Homefirst Health Services

Homefirst Health Services, based in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, is a sizable medical practice and the largest physician and midwife attended homebirth practice in the United States. Healthfirst has five offices, ten doctors, four certified nurse-midwives, and 45 registered nurses and certified nurse assistants in the metropolitan Chicago area. Homefirst promotes an integrative approach to managing illness.

Services and approach
Homefirst has a less than five percent cesarean section rate and a minimal reliance upon prescription drugs, antibiotics and medical intervention as a first line of treatment. Homefirst's clientele tends toward the better educated, and towards those who follow healthier diets and who breastfeed their children much longer than the U.S. norm; half of Homefirst's mothers are still breastfeeding at two years. Homefirst doctors have delivered more than 15,000 babies at home, most of whom have never been vaccinated and their exposure to medicines has been reduced. Medical practices with Homefirst's approach to immunizations are rare.

Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, founder
Homefirst's medical director, Mayer Eisenstein, MD, JD, MPH, founded the practice in 1973, and is a critic of the Center for Disease Control's vaccination policies. Eisenstein has formulated a number of natural pharmaceutical alternatives used by Homefirst.

The few autistic children Homefirst sees were vaccinated before their families became patients, said Eisenstein, who also has a bachelor's degree in statistics, a master's degree in public health and a law degree, and is the author of Don't Vaccinate Before You Educate! (ISBN 0-9670444-2-1). "We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines," Eisenstein said. The same phenomenon has been reported among the mostly unvaccinated Amish population of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.