Looking Back Moving Forward

Homoeopathic LINKS International Journal for Classical Homoeopathy

4/08 Volume 21, Winter 2008

Review of ‘Looking Back, Moving Forward’ by Rowena J Ronson

Reviewed by Ivo Wiesner, PhD, Czech Republic

“So much of what we call insanity is that people are on a different or altered level of consciousness….” Nicky Pool (one of the contributors)

This book is a rich repository of British homeopathic history giving fascinating insights into the lives and philosophy of homeopathic healers in the UK.

It provides really stimulating reading from cover to cover. A reading of this book reminds us that there are many, many methods out there that can and do work. But not everything is for everybody. A key challenge is to reveal the proper way for you and your cases, with the overriding criterion being to help to release the patient from whatever is blocking him or her, and the release from suffering. And we must always keep in mind the golden rule that we must be patient-centred and not practitioner-centred/egocentric. So everything that works helps, such as giving two remedies at once. It may be allowed and justifiable for a particular situation.

This book is made up of 32 chapters reflecting 40 years of fascinating opinions, perceptions and memories of the different contributors. It is like an enthralling pilgrimage through individual interviews and conversations with 34 British homeopaths. Every interview reflects an aspect of the British homeopathic scene, and shows the variety of ways in which homeopathy can be practised effectively. You can get a measure of the vast collective wisdom based on daily practice and teaching. You can witness the roots of the homeopathic renaissance in the UK during the sixties (looking back), from which the future outlines of UK homeopathy clearly germinate (moving forward).

Rowena Ronson, who put this book together, is a British homeopath and registered member of the Society of Homeopaths. Her practice developed in Bushey, where she offers daily homeopathic care. She also teaches at the Open University and contributes to homeopathic journals. Her website, http://lookingbackmovingforward.com contains more information about her. 

As for the book’s strong points from my perspective, I was fascinated by the homeopathic branch rooted in the British druid tradition of the group taught by Thomas Maughan, who was the mysterious hermetical figure of his day. He reputedly gave everybody remedies either in a 200C or 10M potency as their first prescription. He would use 200C for bowel nosodes and detox remedies followed by a 10M polychrest. Even today, when you do not know what to do with your case, you can find one o f his combination remedies to sort it out. All in all a really mysterious person, this Chief Druid of England: a spiritual teacher of great substance who had a strong impact on his homeopathic students. And I could continue with the likes of Yubraj Sharma (interviewed in Chapter 19), self-taught and now principal at the School of Shamanic Homeopathy in Wembley.

Another striking aspect discussed was the issue of infertility in women. What is its root? It is suppression. As Linda Razzell says in Chapter 25: “Kali carbonicum is my great remedy for all fertility problems or Folliculinum followed by bowel nosode program. It is like Sulphur in obstetrics. It can undo almost any damage or interruptions to the female cycle.”

So for whom was this book written? Any reader may learn about various forms and aspects of homeopathy in practice. This book should therefore be in the library of every college to bring inspiration to its students.

No more needs to be said: it is enjoyable reading which can be recommended to everyone.

Thursday 3 March 2005 found me in Kilburn visiting the fountain of knowledge that is Francis Treuherz, a fellow of the Society of Homeopaths. He swept me upstairs to the library in his high ceilinged Victorian house, and as I relaxed in his patients’ worn velvet throne, I was immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of our heritage. Nearly every book written about homeopathy adorns the many shelves of Francis’ clinic room. Exciting trinkets once owned by our renowned forefathers and mothers are displayed for his patients and fellow scholars of homeopathy to view. For the several hours that I was with him I felt that I had stepped back in time. 

How it all started for Francis:

ROWENA: What got you into homeopathy in the beginning Francis?

FRANCIS: I was a successful patient actually. I went to see my dentist one day and made some joke about a dirty needle, because I had had hepatitis years before, and he said, “You have made that joke before – go and see my brother, he is a homeopath”. I had no awareness of the word, although there was a Manchester Homeopathic Clinic at that point in an old building right next to the university. I must have driven, walked, or been on the bus past it countless times, with no conscious knowledge of it. This was in the early 1970s. I had had hepatitis in 1966, seriously.

So I went to see his brother. At the time, I was drinking coffee intravenously and the first remedy he gave me was Nux vomica, but that really was because of the coffee. Then I got another remedy and I remember, very, very quickly, feeling well. I used to ride a bicycle everywhere and I could no longer really ride; I just didn’t have enough energy, and after the remedies I was back on my bike.

I heard about a couple of homeopathic study groups. One was taught by John Damonte in North London, which Misha Norland was attending, and the other was taught by Thomas Maughan in South London. I was holding down full-time and part-time jobs, at the Open University and London University at the time, so I didn’t have much time other than that for private reading. I decided to try and register for a PhD because I felt this was a subject worthy of study and I was interested in the history of homeopathy and in particular, as I was a social scientist, the reactions to successful homeopathic treatment of the cholera epidemics in the nineteenth century.

There had been a cholera epidemic and the then secretary of the Board of Health made a report to Parliament. He added that if he got sick he would go to the homeopaths despite his initial prejudice. He stated their mortality rate was about sixteen percent compared to the general London hospital mortality rate, which was about sixty percent. It could have been that the patients were brought in at an earlier stage of their illness; the homeopathic hospital could have been more hygienic and perhaps the patients could have been better nourished as they were from a higher economic class. The reaction from Parliament was that “This was against all reason, truth and science” and the figures were suppressed.

So I called my proposed thesis ‘The Social Construction of a Rejected Science’ and my idea for a PhD was rejected. The Open University said that homeopathy was not a proper subject to study. However, it was prevailed upon the London University to accept me because, after all, I had been teaching there for eleven years and I was an examiner. I wrote long chapters on Kent’s philosophy and the origins of Kent’s thought and on Rudolph Steiner and the apparent confusion between homeopathy and anthroposophy among homeopathic practitioners. I was trying to look at what the boundaries were of homeopathic science. I began to look at the work of Bach and got as far as the bibliography, which was actually published, but I never got round to writing that chapter because I discovered that a college had emerged where homeopaths were actually being taught.

So I went to see the principal of the College of Homeopathy (COH), Robert Davidson, and asked if I could find out what he was teaching. He replied that the only way I could enter his classes was if I enrolled as a student. I appreciated the way an observer changes the subject under observation and that it would be less of a problem if I was one of the students so I agreed, although, I thought, the notes I would be taking might be different. I wrote down everything the teacher said and before long I became so fascinated that I ended up carrying on seriously studying and the PhD was abandoned along the way.

Francis and the late Harris Coulter:

The first really good grasp I had of the history of homeopathy was a French book by someone called Denis Demarque, Homeopathy, the Medicine of Experience, which looked at the whole gamut of the history of homeopathy, and Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy. I read that very early on before I was studying to be a homeopath. One of the reasons for choosing a project on the ideas of Kent and the influence of Swedenborg was that that was something that Harris had avoided.

I sent that early chapter of my PhD to the American Institute of Homeopathy, for publication in the American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine and they sent it to Harris Coulter for peer review. I never heard. So I wrote to Harris asking for his advice, not knowing that he had been sent it for peer review, and he thought ”Oh no, not an article on Swedenborg – I cannot stand that!” Then he realised I had got inside it in some way and said it was okay to publish, and we became firm friends and he has been one of the biggest influences ever since. Harris is steeped in the history of homeopathy and homeopathy philosophy, without being a practitioner.

A digression, one day I was in my bedroom and I heard the answer phone going, and it was Harris Coulter saying he was going to Moscow and his plane was going to come to London for a stopover later that day. I rushed to pick up the phone, he was in Washington at the time, and luckily I was free and I picked him up from the local station. We sat and talked about homeopathy and got books from the shelves. I had this big pot of mushroom soup, we drank red wine and I had the most marvellous day. Later he went to Moscow and then to Paris and the next thing I got was a phone call saying that he had had a stroke.

He was due in Ireland, a month after that meeting of ours, to talk at the Irish Conference. I simply packed an enormous briefcase with every book he had ever written and took it over there and we lit a candle at the beginning of the Conference when he was due to speak, as I didn’t know whether he was alive or not. I fished out of my bag one book after another, and talked about his work and explained what he had done.

When I returned home, I received a phone call from one of his sons asking me if I would go to Paris where he was in hospital to see him. I just dropped everything and went by Eurostar. I walked in there early in the morning, and there he was with a tube in his face, lying there in a stupor. ”Hello Harry”, I said. ”Hello Fran” he said. They wanted someone whose voice he might recognise.

It was the only time in my life I have pretended to be a doctor. The nurse came in and I asked her what medicine he was going to be given. She replied, ”Opium” and I requested that it wasn’t given to him. But she came in an hour later, and again I asked her not to give it to him. As the day wore on he began to sit up and we had a conversation. He wasn’t really always there, his mind kept drifting off, but by the end of the day he was sitting up, and by the end of the second day he was drinking from a cup instead of from a tube. He had told me a lot of names and addresses of people to write to tell them where he was. I was testing his memory, but he couldn’t remember his own address. So it wasn’t quite right. He had been proving opium, the remedy he needed, as it was given too often.

Unfortunately he has remained partially paralysed and disabled. The last thing he wrote was the introduction to Julian Winston’s book The Faces of Homeopathy. This was a few years ago now. It is possible that Harry took too much Arnica. He used to travel a lot and use an enormous amount for jet lag. So yes, Harry was a big influence.

The Homeopathic Helpline:

ROWENA: How did the Homeopathic Helpline come about?

FRANCIS: Once upon a time I worked above a pharmacy for many years in East Finchley. I was already working there when I got recruited for NHS work and I stayed working there as well. The pharmacist, David Needleman, had studied homeopathy. He didn’t own the shop and the owner said that now he was doing homeopathy all these people were coming along for free advice and ringing him up and blocking the shop line. The owner asked David to get his own phone line. David thought of getting a pay line but obviously he couldn’t do it seven days a week, so when he had a day off I was his first reserve and I still am.

I suddenly realised when I was on duty on the first working day after Christmas, the day when everyone nowadays goes shopping – every homeopath in the land was still on holiday. Everybody who had suppressed their flu or cough over Christmas now rang the Homeopathic Helpline and I got over one hundred calls a day – and this winter it has been like that almost throughout December and January. It is very, very busy and routinely homeopaths now put the number on their answer phones and patient literature. 

We receive calls on everything you can imagine, but we also get people who have never used homeopathy before but they have been recommended to call us by a friend. And of course, they don’t have remedies so we have to have a mental map of where the people can get remedies from all over the UK. Neal’s Yard Remedies, a small chain, is actually very, very useful.

We have to be very careful. For example we might say, ”It is possible, and I am just saying this as a routine question, I think you have got pneumonia, but I don’t know at this distance away. Why not go and see your GP; you will then have a prescription of antibiotics as a safety net. Then don’t let them frighten you. If your GP says that you have, then you are welcome to ring up and tell us, and this will give me an idea as to which remedy to give.” I know in these circumstances that they have got the safety net in their prescription. I haven’t said to them to do anything other than a citizen would say. It may be pneumonia, it may be something else, but I suggest they go and see their doctor, get the diagnosis and ring back. We don’t need the diagnosis to prescribe. We need the symptom picture. But the doctor can listen or observe or say which lung is affected, which will help chose the remedy. For example, I cannot see what sort of rash a person has, on the telephone.

ROWENA: Do you often recommend they go to the doctor?

FRANCIS: Or Accident and Emergency, yes. I am going to suggest a remedy – a child has got a bump to the head and has been unconscious and may need more than Arnica. I say that if there is any disturbance to vision; if a squint develops or there is vomiting, I tell them to go to hospital. I may have said take Natrum sulphuricum but they don’t have it or they might not obtain it fast enough. Or they may not improve from the remedy and I am not there to observe and prescribe again. That is where these little kits are so wonderful, because you can always tell people, if you have got a kit the Homeopathic Helpline is so much more useful, because there is a chance that you have got the right remedy.

The Holy Grail?:

ROWENA: How do you feel about the philosophy that there is one remedy that a patient resonates with all their life?

FRANCIS: This is an ideal state. George Vithoulkas once talked about prescribing for people on his Greek island (Alonissos). Decades ago the patients were simple to prescribe for and they were on one remedy all their life. But now, there is so much Western influence – antibiotics, divorce, drugs and all the rest of it. Life is more complicated and it is harder to be certain of that remedy for all their life. I also think that when an epidemic turns up the ‘remedy for all their life’ is not going to help them when they have got mumps or if they have got septicaemia. They might need Jaborandi or Pyrogenium. Quite often when they turn up with a more chronic complaint, arthritis or anxiety, the ‘remedy for all their life’ might help them. And you might think that it should help their sepsis, too, but often it doesn’t and then you are in trouble if you don’t have other tools up your sleeve.

The question is what to do when the philosophy doesn’t fit the patient. As long as you are prepared for the exceptions, philosophical approaches are very useful; they are heuristic devices, ways of understanding the world and the patients within it.

There have always been innovators and seekers after a new truth. Eizayaga from Buenos Aires was a medical doctor and fitted his way of prescribing with his view of pathology. I think his best work wasn’t his attempt to explain the philosophy but his way of looking at the repertory, which is less well known. If you are new to medicine, although you have a grasp of homeopathy, and a patient comes to see you with multiple sclerosis, do you know how to look for diplopia - visual disturbances or whatever else they have got?

So Eizayaga extracted all the rubrics, which apply to MS from the repertory and created a series of books called his Algorithms (now available on computer as part of MacRepertory). So I read through the repertory to see the pathology, not to ignore the individualistic aspects, but to help differentiate. Eizayaga’s way is not to ignore the mentals but to look for the pathology to guide the way through the repertory. Kent’s Repertory is full of pathology and not only the mentals. Swedenborg talks about the mind ruling the body, and that is true, but the pathology is still there.

Swedenborg:

ROWENA: Tell me what you know of Swedenborg.

FRANCIS: Well, Swedenborg had a big influence over Kent. Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was an Englishman by the name of J J Garth Wilkinson. Wilkinson set off on a holiday to Iceland and he observed the sheep on this volcanic mountain called Hekla. They had got bony growths on their jaws and legs. Due to his homeopathic imagination he thought that it was because of the water, the grass and the lava – the sheep have got ‘hekla’. So he had a lump of Hekla mountain brought back to England and made it into a remedy and behold it was good for bony growths. I looked up Wilkinson and what I found was he was a doctor like Hahnemann, who gave it all up and became a translator. We have heard that before haven’t we? Hahnemann was also a translator.

But what he did was to translate Swedenborg’s mid-eighteenth century Latin into mid-nineteenth century English. Who wanted to read these translations? People like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other transcendentalists on the Eastern seaboard of the USA. Henry James senior, the father of the novelist, and William James, the psychologist, ran a magazine called The Harbinger. Through Henry James, J J Garth Wilkinson’s translations of Swedenborg became known to the intelligentsia in North America and many of these intelligentsia were homeopaths, and so Swedenborg’s ideas filtered into the homeopathic community, not only to Kent, but to all of them. This started in the 1840s and for the next couple of decades.

Swedenborg was a Swede and he was a mining engineer, philosopher, Christian and a hallucinationist. People afterwards founded what became known as the New Church of Jerusalem of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a nonconformist sect, but that is about as much as I know. They have got a reading room and library in Bloomsbury. So that is the short version of how Swedenborg came into homeopathy. We believe that it is possible that Hahnemann knew about Swedenborg but he never admitted it. Kent absorbed it in a more wholesale fashion than a lot of the other Swedenborgian homeopaths, and quotes him.

ROWENA: So what influence does Swedenborg have on homeopathy?

FRANCIS: The idea of the 6C, 30C, 200C, 1M 10M series of potencies. Levels of energy in the universe have this harmonic scale, this series of degrees, for example. The idea of the mind as an influence on the body is a Swedenborgian concept – forward thinking then, taken for granted by us now. Oeconomia Regnum Animalis – The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, he wrote it in the mid-eighteenth century, the body (economia) is ruled by the mind, (anima).

Francis’ take on whether homeopathy will become dormant again and what makes a good homeopath long term:

ROWENA: Homeopathy has obviously gone through a renaissance these last thirty to forty years – do you see it becoming dormant again?

FRANCIS: No, it is too successful for that. I am an optimist. I hope it has learned its lessons for keeping its head above water. I just think it has grown too much.

ROWENA: What, do you think, has contributed to its growth this time?

FRANCIS: The world is beginning to realise that allopaths are busy inventing medicines and then withdrawing them because they are dangerous. There are these things like Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and flu epidemics. If only we could get in there with our foot in the door, that would make a huge difference.

ROWENA: From your experience, do you think we have remedies to combat MRSA?

FRANCIS: It will depend on the remedy epidemicus. It is likely to be a snake venom like Crotalus horridus or Pyrogenium, but it depends on how it presents in any hospital or region at any one time. There is an essay by Pierre Schmidt, which is only in French, on the epidemic remedy. It has never been translated but it would be very useful at this time. It boils down to the economics of publishing; nobody wants to do translations because they cost a lot.

ROWENA: And finally, Francis, what do you think makes a good homeopath long-term?

FRANCIS: You have to be a fanatic. I don’t mean that you go around converting everybody! I just mean you have to be fairly single-minded about the intellectual and emotional demands of the job – and keep at it. And be a member of a team, that is to say whether it is with a supervisor or a colleague – you cannot be a loner. If you are alone a lot you have to find ways of relating to teams so if your Continuous Professional Development, like mine, is devoted to reading books and you are alone, you actually have to go out and meet people and go to seminars as well and learn from other people.

ROWENA: That is good advice Francis. I know that is why some homeopaths want to leave our profession, because they feel unsupported and alone. Many thanks for your time and stories today Francis. What would we do without you! 

[i]  Demarque, Denis, L’Homoeopathie Medecine de l’Experience, Éditions Coquemard,

    Angouleme, 1968

[ii]  American Institute of Homeopathy, American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine

    www.homeopathyusa.org/journal

[iii]  Winston, Julian, The Faces of Homoeopathy, Great Auk Publishing, 1999

[iv]  The Harbinger Magazine, Henry James Senior, editor, Boston 1845-49

[v]  Emanuel Swedenborg, Oeconomia Regnum Animalis, Stockholm. Published as The Animal

    Kingdom, translated by John James Garth Wilkinson, H Bailliere, London, and Otis Clapp

    Boston, 1844

[vi]  Schmidt, Pierre, La Genie Epidemique sa Nature – sa Therapeutique, privately published,

    Paris, 1929

Saturday 26 February 2005 brought me to Yondercott to visit with Misha Norland, his school, his family home and his chickens. I wondered around the gardens and woodland at Yondercott prior to our half ten in the morning meeting time. The students had started their morning classes and I had some time on my hands, some space to gather my thoughts and get into the groove of the School of Homeopathy. It was a cold morning, but here in Devon they had escaped the snow that had been falling constantly all week further north where I had come from. I was already in love with this place. Misha and I found each other near the allotment, his greeting accompanied by the sound of the ducks chatting away; he was gathering eggs. 

After a warm hug, we made plans to take Bear, their dog, for a walk up in the hills before conducting a more formal interview in his clinic room in the quiet of the upstairs of the house. When I say ‘more formal’, we did in fact sit on the floor. Misha has a wonderful way of relaxing his companion, and I felt like I had known him forever. The interview was really more of a conversation which was inevitable as we were already familiar and relaxed with one another from our rambling around the fields. I immediately admired Misha’s warm and empathetic way. Since the interview Misha has now handed down the role of principal to his son, Mani.

ROWENA: So tell me Misha, why do you think someone should choose to learn homeopathy at the School of Homeopathy?

MISHA: It certainly is possible to vision homeopathy and homeopathic education in different ways. My approach to say, materia medica studies, is through an appreciation of how archetypal energies and signatures manifest in nature. For example, we study the spider. The spider is nothing but a representation at the physical level of an archetypal way of being. The disease, as we call it, if it is similar, is nothing other than the energy of a particular spider acting out through the afflicted person.

That person becomes its mind, its sense organs, its limbs, and acts out its essential being. See that and you see what needs to be cured. The vital being of the spider is expressed in its form and behaviour; it is its signature. So any teacher, or any book that can take me to that understanding, is where I would like to be learning. I would hope that people would come and study with me because that was what fascinated them. This in turn probably implies that not very many people are going to come to the School of Homeopathy. Not everybody is excited by an archetypal approach.

ROWENA: What do you think other people are excited by? What motivates them?

MISHA: When you go out and give talks on homeopathy, the questions you are most likely to be asked are to do with therapeutics. How would you fix the arthritis, how would you fix the bruising, tell me how you would use Arnica in the home, etc. It is a fix it mentality. Most people are searching for a series of formulae and methods that can help them to alleviate the pain. Generally speaking, in a group of twenty or thirty people, there may be one or two whose interest ranges beyond therapeutics.

I had a scientific education. E = mc² is a formula that has been familiar to me for a long time, and here in homeopathy we see it in action. This is another illuminating aspect to homeopathy. The potentised remedy represents a similar transformation. There is both a scientific and an artistic aspect to being homeopathic in your vision and to bringing about cure. The disease and the remedy should match at the archetypal level of signature – the art of seeing – while the potency should match the vital force – the science. My parents were artists, painters, and their vision represented a similar, archetypal way of seeing. John Damonte’s vision encompassed all of that, so he was the right teacher for me.

ROWENA: Why did he die young?

MISHA: He had a heart attack. At a physical level, he suffered a congenital weakness, plus he was overweight. At an emotional level, he had a younger wife and two sons, one of who was marching into his teenage years. Like many a man of his generation, John Damonte was authoritarian while being a gentle and loving husband and father. As I understand it, both his older son and his wife were struggling to break away and gain some independence.

At a spiritual level, John Damonte was a man who primarily transmitted knowledge through devotion. This provided a gentle learning environment, because students quite naturally developed openness and trust. It is easy to learn then, because you are not threatened and you don’t put barriers up. However, the family feeling within the homeopathy class was insufficient to make up for what may have felt like a shortfall in the home. At the time of his heart attack, the physical structure of his house was also under threat. The roof was under repair. Chaos in the home was the disorder of the day. As I see it, these were the salient factors.

ROWENA: Do you transmit knowledge through devotion? Do you set it up like that here?

MISHA: I don’t set it up; I am it. I am like John Damonte in that respect.

ROWENA: I have to say, immediately I feel a complete trusting space with you, so if your students all feel that, then I can understand what you are saying. So other colleges that don’t have those central figures, that are called gurus, how do you think it works for them?

MISHA: I don’t know and I don’t understand how it works. Often all I see is trouble. From my perspective, when trust breaks down things become dysfunctional. Families become dysfunctional when trust breaks down.

ROWENA: Who else was a key teacher, a guru?

MISHA: John Damonte was my major teacher, because he gave a vision of healing as well as a vision of homeopathy. He wasn’t that experienced as a homeopath himself, so there was an element missing around the techniques of homeopathy. The basic philosophy was in place, but finding rubrics, repertorisation and differential analysis were not focused on. Because of the spirit of homeopathy, which John Damonte seemed to embody, we felt bereft when John died. We all knew that we needed more, so our first move was totally logical; we went to John’s primary teacher, Thomas Maughan.

We sat in on Thomas Maughan’s ongoing homeopathy class. This was in the early seventies. There was a wonderful crew of people including Peter Chappell, Robert Davidson, Martin Miles and Kaaren Whitney. Thomas was really hot on esoteric teachings - he felt that these underpinned homeopathy because true practise requires wisdom. If you just practise homeopathy as a technician and don’t underpin it with the perennial philosophy, it is one dimensional. So he was really strong on bringing in that second dimension.

He invited the lot of us to become Druids and to follow their teachings. Not many of us stayed with it including me. My heart wasn’t in it, not because they aren’t valid and wonderful teachings, they are. However, within druidic practices is considerable reliance upon ritual. While this is fabulously powerful, it had been poisoned for me. If I search for a ‘reason’, I would have to look to the Third Reich. This was so embedded in ritual; I feel it infused it with great power and to such destructive ends.

John Damonte’s other teacher was Donald Foubister, who brought our attention to Carcinosin. He was a fine homeopath rooted in the notion of signature, looking for the deeper picture and prescribing constitutionally.

Thomas Maughan believed that Kent was right, but he also had many ancillary methods. He said you should start most cases off with Sulphur 10M to clear out past drugging, but before that give Morgan 200C the bowel nosode, because this is like the snowplough that preclears the way. Then, when you give Sulphur it will do really good work and that will throw up the constitutional picture upon which you may prescribe. In the meantime, you can also use certain formulae; he liked triads, putting together three remedies and using them as specifics for this, that and the other. So you can see how the practical approach could have germinated and been nurtured in the nursery bed of Thomas Maughan’s teaching.

ROWENA: Where did he get that from?

MISHA: He made most of the triads up himself; he liked to do that, his creativity went there. Hahnemann, putting his theory of Sulphur being the greatest antipsoric to the test, was the first to give this as a first prescription to patients, only later prescribing the homeopathically obtained specific. As for putting Morgan before Sulphur or Gaertner before Calcarea carbonica that is the work of Paterson and Bach[i], they found that there was a relationship. You will recall, they discovered that stool cultures of patients under treatment, with say Sulphur, showed a preponderance of the Morgan strain of Gram-negative staining bacteria.

I tried all those things in my practice and got terribly confused, so my next great teachers were my patients. I figured, and this comes from basic science, if you are unclear about things, you can remove as many variables as possible and simplify down to basics, to first principles. The first principle of homeopathy is the simillimum principle.

MISHA: I have a clear view about the kind of homeopathy that I like to practise and model for my students. However, that doesn’t mean I am not appreciative of the other camps. Dismissing what others believe in would be like saying I really don’t like slugs, I wish there weren’t any in the world, I wish slugs were banished. But we know that diversity is the key to success and health. Diversity in homeopathy is just wonderful. There is a slight problem I guess, keeping a term like homeopathy, if one is actually practising something that is very different from what Hahnemann wrote about. But I think most of us are guided in a fundamental way by the Organon.

I do fervently believe in empiricism; in a process of evaluating results and modifying practise according to what one finds. I also believe in Continuous Professional Development, especially at this time when homeopathy is developing rapidly and extending its therapeutic range.

I have a sort of prayer to the universe, a wish list, for homeopathy. The wish is that those who practise homeopathy should keep on looking; keep on looking at the world out there and the world inside themselves. I know we are always amazed at the stories that our patients tell us, and if we get tired of that we shouldn’t be practising. The looking I had in mind goes further than that: we are told the story, but the question is what is driving that story. Keep on looking. What is the thing that keeps it going; where is that coming from?

In terms of ill health, where is the vital energy being held and stopped, how is that expressing itself? Here’s a simplified analogy: there is a river, this represents the energy flowing and there’s a rock in the river, which the water gurgles round. This obstruction is the disease. The eddy pools are incredibly interesting. That pattern is what we are looking for and the remedy has that pattern too. We match that pattern to the remedy pattern and the obstruction dissolves.

ROWENA: How do you teach remedies?

MISHA: Through signature. It is what it is. Be with the being of that particular manifestation and you have got it.

ROWENA: I have been reading about The Secret Life of Plants[ii] – that they have a spirit. This concept makes perfect sense to me. What do you think?

MISHA: They are manifestations of spirit, obviously.

ROWENA: I always thought then when we die our spirits would go off to the astral plane, which would be here or somewhere else. Maybe they are in the plant world as well?

MISHA: Absolutely, why would it be different, there is a different awareness and consciousness of course, but in terms of planes of existence, these ‘lower’ astral realms are there for all of us – through them we manifest, to them we return when our manifestation ceases.

ROWENA: Do you think we can move into plant and come back in a human form?

MISHA: Well, we do as diseases, don’t we? What happens, I wonder, when creatures go out of existence, for example, the Bengal Tiger? Its days are numbered but nothing can go out of existence at an astral or spiritual level, just the physical form has gone. So the energy that represents tiger has got to live somewhere and where better than as a co-inhabitant of a human. Maybe there will be more human tigers around the place as the animals go out of incarnation. It is a speculation.

One of the things that is endlessly reinforced by patient’s stories, is that we all have an unconscious theme in our lives; a theme which repeats itself. Going back to the analogy of the river and the obstruction, well it’s obviously the same river, because that’s life. That won’t change, but the obstruction also has an unerring way of remaining fixed. The eddy pools can vary because of changing life circumstances, but basically they represent the same pattern of deviation. It is a golden thread/river that runs through. The expressions may change but the thrust is the same. This unconscious stuff is what we should focus upon because that is where the obstruction resides. The expressions, and they are usually compensations, can change, but the basic unconscious material remains the same.

If that is true then there is one basic remedy that will be appropriate for that person rather than many. So when we keep on looking, what we are doing is searching to find the nature of that unconscious, basic obstruction and the remedy that most closely matches it. One lifetime is very small and short in the evolution of human consciousness. If we think of each human as being like a cell in the body of humanity, which is itself evolving, and we know that we are a very young species, then we notice that individually we have a long way to go. One lifetime of one individual human allows the possibility to work over a particular form, shape and disturbance and that’s enough!

ROWENA: Even with my classical training I was taught the concept of layers.

MISHA: I don’t think that’s true. I think it appears to be true and therefore it is modelled. I don’t actually think that is what happens.

ROWENA: So we are this one remedy, like when you have your astrological chart made for you? The picture that is created at birth of your whole life is reflected in the chart?

MISHA: Exactly like that. Like the natal chart, it tells you everything. There is one natal chart and there is one remedy.

ROWENA: Does that mean that people don’t move on? Let us say I was given Natrum muriaticum and it clears my disappointed love. If I kept having that remedy repeated over time is it just making me feel better and boosting my immunity?

MISHA: Yes, but let us go back to the river and the obstruction. If you are looking at the eddy pools, you note that Natrum muriaticum covers some of these eddies. So if these eddy pools appear and I take Natrum muriaticum, the river flows with less obstruction, so it’s good. I don’t knock it. What I am suggesting though, is that if you prescribe a remedy for somebody, even by accident, and you see the miracle of cure at the deepest level, not just some but all the eddy currents disappear.

It is the Holy Grail of homeopathy; it is the quest. It is a model that keeps us on the search for more remedies and more provings because as we develop our materia medica, we also increase our capacity to find simillima, not just partial remedies, and this in turn moves our practice away from a layer model and towards a single remedy practice.

[i]  Bach, Edward and Wheeler, Charles, Chronic Diseases, A Working Hypothesis, H K

    Lewis, London, 1925

[ii]  Tompkins, Peter and Bird, Christopher, The Secret Life of Plants – a fascinating account

    of the physical, emotional and spiritual relations between plants and man, Perennial, 1989

    and then 2002

Last month I included the first of a series of excerpts from my book Looking Back Moving Forward in

Hpathy.com and for those of you who had a chance to read it, you will know it was from the controversial Robert Davidson. I hope you found what he had to say interesting and thought provoking.

This month I have taken some sections from Jeremy Sherr’s interview. I felt absolutely privileged to spend time with such a burning flame in our field and really excited that his plans for working in Africa and coming to fruition.

As I mentioned last month, I have just launched a blog on my website www.lookingbackmovingforward.com for discussions about how we feel about our profession, how we feel about what is discussed in the interviews, for us to share our experiences and to create an international place to meet and chat in the matrix. Feel free to come and visit and contribute your thoughts.

And so now some words from Jeremy…..

Jeremy on homeopathy and AIDS in Africa:

I am concerned about AIDS and twenty five million people dying in Africa. Whole populations are being wiped out and billions of US dollars are being poured into allopathic nonsense. People are going through untold suffering, not only the dying, but those that are left behind. If homoeopathy can help, then it has to be our mission; that is the one thing that we need to achieve. There are a lot of very great and noble homoeopaths that have gone out to Kenya or Swaziland, and sit in clinics and treat one person after another and that is fantastic; I really admire them. In some ways I would really like to do that but I don’t see that as necessarily being my role. My aspiration is to help in a formal, academic way.

I believe we have got to go out there and say, “Look, this is what homoeopathy can do in AIDS cases; here are the figures, here is the research, it is all watertight.” Billions of US dollars go to AIDS in Africa every year; if a small fraction went to homoeopathy, can you imagine what we could do? But nobody is going to give money or resources to anything anecdotal. I can show fantastic AIDS cases on video, where you clearly see people getting better and coming off their drugs. We can go and show these and a lot of other evidence to Bill Gates and Elton John charities or any other AIDS charity, but that is not going to impress them. They won’t give us money on anecdotal evidence. They want to see academic figures; that is the way.

I personally am too impatient for academics, research and statistics but I feel that it has got to be done. Therefore I have been working to set up a proper research study of homoeopathy treating HIV and AIDS patients. And because I have contacts and a bit of a name, maybe I can get it off the ground, with a little luck and help from my friends. But it has been very frustrating, because the academic wheels grind far too slowly for me. You have to find willing partners and get a protocol through an ethics committee, and you need to talk their language. I hope it will work but if not, I will just go and do it on a small scale myself – I am determined to do that.

ROWENA: So what would your project involve?

JEREMY: Ideally it would involve treating three to five hundred AIDS patients over a couple of years. The aim is twofold; one, to treat individually and show the efficacy of homoeopathy for these patients and two, to look for a genus epidemicus for AIDS, providing it is an epidemic. Epidemics have certain characteristics and AIDS is one foot in and one foot out. I do not want to hear what this or that homoeopath gave an AIDS patient; I just want to collect the symptoms for myself, as Hahnemann said we should do with epidemics, and see.

I went to Tanzania as I have a friend there, Sigsbert Rwegasira; a homoeopath and a lovely guy. He also has a hundred percent success in treating malaria, which is still the biggest killer the world has ever known. The allopaths are poisoning people with pharmaceuticals such as Lariam, which is causing absolute devastation. He has treated five thousand AIDS patients. I went for a week and treated twenty AIDS cases and collected all the symptoms, and we are getting really good results.

Jeremy on having a successful practice as a homeopath in the UK:

ROWENA: Do you feel that the UK is saturated with homoeopaths and there are not enough patients?

JEREMY: Yes, that is the case, which is evident because not everybody can make a living. I think those who really want to make a living from it, will, because there are plenty of sick people around, but it is not easy. It takes a long time to build a homoeopathic practice. There are two things that bring people to a homoeopath – the carrot and the stick. I have seen four new patients today and at least three of them have come because of the stick – arthritis and MS - they didn’t know anything about homoeopathy but somebody mentioned to them that it might help. Those that come from the carrot of awareness, of course, make the best patients.

ROWENA: How long, would you say, does it take to build a practice?

JEREMY: At least two years. A lot of people want to study homoeopathy because it is fascinating. At least thirty percent of them are not practitioner material. They like to study and write excellent essays but when it comes to sitting all day with patients, they decide it is not for them. I still think they should study homoeopathy, but there should be a differentiation and filtering process to help students find out if they do actually want to actually practise, so that if they don’t, the guilt at not succeeding is taken away. They could become a homoeopathic historian, develop computer programs, organise charities or treat friends and family.

There are all kinds of support roles our profession needs. We could do with more people writing articles for the press. But those students who do not practise can end up feeling guilty; they try to build a practice but it only half works. Many want to be practitioners but have all kinds of restraints – financial constraints, kids, divorce – so it is difficult to hold on until a practice gets going. Then you have got the forty percent who get through the initial hurdles and succeed.

Part of the problem financially for us is the fact that we see patients once every four to six weeks. In comparison, an acupuncturist or an osteopath sees a patient one or two times a week. Patients book in for six treatments and they hear their neck cracking and are happy with what they see as an immediate result. With homoeopaths there is a four to six week wait so there is a high drop out rate. Patients think, “He gave me one little white pill but I didn’t hear a crack and there were no fireworks. I am not going back just to talk.”

ROWENA: Prescribing LMs helps.

JEREMY: Yes, daily repetitions, phone contact and booking patients for a follow up at the end of the first appointment all help as they make the process conscious. This is basic business management but it is still going to be a very slow, logarithmic build up. Eventually there will be a build up of patients, especially after you find the golden patients who recommend you to another thirty. But you have to get past those first two years and not everybody makes it. Working part time can also stop practitioners from building their practice, as subconsciously they might want to keep it part time before giving up their day job. The market is saturated to a degree, but it doesn’t have to be. If some of those people who write beautiful essays but do not want to practise did some research, wrote articles or gave talks it would raise public awareness.

Jeremy on Dynamis:

ROWENA: So tell me why graduates come to study with you at the Dynamis School. What is it all about?

JEREMY: Homoeopathic colleges are just a first step. There is much more to be taught in homoeopathy than what is learnt in undergraduate college. People who come to the Dynamis School want to go deeper into the philosophy and practical aspects. Some Dynamis students study alongside their undergraduate course while others may have up to twenty five years of practise. I have never had a problem with the diversity of levels because I am not teaching horizontally; I am going deeper. You can always go deeper, it doesn’t matter what stage you are at. And the deeper you go, the better the results and the more pleasure you get from practise. We build strong philosophical roots so people know exactly where they are coming from and where they are going to, and that makes all the difference. A lot of people want to get continued support and share knowledge, and a lot of people just love studying homoeopathy.

ROWENA: Are you going to keep the Dynamis School going? If I delay studying with you for, say, a couple of years, will I have missed my opportunity?

JEREMY: Since I started the Dynamis School eighteen years ago, there have always been rumours that it is going to stop and I don’t make those rumours up myself! I should, but I don’t! I love Dynamis; that is where I have fun. It gives me great satisfaction to teach the same group for two years and see their progress. The truth is two years isn’t enough but I do two years because people wouldn’t come if I did four! But at the end of the course most students say they would love to continue.

Part of the course is long-term live cases; that way students can learn much more than the first prescription, like case management, remedy reaction and second prescription. When one takes cases in front of students you really have to have faith and drop the ego. But the group energy helps. I do my best but if I fail then everybody can share the failure and we try to learn from it. And if I succeed, then everybody can share the success too. There is always learning to be had, whatever the outcome. You have to come to a place in yourself where you believe that you will be able to solve the case in that hour in front of all those students. It is a good challenge!

Jeremy on Provings:

ROWENA: How many remedies have you proved Jeremy?

JEREMY: I don’t know exactly, but I think it is somewhere between twenty seven and thirty.

ROWENA: How do you choose them?

JEREMY: I have two methods of choosing; intellect and omens. An intellect choice is like when I decided to prove all the noble gases because I know that they can increase our knowledge of the whole periodic table.

ROWENA: Are they for very spiritual people?

JEREMY: Yes, there is something spiritual about the noble gases, because at their full potential they can really touch heaven.

ROWENA: So they feel very connected to the source; to God?

JEREMY: They can be very connected to the source, if they are in the right place. But their problem is that they don’t know how to disconnect from it. They feel they are in such a perfect position and everything is so right that they cannot step into life and get dirty, and if you don’t get dirty, you are not living. You have to suffer if you want to sing the blues.

So proving the noble gases was an intellectual decision but other remedies I chose through omens or synchronicities. Swan (Cygnus cygnus) was an omen choice. I was sitting by the sea with a very sore neck, and this swan sailed by. I had previously asked for an omen and you have to ask for one otherwise you don’t get it.

ROWENA: Like in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist?

JEREMY: Yes, absolutely. To get omens, you have to believe in them, ask for them, and not miss them when they are revealed to you. When I asked for an omen before choosing fallow deer, in one day five people mentioned deer to me or showed me pictures of deer and then I saw a TV documentary and that sealed the deal.

ROWENA: Do you think sometimes that your patients move you spiritually on your own journey?

JEREMY: Definitely. Patients come who are in a high place spiritually and they will impart something to you, but nearly every patient to whom you give a good remedy will come back with a lesson for you. They will come back and say one little sentence that will resonate with you; they will come and give you their gift back.

ROWENA: A lesson about the remedy, or a lesson for yourself?

JEREMY: Both a lesson for me and a lesson about the remedy, and that is a gift in itself. It will often be just what I need to hear for that day and will pick me up and make me feel better about life.

ROWENA: Do you think that you get those patients that need your remedies or do you think we are all getting them but we just don’t recognise the remedy picture? 

JEREMY: A bit of both. Maybe some get attracted to me because they need those remedies, maybe because I know those remedies I recognise them in patients and maybe other people miss them because they don’t know them. There was an interesting experiment in India that some homoeopaths did ten or so years ago. They did sixty provings and then created a homoeopathic network in a few centres across India, and for two years, they worked exclusively with those remedies, and they got great results.

I could probably survive only prescribing my thirty remedies and just about get by, but it would not be great homoeopathy. Hahnemann only used twenty remedies for many years until he proved a hundred. You can work with a small number of remedies that you know very well and get reasonable results, because similars work, not just simillimums. If only simillimums worked, we would all be out of business! Hahnemann says there is no such thing as a simillimum.

ROWENA: Really?

JEREMY: He says it is just a theoretical concept and I agree with him. It does give us a beacon to work towards but it is a delusion that gets planted into people at college until they start practising and hopefully realise there is no such thing. If there is a simillimum for each person, and we have only proved three thousand remedies, then how are we finding the simillimum for millions of patients around the world? We cannot be.

There are a hundred thousand minerals and plants and a hundred million animals and insects. Curing like with like is about metaphor and analogy, not sameness, so there cannot be one simillimum and we don’t want there to be a simillimum either, just like there can never be only one perfect poem for each person.

Homoeopathy is poetry or music because it is analogy. You don’t say to somebody, “Your eyes are beautiful, like eyes!” You say, “Your eyes are like the lake in the spring and your hair is like the wind blowing through the soft leaves as they fall to the ground in the autumn.” If it is the right music, rhythm and words, it will touch. So many poems touch you and they will do so in different ways. Some poems will be better than other poems, and they will touch deeper and longer and carry you further. And some will be crap and not touch much at all!

We want to work ‘in the image of’ and it is better that way because it means that every level of practitioner can get results. It allows practitioners the possibility of not being perfect. If you take a case in any class, if you have got twenty homoeopaths, it is likely that you will get fifteen different remedy suggestions.

ROWENA: And do you think all fifteen remedies will work?

JEREMY: Probably three or four would act beneficially; some more, some less. It is a matter of how close you get by percentage. Those within ten percent of the target would get a good result, those within twenty percent would get a medium result and with those out of range, nothing much would happen or they would suppress the case. It is a grey area between the unattainable Holy Grail of the theoretical simillimum and suppression.

So I hope Jeremy’s words have inspired you to either help him find sponsorship for his work in Africa, research his remedies or go and study with him at Dynamis. And perhaps they have inspired you to read his whole interview which of course you can do if you purchase the book which you can do in a variety of ways including direct from me through the website for the book www.lookingbackmovingforward.com. Readers of Hpathy.com will receive a ten per cent discount. And of course I would love for you to utilize the blog on the site and strengthen our community’s worldwide connection.

Until next month…..

And now for your monthly slice from my book Looking Back Moving Forward (www.lookingbackmovingforward.com). This time I have chosen the inspirational and rule breaking Peter Chappell world famous for his work with AIDS.

I found myself on Thursday 10 February 2005 taking the tube down to Shepherds Bush, West London, to the home of Peter Chappell. I had attended a lecture of his a few weeks earlier on his new remedies and I was keen to learn more about them and hear his story. He has been practising as a homeopath since the renaissance, he studied with Thomas Maughan, he was a founder member and is a Fellow of the Society of Homeopaths and he has a lot to say! It was a fascinating few hours.

Peter on Thomas Maughan and his influence on our profession and combination remedies

I fell in love with Thomas Maughan; a most amazing man. Of course I had treatment with him. He gave me Sulphur, which gave me a very deep spiritual experience. The remedy made me see myself exactly as I was – a very ordinary, poorly developed individual with endless weird thoughts and failings. I recognised a big long list of them and felt stripped of all pretentiousness and defences. I saw that I was perfectly alright just as I was. That experience and process lasted about ten years.

First of all, Thomas gave me Morgan followed by Sulphur. He then gave me the tissue salts Natrum phosphoricum and Kali phosphoricum alternating to take three times a day. That was his first prescription and he had a routine. He said not to give the indicated remedy if you could spot it but to wait until you had worked on other levels first. Basically he knew about toxicity and detox, so he detoxed the body first, tuned it up, and got the person functioning better. Only then would he prescribe a constitutional remedy. He would know it by then anyway, or have a pretty good idea at least. This obviously had many advantages including stopping you needing to be spot on right at the start of treatment and to fully and deeply understand the person.

ROWENA: So was it because he wanted to get to know the person slowly?

PETER: No, he just wanted to make sure that they were ready for the remedy. His perspective was that if you give the indicated remedy when your patient is congested, for example, it isn’t going to have much of an impact because it cannot drive through the shit. If they are really full of toxins the indicated remedy won’t work properly so he prescribed routinely at the start of treatment using remedies to warm the person up.

He was inventing combination remedies at the time, which are still being used by homeopaths in the UK today. At the College of Practical Homeopathy (CPH) they talk about Ambra grisea, Anacardium orientale and Argentum nitricum in combination as Triple A. In those days he would think them up, order them from Galen’s pharmacy, and just see what happened. They have become folklore since but he was really just playing about.

He gave me Triple A once and one of them opened up my heart and had a very profound effect on me. I could argue for Anacardium orientale, I could argue for Argentum nitricum and could even argue for Ambra grisea, but one of them really deeply affected me and I will never forget it. It made me feel incredibly loving, as if my heart had opened and something shifted inside me. I think he christened it ‘the Love pill’ based on my response and that of others.

By the time I was about thirty I was starting to practise and I think it must have been around 1970. I didn’t know anything really but I thought you gave everybody remedies either in a 200C potency or 10M as their first prescription as that is what Thomas used to do. He would use a 200C for bowel nosodes and detox remedies followed by a 10M polycrest. I started practising using this system until I found my feet.

ROWENA: How long did you have to study with him?

PETER: Well, I didn’t have the opportunity to study any length of time, because after about two years he was dying; he even treated us in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He had very severe lung cancer, but he just didn’t want to give up smoking. I took him to see an acupuncturist in the final stages of his cancer and he was very impressed.

He used to love going out for the day; he didn’t drive at that point. We often went for breakfast to Galen’s, a homeopathic pharmacy in Dorset. He liked to leave at seven o’clock in the morning from South London before the rush hour and speed at ninety miles an hour along the not yet motorway roads to get to Galen’s pharmacy for ten in the morning to collect his remedies instead of having them posted to him. He just loved the idea of going out for a trip and he also gave me driving lessons. Because he was the Chief Druid of England at the time, he was a very heavy-duty spiritual teacher. He had a long white beard and he looked like the Asterix Druid.

When we drove to Dorchester, the roads were bad and if we didn’t overtake, the journey could take us all day. He would make me overtake on blind bends with only a fraction of a second’s notice to pull out. He was teaching me about consciousness; he was saying, “You have got half a second and if you take that half-second we could be out and back in before they know it” and I could. Just occasionally we would go around a blind bend and there would be a tanker coming towards us, and I would slam on the brakes and would just make it back in again in time. But those who drove him never had any accidents with him.

ROWENA: Why do you think he wanted to teach you that?

PETER: It was to sharpen up our minds. He came from the Golden Dawn Tradition; the true mystical and magical tradition of England. He knew a lot and had done a lot of things. He said he had to climb down several levels of consciousness before he could make contact with the people of my generation as they were pretty much wiped out by drugs. Even then he was having a hard time finding anybody to teach anything to. Anyway he was my introduction to homeopathy, and I just loved him! He also ran rituals in Druidism and other classes so I just queued up and took the whole lot. And while he was alive it was totally fantastic. It was quite good afterwards but his presence was all I really cared about.

Peter on Rajan Sankaran

And then of course Rajan Sankaran arrived on the scene and he was ace for me. He was about thirty then and it was like sitting at the feet of a master. He knew so much more than I did and he was stunning out there; honestly, I just lapped him up. He sat in a room for four days and we gave him all the difficult cases of Europe to treat. The patients would come in and sit down and he would then write the remedy on a piece of paper, screw it up and give it to us, not to open. Then he would take the case for an hour and go through it with us, explain all the rubrics and then we would open the screwed piece of paper up and there was the name of the remedy. He had already worked it out in one minute. He did that routinely, virtually every time. And he got it right and the results panned out just by making observations when the patient walked through the door.

He was really funny in those days. He would not look at the patient at all, he would just listen, and he would write down the rubrics as they came out in the case in the side margins and doodle on the main pages. He had no eye contact and we had to warn the patients about this. We learnt a lot from him, and he solved our difficult cases and made them look easy. Obviously over twenty years he has evolved and every time he writes a book he says it is a work in progress, which it is. Nowadays his focus is on the patient’s gestures so it is completely different. He has been going steadily step by step, and in Mumbai he has built up a base of people around him and they are all involved with each other.

I have never been to Mumbai, but I think that there is a great group of practitioners on the same wavelength who all work with his methods and they get good results. He says to understand the real person, watch their hand movements and their body language, and don’t take much notice of what they say. As I understand it, if you want to know their unconscious processes, their deepest forming forces, or the shape of which they really are in a primitive way, you need to look at their gestures, because sign language came before verbal language. If you watch their hands you get the sign language; if you listen to their voice you just get the chitchat. Obviously, that is a simplistic version of what he does, but it conveys the depth to which he now goes.

He has taken individual homeopathy, what I call the first simillimum, to its peak. If I was practising now I would spend some time getting myself to grips with Rajan Sankaran’s new system, so I was up to date. I would say that is where the energy is, if you want to be the best. Obviously, you can learn a lot from Rajan, from Jan Scholten, from Jeremy Sherr and all sorts of other people, who are great teachers.

Peter on the Second Simillimum and treating Cancer and AIDS

PETER: Having said that, I think what I have discovered is what I call the second simillimum, which is possibly the biggest step forward in homeopathy since Hahnemann. It is like the next step after Hahnemann because up until now what everyone has been actually doing is refining Hahnemann. However, no one had any idea about how you treat diseases. It is my conclusion that individual homeopathy never treats diseases, it treats people, it removes obstacles to vital energy flowing, which allows the disease to be overcome, but it doesn’t treat the disease. Now some very obvious remedies have affinities with diseases or certain types of pathology. Aurum metallicum and testicles, Sepia succus and fibroids, but that is because there is a relationship between the individual remedies inside a person and the disease simillimum. 

For the first simillimum you must stick to the individual, and I would say you can forget anything in the repertory that has anything to do with pathology because it is at best only a confirmation and materia medica likewise. You can say it has got some indications in that way, but fundamentally you need to stick to the individual.

In my opinion, all chronic diseases are unique combinations of epidemic diseases. Epidemic diseases exist inside the same person for a long period of time; for example tuberculosis (TB) and malaria coexist together in Africa inside many people, it is just normal. There is no way that you can have only one disease at one time; everybody has got lots of miasms running all at the same time, it is just impossible for them not to. It is just a question whether the immune system keeps them under control or not. But if the person has AIDS or is subject to enormous trauma, the miasms start becoming active; the vital force cannot keep them under control and they just start to manifest.

Hahnemann says if you have got no symptoms, you have got no disease and there is no way that this can be true. That is only an ideal. There are lots of things that are wrong with what Hahnemann said, but you know he wrote the Organon two hundred years ago, for heaven’s sake, and things have moved on. I have written a book called The Second Similimum and in it I have pulled homeopathy apart, reformed it and said what I think about it. I might be completely wrong in some of my formulations, but I had a go at it based on my experience of homeopathy.

What I observed was that things join together in the microcosmic world by symbiosis, and in the real world they do too. Turtles have fish that swim with them to keep them clean. Buffalo have birds that sit on them to keep them clean and eat the flies. Symbiosis is everywhere. Inside our guts we have enormous numbers of bacteria to help us eat and snails have certain animals inside them to help them eat too and without those they couldn’t live. I think diseases are combinations of miasms and therefore you can treat diseases like chronic miasms; you just take the totality of a disease and you find the remedy and prescribe it.

Carcinosin is not a miasm; it is the first example of a disease remedy. I am not breaking new ground here. Donald Foubister said how brilliant Carcinosin was in treating incipient cancer, and it is pretty close. It is brilliant and totally curative at times. I have a case in my book, Emotional Healing with Homeopathy, with a seven year follow up; complete cure of diagnosed cancer based on one dose of Carcinosin.

ROWENA: Is that because it matched the situation?

PETER: Yes, but it should do. Unfortunately, the reason why Carcinosin generally doesn’t work is because there should be a hundred different samples in there of different types of cancer. Or you could take a Carcinosin made typically from ten people with a typical cancer you are working with. You could have cancer of the testicles or cancer of the prostate. Ten different men with prostate cancers from around the world, all samples mixed together at the same time by some intelligent process and made into one remedy. Then you have got a remedy that has got a possibility. At the moment we have one remedy for cancer and it clearly doesn’t work. If it did then the Ramakrishnan method wouldn’t have evolved. So I have worked out a different way of making remedies, which does work, and I now have remedies for miasms and remedies for diseases.

ROWENA: So have you been using your Cancer remedy to treat people with cancer?

PETER: Well I don’t treat people except in Africa; I wait for other people to get me the evidence. Also it is more convincing if other people do so. Disbelief was a real issue for me in Africa with my remdy for AIDS, PC1 remedy, so it was good that practitioners other than me treated patients and they got the same results. So my system seems to work and I have got enough results now to show that it seems to work across the board. There are results for cancer treatment documented on my web site with two year follow ups, but not enough results by a long way.

ROWENA: Are your results mainly for your AIDS remedy then?

PETER: My early results are all AIDS. Later I started work on chronic diseases. While not everybody gets a result the first time they used one of my remedies, sometimes they get a fantastic result beyond anything they have previously experienced. In some cases practitioners have given patients who have been treated for twenty years without a very satisfactory result, one of my remedies and they have responded very dramatically and successfully.

Peter on the shortcomings of our education system

On a different subject, I have to say one of the weaknesses I perceive in homeopathy is that homeopaths are not sufficiently trained; they haven’t done enough internal, therapeutic inner training. The world is emotionally illiterate and I think emotional intelligence in homeopathy is still limited. The results of critical life events and emotional trauma are often in the way when we are seeking the individual simillimum and we shouldn’t be giving an archetypal simillimum at that time, but a traumatic one and that is usually enough. Most people go back to functioning okay when they have dealt with their trauma. 

There is a constitutional pattern below the trauma that is archetypal and comes from the animal, mineral or vegetable kingdom and it might be a very satisfactory life pattern and doesn’t always need treating. You could treat it, and it will open up a whole lot more if the life pattern is too constrictive. You often see by giving the remedy for that life pattern, that the person will open up and their energy will flow more efficiently. But the traumatic pattern is often laid on top of that, and I think homeopaths are not trained enough in that area and they don’t understand themselves sufficiently, and therefore they don’t understand this. You cannot understand other people without understanding yourself; that is a given. What is often not recognised is that the trauma miasm - if we can call it this – is in the way of the deeper archetypal remedies and the trauma needs to be treated first. Traumas pass down from generation to generation, as I have shown in my book Emotional Healing with Homeopathy. It is common and is a dominant part of human make-up.

Sexuality is such a good example of an area where there is insufficient training. If a group of homeopaths went on a weekend course in sexuality training, I bet you on Monday morning when their patients sit in front of them again they would be asking questions they have never asked before. And they would be getting information or responses they have never had before, because they would then be much easier with the subject. And that is the same with all these areas.

Another area where homeopathy is relatively undeveloped is belief systems. I figured out that there are a whole lot of remedies out there in the ‘belief structures realm’, which are different from anything that we have proved before, because we don’t deal with belief structures. You can give people really good remedies but their beliefs won’t change. All sorts of other things change, but their beliefs stay the same. I have developed remedies that work on that level too.

My thought process behind this is based on my perception that the spiritual realm is the only solid reality; the rest of it is rolled out by our mind and is not grounded in reality. Being in a physical body is an enjoyable learning experience but it is not solid reality. The spirit is what is solid and we choose to roll out a body every now and then by a process we have evolved. So I started rolling out remedies for belief structures, and a simple but profound example is fat and famine. My Fat remedy is brilliant because there is a belief structure that there isn’t enough food to go around. That is an easy one to understand.

ROWENA: So you wouldn’t give it necessarily to someone who was overweight, because there are lots of different reasons why people are overweight, only if they have that belief system in their consciousness?

PETER: I would prescribe it when there is an eating disorder related to there not being enough food. But the whole human race has been through that issue as poverty and malnutrition were epidemic for centuries; you don’t have to go back too far before people were dying because they were starving in the winter. In a way, it is a trauma miasm. They wouldn’t be aware of it; it is completely unconscious and there is no way that you can approach the consciousness of that one. You can acknowledge that you are fat but you won’t know that it might be because of a very deep issue.

I hope you enjoyed reading this extract from Peter’s chapter in Looking Back Moving Forward. I would very much welcome a worldwide discussion on the issues raised by Peter If you visit the blog on my website, www.lookingbackmovingforward.com, you can make your contribution and also receive a ten percent discount if you buy the book. For those of you who tried last month to reach the blog but were unsuccessful – apologies. Those problems should now have been rectified and I welcome you to try again. Many thanks!

Long live homeopathy!

I first met Simon Taffler in Malvern in November 2004 where I met several of the other interviewees. Simon and I had stayed in touch since meeting for joyous conversations about homeopathy and our profession. We set this specific session up for the purpose of the interview and I was very excited about it as Simon is one of the high earners within our profession and he has carved for himself a successful career in homeopathy. It was a cold yet sunny Monday 28 November 2005 that I picked him up from my local train station and took him back to my home for lunch and a long and fruitful conversation.

SIMON: I see the need in the UK and in the USA for the vision of homeopathy to change and be clearer, especially about where our profession is going. And I see a lot of common traits that I am not comfortable with. Homeopaths for example, are susceptible to working in their ivory tower alone – forsaken, isolated and separated from the world. With that susceptibility in mind, I think we should be working together and opening centres of excellence that invite research and co-operation in which homeopaths work together to improve and evolve themselves and their profession.

Perhaps a floor of a building in Harley Street with two-way mirrors in all the treatment rooms so that practitioners and students can observe, learn and give advice. Then, if you have got a problem with a patient, you just walk into the observation room and invite someone who has been observing into the clinic room to help. This is an experience I had in Sri Lanka this summer where I was working. There were ten or eleven of us all practising in one room without any curtains, without barriers and I loved it because people called me down to diagnose something or treat someone and they sent me patients and I did the same. I like that kind of interaction and it has got to be much healthier, in my mind, than working in isolation and competition. This ethos acknowledges our collective susceptibility and offers opportunities for all sorts of learning and healing.

ROWENA: You spoke earlier about going to the USA in order to study further how to teach homeopathy. What were your frustrations with how homeopathy was taught here?

SIMON: It has been changing in the last few years, but there are a number of schools that still have a curriculum that is very allopathic with a disproportionate emphasis on the material aspects of health and not enough importance given to the energetic aspects of life. And homeopathy is a vitalist, energetic medicine. If you take the model in the Organon. of the mind, body, soul and spirit of homeopathy, then the mind, soul and spirit are the energetic parts of the totality leaving the body as the only physical part. That means three quarters of our being is energetic and one quarter is physical.

In my opinion many curricula are based the other way around – that is three quarters physical and one quarter energetic, if that. And some schools are even more physically inclined, particularly the ones that have gone for university degree status, and that has meant that the way they do anatomy, physiology and pathology is much more allopathic than homeopathic. So, I have a problem with this. The extreme of this occurs at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. They were much more homeopathic in their thinking, but not anymore; now they think and prescribe like allopaths. When I went there a few years ago a patient would sit in front of a doctor for say ten or fifteen minutes, the repertory would be opened and they would look at asthma and locate the black type remedies and keep trying them until one of them made a difference. That is not homeopathy.

What I see is that the essence of the curriculum of homeopathy has not changed in the last twenty years and it is very allopathically oriented. What I have found is that many of the people I supervise are allopathic thinkers prescribing homeopathy and I don’t get on very well with that concept and I cannot supervise them very easily. So I encourage them to venture forth on a transition process from allopathic to homeopathic thinking. However, everything in our society validates allopathic thinking, so people need to do this journey against the current.

For me, a homeopathic curriculum needs to acknowledge and recognise primarily that the student is there to make this transition, this journey from allopathic to homeopathic thinking. From thinking and considering things from a culturally based model that validates allopathic meaning making, to being prepared to stand behind a philosophy that understands life differently and puts us on the margins of society. When we start thinking differently, we start appreciating different values based on different assumptions and we start having a comprehension of a way of understanding that validates individual experience over notions of collective symptom pictures or syndromes.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems we have in ensuring the future of homeopathy, is how do we make sure that our curriculum is homeopathic and not allopathic? And this could get worse once we have a single register. The more the Government and conventional Western medicine become involved with homeopathy, the more allopathically thinking and allopathically validating it could become. If homeopaths don’t think homeopathically they will not be able to teach their patients nor advocate clearly for their profession.

This is reflected in the media that constantly criticises homeopathy from an allopathic perspective and headlines research that can only invalidate homeopathy given the premises under which the research was undertaken. You cannot double-blind test homeopathy, it just cannot happen and there is no point trying. It just won’t work because the essence of homeopathy is about treating everybody as an individual. And that means double-blind testing won’t work.

Homeopathy prescribed and researched allopathically is happening all the time. The 2002-3 research into Arnica for pain relief after carpal tunnel release surgery is a good example as I don’t know a single homeopath who would give Arnica for postoperative carpal tunnel pain relief in the first place. But this type of research and the thinking behind it and the media that publishes it, is going on all the time and I think it affects the way homeopaths write their brochures, the way they promote their clinics, the way they think about what they do, the way they address their patients and the way they address the world. And I have problems with that, because to me that is not homeopathy. You can see I feel passionately about this.

ROWENA: Yes, I can see that. So what is the answer Simon; how do we move our profession forward

SIMON: I think everybody needs to be plopped into a crucible that nurtures and supports them to think homeopathically. It is important that students get exposed to as many different forms of practise as possible. It is not about creating little Simon Tafflers or teaching and making little Rowena Ronsons. It is about everybody becoming the person that they can be and practising in their own way and I think that that is very important. Listen, I started in a class of around two hundred and fifty potential homeopaths of which at the end, I think, fewer than forty graduated. The year I left the College of Homeopathy, ten of us transferred to the School of Homeopathy and many more left without completing the course. It was an appalling indictment of the way I was taught and if I think of the people that started with me, I don’t know how many of them are still practising.

So learning homeopathy clearly is not just about helping people prescribe; it is about validating the chosen philosophical framework (homeopathic) and then helping them validate their experiences by reviewing their understanding of the world. This is one way of looking at what a remedy does. And that is the starting point because many of the people who graduate don’t practise. They need to be exposed to as much personal development, validation and acknowledgment as possible. Then they will know that it is OK that we think differently from everybody else and that we can address medical problems based on the experience of the patient and not on what a test says. They will know that people’s health is transitory and that we have assumptions in homeopathy that actually support the way people understand their health.

Case taking in homeopathy is unique and extremely pertinent and relevant to every single practitioner of medicine anywhere in the world. When I teach doctors, I don’t start by telling them about remedies. Instead, I tell them how we take a case, because it is an eye opener for them. And when doctors sit in on my practice and I take a case, they ask me where I get the information from. That is because they sit and hear, and I sit and listen. Hearing, for me, is a physical thing you do and listening is an active participation in a conversation without influencing it. I think people need to be trained and it is a skill that they have to have when they leave homeopathy school. And that is much more important than how many remedies they know because you can always look up a remedy.

I am concerned that homeopathy could die because it could get swallowed into an integrated health care programme where the primary responsibility for a patient is taken by an allopathic doctor who will validate tests and research over personal experience. In other words, I see that conventional Western medical practitioners will validate explanations over experience while homeopaths validate experience over explanation. I cannot envisage an integrated medicine approach working for homeopathy, because as I said before, the homeopathic paradigm has a greater worldview than conventional Western medicine. And therefore, allopathy or Western medicine fits nicely into homeopathy but not the other way around.

I hope you enjoyed reading this extract from Simon’s chapter in Looking Back Moving Forward and it has given you plenty of food for thought! I would very much welcome a worldwide discussion on the issues raised by Simon. If you visit the blog on my website, www.lookingbackmovingforward.com, you can make your contribution and also receive a ten percent discount if you buy the book. Also, please check out the website which has very recently been updated with all the latest reviews. Many thanks!

Long live homeopathy!

Here is the excerpt of my book that appears in the June edition of h.pathy.com. This time I have chosen to give you a taste of Ellen Kramer who is the principal of the College of Practical Homeopathy in London (CPH). Please feel free to add your comments and start discussions!

It was a student clinic day when I visited her, but Ellen managed to maintain her focus with me and illustrated, yet again how enthusiasm, dedication and ambition play a large part in the successful career of a homeopath. Ellen fixed her deep and intense brown eyes on me and I knew that hour I would spend with her would shake my classical foundations and leave me breathless.

ELLEN: Looking for totality prescriptions for patients when they are not ready, adds to their problems. It doesn’t help. When people are highly toxic from the drugs that they are taking; the main organs that are affected are the kidneys and the liver. I remember I had a lovely case of a lady who was suffering from hot flushes. She couldn’t go on to Hormone Replacement Therapy because she had had a stroke but she was really suffering with the menopause. She was in a wheelchair so she couldn’t come and see me. So I went to her and I looked at the case and it was a classic Natrum muriaticum. Her stroke had started within a year of her husband dying. Unfortunately it was a complete disaster, her symptoms became much worse; she was in a right state.

Then I went on a classic remedy hunt, I thought it has got to be Lachesis muta, because she is loquacious and all this sort of rot. I gave her Lachesis muta and it just got worse and worse, to the point where I just said to her, “Look, I don’t think homeopathy’s for you. I think you should see a nutritionist and a herbalist, thank you very much, goodbye.” I felt I was just adding to her problems. Now in hindsight, I would never, ever, ever start a case from that perspective. I would actually look at what was presenting. She was on about seven or eight different drugs. She was on blood thinners and drugs for high blood pressure. Now I would have started her off with a detox therapeutic, organ drainage and nutritional support. And then I would be looking at which drugs are causing the main symptoms.

ROWENA: So when you get a patient who comes to you with side effects of Tamoxifen after breast cancer and has had radiation treatment – and has a history of the Pill and Hormone Replacement Therapy – would you give Tamoxifen in potency to start the case?

ELLEN: Yes, you can buy Tamoxifen and give it back to them in potency. It works. I have had patients that come and say that they just want you to help with the side effects of Tamoxifen. I think, ”Well thanks for your money, here’s Tamoxifen back in potency.” I tell them to take less of it because they will become more sensitive to its action. Tautopathy gives the patient maximum therapeutic value from their allopathic drug. So they just need to take less of it, otherwise they can go into overdosing. You sensitise the vital force to the drug so they need less of it. You can use tautopathy to wean people off their drugs, so if they are taking Thyroxine, in time they are only taking one Thyroxine a week and the rest of it they are taking homeopathically, and that one Thyroxine a week is enough.

ROWENA: So when you get patients that have come to you for something else and then they tell you that they are on Thyroxine, would you go with the Thyroxine first?

ELLEN: No, not unless it is a problem. If people are on drugs I leave them alone until it becomes a problem. I know if they are on good homeopathy, within about a year the drugs will be a problem. Because the liver starts to clean up; it gets more sensitive to the drug and the vital force will not tolerate a poison any more.

I find it very difficult to understand how people are so hung up on a methodology that suits nintenth or early twentieth century patients. It is just not applicable to twenty first century patients. You get the odd twenty first century patient who you can apply that method to. So it doesn’t surprise me that you get a whole load of homeopaths that say you cannot make money out of homeopathy; there are not enough patients. I just think to myself, good; if that is your belief system, stay there. I don’t believe that, I know homeopathy works; it is just how you apply it. Homeopathy works – it is easy and it is simple. You just have to know the art of application. And the methods are a guide. They guide you to that application. Practical homeopathy is the practical application of different methods according to each patient. So it is the patient who tells you what to do, not you trying to apply something to a patient.

It is like having tools in a toolbox the classical method is one method. I really understand where Kent was coming from, because I would say in observing people, eighty percent of their sickness comes out in mental and emotional stuff. Now, the simple question is this, can I cure that now? If I can, there are no drugs, there is no suppression, there are no obstacles to cure – and then a Kentian totality prescription will work.

If you have a mental/emotional causation, you can see that their pathology is coming out of that, but they have spent twenty years on Amitriptyline and have got loads and loads of other stuff, or their diet is so appalling they are nutritionally depleted, can you give them that? No, you cannot. Unless you want to enjoy a good aggravation, and then tell your patient it is a healing crisis when it is not. It is inappropriate prescribing because you don’t understand what you are doing. Okay, if you can see it is coming out of a mental/emotional causation, there are no obstacles to cure, and if you go back to the Organon, what did Hahnemann say? He says remove the obstacle to cure. What is it that needs curing? What needs curing is the cause of those symptoms. If you can cure that straight away, then what we call here at CPH ‘the whole patient methods’ will work.

If there are obstacles to cure, then you are basically looking at what we call ‘part patient methodologies’, that is, organ drainage, tautopathy, aetiology, sequential, nutrition, cell salts and polypharmacy. Those are your toolbox and you will get a result with your patient.

ROWENA: Everything you have said makes perfect sense. I think if somebody sat down with you who practised in a different way to you, if they heard that, they would understand it. But I am wondering if people attract what they can treat; do you know what I mean? Because I do think that there are a lot of classical homeopaths who have very successful practices and they don’t practise the way you do, so I am wondering if they just attract those patients that they can help. I am not saying that there is some that they cannot but…

ELLEN: Listen, what you do in life is you get what you are open to learning, and I am very happy for people to do that. I think, if that works for you, it works for you because you are a great homeopath. It didn’t work for me; it didn’t work for loads of my patients.

ROWENA: It doesn’t mean that you are not a great homeopath.

ELLEN: No, I had to find a different way of getting round the problem. So wherever people are and what they do in homeopathy, I applaud them. But I know that what I do works for me and I am very, very, very busy. When I was at my practice in Islington, which I have cut down to once a week now, the receptionist used to say to me, how can you see seventeen people in a day? How do you do it? I can do it because I know exactly what I am looking for. I know how to apply different methods to different people, so everybody who comes to the door, as far as I am concerned, is my teacher. They teach me homeopathy and I just have to be sharp, sharp, sharp, on how I apply homeopathy, and if they come to me and I think that all they need for the first month is nutritional changes; that is what they get. And I am happy for them to go away and make those dietary changes.

ROWENA: How do you know that they need dietary changes? Is there a questionnaire that you give?

ELLEN: No, I can tell by the symptoms they are presenting that they are depleted in all sorts of things.

ROWENA: And that you had as part of your training in homeopathy as well?

ELLEN: No, I picked that up, I had to. Most people are so fearful. If they get it wrong they think it is the end of the world. Do you know, when I was a student I used to go to tutorials and they used to say, ”You did what?” I said, “Yes, I did that.” “You aggravated what?” I said, ”Yes, I did.” I aggravated everybody; I spent a good year as a student aggravating everybody who came into contact with me.

I used to dread eczema patients as I had the worst aggravations with them. I had one mother who brought her husband with her, shouting at me because their daughter came with two bits of eczema on her elbows and was covered from head to foot in it now. She looked like somebody had taken a blowtorch to her, and that was on Sulphur 12C, once a day. What did that mean? That meant that I had inappropriately prescribed. I didn’t understand what was going on; I didn’t see that the cause was the vaccinations.

ROWENA: But Sulphur is worse for vaccination so it might have been the right remedy. So did you go with the vaccines in potency?

ELLEN: I did all of that, but what I didn’t understand was the relationship between the skin and the bowels. Vaccines produce an incredible level of toxicity, they weaken the liver, the liver governs the digestive system, and the large intestines become extremely sluggish, and so on. You give something like Sulphur, which is a big liver remedy and it stimulates the liver. Then if the lines of elimination are blocked, where is it going to come out? It is coming out in the skin. So when you see eczema you know that the lines of elimination are blocked, that is the bowels, and that is why this stuff is coming out in the skin. You can see the cause, the toxicity from the vaccine, so what are you going to do? You need to start with the bowels first, you need to get those bowels moving; you need to get the bowels clean. So a healthy bowel movement is every time you eat your main meal, within half an hour to an hour or so, you should want to pass a stool. That is a healthy bowel movement. Most people are constipated.

ROWENA: So then what do you recommend?

ELLEN: You have to put them on to a complex carbohydrate, high roughage diet. Encourage them to eat more fruit, cut out refined carbohydrates and get them off dairy products and excessive wheat. And that is what I do; you know. Patients come in, they bring their kids with their skin and I say, “This is where we are starting. Before we go into energy medicine we have to start with what is not physically functioning properly, and we start there.”

ROWENA: What happens if it is an emotional causation that is causing their bowels not to move?

ELLEN: If it is an emotional causation and there is no obstacle to cure, then you can go and do your classical case. If there are no steroids, for example, you can go straight in with your classical case, and guess what; you will get an excellent result. But I have seen very few children who have come to me that way. I have teenagers that come to me for acne, and I sit there and I say to them that we are going to start with opening their bowels.

ROWENA: And you do that via the diet?

ELLEN: Dietary recommendations and I use a lot of tinctures.

ROWENA: Specific to the organs?

ELLEN: Specific to the organs to get them to function properly. I look at what organs aren’t functioning, what ones I need to nourish with different tinctures, and then I use diet and recommended supplements for them. So I start with where the patient is. I don’t delude myself that I know the answers but I think, “This is going to be interesting.” But I have got the tools, so nothing is a great challenge, and if I do get an aggravation I think, “What did I miss?” And most people are so busy telling me how unsafe homeopathy is, and I say to them it is because they don’t know how to use homeopathy. They do not understand how to use homeopathy; that is why they think it is unsafe.

Homeopathy is a safe system of medicine; it is gentle, it is effective, and you get excellent results. If you are not getting the results, it is because you are not applying it properly and you do not understand how to apply it. And that is it. It is not the tool you are using that is at fault. It is not the patient. It is the person who wields the tool that lacks the knowledge. And so people learn homeopathy, and they take with them from their course all the fears and they never move beyond those fears.

And there is nothing to be afraid of when you are dealing with patients in homeopathy, because you should have an insight into vital energy that doctors don’t even understand – they have no concept of vital energy. You are in a fantastic position. You cannot even begin to come close to the incompetence of your local GP when it comes to irritating and suppressing the vital force. Even if you were the most useless prescriber on this God’s earth, all you would do is have constant aggravations, and if you are so stupid you cannot actually look at your aggravations and learn from them, then you deserve to stay stuck, poor and fearful.

Thought provoking don’t you think? I would very much welcome a worldwide discussion on the issues raised by Ellen. If you visit the blog on my website, www.lookingbackmovingforward.com, you can make your contribution and also receive a ten percent discount if you buy the book.

Long live homeopathy!

August 2004, a waterfront Greek tavern on Alonissos; here the idea of Looking Back Moving Forward (www.lookingbackmovingforward.com) was born. Nigel Summerley and I were in the aftermath of a few hours spent in the company of the great George Vithoulkas interviewing him at his Academy (www.vithoulkas.com). Chatting through our perceptions of the experience, I became inspired to return to England and interview as many UK-based great homeopaths and teachers of homeopathy that I could in a year. Little did I know in this temporary, sun-induced state of immense enthusiasm and passion for homeopathy, my life would suddenly move into full throttle and would stay that way for the next two and a half years!

The result, a book of thirty two interviews with thirty four of our UK leaders in our field. I would have loved to have continued on my interviewing journey but the chapters took a further year to edit and compile and resulted in a tome of five hundred pages. 

Manish Bhatia of Hpathy.com suggested I share with you, over the coming months, excerpts from some of the interviews and my thoughts and feelings about having been part of the process and what I have learned from the experience. I would also like to invite you to explore and share your thoughts and feelings having read the excerpts (see the end of this article).

Looking Back Moving Forward was a huge project to be involved in; I can hardly believe it is complete. I feel extremely privileged to have been given an audience with these inspiring souls and equally fortunate to be able to share their wisdom and stories with so many homeopaths all around the world. Copies of the book in its first few months since publication have found their way across the UK to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, America, Canada, Belgium, Holland and Italy – and those are just the ones that I know about.

So to start with, let me introduce you to the interviewees. In alphabetical order I had the great honour of chatting with:

Subrata Kumar Banerjea * Mike Bridger * Peter Chappell * Kate Chatfield * Sheilah Creasy * Robert Davidson * Annette Gamblin *  Lesley Gregerson * Linda Gwillim * Barbara Harwood * Brian Kaplan * Ellen Kramer *  Martin Miles * Lionel Milgrom * Misha Norland * Nicky Pool *  Rebecca Preston *  Linda Razzell *  Ernest Roberts * Bill Rumble * Gordon Sambidge *  Roger Savage *  Yubraj Sharma *  Jeremy Sherr  * Myriam Shivadikar * Sue Sternberg  *  Dion Tabrett * Simon Taffler * Francis Treuherz * Charles Wansbrough * Anne Waters * Jerome Whitney * Kaaren Whitney * Carol Wise 

Robert Davidson is extremely well known in the UK. He is responsible for establishing the first school of homeopathy in London, COH, in 1978 with the late Martin Miles, he then went on to set up the three Practical Colleges in London, the Midlands and Iceland. He is known for being somewhat controversial and prides himself in being a disruptor.  Interviewing him was a three year education in itself and really got me thinking!

I include three excerpts here. The first is about how Robert got into homeopathy in the early 70s and illustrates how far we have moved on as a profession in the last forty years.

ROWENA: I wanted to start with how you got into all this. I know you studied with Thomas Maughan, but what inspired you to even go to him in the first place? Tell me your story.

ROBERT: In 1971 I was living in a macrobiotic communal house in Ladbroke Grove, London. I was just sitting there in the lounge reading a paper one Sunday afternoon. One of the people who had left a few months earlier came back for a visit. She was talking to someone else about a particular gentleman and inadvertently I heard the conversation. He was in his seventies and his wife was pregnant and a few other things like that. I thought I should talk to him but I had no idea why. So I phoned him up and said, “I would like to talk to you”. He asked me, “What about?” I said that I didn’t have a clue and he replied, “Right then, tomorrow at three in the afternoon.” And that was that. I had no clue about homeopathy; I didn’t even know anything like that existed. This was in the early seventies and it actually hardly existed at all.

ROWENA: And what were you doing workwise at that point?

ROBERT: I was very bored repairing extremely primitive telephone answering machines.

ROWENA: And how old were you?

ROBERT: In 1971 I was twenty five. I am only twenty seven now; it is amazing how slowly it has gone. After a couple of months or so I turned up at his homeopathy classes and this whole universe opened up. I was this complete nutcase who wrote down absolutely everything he said. I was watching everyone else at the table. They knew that they would never forget what he said and they didn’t write anything. Ha Ha.

ROWENA: Oh, I would have done what you did.

ROBERT: You can get wrist muscles the size of an elephant, you know.

ROWENA: Did you know what remedy he was? You observed him so much.

ROBERT: Thomas was undoubtedly Arsenicum album. He probably started off in his youth as Nux vomica, and there is a rare constitutional progression from the Nux vomica who lives life so intensely that they become different. Most people’s lives are too dull, boring and protected for them to change constitutions. How long will it take a Calcarea carbonica to get enough life experience to need to evolve? So the Nux vomica just goes in there, head down; usually goes through Ignatia amara and gets into Arsenicum album  in old age. So many homeopaths actually turn into Arsenicum albums. It is more the nature of the work that they do. They often get ….

ROWENA: Obsessive?

ROBERT: Anally retentive. Thomas held the homeopathy classes on Saturday evenings. It was very simple. On the first evening the theory took an hour and a half, just the once. I liked that. After that we did materia medica before tea, and cases after tea. And that was it. It was about a three and a half year cycle. We just went through all the remedies and everything was fleshed out with our own real cases. And as you went along, you gradually got cases and you just ended up doing it. It was an evolution.

ROWENA: How many of you were there?

ROBERT: Not that many. There was a flow through; people would come and go. The classes were once a fortnight. It totally ruined my social life, but there was nowhere better to go so it was fine. When he died in 1976 I naїvely started teaching his Saturday night classes and at the end of 1977 I got the idea for the College of Homeopathy (COH), and set that up to start in September 1978. I had a lot of encouragement like, “Who is going to go? You will never get people. Oh, that is far too much money, nobody will pay that.” It was an exciting time, but it was the same thing in 1985 when I started the first full-time course, “Oh, nobody can come full time; you are charging too much money.” Yes, right. I like the beginnings of things, when they are usually impossible. When it gets administrative and ‘corporate’ I am out of there.

ROWENA: At the time that you studied was there the classical/practical issue being discussed?

ROBERT: Oh, no. I started that one and here is the story behind it. Thomas had a particular way of practising; he used the totality remedy. However as there was almost always a difference between the organ and the organism, because of modern drugs, lifestyle, foods, sugar, alcohol and all the rest of it, often the organs would be specifically damaged out of proportion to the organism. For instance, if you prescribe for the organism – the totality - and it starts to repair the totality at a rate of twenty miles an hour, say, and the organ can only do ten, then you will either have prolonged aggravations or problems with pain and all sorts of other stuff. His skill was to be able to help the limited organ do twenty miles an hour and keep up with the organism. So with his way of prescribing you didn’t get the aggravations or the prolonged discharges. It was a very high level of skill and I don’t know anybody who has replicated that yet. And, naїvely again, that is what we taught at COH from 1978 through to about 1981-82.

It was about 1982 and ‘Greeks bearing gifts’ started to arrive. When George Vithoulkas first came over what he found, in his own words, were the best homeopaths that he had so far come across. Then he decided that, of course, like everybody else except him, we were doing it the wrong way. By that time, the interpretation of what George Vithoulkas was saying was about essence; that there was the central core, this absolute essence. Find that; prescribe the ‘right remedy’ and everything cascades better. This is not actually true in these benighted times, except in rare circumstances.

In this second excerpt Robert talks about methodologies:

ROBERT: So, one of the reasons I got Robin Murphy over from the USA was because what we needed to introduce were methodologies. The concept didn’t exist before then.

ROWENA: What was it like then if there weren’t methodologies?

ROBERT: It was just ‘what we did’. A lot of people still practise that way, saying there are no methodologies, there is just homeopathy. Which is true, as homeopathy is similarity. But homeopathy isn’t what you do; homeopathy is the reason you do it.

ROWENA: Okay, explain that a little bit to me.

ROBERT: Well, homeopathy is the reason you prescribe. It is not what you prescribe and it is not how you do it. Homeopathy is a principle. A principle is a vague idea, a kind of overarching vague idea. Anything specific in it is an individual’s interpretation of principle, which can only be judged by effectiveness in the world. (Read that one again..!) So the purpose of creating methodologies and distinct ways of doing things is that you create a set of rules within its own patient specific universe. Like Eizayaga’s layers methodology, which has rules that are completely the opposite of Kent’s? The methodologies contradict, but only if you use them to treat the same patient. That is one of the reasons I think there should be no philosophy in homeopathy; I am with Samuel on that.

ROWENA: He said that too?

ROBERT: Yes. He said ‘have no theories’. Of course he then went on and had a theory but, hey, he’s human too, maybe. Essentially homeopathy is a technology; it is an application of principle. The philosophy is not philosophy at all; it is actually just rule systems. And the rule systems apply individually within each distinct method. So the methods are defined by the rules you use, and what you need to do is retain integrity in your method and not jump from one method to another to another. That is why we ended up eventually creating distinct methodologies – aetiologies, Kentian, physical generals, layers and sequentials. Each methodology has its own rules and expectations. Each, if you like, has its own philosophy. What you do is individualise the methodology to the patient. That is the bit most homeopaths are missing. Almost no-one, worldwide, is teaching how to find the most appropriate method for each individual patient.

Survival (and health) is the ability to adapt to changes. Extinction and disease are the inability to adapt to changes. The righteous have no capacity to change. If homeopathy doesn’t get that it has to be methodologically adaptable to the individual then it becomes extinct. It dies because its practitioners have never given up the allopathy in their soul.

Classical homeopathy is much closer to allopathy than it is to anything else. They don’t individualise a patient; they just look for the symptoms which support the classical methodology. They don’t even look and see if a patient is weak, strong, damaged or poisoned. It is like the person comes in and you do your thing with them. And your thing is to find the symptoms appropriate to finding a ‘classical’ remedy and the theory being that the ‘right’ remedy will then fix everything. This is pure fantasy ninety five percent of the time.

As I said, homeopathy is a technology; it is not a science. It will probably be another couple of centuries before we have anything close to a science that explains it. Somebody fell over it, picked it up and wondered what the hell this is and found it worked. It is a bit like somebody from medieval times stumbling over an electric torch; you pick it up; accidentally push the button and wow. Okay, it works but how does it work. Duh? It is a bit like Shakespeare watching television and wondering how the little people got in the box. The intervening evolutions and their changed perceptions aren’t there. The glorious and amazing homeopathy simply becomes more sophisticated, over time, in what it does.

The uniqueness of homeopathy is that nothing ever developed becomes redundant. It never goes out of date. The monumental significance of this escapes most people. It is the one observation that makes science look like the kiddies playing in the puddles. With homeopathy you don’t have to change fundamentals and you never have to throw away anything developed from experience. I can take a materia medica published in 1830, put it on my desk and use it. What has changed? Nothing. Homeopathy doesn’t change because it is based on what is real. All the rest of it, science and all the other illusions of our time are based on what is not real. If science was true it would not be changing all time. It would be refining and exploring what is true, not scrabbling around looking for this week’s truths and hoping to get next year’s grants out of them.

And finally, Robert’s thoughts on the future of our profession:

ROWENA: What do you think will happen to homeopathy in this country? Do you find it worrying?

ROBERT: No, I find it cyclical.

ROWENA: So do you think it will go dormant again?

ROBERT: It will go minimal, for sure. The same people that corruptly produced the EU (hence UK) legislation to wipe out all the supplements and vitamins; the same money will essentially try to wipe out everything else. It depends on how far homeopathy abandons common law. It should never do that; it should have embraced and rejoiced in common law because that is where the freedom lies. In my opinion, it is organising itself out of its own freedom to exist. But then again if you look around the planet, who isn’t? That seems to be the tone of the century – people giving up their freedom voluntarily. Selling the freedom of the individual for the rights of a slave is not ‘Fairtrade’.

The elimination of anything that might obstruct the truly obscene profits of ‘Big Pharma’ will be eliminated and the level of sickness will be controlled downwards, to ensure sickness, so that everyone has to take drugs with no other choices available. By the way that is a ‘done deal’. It is already set up and must be implemented by all countries signed up to the World Trade Organisation. What they are planning is so evil, so totally evil and unthinkable for most folks that it will be riveted into place before anyone notices, as it has always been done when totalitarian control of populations occurs.

A lot of what Robert said in his interview I managed to follow but there got to a point where really I just couldn’t get my ‘classical’ head around it and I told him so. He looked at me with his piercing blue eyes and said, ‘how arrogant are you that you think you have to and can get your head around everything.” His intention was not to knock my confidence, and he didn’t. His comment was quite empowering and how right he was!

I wrote in the preface of my book that my wish is for discussions to arise from the conversations in Looking Back Moving Forward and for us all to pull together as a profession to secure a continued and expanding future for homeopathy; a wish that I am sure we all share. To facilitate this I have established a blog on the book’s website (www.lookingbackmovingforward.com/blog). Please participate in the discussions and instigate some of your own. We are such a wonderful community doing good work all around the globe. Let’s share our ideas and experiences and move forward through this current wave of negativity and scepticism. 

Hello fellow homeopaths! My name is Rowena Ronson and I am responsible for the book Looking Back Moving Forward. As you can see from the website, it is a compilation of conversations I had with thirty four of the UK’s finest homeopaths. So many issues were raised in the book and I wanted to create a forum for discussion, both for those issues and the many others facing our profession at the moment. I would really value your input in these discussions and hopefully through them we can discover ways to move forward together to build and secure a future for our profession.