Gerasimos Stouraitis
Founder of the Hippocratic Centre of Classical Homeopathy.
President of the Association of Greek Homeopaths
It is now an indisputable fact that the citizens of the member states of the European Union, and of our country in particular, are turning more and more to alternative therapeutic methods and above all to homeopathy. Perhaps this is why from time to time various people appear claiming that homeopathy should be practised by doctors, that homeopathy should come under medicine because, as they say, medicine is unified, and various other things, for obvious reasons.
But let us see whether those who claim the above are right, or whether what they argue does not stand up, in which case we may make various assumptions about their motives. 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.
This idea must have become an inner experience of every true student of homeopathy and be present in all his reasoning.
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! So medicine does well to be unified, but it has nothing to do with homeopathy!
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 medicine will never be given because of the name (that is, the diagnosis) of a particular disease. What matters is the person, the particular patient!
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.”
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 both homeopathy and medicine are related to therapy by no means implies that they are related to each other or that one is part of the other.
But let us now come to the question of the training and practice of homeopathy. I will confine myself to a few basic facts that are of interest and relate to the training and practice of homeopathy in the European Union and in our country.
Homeopathy is an independent therapeutic method, an energetic therapeutic art, and it is not part of conventional medicine. For more than 200 years conventional medicine has declared that homeopathy has no place within the medical system. This is entirely accurate, since homeopathy is a completely different therapeutic system, with radical differences in both its philosophy and its methodology. 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 some people, evidently 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. All over the world homeopathy is practised by whoever has studied it, regardless of whether they are a doctor or not. Indeed, in member states of the European Union such as Germany, England, Norway, the Netherlands and others, homeopathy is officially practised by non-doctors and comes under the national health system.
The European Parliament, in its resolution A4-0075/97 on the status of non-conventional medicine, has already urged the governments of the member states that have not yet recognised homeopathy to set up committees, on the one hand for the equal status of medical practitioners (as in the system in force in Germany), and on the other for the recognition of homeopathy as a therapeutic method independent of conventional medicine.
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 educational criteria and requirements of the European Central Council of Homeopaths (ECCH) is the Hippocratic Centre of Classical Homeopathy (tel. 2796022102 or 6945977575, www.ikko.gr), which has been operating since 1993, providing doctors and non-doctors with complete training in homeopathy and not merely some form of seminars. Indeed, the Association of Greek Homeopaths, in order to protect patients, gives its members a certificate, which they display at the entrance of their practices. At the same time it takes every necessary step to have homeopathy recognised in our country.
