approach to collective and individual diseases

 AV: But you asked me if we should have a different approach to collective and individual diseases. The answer is yes; we have to treat the epidemic first, whether it is a physical or a social epidemic. Now, the latter are more difficult since they seem to be the result of life circumstances that deplete or even damage the energy body, poison the system with innumerable products, expose the person to massive electromagnetic pollution and many seen and unseen stress factors. The effect of all this is not a disease but a person whose vitality is drained from him. Our daily practice tells us that there seems to be a limit or a threshold and when this is surpassed there is not enough vitality left for the homeopathic remedies to ‘hold’. What you can observe then is the typical reaction pattern of an incurable disease.

AvdM: A short amelioration immediately after the intake of the remedy and then a quick relapse to the original situation, is that what you mean?

AV: That is precisely what I mean. We all know or should know: if you get these reactions in a patient, he is beyond our capability to cure. The only solution is palliation, as we often have to do in the last stages of degenerative diseases. We can change the remedy quickly then, weekly or every few weeks, because the second dose of the same remedy won’t provoke a reaction anyway.

AvdM: But how can you tell the difference between an incurable disease and a wrong remedy? After all, when you get a patient in her 30s, for instance, and she comes with CFS and she reacts with this pattern: couldn’t it just be a matter of a simile, not the similimum?

AV: That is what we tend to think but then you try another remedy and the reaction is the same: an immediate flare up and quick relapse, within days. You try a higher potency of the same remedy and you get even less reaction. You try all kind of potencies, since the remedy had ‘clearly acted’ and nothing will happen. This is an incurable case. If it was a matter of remedy, either the wrong remedy wouldn’t do anything, or it would act on certain symptoms and do so for a long time. Some symptoms might even disappear forever. But in most cases, the simile doesn’t hold longer than six months, mostly shorter, two, three months and then the repetition works shorter and in the end the same remedy won’t help anymore.

That is when the people who believe in layers say that the remedy has addressed this layer and now a new layer comes to the surface and needs another remedy. And they will again come to a point where that second remedy stops acting and again they will conclude it dealt with that layer and now a new remedy is needed. With a succession of partially suitable remedies you can zigzag through the case and in fact this is the second best you can do. If you can’t find the similimum, you will end up with remedies that cover part of the case, not the core. But the incurable patients will experience a clear, often very pleasant reaction in the hours after the intake. Often they experience an energy boost they haven’t had for ages, but it is like fireworks, big and beautiful but short. And then very soon, there is a complete relapse. This is in contrast to a partially suitable remedy, which displays its action more slowly and acts longer, as I said sometimes even leaving the patient better in some respect. This is not so with the incurable patients. When the effect of the remedy wears off, they are as bad as before and my concern is that this could be the price we pay for our lifestyle. It’s not something innocent, but rather so damaging to our vital being that the patient is beyond cure.

AvdM: This really sounds dramatic! And exactly these patients have high expectations from the homeopaths.

AV: A lot of our patients consist of people suffering from Level two disturbances, who can’t be helped by the doctors and who object to taking medication with serious side effects. But many of them if they come in time can be helped, of course. The situation is not that hopeless yet, but it surely is evolving in that direction. I consider ADHD children –and I mean the real ADHD children, not all of them who are labeled as such as seriously disturbed. They suffer from a chaotic energy which is destructive: nothing productive comes out of them, they have no control and they are destructive to their surroundings. I consider CFS patients as the weak links in the chain and in that way they are the messengers of a society that has gone crazy. I consider diabetes patients as victims from food poisoning or how else would you call the kind of stuff people put in their mouth and the mouths of their children? Most likely Alzheimer and Parkinson patients suffer from heavy metal poisoning or a saturation of all kinds of poison that evaporate from our houses, from our machines and factories, from teeth fillings and the preservatives in the vaccines. We could go on like that, indefinitely. If people only had the slightest idea of the hundreds of pesticides, fertilizers, preservatives in the water, their food, the mother’s milk…

AvdM: … it would make everybody utterly depressed!

AV: Maybe, but denying or closing our eyes to the very facts is not a solution. As healers, I feel we have a responsibility. We have to ask ourselves what is sickness and what do we try to heal but also, if we think we have an incurable situation, why is this so? We don’t have to preach to our patients but in my practice I find it very hard to try to cure somebody who, deliberately or not, is made sick. When somebody takes arsenic, we won’t take his case for two hours, we’ll make him drink milk and call the antipoison center. If the energy body is so damaged that the remedies don’t hold and we get the incurable picture, I refer the patients to healers who hopefully can restore their energy body first. Then there’s a chance we can build up the vitality again. I know other homeopaths who would start a rigorous detox program first and after that prescribe homeopathic remedies.

AvdM: It is remarkable though that in the same circumstances, in the midst of all this contamination and poisoning a lot of people still manage to stay acceptably healthy. Or they might come to the homeopath with their ‘natural disease’ and they don’t seem to be affected much by their harmful surroundings.

AV: Yes, you are right and I have asked myself why some patients ‘chose’ to become individually ill while others ‘preferred’ to become socially ill. It must be a matter of a ‘life lesson’ and a plan for this life in this place at this time. Maybe a person with a strong individual consciousness lives his individual life rather than the collective and on the other hand the one who let himself be lived by the society, gets its diseases. Does that make sense?

AvdM: We can only guess. After all we don’t know why somebody falls ill and why he gets the disease he has.

What do you think about homeopaths who start a case with a series of homeopathic remedies ‘to clear the field’ which can be nosodes first to clear the miasms, or isopathy to deblock the vaccinations, or remedies like Placenta, Saccharum , Carcinosinum, Cuprum and the other remedies that Tinus Smits34 used to give? Is this an answer, to clear the social diseases first?

AV: All those measures make sense to me but I don’t think there is one good procedure for all. As homeopaths we learn to individualize and to differentiate. This is why I would always try to find the similimum first and if this doesn’t have the beneficial result I expected, then I would look at what can be done next, be it detox, deblock, isopathy, organ therapy, healing, whatever is required. If it looks like a poisoning from medication, like a potentized chemical drug or damage from recreational drugs, restoration of the damage has to be done first.

I read somewhere “Disease is the person’s conversation
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34 www.tinussmits.com/3734/home.aspx
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- with God” and maybe a lot of diseases make a whole lot of sense in a persons’ life. I recall Vicky Wall, the creator of Aura soma who was diabetic, had a heart attack and became blind, all before her creative inventions. It is hard or even impossible for the outsider to know, let alone to judge what this meaning could be. As homeopaths we don’t need this meaning in order to prescribe a remedy. As human beings we can’t but ask ourselves questions and try to understand what is going on. There is no one and only fixed truth, there is always a greater truth from another perspective. I have the intuitive conviction that disease shouldn’t exist but I can‘t explain this. The only thing I can say is that it somehow feels like a temporary thing, maybe a phase in human history but something that can be overcome when we are in harmony with ourselves and our surroundings. For the time being homeopathy is the best help towards that goal that I know.

AvdM: Maybe one last question on this subject. You said that not everybody who gets his similimum will be cured. Is there a reason for that?

AV: You mean besides the poisoning, the damaged second level or karmic lesson? Mind over matter? Maybe the patient is not ready yet. I use this picture to visualize what is happening in a homeopathic cure.