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INTERVIEW
with ANDREW WARD, LCH RSHom.
28th June, 2007.
Andrew Ward
in frank discussion with
Louise Mclean, LCCH MARH, Editor, Zeus Information Service. www.zeusinfoservice.com
Andrew: We are allowed to practise under Common Law at the moment….
Louise: Which will be gone when we are fully in the EU?
A. It may well be and then we may have to be medically trained. There is a potential threat because there is a distinct group of medical people who are out for our skins.
L. Do you think so?
A. Oh definitely.
L. It was awful what happened to Jacques Beneveniste. He was just about to revive everything he had been doing and then he went in for some surgery and never came out. I often wonder....
A. An interesting story George Vithoulkas has about that because they met just before he published his famous 'Memory of Water'. They met in the Bahamas - Bermuda I think, for a conference about this and because what he was doing was not homeopathy actually, it should never have been published. George begged him not to publish it but he ignored him and went ahead and of course it went wrong. To just dilute something is not homeopathy. It doesn't work like that. It works when there is a similarity of symptoms. Unfortunately it was the end of him. George warned him.
L. This is what annoys me when they go on about dilution, dilution. Dilution alone would do nothing.
A. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
L. I said that to Dr. Peter Fisher of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital when I went to that Homeopathy Debate in the Darwin Room at the National History Museum with Ben Goldacre. Peter Fisher had a powerpoint presentation and Goldacre arrived late and didn't have one and there were lots of homeopaths that turned up who kind of glared at him. There was free wine and I reckon they put it on because they were trying to catch us out so they could put something in the papers. There was interactive voting and one of the questions was whether we would actively not recommend vaccines to our patients. Luckily everyone refused to vote on it. It was a trick.
A. Yes
L. I have recently been in touch with Dr. Peter Fisher about the WHO draft Report on Homeopathy which had been favourable. I realised it had been totally suppressed. I could not get anything up on the internet on it apart from one Indian newspaper report. I was a bit cheeky. I asked a). had he seen it and b). could he send me a copy. Of course he wasn’t going to. He said yes, he had seen it and no, it was confidential but he was working with the WHO for another report.
A. Why was it confidential?
L. Other people have commented on that. That’s why the Lancet published that press release – those meta-analyses – 108 studies where 101 were thrown out and they just took the inconclusive ones and said homeopathy didn’t work. It went to every major newspaper in the world. A complete hatchet job.
A. They want to get rid of us. We don’t really have a profession if we are honest. There are a number of practising full time homeopaths, not very many and there are a whole host of part time people, just doing it as a kind of a game or something and they want to be included but they don’t want to contribute anything. I’ve got to the point now where I am totally sick of it and I contemplating leaving the Society because I think they’ve been instrumental in bringing this state of affairs about.
L. With CORH?
A. Well yes, not just that. The way they’ve let homeopathy slip as a profession.
L. Well they haven’t been proactive enough with the PR.
A. They haven’t protected it. Homeopathy at this point in time needs protection. Not only are we being attacked from outside but it’s more self-destruction really. There are so many people now who don’t know what homeopathy is.
L. It is a bit better. I sent a lot of stuff to Lynne McTaggart of What Doctors Don’t Tell You a few years ago and now she is mentioning it all the time and she has a huge subscriber list so that’s helped. But the thing that worries me is that you know that we were the Big Five in the House of Lords Report and all the others going for the statutory regulation, though I know someone senior said ‘Oh but we don’t want the Department of Health breathing down our necks’ but it’s either that or we are totally vulnerable and can be swept out the door.
A. Most of our profession don’t want it, they’re not interested.
L. But that would have given us protection in law.
A. They’re not really interested in that.
L. It’s very naïve. This is what I can’t get across to people. Once we’re in the EU, they are regulating everything. Do we really think that we can get away with just regulating ourselves? Dream on.
A. We need to define what homeopathy is. For me there is no definition. It could be a range of 100 different practices. This is what’s going to destroy us. We have to change it because it is very clear to me. It’s very simple. Somehow there is some sort of agenda of various teachers to distort it and it has now become something else and now homeopathy can be anything. You can use a machine, use a pendulum, you can levitate and all this stuff has to go because noone is going to take it seriously. The reason why CORH has collapsed is they included too many organisations which I said from the beginning was a mistake. The Society said let’s include everyone and of course they couldn’t decide on anything.
L. It should have just been the main three really.
A. Exactly. Someone who swings a pendulum is not a homeopath and I don’t care what they call themselves, it’s not homeopathy. Unless we are clear about that we haven’t got a hope.
L. We have got to know who we are quite clearly.
A. I come to this position as I am a student and colleague of George Vithoulkas and I would say I know what homeopathy is and what we are trying to do is re-establish homeopathy in the UK. Slowly it’s happening and we are getting more and more people who are gravitating towards what we are doing. We’re re-training people and the next step is to try and set up a classical homeopathy organisation – an organisation for real homeopathy I think I might call it. People are saying we are just waiting for this, we are fed up. We will see who joins and then push forward the regulation thing from there and not worry about everyone else, I don’t care what they do.
L. We have got to have some real leadership. People might not want the DoH breathing down our necks but I don’t think we are going to have any alternative.
A. That’s because people don’t understand that homeopathy is a true science.
L. Yes, it is – it is much more scientific than medical.
A. We can show it’s a science. It’s very easy. I have no problem with that but of course if people have got things to hide with all these crazy teachers of course they don’t want to be scrutinised. It’s utter nonsense what they are teaching.
L. Yes, in my college, when it got to the last year, we were supposed to have a clinic. It never happened and they were sort of wanting us to teach ourselves – they wanted us to put on presentations and I just got fed up and left. I went to Mike Bridger’s College when it started. It wasn’t recognised by the Society as it was newly formed but I just couldn’t waste my time.
A. I got contacted yesterday by a student from one of the colleges who came out to Greece a couple of weeks ago when we had an international seminar with George and she was so impressed by it that she decided to leave her course.
L. Yeah because you just can’t waste your time.
A. She said she now realised her course was rubbish. (This is an established college).
L. Some of my teachers were good but others not particularly experienced. I learnt more from my colleague who has 20 years experience than at the college. She always says ‘well it’s all in the books, look at the books’. She taught me so much. The absolute methodology of the way you must prescribe and the way you must wait. She says some remedies can work for 3 months, especially syphilitic ones. Leave it for a long time because it’s still working. For a deep illness you must leave it.
A. Yes, of course. If you have prescribed the correct remedy, you must wait. Sometimes a year. That’s one of the essentials I have learnt from George. What you see with correct prescribing is this is okay.
L. You are watching all the levels, moving down. All the correct observations in the books and we are not really taught it in the schools. You never get people better if you don’t follow the rules – especially chronic illness.
A. That’s why we started George’s video training course in London now.
L. Wow, I’m in London. Perhaps I should come.
A. Yes, you should come along to it. We are doing what’s called a Refresher Course in October for 5 days. What we want to do is try and highlight the real essence of the theory that he’s teaching now over 5 days.
L. But how much is it?!
A. It’s £400. I can send you some details. It is on my website. It has all the details we’re teaching and the whole idea is to maintain what homeopathy is on a world stage and it’s succeeding. Vithoulkas has succeeded in getting his two year course into the medical universities in Greece sanctioned offically by the Government.
L. Amazing.
A. Which is a huge achievement and it’s just starting in Germany now and in Russia in the medical universities. So on the one side we’re getting very serious recognition and on the other side with all this crap, we are being ridiculed. And we’ve just got to get rid of it. Establish it in the UK like these other places where medical universities accept us. Our next step is to try and get this course into one of the medical places. This course is to me beyond doubt the best education training there is in the world. I mean it is absolutely all the rules, all the theory, it’s all there. It’s unbelievable and unlike any other homeopathy training.
L. That sounds fantastic and this is the thing we have got to push forward – that homeopathy is absolutely totally scientific.
A. If and when I get this organisation up and running, we are going to also establish some kind of journal. We need basically a renaissance of homeopathy. It’s lost, it’s completely lost in the UK. If it carries on like this, it will disappear, I am sure.
George wrote an article about 2 years ago predicting this.
L. Well I’ve been saying the same thing and people just think I am alarmist but I am just totally alarmed myself at the fact, as I say, that we have got no proper protection in law. We could have gone for the statutory regulation.
A. We need to re-establish that and the Society is incapable of it.
L. Perhaps not showing the right leadership?
A. I’m not interested in that. I want a new campaign and organisation and get it going, based on proper teachings.
L. Yes.
A. There aren’t different ways actually of homeopathy, there is just one way. It’s a science and you do it this way.
L. The proper methodology has to be applied.
A. I mean you can do different things in the way that you take cases and all the rest of it but the actual application of the theory is straight forward.
L. Yes I notice that some people are always popping remedies but you never ever get the person better. They stay on the spot, they never improve unless you give the remedy a chance.
A. We have to establish the science.
L. How would you define homeopathy? You say it’s not defined properly.
A. In homeopathic terms, the classical approach using one remedy at a time and waiting. Not combining remedies; all the classical principles; the Law of Cure. It’s very straight forward.
It doesn’t mean you have to stick with one remedy. In certain cases some people will need six remedies but they need them in a particular order. Start with a one, that leads to another remedy, and then move to another remedy and then the next one and then finally they get cured. It is not a question of only one remedy.
L. No, there won’t be only one remedy that’s going to cure them, especially if they are very ill.
A. That’s very rare now. You need a few remedies but they must be given in the correct order. This is the way to cure chronic disease. This is what George teaches in his course now. How to treat chronic disease with this method and it’s whole new information that he has gathered over the last 20 years and no one has ever been taught it in the UK. And therefore noone can actually do it.
L. No, and the other thing is I am absolutely obsessed with complementary remedies. Always looking at the relationship of remedies. That is so important. You can’t go giving completely different remedies.
A. George again is teaching people the concept of understanding the different levels of health.
L. You have to go with the level of health. It rules the potency. My mother’s 90, I wouldn’t give her above a 30c, except possibly one of the miasmatic remedies.
A. There are some people where you can easily give a 50m, no problem, even at 80 yrs but you have to know which people those are and which level of health – they can only be in the top level.
L. They have to be strong to take it. The potency goes with the energy.
A. Yes but how do you tell the energy? It’s not just a feeling. There is actually a set of guidelines that are taught. How do you assess where someone’s health is?
L. Because of the kinds of illnesses they have had?
A. Well there is other things. We teach about 50 hours on that. A very complex thing. A model. Unless people have it, I don’t know how people think they can practice.
We must have a new standard and say right, we’ve had enough. We need to regroup. Get back to what it really is.
L. Yes but I am worried about the legal position and how vulnerable we’ll be.
A. I think the two positions are that there is the worry from the outside, which is the legal position - the attacking because of all the ludicrous things that are being written, it is just ammunition for our detractors. Then there’s the internal self-destruction that’s going on. I think there’s two angles. Our own folly and loss of the sense of what we are and those two things are pretty lethal really.
L. Yes.
A. I am doing my best to try and re-establish the one side, I can’t do much about the other. But I think that if we can set down our principles stand up and show that we are a science, then they can’t ridicule us. We are seeing the opposite in Greece, Germany and Russia. They are being accepted into medical student training. I mean this is very serious. Why can’t we do that here? Because actually, we are not serious enough about it.
I mean most people only see a few people a week and they do it as a sort of hobby or an interest and it’s all very nice and they don’t want to have to pay all these fees and be scrutinised. After all in effect if we claim what we do is true, we are doctors. We have a system that is more powerful than allopathic medicine, far more powerful. So we’re medical people. So what are we doing playing around with these things? We should be in the same status as doctors. So we have to be serious about it. Very serious. We’re dealing with people’s health, their lives. It’s not a game. I think that it’s become some kind of, I don’t know what it is now. I despair really when I see what’s going on. Some kind of mental game people are playing.
L. It’s almost not being responsible.
A. It’s not real. I mean all these Sankaran theories – which by the way desperately have to change every year or two to present a “new” idea – to keep all the “bored” homoeopaths happy. I am sorry but it’s fantasy.
L. I do find some of these top homeopaths…They start getting a bit too weird and wonderful and getting away from reality.
A. Yes, and it says in the Organon in the beginning in the first Aphorism - what is our task? It’s to help the patient. Nothing about our greatness or our ego or our interesting theory, or I’ve got this new…it’s helping the patient. That’s it. And I think people have lost track of this or something. I think it’s the teachers who are responsible for what happened in the last 20 years.
L. A lot of ego with the teachers.
A. It’s very disappointing to George who taught them all. What they did is they just went to him and then they just abandoned what they had learnt. Over the next few years they became very well known because they were getting results intially. However they never understood the whole theory properly because it had only been taught in its infancy at that time. They became well known and they established their colleges, then they just abandoned it. I believe this is because with only 30% of the information they could go no further and so they started to look further afield for inspiration. Now we have the full information and they think they know it all – its ironic! They all need to come to the course for re-education.
L. Created their own kinds of versions and their own teachings.
A. They’re responsible for it. Creating some kind of pseudo-science now. Pseudo-science is what it is.
L. Because as you say, homeopathy is a very clear science and there is no reason why we can’t present it as such.
A. We have to. They are going to challenge us. They already are. It’s started. With the degree courses which are Bachelor of Science, they say it is not a science and we should get rid of them (homeopathic practitioners). Well it is a science.
L. Much more of a science than allopathic medicine.
A. I think we have to do this and we all have a part to play in it. I realise that my role is getting bigger. That’s just how it is.
L. What do you think about everything at the moment? We just don’t know. It is all in mid-air if CORH’s disbanded.
A. I don’t think anything will happen there.
L. But we are going to be forced into something. That’s what’s worrying me.
A. Yes, I know. It’s a big task but we need to establish some kind of organisation.
L. Yes, I hope you will be influential in that.
A. Well I think it will base itself around what we are doing already which is the organisation we have in Greece. We’ve already established an organisation in the UK promoting the teaching of George, hopefully we can take it forward.
L. Just in the same way it has in Greece and Russia you mean?
A. The Vithoulkas Course is running in about 14 countries. In most of the world they take it seriously now. Even in India, despite Sankaran’s best efforts to distort it, homoeopathy remains well respected and within the medical system. www.vithoulkas.com has got very much information on there – videos, materia medica and fantastic discussions and articles, predictions. It’s really good.
L. It’s fantastic that he is still going strong like that.
A, He’s very well and going strong.
UK Programme 2007
Sept 15th – 16th Bristol Vithoulkas Cases Seminar – with Andrew Ward R.SHom Sat/Sun - £100
These cases are from the files of George Vithoulkas – one of the world’s greatest prescribers. George teaches us, through these cases, the complete system needed to understand and successfully treat these difficult chronic cases. Learn the practical application of real homoeopathy in chronic disease cases.
Sept 22nd – 23rd London Lung Seminar – with Dr Jorge Kavouras
Sat/Sun - £150
Dr Kavouras will present an in-depth seminar exploring the treatment of acute and chronic lung conditions and the remedies, many unknown, which we may need to use. From coughs to pneumonia.
Oct 10th – 14th London Vithoulkas Video Training Programme – Refresher
Course. Wed-Sun - £400
A 5-day refresher course which will, in essence, explain the theory behind the revolutionary Levels of Health model formulated by George Vithoulkas from over 40 years and 150,000 cases of experience. Once understood this model, for the first time, enables us to fully understand the rules that govern the practice of homoeopathy and successfully tackle the most difficult of chronic, multi-layered cases of today. This is a stand-alone course that will give you, in essence, the basic information of the first two years of the Video Course and enable you to enter the third year. (Oct 07 – April 08). We guarantee you will be astounded by the information presented. + Join the full course at a 10% discount. New Course starts Oct 08. Taught by Dr Jorgos Kavouras and Andrew Ward R.S.Hom.
All further details from www.homoeopathyuk.org or contact Andrew Ward - 01225 862654 or 07736183395
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=George+Vithoulkas&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
