Interview with Dana Ullman (No. 2)
On Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, the AMA, Institutional Capture, and Russia’s Reconsideration of Homeopathy
Dana Ullman’s peer-reviewed paper on Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, and the AMA was the most-read article in its journal in 2025. The paper presents five private reports written by Frederick T. Gates — Rockefeller’s chief philanthropic adviser — that were intended for Rockefeller’s eyes only and have never been examined by any historian or biographer until now. These documents reveal how a Baptist clergyman with no medical training shaped funding decisions that dismantled American homeopathic institutions, despite Rockefeller himself relying on homeopathic physicians for the last fifty years of his life.
The paper was funded by Marion Rockefeller Weber, a great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. It documents the collusion between the AMA and the Carnegie Foundation in producing the Flexner Report, the AMA’s advertising-pharmaceutical revenue engine under George Simmons, and JAMA’s own data showing homeopathic graduates outperformed conventional graduates on state board exams — data that made no difference to the outcome. Homeopathic schools were shut down anyway.
This is my second interview with Dana. The first covered his background, the principles of homeopathy, nanopharmacology, and the disinformation campaign against homeopathic medicine. This conversation goes deeper into the primary source evidence — the Gates reports, the institutional mechanics of suppression, and what happened when financial power rather than clinical outcomes determined which system of medicine survived the twentieth century.
With thanks to Dana Ullman.
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1. Dana, for readers meeting you for the first time, can you tell us about your background and how you came to spend your career focused on homeopathy?
I became a serious student of homeopathy in 1972 when I was a junior at UC Berkeley. As the son of a pediatric allergist (who later became a professor emeritus at UCLA) and being a child of the sixties (!), I followed in my father’s footstep with a “twang.” I joined a group of 3 MDs, 2 nurses, 1 dentist, a male midwife, 2 yoga teachers, and a handful of others who studies homeopathy together on a weekly basis for five years.
I felt compelled to write about homeopathy because few people at that time were doing so in a responsible manner, that is, writing about homeopathy in the light of what we understand today as modern science and of systems/holistic thinking. I actually found that homeopathy was much more scientific than the reductionistic model of science that conventional medicine utilized.
Further, homeopathic history is so fascinating. Over time, I was collecting stories from history, along with great quotes about homeopathy from dozens of very famous cultural heroes of the past 200 years.
In 2009, I wrote a book, The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy, which was a seminal work that described the personal stories and quotes from 11 American Presidents and dozens of world leaders, literary greats, physicians and scientists, artists and musicians, entrepreneurs and philanthropists, women’s rights leaders, religious and spiritual leaders, and Royalty worldwide.
The two longest stories in this book were of Charles Darwin (!) and JD Rockefeller. I had previously expanded my articles about Darwin and got an article published in a prestigious peer-review journal (that was published by Oxford University Press at the time).
During Covid’s lockdowns, I had some extra time and wrote several articles on homeopathy for the peer-review literature, including one article that explained in a technical way compelling modern theories about how homeopathic nanodoses could work based on modern science.
I then wrote an article that reviewed four government-sponsored “reviews of homeopathic research where I discovered that the most comprehensive and best review of this research concluded with very favorable results about homeopathy.
And next, I expanded my writings about J.D. Rockefeller and incorporated important historical evidence for how the American Medical Association (AMA) colluded with Abraham Flexner in their coordinated attack on the AMA’s leading competitor, homeopathic medicine. This article became Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, and the American Medical Association: The Contentious Relationship Between Conventional Medicine and Homeopathy in America.
I am very proud to say that this article was the most read article in the journal in which it was published in 2025.
2. When we last spoke, you touched on the historical suppression of homeopathy. Since then, you’ve published a peer-reviewed paper in Cureus presenting five previously unpublished private reports written by Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s chief philanthropic adviser — reports never intended for public scrutiny. How did you locate them, and why has no historian examined them until now?
First, I made two trips to the Rockefeller Archives in upstate New York…and it is there where I uncovered these five reports on homeopathy that were written by Rockefeller’s leading financial advisor and written by Rockefeller’s eyes only. What is so remarkable here is that no other historian OR biographer has EVER made mention of these five reports, let alone analyse them.
What is also remarkable is that I posted ALL five of these reports in the article’s appendix (listed at the journal’s website under “Media”!). Now, all medical historians and everyone else can have access to these truly historic documents.
For the record, it is literally impossible for other historians and biographers to have NOT seen these documents, especially because Rockefeller had such a special passion for homeopathy. And these five reports were impossible to ignore in the Archive because the file on “homeopathy” in the Archive was relatively thin, with these reports taking up a major portion of the file!
Finally, I am pleased to announce that I received funding for writing this article from Marion Rockefeller Weber, daughter of Laurence Spelman Rockefeller, the youngest child of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and a great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller.
3. How was Rockefeller’s personal reliance on homeopathy kept separate from his foundations’ anti-homeopathic funding choices?
The apparent contradiction between John D. Rockefeller’s lifelong reliance on homeopathic physicians and the complete absence of philanthropic support for homeopathy can be understood as the result of strategic, political, and economic considerations—largely shaped by Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s primary financial and philanthropic advisor.
First, my article highlights Gates’s acute awareness that Rockefeller’s business empire—especially Standard Oil—was under intense scrutiny and legal assault by the U.S. government during the very years when Rockefeller philanthropy was being organized. In that context, Gates claimed that the new philanthropic institutions had to be above suspicion. Any visible pattern of funding that could be interpreted as advancing Rockefeller’s personal preferences or private interests risked reinforcing accusations that his wealth was being used to consolidate influence or extend monopolistic control into new domains.
Second, these political concerns aligned with—and likely reinforced—Gates’s own documented antagonism toward homeopathy. My article shows that Gates’s private memoranda mischaracterized homeopathic principles and elevated a narrow interpretation of “scientific medicine.” This suggests that his opposition was not purely neutral or evidence-based, but also ideological and strategic. In effect, Gates’s skepticism of homeopathy provided an intellectual justification for a funding posture that was already politically advantageous.
Third—and critically—the funding decisions also aligned with powerful economic incentives. The model of medicine that Rockefeller philanthropy chose to support was deeply intertwined with the rise of industrial pharmacology, including drugs derived from coal-tar and petroleum byproducts. Early blockbuster medications such as Aspirin and later Acetaminophen emerged from chemical processes linked to the same industrial ecosystem that Rockefeller dominated through petroleum refining.
While one must be cautious about claiming a direct, explicit quid pro quo, the alignment is striking:
Rockefeller’s industrial empire produced the raw materials and chemical infrastructure.
Gates promoted a medical system centered on laboratory science and pharmacological intervention.
Rockefeller philanthropy funded the institutions that trained physicians in precisely that model.
In contrast, homeopathy—largely non-industrial, low-cost, and not dependent on large-scale chemical manufacturing—offered little opportunity for integration with industrial profit systems. Supporting it would not only have conflicted with Gates’s ideological stance but also failed to reinforce the broader economic ecosystem in which Rockefeller interests were embedded.
Taken together, these factors help explain how the disconnect was maintained. Rockefeller’s personal medical choices remained private and idiosyncratic, while his philanthropy—guided by Gates—was shaped by:
political necessity (avoiding the appearance of self-serving favoritism during antitrust scrutiny),
ideological framing (defining “scientific medicine” in ways that excluded homeopathy), and
economic alignment (supporting a medical system compatible with industrial pharmacology).
The result was not an accidental contradiction, but a deliberately managed separation between Rockefeller the patient and Rockefeller the architect of modern medical philanthropy.
4. What does Gates’s apparent ignorance of Osler’s pro-homeopathy remarks suggest about the quality of analysis behind the funding decisions?
At minimum, it suggests selective analysis rather than fully informed analysis. My article shows that Gates praised Osler in his private reports while appearing unaware that Osler had publicly criticized the quarrel with homeopaths as “a most unwise and stupid thing to do,” and that Osler credited Hahnemann with helping medicine escape polypharmacy. If Gates was invoking Osler as an authority while missing—or ignoring—highly relevant public statements by Osler himself, that weakens confidence in the intellectual rigor of the reports guiding Rockefeller philanthropy.
More broadly, it suggests that the analysis behind the funding decisions may have been advocacy dressed as expert assessment. A serious comparative evaluation would have included counter-evidence from leading figures like Osler, especially when Gates was explicitly using Osler’s prestige to support a funding worldview. Missing that evidence implies either poor scholarship or a predetermined conclusion. Either way, it does not reflect the kind of balanced inquiry one would hope for in decisions that helped reorganize American medicine.
5. What should we understand about a funding system shaped by private documents this inaccurate?
We should understand it as a system that may have been powerful without being epistemically reliable. My article quotes Gates claiming that germ-caused diseases constituted “at least nine-tenths” of practice, then contrasts that with mortality data showing that in 1900 six of the top ten causes of death were not primarily infectious. CDC historical mortality sources likewise show a mixed disease profile in that era, not one reducible to infection alone. That does not mean germ theory was unimportant; it means Gates’s framing was overstated and reductionistic.
The same is true of Gates’s claim that Hahnemann denied the body’s self-healing power. As my article notes, that badly misstates the homeopathic framework as understood by its own practitioners. When private memoranda contain errors about both epidemiology and the doctrine they attack, they should be treated not as neutral analysis but as ideological instruments. A funding system shaped by such documents can still transform institutions, but its success should not be confused with factual soundness.
6. How should we reassess the Flexner Report given the memo and Flexner’s limited qualifications?
It should be reassessed less as a detached survey and more as a politically coordinated intervention. My article cites the Carnegie memo to the AMA stating that they had been “hand in glove” and wanted to avoid publicizing the connection. If that memo is taken at face value, it undercuts the conventional image of the report as an independent evaluation. It suggests the report functioned partly as strategic ammunition for an organized campaign already underway.
Flexner’s own background strengthens the need for reassessment. He was an educator, not a physician, and your article emphasizes that he often spent very little time at each school while working closely with AMA personnel. That does not automatically invalidate every conclusion in the report; many schools were indeed weak. But it does mean the report should be read as a normative blueprint shaped by alliances, assumptions, and institutional goals, not as an unimpeachable scientific audit.
And as it turns out, Abraham Flexner’s older brother, Simon Flexner, worked under Frederick T. Gates, serving as the first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Simon Flexner, like his boss, Gates, were extremely antagonistic to homeopathy. After the Flexner Report was published, they hired Abraham Flexner to work to enact his proposals (which were co-written by leading AMA operatives)…and Rockefeller’s huuuuge largesse ONLY funded conventional medical institutions. If any medical school OR hospital had the word “homeopathic” in it, that alone would ban them from any funding.
7. How did funding override the judgment of Osler and Cushing?
Because money was not just supporting ideas; it was building the future infrastructure of the profession. My article quotes Osler’s complaint that Flexner had a “very feeble grasp of medicine” and cites Duffy’s observation that Osler’s and Cushing’s objections were hushed by the “irresistible seduction of large sums of money.” That means the dispute was not settled chiefly by argument. It was settled by which side could endow laboratories, full-time faculty lines, universities, and prestige networks.
So, the deeper lesson is that elite medical judgment can be overridden when philanthropy changes the incentive structure. Once Rockefeller and Carnegie money rewarded the full-time laboratory model, dissent from towering clinicians became easier to marginalize. Their authority remained symbolic; the foundations controlled the machinery of institutional adoption.
8. What does the AMA’s enforcement pattern reveal?
It reveals that the AMA’s ethics enforcement operated less as a neutral protection of patients than as a boundary-policing mechanism against a rival profession. My article documents that physicians were rarely disciplined for malpractice, addiction, or sexual misconduct, yet were punished for consulting with homeopaths, including one doctor consulting with his own wife and another merely buying milk sugar from a homeopathic pharmacy. That pattern strongly suggests sectarian exclusion was treated as a higher institutional priority than ordinary professional wrongdoing.
In practical terms, the “consultation clause” looks like a cartel tool: it raised the cost of collaboration, isolated homeopaths, and used licensure-linked societies to squeeze them out. So the pattern reveals not simply prejudice, but a sophisticated form of professional market control under the language of ethics.
9. How central was the advertising-pharmaceutical relationship to the AMA’s rise?
On my account, it was very central. The article says Simmons took over when JAMA advertising revenue was about $34,000 and that it rose to about $150,000 by 1909. It also says Simmons built a system in which AMA approval signals increased the value of advertising in JAMA and linked the association more deeply to pharmaceutical manufacturers. That is not a side story; it looks like one of the key financial engines of the AMA’s expansion.
The Simmons biography in your paper makes that even more revealing. If the same man had attended a homeopathic school, practiced homeopathy, embellished his credentials, and later burned his files, then the story is not one of pure scientific purification. It is also a story of organizational entrepreneurship, revenue building, and strategic hypocrisy. I would therefore treat the advertising-pharmaceutical relationship as a major structural factor in the AMA’s rise, even if not the only one.
10. On what empirical basis were homeopathic schools shut down?
Based on the evidence I cite, the empirical basis looks weaker than the later myth suggests. My article reports JAMA’s own survey finding lower state-board failure rates for homeopathic graduates than for conventional graduates from 1900 to 1905, and it notes that Boston University outperformed Harvard in 1912 failure rates. If those figures are accurate, then closure cannot be explained simply by saying homeopathic schools were demonstrably worse at producing licensed physicians.
That suggests the closures rested more on a changing definition of legitimacy than on straightforward performance failure. Schools were judged by laboratory orientation, university affiliation, capitalization, and conformity to the emergent biomedical model. In that framework, being homeopathic became disqualifying almost by definition, regardless of exam performance. So the empirical basis was not null, but it was largely about conformity to a preferred institutional model rather than a clean demonstration of inferior outcomes.
11. How directly can we connect Rockefeller’s industrial interests to the medicine his foundations funded?
A direct, documentary smoking gun saying “fund this because it helps Standard Oil” is not in the material I quoted, so I would be careful not to overstate the case. But my article does establish a plausible structural alignment: Gates, Rockefeller’s most trusted philanthropic strategist, pushed “scientific medicine”; many early drugs were coal-tar or petroleum-related derivatives; and Rockefeller’s industrial empire was deeply tied to petroleum refining. That does not prove a one-step causal conspiracy, but it does show that Rockefeller philanthropy favored a medical system materially compatible with Rockefeller industry.
So, my answer is: the connection is probably best described as indirect but substantial. It was not merely ideological, because there were real commercial synergies in backing a therapeutic order reliant on industrial chemistry. But it is stronger as a claim about converging interests and institutional incentives than as a proven case of explicit self-dealing. My article makes that convergence hard to ignore.
Overall, my article supports a reassessment of this era as one in which philanthropy, professional cartelization, educational reform, and commercial interests converged to define “scientific medicine” in a way that excluded homeopathy not only through evidence claims, but through power.
DANA ULLMAN, MPH, CCH, received his Bachelor’s degree (1975) and his masters in public health from UC Berkeley (1978). UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine published a feature interview with Dana Ullman here.
Besides writing a lot about homeopathy and real healing, Dana has an active clinical homeopathic practice via Zoom, which means that he sees patients from all over the world. You can see his fee structure here, and to inquire about having a homeopathic consultation, email him at: email@homeopathic.com — you will receive a summar of his policies and fees, and upon agreeing to these simple policies, you will be given a day/time for the first hour-long consultation.
He is one of America’s leading advocates for homeopathy. He has authored 10 books, including The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy, Homeopathy A-Z, Homeopathic Medicines for Children and Infants, Discovering Homeopathy, and (the best-selling) Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicines (with Stephen Cummings, MD). Dana also created an e-course Learning How to Use a Homeopathic Medicine Kit which integrates 80 short videos with his famous ebook that is a continually growing resource to 500+ clinical studies published in peer-review medical journals testing homeopathic medicines. This ebook is entitled Evidence Based Homeopathic Family Medicine.
Dana Ullman has also authored chapters on homeopathic medicine that included in medical textbooks published by Oxford University Press, the American Academy of Pain Management, and Mosby.
He is the founder of Homeopathic Educational Services, also known as www.homeopathic.com, America’s leading resource center for homeopathic books, tapes, medicines, software, and e-courses. Homeopathic Educational Services has co-published over 40 books on homeopathy with North Atlantic Books.
Dana previously wrote a regular column for the popular website, www.huffingtonpost.com (to access these articles, click HERE!) At present, Dana’s newest blog is here:
Dana’s most recent academic publication was “Rockefeller, the Flexner Report, and the American Medical Association: The Contentious Relationship Between Conventional Medicine and Homeopathy in America.”
Everything comes full circle
Way to go Dana! We use your book for homeopathic prescribing many times.