This posting offers my patients, colleagues, and all of those looking me up on the Internet a stern rebuttal to the malicious and false postings regarding the Connecticut Consent Order and Investigative Report on the web site which calls itself "Case Watch". Those postings deliberately cast me in a false light and misrepresent the essence and purpose of the Connecticut Consent Order and the Investigative Report that preceded it as part of the State's investigation. The Casewatch gratuitous and false comments accompanying those postings defame me, and my unsullied reputation and practice as a pioneer of Complementary/Alternative Medicine (CAM). They are intentionally and maliciously attempting to denigrate me by the use of low–down, dirty and illegal smearing tactics. The Casewatch postings utterly fail to disclose the true state of affairs, the limited purpose and total lack of effect that the Connecticut Consent Order has had on my overall illustrious reputation as a practitioner of CAM among those who know the full story.
The deteriorating history and lack of credibility that Casewatch and its sister web site, "Quackwatch" have accumulated since I, personally, destroyed the credibility of the first self –anointed "Quackbuster" – Victor Herbert, MD, JD – is readily apparent to anyone who searches the evidence over the years, or who witnessed the Crusades against those patients that sought for CAM practitioners and the physicians who fought to create a place in the sun for themselves and their clientele. However, that history is not known to new patients and other individuals who have not yet had exposure to Alternative philosophies. This exposé will uncover the lack of credibility and the maliciousness of Casewatch behind their posting of the Connecticut Consent Order to which I am a party.
Specifically, in 2005, I entered into a consent agreement with the State of Connecticut. The purpose of entering into that agreement was not, as the false and malicious Casewatch post suggests, to give Connecticut a means to deny my further license application in the future should I decide to return to Connecticut. To the contrary, the Consent Order was entered into for the benefit of the State of Connecticut and for that of the Department of Health. The purpose of the Connecticut Consent Order was to save the State of Connecticut some serious expenditures and embarrassments in a serious court fight for which we were headed had they persisted in continuing to persecute and prosecute me. The State chose that legal way out of the hole that they had dug themselves into when they decided to come after me without due cause. I had already filed suit in against the State in the civil court for violation of my rights. The Connecticut Consent Order and the specific terms of the same [in which I specifically deny their allegations and contentions,] was the "out" offered by my Attorney, Jacques Simon, Esq, to the state authorities -- not vice versa.
When I left Connecticut in 2003, no charges were pending against me by way of medical discipline in that state, and my intention was quite clear – I was never going to return to that part of the country. It was a business as well as a personal decision for me. I allowed my Connecticut medical license to lapse [as of August 2004] simply by not paying the registration fee when it came due. The Connecticut Consent Order states that fact in no uncertain terms. Thus, Connecticut did not need the Consent Order as a weapon to prevent my return and practice in that state as falsely posted on Casewatch. Their filing of charges to take away my license was a vendetta – I had no license for over 6 months before they filed!
Moreover, there is another rather important point which Casewatch deliberately and conveniently omitted. In the aftermath of the Connecticut Consent Order, the same has to be reported by law – within thirty days from the date when it became a public document – to all other jurisdictions in which I had a license to practice medicine at that time, namely, AZ and NY. That is exactly what my attorney Jacques Simon had to do and did. Moreover, the Consent Order also had to be disclosed to the Virginia authorities in my application for a license to practice medicine in this state.
All these states have reciprocal statutes that permit them to initiate disciplinary actions of their own or to deny a license application based upon disciplinary actions taken in another state against a physician, if such action amounts to a disciplinary matter in the respective states. In this case, NY, AZ and VA – after having very carefully evaluated the Connecticut Consent Order, none of the three states deemed the document an adequate basis for either further disciplinary action or, in the case of Virginia, any license restriction or denial. To the contrary, New York wrote a specific letter indicating that they will not proceed against me based upon the Connecticut Consent Order, Arizona took no disciplinary actions and Virginia granted me an unrestricted license to practice medicine and commended my contributions to CAM in a side letter.
The fact that three other states did not deem the Connecticut Consent order grounds for discipline in their own jurisdiction, speaks volumes as to the purpose and ineffective and benign content of the Connecticut Consent Order as set forth above. All of these facts eviscerate Casewatches' theory that the Connecticut Consent Order was anything other than what it really is: a toothless document designed to spare that State of Connecticut a bloody court fight and embarrassment and further designed to allow the Connecticut state authorities to "save face" on an issue that in no way whatsoever diminishes my reputation or questions my overall competence as a Physician.
In short, nothing stated in the Connecticut Consent order makes my practice of medicine illegal or in any way sub par. Had that been the case, three other states, NY AZ and VA would have adopted the Connecticut view after reviewing that order, and the events and investigation that led up to it. They simply did not.
The fact that Connecticut accepted my outright denial of their allegations to be specifically stated in the Consent Order, (an important item which was negotiated by my attorney Jacques Simon Esq., that is usually not accepted unless that state's authorities know that they are not on solid grounds), eviscerates the importance of the so called "findings" of the investigative report. So does the non-action of the other three states.
This case is one in a long string of battles which I have been successfully fighting since the late 1980s against state licensing authorities who attempt to limit the practice of complementary medicine and to cater to private interest groups such as Big Pharma and insurance companies.
Below I am unveiling the history of my battles on behalf of physicians and patients who opt for CAM approaches when allopathic medicine no longer works. Casewatch, Quackbusters, Stephen Barrett, Robert Baratz and their associated assorted goofball friends are known nemeses of health freedom and complementary medicine for many years. Their postings and court cases have been repeatedly discredited and their take on life in general has been systematically eviscerated in court cases which they have recently been losing all over the country.
Consider the abbreviated history outlined below of my role in the fight for CAM which ultimately resulted not only in the defeat of the Connecticut Health Department, but over ten years earlier led to the passage of New York State's Alternative Medical Practice Act, just as I was exonerated by the Board of Regents Blue Ribbon Appeals Panel.
My Victories in New York
I am called a Pioneer and the "Dean of Alternative/Complementary Medicine" on the East Coast. That came about because I had the audacity [and naïveté] to open the first Holistic Health Center in NYC, in 1974, and to talk about it on the radio! [I had Frank Sinatra's voice ringing in my ears: "If I can make it there I can make it anywhere – New York, New York?."] In truth, I was not the first NYC physician to practice in an Alternative way. That recognition belongs to Harold Rosenberg, an Osteopathic physician who lost his license because of his methods, but he did not call his office a Holistic Center, as I did, nor did he openly confront the authorities. I have been persecuted and prosecuted for over 30 years by the incestuous cartel of the Insurance Companies, the Pharmaceutical Industry, the Insurance Industry, the Medical "Establishment" embodied as the Offices of Professional Medical Conduct [OPMC] of the State Medical Boards, and the immoral if not illegal collusion between the States in the form of the Federation of State Medical Boards. Together they had then, and still have now, a specific agenda for stifling the nascent movement that continues to threaten their control of Medical Practice even today. (Since 1993, it has been known that more patients consult "Alternative" practitioners in this country, paying for it out of their own pockets, than Conventional Family Practitioners and Internists.)
In all those years, the worst patient complaints that New York's OPMC could come up with in 1989, after surreptitiously "investigating" me beginning in 1976, were:
(1) The mother of a child who claimed I "double-billed" her for services on one occasion. [Perhaps my staff did, but "stuff happens," and there was no evidence of such a pattern of behavior that would make it a legitimate cause for a 14 year Crusade – and you can be sure they looked very hard to find it.] On cross-examination she testified that the child had been having seizure like activity for years, and by following my recommended diet changes and nutritional supplement program, she had never had anther episode in the ensuing years. That's a weird form of gratitude from my point of view.
(2) A young man who had come with long-standing chronic gastrointestinal complaints. He dumped a large number of vitamin supplement bottles on the table, and complained that they cost a lot of money and they didn't work. He had changed doctors, and had gone off dairy foods, and had complete relief. I demonstrated, from his medical record, that my tests had demonstrated a milk allergy and that I had recommended that he discontinue all dairy, and he confessed that he had not followed that advice.
It ultimately turned out that the complaints that started the investigation and filing of charges came from another source: Victor Herbert, MD, JD was the self-anointed, self-appointed first "Quackbuster" of the United States. He had testified against dozens of my colleagues all over the USA, and all of them were sanctioned in some way or other after his testimony. Many had lost their licenses to practice Medicine. In 1980, when I was the Vice President of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians [specializing in weight control], Dr. Herbert and I debated the value of testing and treating obese patients for nutritional deficiencies. From the podium, he pointed a finger at me and announced that he was "going to get me" for such quackery. Indeed, he succeeded in convincing the OPMC to investigate me, based on HIS IDEAS of what medical practice should be. That, in itself is contrary to the State Law, for no individual can determine the Standard of Practice in any jurisdiction. However, anyone may complain about anything – it was the State's error in accepting his judgment, and using it as the basis of an action against me.
We fought in the State Courts, up to the highest level, the Court of Appeals. Their verdict was in my favor, in profound and beautiful language:
"before the engines of the State are started up against an individual, there must be some threshold showing of justification for such an intrusion."
My jubilation was short-lived, however. The OPMC filed the exact same Subpoena Duces Tecum again, only 6 months later, and I had to go through the whole judicial hierarchy again, only to lose at the Appeals level, because of a precedent-setting case that involved the Mafia, and the risk of revealing the identity of a complainant. There is no such thing as protection against "Double Jeopardy" under the Administrative Laws that govern licensing of Physicians! That ruling came down in 1986, 10 years after the State first began their investigation. I turned over the charts that were requested. It was not until 1989, a full 3 ½ years later, that I received notice that the State was officially bringing me up on charges of Professional Misconduct, for things that I had allegedly done over 13 years earlier!
Thus began what became the longest Hearing ever before the OPMC at that time – The State of New York vs. Warren M. Levin, MD. The final verdict was a resounding Victory for me, the "Respondent." A Blue-Ribbon Panel representing the NY State Board of Regents, which licenses professions, reviewed over 5,000 pages of Testimony and over 200 articles from the Medical Literature presented "in evidence."
The panel members – a retired Chancellor of the Regents; a retired Appelate Judge and the then current legal counsel to the Regents – denounced the entire process as having deprived me of my Constitutional Rights. Then, from the top down, they castigated the Commissioner of Health, David Axelrod (now deceased) for not following legal procedure; the Attorney General's Office and the Prosecuting Attorney for abrogating my Rights; the Prosecutor, Terrance Sheehan, for ineptitude and for failing to control his star witness, Dr. Herbert, who had ranted and raved, lied in his testimony and attacked me and my attorney personally while under oath; [the State never used him again as an "expert"]; the "ALJ" – Larry Storch, the Adminsitrative Law Judge -- for failure to keep order in the Court; the 3-person Hearing Panel – consisting of 2 physicians and one "Hired Gun", Robert Briber, who refused to recuse himself from the panel despite the fact that he had heard extensive testimony from me in defense of one of my Upstate colleagues who ultimately lost his license. That demonstrated, as I had claimed, that he was prejudiced before I even started, since one of the charges against me was the same as the one that I had testified about, unsuccessfully. The other two panelists, together with Briber, were admonished for reaching a decision that was not justified by the record, since they had admitted that Herbert was not a reliable witness. They had, therefore, set themselves up as experts and reached a decision based on their own opinions, again depriving me of my legal rights.
This Victory was a Milestone in the cause of Alternative Medicine. It led to the passage of the NY State Alternative Medical Practice Act – signed by Governor Cuomo in 1994, shortly after my decision was finally handed down, over 18 years from the start of the investigation. Although the OPMC sent me a letter advising me that they were dropping the case, (because it was not an appropriate use of further funds from the State after all those years), they also gratuitously added that they had other complaints against me that they were looking into!
They did ask for some charts, which they reviewed and never acted upon, yet they never notified me that the investigation had been completed. Talk about torture! It was not until approximately a year ago, that my current attorney, Jacques Simon, was able to obtain a written statement that the OPMC had no other matters pending against me. I still have a license to practice Medicine in NY State, although by the time I received that notification I had long since left that practice.
It is of more than passing interest to me that although I "won" this landmark case, it has only recently become useful to others as precedent-setting because of a change in Administrative Laws
What is the story on that ad hominem attack against me? It is the work of Victor Herbert's self-appointed successor as Chief Quackbuster of the USA. His name is Stephen Barrett, and he is an MD who has never had a successful private practice, and has been brain-washed by his deceased idol, so that he appears to believe the baloney that he has memorized from Herbert's scripts. He, too, has traipsed around the country, testifying against Alternative Practitioners, but unlike Herbert, he has been extremely embarrassed by his failure to obtain convictions of those accused, and has instead been the subject of repeated severe judicial criticism for his ignorance and perfidy.
Herbert, to give him his due, was at one time a brilliant scientist, highly respected for his work in identifying the function of Folic Acid in the formation of Red Blood Cells. He was knowledgeable in Biochemistry as it was known in his heyday, and he theorized from that basic understanding that Folic Acid deficiency would produce an anemia that was similar to that of B12 deficiency. His animal experiments convinced him that he was right, but he was unable to obtain human volunteers to prove his theory, so he, too, in the tradition of Medical research heroes, did the experiment on himself. In the end, after becoming seriously ill -- with major impairment of brain function as well as profound physical prostration -- the last of a long series of bone marrow aspirations from his breast bone demonstrated the changes that he had predicted. During his testimony, my attorney asked him, as an acknowledged expert on Folic Acid, whether prolonged deficiency would cause permanent brain damage. He said: "absolutely not." We then produced 5 articles from the peer-reviewed literature showing that he was either not keeping up with the science in his field, or he was lying – again. A famous Psychiatrist, Abram Hoffer, MD from Canada – who had come to testify about the proven value of mega-vitamin therapy in Schizophrenia – had reviewed all of the 5 days of Herbert's testimony on the record, and he gave his professional opinion that the combination of Herbert's uncontrollable behavior, his constant lies and his made-up statistics were indicative of brain damage that was probably the unfortunate result of his self-experimentation. Herbert has since passed away, after refusing my offer to provide him with Chelation therapy at no charge after he had suffered a stroke. I respect him for what he did when his brain was "right."
Unfortunately, his successor, Stephen Barrett has no such excuse for his ignorance while feigning expertise. He has been unmasked, and skewered in the courts that he has chosen to appear in, yet he continues in his misguided attempts to attack Alternative Practitioners. He has recently been relegated to the anonymity of his Internet presences, hiding behind the names Quackwatch and Casewatch, while taking potshots at me and other unprotected practitioners. Suing such an annoying pest is not an unfeasible option, and in fact it is one which is seriously being considered presently by a whole group of aggrieved physicians whom this individual has defamed . You can confirm my statements about him by Googling him or looking for his dossier on Tim Bolen's website: www.northamericanconsumersagainsthealthfraud.org
Consider this about the Internet, and Casewatch in particular:
"My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating."