Gerasimos Stouraitis
Founder of the Hippocratic Centre of Classical Homeopathy.
President of the Association of Greek Homeopaths
In 1993 the Hippocratic Centre of Classical Homeopathy was founded with the aim of giving anyone who wishes the opportunity to study and then to practise the therapeutic art of homeopathy. Since then many Greek women and men, doctors and non-doctors, have studied homeopathy at the Hippocratic Centre of Classical Homeopathy and practise it lawfully.
In Greece some people, perhaps serving their own interests and taking advantage of the prevailing ignorance, have tried to spread the view that homeopathy should be practised only by doctors. But all over the world homeopathy is practised by whoever has studied it, regardless of whether they are a doctor or not, as for example in Germany, England, Norway, the Netherlands and other member states of the European Union. In Portugal a law was passed (on 15/10/2003) under which the therapeutic art of homeopathy is lawfully practised by non-doctors. It is also interesting that in Sweden doctors are forbidden to practise homeopathy, and its practice is the exclusive concern of homeopaths. This becomes understandable once one understands what exactly this therapeutic art is.
And let us start with the concepts of health, disease and therapy, since these come first in our subject.
In homeopathy the concepts of health, disease and therapy are understood as processes taking place in a dynamic field:
- Health as the all-embracing balance of the human being,
- Disease as an imbalance of the vital force,
- Therapy as a return to harmony with the person himself, but also with everything else in which he lives, moves and exists.
The World Health Organization, which does much for but also much against humanity (such as vaccinations, for example), gives the following definition of health:
“Health is physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of complaints or disease.”
For us in homeopathy, health, as a state of life, means eurhythmy, harmony with everything, and both organic and mental balance.
Consequently, disease is another state of life. Real disease, which changes a person completely, which alienates him from his environment and turns him against it, is an equally natural and equally all-embracing state of life as the normal one. This state of life, which is called disease, is evidently nature’s perceptible effort to restore the normal state.
It is precisely this effort that produces a series of symptoms or phenomena with whose help our nature seeks to return to the state of health. So what does medicine do with these symptoms? It fights them at all costs, trying to make them disappear, unable to understand that these symptoms are the trenches, the organism’s lines of defence. But can something that the organism itself produces for its defence be made to disappear? Is it not that, instead of making the symptoms disappear, all medicine achieves is to suppress them, with the result that the disorder penetrates deeper, into organs more vital to the organism? Statistically this situation is known, but who cares about it? Does medicine not know that suppressing a simple cold can cause asthma? Does medicine not know that suppressing a simple eczema can cause arthritis? Does medicine not know that suppressing an arthritis can cause heart disease? Does it not know the harm that can be and is caused by vaccinations? And these are only a few examples!
Another issue raised by those who, for their own reasons, wish to claim that homeopathy is related to medicine is taking medical and homeopathic medicines in parallel, or the practice of taking chemical medicines one time and homeopathic ones another. But any homeopath who supports this view proves only that he is completely ignorant of homeopathy, as the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, stresses when he says the following about the homeopathic and the medical ways of treatment:
“Each is directly opposed to the other, and only one who does not know can indulge in the illusion that the one could approach the other or that they could be combined. Indeed, he can become quite ridiculous by acting sometimes homeopathically and sometimes medically.”
And diagnosis? What about diagnosis? That is, one might ask, will a non-doctor make the diagnosis? Of course not, but have you thought about what diagnosis is? At some point some people conferred and decided to call this set of symptoms X, that one Y and so on, so that when they deal with disease X or Y they give a medicine for that particular disease. But in homeopathy there are no diseases, only sick people! In homeopathy a remedy will never be given because of the name (that is, the medical diagnosis) of a particular disease. What matters is the person, the particular patient! And the therapeutic art of homeopathy of course has its own diagnosis, on the basis of which the remedy indicated for the patient is given.
After what we have already said it becomes clear that homeopathy understands health and disease as a dynamic reality. So when one understands life (that is, health but also disease) as a dynamic reality, one realises that therapy too must be placed and applied on the same level, that is, on the level of the effort to restore balance, which is health.
I believe that the above sufficiently stress the gulf that exists between homeopathy and medicine. But please let me be correctly understood. I reject nothing; I simply stress that homeopathy and medicine are dissimilar subjects, opposed to each other. The fact that the therapeutic art of homeopathy and medicine are both related to the concept of therapy by no means implies that they are related to each other or that one is part of the other.
There is no doubt, then, that medicine is unified, but there is also no doubt that it has nothing to do with the therapeutic art of homeopathy!
Homeopathy is an independent therapeutic method, an energetic therapeutic art that is not related to conventional medicine. This position is recognised by the medical association of England, which stresses that “homeopathy is an independent method; it has its own foundations and educational criteria, as well as its own criteria of competence and professionalism”.
In Greece the official body of homeopaths is the Association of Greek Homeopaths (http://www.homeopathy-greece.gr/), which is a member of the European Central Council of Homeopaths (ECCH), and the only school of homeopathy that meets the pan-European educational criteria and requirements of the European Central Council of Homeopaths (ECCH) is the Hippocratic Centre of Classical Homeopathy (www.ikko.gr), which, as already mentioned, has been operating since 1993, providing doctors and non-doctors with complete training in homeopathy and not merely an acquaintance with it through some form of seminars.
