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HEALTH THE HAPPY HOMEOPATH

Doc Rogers doesn’t fool with Mother Nature
By Eric Miller |

THE FIRST TIME I met the Doctor I never suspected he had anything to do with the noble profession of healing. Our first encounter was over a cup of coffee at a Pig Stand restaurant one cold winter evening a few years ago. Dr. Charles Layton Rogers-alias “the Doctor” or “Doc”-wanted to talk to me about doing a story on a Garland attorney who supposedly paid an assistant district attorney more than $100,000 to get a case fixed.

We talked for several hours that night, and for the next few years our paths crossed occasionally. Doc’s personality was intriguing, but the confidential information he came up with was even more puzzling. For instance, during one of our meetings, Doc talked of the Billy Carter/Libyan C-130 affair some time before it hit the newspapers. Another time, he slipped me a Nassau phone number for fugitive financier Robert Vesco, informing me that a house girl would answer the phone. I never asked how he knew these things. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know where Doc got his information, but I always figured that, as a reporter, one of the reasons I had lived to see 30 had something to do with my belief in the old Greek maxim (or is it Jack Anderson’s law?) that so wisely maintains, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Getting to know Doc, peering beneath the facade of the barrel-chested, jovial gentleman from Denton, was never as easy as acting on his tips. In fact, it wasn’t until about six months ago that Doc told me about his three-year battle with the state board of medical examiners over his right to become a medical practitioner. He also revealed for the first time to me that he was a formally trained doctor of homeopathy and had hung out an official shingle in his front yard. Rogers lives in the sleepy community of Shady Shores on the western side of Lake Dallas (his neighbors jokingly refer to the area as “Dr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”) In July, Rogers gained the approval of the FDA to manufacture his own non-prescription homeopathic remedies.

Now, his telling me he was a homeopath really didn’t compute, since I’d never even heard of such a creature. And when he started talking about crushing flowers and mashing herbs. . .well, I have to admit it sounded like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But we always listen to the American Medical Association. Why not listen to a man who practices a form of medicine that was good enough for the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Mark Twain and Gandhi?

What Doc told me was that a homeopath practices holistic medicine, a discipline that takes into account the entire body and mind and how they interact. He doesn’t perform surgery, and he rarely administers a drug to his patients. Instead, a homeopath gives his patients a “100 percent natural medication” that is derived from the earth’s substances. Whereas most drugs prescribed by medical doctors are synthetic and assist the body in fighting off illness, homeopathic remedies are instead supposed to trigger the body’s immune systems to gear up and fight the illness itself. For instance, a homeopath would give a person with a throbbing headache a minute dose of belladonna. A victim of a headache from overeating or excessive drinking would get a dose of nux vomica or of iris versicolor if the headache was a real whopper. A cough would call for a small dose of bryonia, antimonium tartaricum or ignatia; for indigestion, a homeopath might give his patient carbo vegatabilis, anacar-dium or pulsatilla. All these remedies are derived from animals, vegetables, minerals, herbs, plants, flowers, roots and seeds.

I grew even more confused when Doc proceeded to detail his past. His life experiences would make excellent fodder for a paperback novel. Born in Corpus Christi and raised mostly in Garland, Doc was a one-time cadet at the Dallas Police Academy, a philosophy student and part-time undercover investigator at North Texas State University who chased mad bombers and campus radicals. He was a private investigator who received threats on his life when he testified against a district attorney in South Texas. He’s chased missing diamonds to a railroad station in Belgium, served as a national field director for The Fund for Animals and has been a semiprofessional student and international bookworm, attending colleges in the United States, South Africa, Haiti, and Mexico.

So what’s a former noseguard for the Allen Military Academy doing talking about flowers, herbs and minerals? Why would a hell-raising, streetwise former private investigator have anything to do with a group of cosmic sorts who have this un-American contempt for Eli Lilly or Upjohn and instead gather their pharmaceuticals from oceans, mountains, valleys, rivers, frozen tundra, deserts and tropical jungles?

The answer, although ironic, is really quite simple. Doc says the first time he ever heard about homeopathy was in the early Seventies when he testified for an osteopath friend of his at an extradition hearing in Michigan. In the course of the testimony, a homeopath who “looked like actor John Barrymore” took the stand to testify about the osteopath’sresidency.

“He talked about a way of living and a system of medication beyond anything I’d ever seen in my life,” says Doc. “It was so gentle, natural and logical that it attracted me. It really got to me. I thought, ’this is the thing for me, helping people through natural medicine.” I know this all sounds kind of corny, but I think it’s the sort of thing we all got away from a long time ago and we need to get back to.”

After that, Doc began researching the subject of homeopathy and discovered there were no medical schools in the United States that actually offered any formal training in the discipline. So in 1974, he enrolled at the Homeopathic Medical College of South Africa. He graduated in 1976; in 1977, the college received him as a fellow in homeopathic pharmacology, and in 1978 as a fellow in natural medicine. That same year, Doc opened his first practice in the small Idaho town of Nampa, near Boise, Idaho. He returned to Texas in 1979, but in 1980, he spent several months in a quarantined tuberculosis zone in a remote area of Tepic Nayarit, Mexico, to provide medical assistance to several clinics.

“Over the past seven years, I have helped thousands of people to rid themselves of health disorders through the most advanced natural medicine available,” Rogers writes in a promotional pamphlet. “I have developed these through years of hard work and research. Many medications I formulate have plant and mineral medicines from every continent on earth.”

Despite his beliefs in natural medicines, Rogers is quick to admit there is widespread quackery within his own ranks. “I remember-when I first began practicing at the clinic in Idaho-a little 10-year-old girl came in who had been experiencing fainting spells and headaches,” says Doc. “I could see that one pupil was bigger than the other, a sure sign of serious neurological problems. I told her mother to get her to a specialist right away, but my partner, a gray-haired man whom the mother trusted, said it was nothing serious. My partner and I parted ways right then. The little girl fainted one day in the mountains and died.”



ALTHOUGH THE WORLD Health Organization says that about one doctor in five is a natural-medicine practitioner, there are only a handful of true homeopaths in Texas-partly because the field has become anachronistic in the United States, and partly because natural-medicine practitioners aren’t exactly welcomed by the Texas medical profession. In Texas, as in most states, a doctor may not practice medicine unless he is licensed by the state. One of the requirements for licensing is an M.D. degree from an accredited medical school.

Homeopaths did, however, enjoy immense popularity in America until they began a decline just after the turn of the century. The general laws of the 27th Texas Legislature in 1901 called for three different types of medical examining boards, each made up of nine members appointed by the governor. One of the three boards was called the Board of Homeopathic Medical Examiners.

The homeopathic theory of medicine was formulated early in the 19th century by a German physician and theorist, Dr. Samuel Christian Hahnemann, who concluded through personal experimentation that naturally derived drugs, when taken in significant dosages, produce similar symptoms in the human body. Hahnemann, often called the father of homeopathy, taught what he called the Law of Similars (similia similibus curen-tur): “let likes be cured by likes.” For instance, a homeopath might give a patient suffering from nausea or vomiting a minute dose of ipecacuanha, a natural remedy that would induce vomiting in an otherwise healthy person. Eventually, Hahnemann showed the effects of hundreds of drugs in 1811, when he published his Materia Medica of Homeopathic Medicine. Later, he developed his law of “infinitesimals,” declaring that the smaller the dose, the more effective a drug was in triggering the body’s immune systems.

In Texas, as in most states, a homeopath is not permitted to charge a patient for diagnosing an illness unless he is an M.D. If he does so without a medical degree, then his practice is considered illegal. Therefore, the Texas homeopath must walk a fine line: He can ask a patient what ails him and then sell him a homeopathic remedy designed to address the symptoms. At least, that’s the type of practice the Texas attorney general apparently has given Rogers tacit permission to conduct. That system works for Rogers, he claims, since many of his patients already know what’s wrong with them when they enter his office. Many have already been to a medical doctor but still have a problem, he says.

In recent years, the pendulum has swung against alternative medical practitioners such as Rogers, according to Don Deluski, executive director of the Idaho Medical Board, and a man who knew Doc when he ran the clinic in Nampa. In 1949, the U.S. Supreme Court said that naturopaths (an umbrella term that includes homeopathic doctors) were permitted to practice their medicine if they met certain requirements. In the late Seventies, however, the court reversed itself in a landmark case in which an Idaho naturopath was convicted of manslaughter after he took one of his patients off a cancer medication.

Deluski says that M.D.s and homeopaths have long been bitter enemies. “M.D.s are scientifically trained,” he says. “They have difficulty accepting the credentials of people with a different sort of emphasis. They also feel that the naturopaths accept things more readily on solely anecdotal evidence.

“Part of the problem with naturopathy is there is no recognized school of naturopathy. There are no accredited schools in the United States, no tests for licensing and no real way to judge credentials. Anybody who wants to be a naturopath could put up a shingle. Nevertheless, the naturopaths believe the public has the right to determine what its own treatment will be.”



SUCH WERE THE types of problems Doc Rogers encountered when he returned to Texas in 1979. When he made an inquiry with the state medical board, he was bluntly told he would be prosecuted if he established a practice. A short time later, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Texas State Board of Examiners. Rogers represented himself in the lawsuit.

In a November 1982 motion for protection, Rogers asked U. S. District Judge William Wayne Justice of Tyler to issue a temporary restraining order against the state. “The attorney general’s office has made threats after plaintiff corresponded in the sincerest and most civilized manner possible,” the motion said. The threats, Rogers alleged, came from a state medical board attorney, who warned him to drop the suit. “You are talking about trying to overturn the Texas Medical Act. And I’ll tell you what I am going to do: I’m going to have a judge in Travis County punish you.”

After Rogers had jousted with the board for several months, Judge Justice allowed the suit to be dismissed voluntarily in early 1983 at the state’s request, primarily because Rogers’ legal briefs were inadequately drawn. It was then that Neil Cogan, an SMU constitutional law professor, began communicating with the state medical board on Rogers’ behalf and agreed to rekindle Rogers’ civil rights litigation.

That never became necessary, says Cogan, because Doc agreed he would not charge any fees for diagnosing his patients, treat seriously ill people or prescribe any drugs, but would instead earn all his income through the sale of homeopathic preparations.

“I was all fired-up to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court,” says Cogan. “I think Charles is an honest fellow-he really does believe in his practice, and there are a lot of people who believe he can help them. I had lined up a half dozen people who had agreed to join as plaintiffs in the lawsuit. My prediction to Charles, however, was that we probably would not win this one and that he would get very little protection from the high court.”



EARLIER THIS Year, Doc hung out his shingle. These days, he says he’s seeing about 30 patients a week, quite a small number when compared to the 50 or so a day he saw while running the Rogers Clinic in Nampa, Idaho. He claims he can reach more people in Texas through the sale of his homeopathic medicines (which he markets to other physicians as “Physician’s Geomed-ical” to chiropractors as “Physician’s Chi-romedical and to the general public as “Dr. Rogers’ Homeopathic Remedy”) than in sparsely populated Idaho.

His formulas, which he claims he researched himself, are aimed at some 40 different maladies ranging from hemorrhoids, skin eruptions, sore throat and sinitis hayfever to jet lag, menstrua] pain, alcohol desire and weight loss. Each bottle of 100 tablets sells for about $14.95. Rogers claims he’s selling about 70 bottles of his remedies a week to Dallas area chiropractors, osteopaths, M.D.s and psychologists, as well as to patients and Dallas health food stores. Recently, he even left samples of his natural medicines with the Texas Rangers, who finished in last place this year. Whether homeopathy can cure “cellaritis” remains to be seen.

Doc has plans to build a clinic next door to his home in Shady Shores and dreams of someday marketing his homeopathic remedies all over the country. But he remains a country doctor at heart.

“I like the rural life,” he says. “Even though I suppose I could help people just as well if I set up a practice near the Galleria, I’d much rather help a common man deal with the pressure of supporting a family than I would a woman who is depressed because her drapes don’t match.”

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