This book review is reprinted from The Homoeopath with permission from Nick Churchill of The Society of Homoeopaths.
A New Model Of Health And Disease
by George Vithoulkas
1991, pbk., 205 pages
Reviewed by Patrick Pietroni
Dr Patrick Pietroni FRCGP, MRCP, DCH, is Senior Lecturer in General Practice at St. Mary's Medical School. He founded the Marylebone Health Centre where he has his practice.
The scene: the hospital staff room at St Richard's Hospital Medical School. Dr Newage, a General Practice trainee, enters with book under his arm and sits next to Dr Cartesian, the senior medical consultant.
Dr Cartesian:
What's that book you're reading-oh yes, another tract from Vithoulkas - A New Model of Health and Disease. What does he say now? -homoeopathy will cure AIDS I suppose.
Dr Newage
Well, that's not quite what he says but he does seem to think that many of the new epidemics we are dealing with are the result of all those antibiotics and immunizations we have been forcing down our patients these last fifty years.
Dr Cartesian:
Does he back it up with any evidence or is it like his other book The Science of Homoeopathy - full of naive notions of the vital force and all that Middle Ages stuff. It really is quite irresponsible that serious clinicians are suggesting we go back to models of illness we discarded three hundred years ago.
Dr Newage:
I don't suppose you would be convinced by his ideas and I must admit there is little hard evidence to back his claims.
Dr Cartesian:
There you are, he should be reported to that quack-buster organisation. Professor Michael Baum demolished homoeopathy as a serious therapeutic intervention. I am not against alternative medicine and I am all for having an open mind, but you, Newage, seem to have such an open mind that your brain falls out.
Dr Newage:
Well just suspend your disbelief for a moment and listen to what he says.
Dr Cartesian:
I've heard it all before.
Dr Newage:
Well listen once more. First, he questions why a bacteria or virus actually infects a human being. You know how super-infections occur in hospital. And remember, it was Pasteur who said on his deathbed - "the bacteria is nothing, the soil is everything",
Dr Cartesian: So?
Dr Newage:
So he says we should concentrate on strengthening the body's own capacity to resist infection rather than give endless antibiotics
Dr Cartesian:
Tell that to Mrs. Jones - her two year old was saved by antibiotics - he had meningococal meningitis. I suppose Vithoulkas would have given
some homoeopathic remedy with no active molecules.
Dr Newage:
He doesn't answer that point and I did find his case weakened by his unwillingness to come clean on this issue.
Dr Cartesian:
I accept we give too many antibiotics and that we have caused superinfections, but I gather he thinks immunizations are wrong as well. That in my book is almost a criminal suggestion.
Dr Newage:
Hold on, hold on, - it was McKeown who showed that most of the infectious diseases were already disappearing before the emergence of antibiotics or immunisations. Vithoulkas believes we compromise the immune system by the global immunisation of all our under-fives. He claims that rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, AIDS and fungal diseases are the result of this intervention - a bit far-fetched I know, but should we not at least check this hypothesis out? After all, we haven't done too well in modern medicine.
Dr Cartesian:
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It is so easy to trot out these naive notions. Science and medicine progresses by our being willing to submit our hypotheses to proper testing. There is no homoeopath I know, apart from that chap Reilly in Glasgow, who has been willing to do that, And until they develop a level of critical rigour they will not be taken seriously, Does he say anything else?
Dr Newage:
You won't like this either. He puts forward the notion that there is a hierarchy of disease in the mental, physical and emotional planes. For instance, he says that skin disease is a 'superficial disease' and that treating eczema with suppressive treatment like steroids will force the 'disease' into an internal organ and cause asthma.
Dr Cartesian:
An interesting idea - his observation is right but why does he put forward such a cock-eyed theory.
Dr Newage:
Oh dear, I'm not going to convince you - look, why don't you read his book and see if he can convince you. It's well written and has some interesting references. It's made me feet less confident in orthodox medicine but like you, I feel I need more convincing.
Dr Cartesian:
Maybe we should invite him to one of our grand rounds- that would shut him up.
Dr Newage:
Careful. When Vithoulkas spoke at the University of California Hospi-tal in San Francisco, he received a five-minute standing ovation from the medical personnel despite the fact that he had demolished in his lecture everything that the medicine practised in that building stood for.
Dr Cartesian:
I am no longer surprised at anything I hear coming out of the West
Coast of America. I am pretty certain that would not happen at
St. Richard's.
Dr Newage:
Shall we invite him then?
Dr Cartesian:
Let me read the book first.
The Homoeopath Vol.12 No.3 1992