water squirting out of their liver?

People don't melt it and it accumulates. And there's a whole lot of other reasons behind that. But that's a quick, uh, synopsis of this is a problem of the organization, of the water. And we organize the water because we're exposed to the sun and we're exposed to the earth and we eat good food and we have the right amount of earth substances like minerals.

Water is not H2O, it's just water. Now, there are different kinds of earth elements, salts, but uh, that's when science stopped. They made up atoms. There's no evidence for atoms either. In fact, the, the whole Atoms story is interesting because there's basically two creation stories. There's Adam. So God created Adam, a DAM.

And then everything came into being and they got these atoms and they were like billiard balls, and they started colliding, and then they formed chemicals and then viruses, and then bacteria. Then monkeys and then you and Uncle Harry. But you had to have Aunt Sue and Uncle Harry at the same time in the same place.

Otherwise you have to start over 'cause that wouldn't work. And it's the cult of the bouncing billiard balls

that's called science. You look like you're not quite with me anymore.

Josh: No, I'm my, my, my neurodivergence, my brain that goes in many ways is just like,

Josh: No, they're thought provoking questions is, you know, stemming around these things is if you, you know, you're looking at it from a lens that has more like.

The word practicality in there, but like, it makes sense in some ways to go through this process and, and to understand things from a different perspective and some level of, I don't know, we can call it reality or truth at this point, um, is, is looking at it from these new biological components, right?

This way and manner in which you're speaking.

Dr. Tom: would guide it? It's the principles we're trying to figure out in our new biology clinic. So, you know, I retired and we started an online clinic and we have, I think seven doctors.

You know, one's a reti, a plastic surgeon, and one is a anesthesiologist by training. Yeah. Uh, family doctor. Two osteopaths. We have a nephrologist, we've had an oncologist. We've had a lot, you know. People who are saying this, this materialistic animistic approach doesn't work. It's fundamentally wrong. So what, what, how do you help another person who's not doing well?

It's, you're afraid of the dark or whatever it is, and that's your story. So just like I said with the guy getting hit with the hammer and the, and the guy with the flu shot, I have hundreds of stories like that. Everybody's different. You find the story, you stick with reality. There's no theories there, there's no, uh, there's just, here's what happened to me.

But, but there is a story now. I heard hundreds, thousands of times. After I, I would tell the story back to them, here's what you said. Tell me if I got it right. And the people would cry or laugh. Somebody finally heard their story and then they would say, I know it was that, whatever. What do I do about it?

The more you'll feel, the more you will see, the more you will, uh, be able to experience because you're not bound up with all this nonsense about, well, it must be a virus. So I don't have anything to do with it. No, it's wet. It's the food you're eating or that you hate being in this situation, or you're, you're injecting yourself with poison all the time.

That's what we do in the clinic.

Josh: That's very, um. A lot of my, let's call it the, the, I don't wanna call 'em trainings, but my experience with indigenous wisdom, indigenous healing, shamanic work, things of that nature is, is rooted around these thoughts that you're been creating now is like getting to the story and using the story and, and you're right, like half.

Dr. Tom: is the most

Josh: impactful thing I ever did. A hundred and, and you'll probably agree, right?

I'll literally get someone in my office and like, this is part of where I feel like the placebo goes from and it's like the biology of belief and thinking. It's like people being heard of their own stories is medicine. It's like, holy crap, somebody actually heard me. This is what you got me. And they, they leave.

I try to tell people like it's, it's not wrong or right, but what do we do when we don't like a diagnosis? What do we call it? We go somewhere else. We call it a second opinion, but in the beginning we call it a diagnosis. Like something was labeled to me that I have a thing. And I think moving past that into a place where people can take agency over their health.

And they can move it through their own lens, their own story, right. You said like there is, there is a space where everybody has an individualized approach to the things that they have in their own reality. And so we could probably talk through this on many, many occasions, but I really enjoyed this con.

Dr. Tom: So basically we, the central website is dr tom cohen.com okay. And we have three companies. One's called um, dr cowans garden.com, and there we make, uh, foods.

So, you know, we either make them or sell them that other people make. They're the best foods. The, you know, we get the best sources, we process them, right? Everything. Uh, so that's one. Then the Dr. Tom Cohen has information. I do a weekly webinar. We have the medicines that we use in our clinic and that I use in my practice.

That's our goal.

Josh: Well, I think that's. When ethics and intention are matched at the highest level, I think that's when we start to move our, our, our beyond approach. This, this, this way, manner in which we've move our thinking. Um, if you, you could leave the listeners with one guiding question to hold as they navigate this he health information, what would it be?

Once you do, your life will change in ways that you could not have imagined. But you have to be willing to be in that, I don't know, space.

Josh: I, I call it, uh, being, I call it being comfortable in the unknown. That's, that's how I would

Dr. Tom: get it. You gotta be comfortable. I don't know. I know it isn't true. I know there's no viruses.

Josh: I love, I love, I love that. From that perspective, I think, uh, we're, we're on the definite same page and, and looking at it from these new lenses. Great, Dr. Tom, this has been amazing. I know you have to go feed some goats now or things you do in your space 'cause Yeah, I gotta feed my goats. Um, I love it. Um, thank you so much for being a part of this mission and moving people beyond the pills and into these new light and into these new ways of thinking because I think that's in fact where, uh, we get our answers.

So great.

Josh: I appreciate you. All right guys. Bye-bye. Let's wrap. Until then, stay well. Thanks for joining me today on Beyond the Pills. If our mission to de-prescribe 10 million unnecessary medications resonates with you, share this episode, subscribe and leave a review.

Whether you're a practitioner or someone ready to reclaim your health, visit rx to wellness.com For free resources to begin your journey together, let's go beyond the pills and co-create a world of vibrant health and true healing. Until next time, live better and stay well.