This book review is reprinted from The Homoeopath with permission from Nick Churchill of The Society of Homoeopaths.
HOMEOPATHY RENEWED: CURE AND PREVENTION OF CHRONIC ILLNESS; AN INDIVIDUALISED SEQUENTIAL APPROACH TO HOMOEOPATHY
RUDOLF VERSPOOR AND PATRICIA LYNN SMITH
134 pages, paperback
Reviewed by Ian Watson
This book was written by a homoeopath based in Canada, and sets out to describe a technique called sequential therapy. The term was apparently coined by a Swiss homoeopath named Dr. Jean Elmiger, from whom the author learned the technique. Due acknowledgement is given to Dr. Elmiger throughout the book, and mention is made of his original work entitled La Medicine Retrouvee (Medicine Rediscovered) which seems to be the main source of inspiration for this present book.
The basic premise of the work seems to be that traditional homoeopathy struggles these days to cure many chronic diseases, owing to the prevalence of allopathic drugs, vaccinations and "chronic stresses of life in the fast lane". The author describes himself as possessing a classical homoeopathic training and bent, but he has found through his own and Dr. Elmiger's experience that sometimes the classical techniques are inadequate to bring about a cure in every chronic case, particularly those with a complex history involving multiple traumas and stresses. It is these cases in which sequential therapy has been found to be effective where traditional methods have failed.
I get the impression that the author has (or fears that he will) come in for some criticism from his classical colleagues, as the first half of the book takes great pains to justify the sequential prescribing technique, with an abundance of quotations from sources both modern and historic. I was flattered even to find a paragraph quoted from my own book (A Guide to the Methodologies of Homoeopathy) tucked in amongst quotations from such homoeopathic giants as Close, Foubister, Eizayaga, Whitmont and Sankaran. The remainder of the book goes on to describe what the technique involves, and includes a dozen case examples to illustrate the idea.
So what, then, is sequential therapy? Well, the basic idea is that the solution to chronic cases lies in the application of the principle of aetiology, together with identifying and neutralising every potential blockage to the action of the similimum. It is suggested that in practice there exists a I repertory of shocks' which apply to virtually everyone to a greater or lesser extent. These include birth traumas; childhood illnesses not properly dealt with; vaccines; traumatic life events, both emotional and physical; prolonged use of drugs; and serious diseases e.g. tuberculosis, venereal disease or malaria. The author emphasises that time is a crucial factor which has largely been overlooked in standard homoeopathic practice, and that it is essential both to identify and to treat each shock or trauma that has occurred in a person's life in a strict chronological order. I quote: "Treatment with sequential therapy proceeds, as the name suggests, in sequential fashion, but in the exact reverse order of the occurrence of the shocks....... the most recent trauma is treated first, then the second most recent, etc., up to the birth trauma, and even traumas suffered by one or both parents at the time of conception or the mother during gestation."
And that, in a nutshell, is sequential therapy. It involves taking a detailed case history and determining the nature and exact sequence of all shocks and traumas that have occurred in a person's life, including the gestation period. Remedies are then given in reverse order which are known clinically to be capable of neutralising the effects of each trauma. I am unsure how much time is allowed to elapse between each prescription, but my impression is that it ranges from as little as a day or two up to a month or longer, depending on the severity of the shock being treated, and on the potencies being used.
I am also unsure as to why certain remedies for neutralising emotional shocks are chosen in preference to others - grief and loss for example seems to be routinely treated with Natrum muriaticum, whereas if I were to be given only one remedy to use in this context, personally I would probably have chosen Ignatia. The fact that a fair degree of routine prescribing creeps into the technique is probably one reason why the author is liable to be scorned by the homoeopathic establishment. For my own part, I see no reason why the principle of sequential therapy cannot be applied more individually, so that remedies are matched at least to some degree to the experience of the individual patient.
There are a few other modifications of the technique which are worth mentioning. Dr. Elmiger apparently found that the higher the potency, the greater the ability of the remedy to travel back in time. Therefore the treatment should commence with lower potencies for the most recent shocks, and work up the potency scale for the more distant traumas. This is an interesting concept which would be worthy of research -personally I feel that individualisation also over-rules this factor, although it might still prove to be a useful rule of thumb. Another premise given in the book is that "the first shock of any kind is the most serious for the body... In the case of vaccinations... it is sufficient to treat the initial vaccination of any type." This again, is an interesting idea that perhaps one day we will have the technology to confirm or refute.
Several things occurred to me whilst preparing this review. The first was that sequential therapy is not a new idea to many British homoeopaths - the famous Canon Upcher case in Clarke's Prescriber (pp 55-58) Is a fine example of the technique (interestingly the good Canon used mother tinctures rather than high potencies to neutralise distant traumas, with dramatically good effect). Secondly, I couldn't help wondering whether this is an idea whose time has come, knowing that the technique described in this book is remarkably similar to that employed by the late Lisa Monk, whom I know has inspired a number of contemporary practitioners to practice in a similar fashion. I heard Lisa describe how she would identify the significant traumas In a person's life and prescribe for them during the interview whilst the experience was fresh in the persons mind. She was confident that a great deal of healing could take place from this method in an incredibly short space of time, and my own very limited experience of prescribing in this way suggests that she was definitely on to something.
A section in the book describes how the technique can also be applied to treating the miasms, and this again bears more than a passing resemblance to the techniques taught in the UK by Pritam Singh in recent years. When diverse individuals across the world suddenly appear to be reaching similar or identical conclusions totally independently of one another, that suggests to me that these ideas ought to be shared and considered open-mindedly by all of us concerned with enhancing our results in practice. If Rudolf Verspoor's book succeeds in bringing these ideas to the attention of a wider audience then I feel it will have served its purpose. It is not the easiest homoeopathic book to read, and I would recommend it more as a basis for stimulating ideas and research for those with an open mind, rather than as a how-to-do-it manual.
The Homoeopath No. 58 1995