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The Space between the Words by Mark Carpenter, Germany
I remember clearly a remark made by George Vithoulkas in Alonnisos, 1997. It almost stopped me pursuing my goal of becoming a veterinary homeopath. He said that we have to be very careful when prescribing, that it is important to be very accurate, and that the wrong prescription can ruin a case – and thereby someone’s life [my extension] – forever.
As a student of homeopathy, yet to commit to taking my VetMFHom, these words were chilling: get it wrong and you’ve screwed your patient up for good. With little experience behind me, and little confidence in challenging the views of one of the reported greats, I was plunged into uncertainty and doubt. Could this be right? Is this
medicine such a powerful force that we can as equally destroy a patient as heal them? Can a natural re-balancing, as I perceived homeopathy to be, really create such catastrophic ruination of what remains of health when used inadvisably?
He did me a great service that day, in many ways. The fact that I can still remember the fear his utterance induced in me some 23 years later, and how I felt at that time as the limited confidence I had flooded away, illustrates the impact those words had. Now let’s be clear, I would never suggest that my understanding of homeopathy is anywhere close to that of George Vithoulkas. Nor am I anything other than grateful for the jolt his comments
gave me, creating a life-long interest in the philosophy and understanding of what we are doing as homeopaths, and the interactions we are catalysing within our patients. But was he right to say such things in a class of keen students hanging onto every word of this perceived homeopathic master? Was his comment right anyway? Is there any such thing as a “wrong” prescription? This requires a deeper investigation into our understandings of what (and why) is disease, what are signs and symptoms, and what are we actually doing when applying a homeopathic remedy to the perceived imbalance presented (and “perceived” is the important word). These are all aspects of the whole that I will be attempting to review from my viewpoint over the next few articles.
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