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We conducted this Alternative Santé exclusive interview at Susan Cohen’s professional offices on Monkland St. in Montreal. She was accompanied by a dear friend Homeopath, Ms Marion M. Elliot, who also participated to this interview. Ms Elliot is also a Heilkunst therapist and practices in the West Island of Montreal region. Both are COPNN members and also affiliated with an Ontario Association, NUPATH, The National United Professional Association of Trained Homeopaths.

What is Heilkunst? It is the name given by Dr Hannemann to the complete system of medicine and health found in his writings, most notably the Organon der heilkunst, his central work. Homeopathy is only a part of this remarkable system.

We all knew Hannemann was the founder of homeopathy but what you will read in this interview is surprising. You’ll hear about a book not very well known, an Organon, the term selected by Dr Hannemann to aptly describe the full medical system used to bring his patients to full and complete health. A system of principles for philosophic or scientific investigations to be used for the physician’s highest and only calling, which is to make the sick healthy. It is called curing.

AS: How did you decide to start to practice alternative medicine?

SC: Ten years ago I was an accountant, didn’t enjoy it, so I decided I’d go back to school. I heard about NHC http://www.nhcinstitute.com/ and decided to start Chinese medicine courses, then another course, and another one, then acupressure. I heard about homeopathy, read a book, liked what I found, started a Homeopathy course in Ottawa for three years at The Hannemann College for Heilkunst (http://www.homeopathy.com/). When I first met the dean, I was impressed by his knowledge and by his pursuit for truth. After the first week-end there was no turning back.

ME: Heilkunst is a methodical system of health that is systematic; you know it’s going to work. You can expect results and the principles are so clear that even if you take a wrong turn you can easily come back to the outcome you’re looking for.

SC: It’s not just Homeopathy, treating with the similar remedy. It’s about the whole life, nutrition, sleeping, thinking, reading and being because everything in the person’s life has to be tackled. Sometimes the person wants you to try to cure a disease when the real problem is that she doesn’t drink enough water.

AS: What is the protocol when a person meets with you?

SC: Usually the first session will last for a minimum of 90 minutes. I go through the person’s lifestyle. Does she sleep well, what does she eat and how, depending on blood type or glandular type, many questions are needed to put into light a person’s lifestyle. Heilkunst is all inclusive.

ME: It’s as three parts: Therapeutic Regimen, your way of life, Therapeutic medicine, remedies, and Therapeutic Education, which is how you’re thinking.

AS: Can we compare Heilkunst to psychotherapy?

SC: Well yes and no. Of course we talk about the traumas in the person’s life. But at the first session, I prefer when the interview is conducted with another member of the family present because the way you see yourself and the way others do is sometimes quite different. It is unfortunate that many of us don’t want to share this because it would be so much easier to get directly to the point. So now with experience rushing in, I am aware that people are not always the way they describe themselves. I find there is no such thing as a perfect questionnaire.

ME: We’re not undertaking this as psychoanalysis. All we need to know is the kind of experience they had because we address the experience. For example if fear or anger was involved, we just need to know about it.

AS: So what is the difference with Homeopathy, are the remedies different?

SC: No they are the same. It’s in the way we administer them that is very different. In classical Homeopathy the therapist is looking for one remedy that covers all the symptoms. We look for one remedy for each disease. We believe that every trauma leaves a residue in the body. We try very methodically to go through the person’s life to get rid of each trauma. As we annihilate the residues, more vital energy comes alive helping to combat new trauma and just live. Your whole body has more energy fighting what is left to be dealt with.

AS: Does it mean that people must tell you about all their traumas?

SC: Yes, all of them. We ask the person to fill out a timeline with every trauma that happened in their life that they can remember, in order, either from birth onwards or from present backwards. The traumas can be physical, spiritual, emotional or a combination of all of them.

AS: How can people remember all of that?

SC: Well some people’s lives were so traumatic that they just block it and they can only remember the last two years. So you have to go slowly. Some remember everything. But then as you move along the timeline you come to a certain point where people say ‘’hey how could I have forgotten” and they give you yet another trauma, because the body, after a little while, starts to remember. The timeline process makes your body get into that rhythm of healing. If you decide to take a break or you’re going on vacation, the body will put into your face a situation that’s going to remind you of it.

ME: For example, I don’t know how it happened but it was summertime, I couldn’t get to Ottawa and I didn’t see my therapist, whom I was working with every six weeks, and three months had already past, so finally I had an appointment. A few days before my session, I woke up with a pain that lasted three days and after spending two nights awaken with such awful neuralgia I decided to go to the hospital where I spent almost twelve hours after which they diagnosed shingles (zona). They gave me a strong pain reliever which I didn’t take and they told me I could be taking them for months.

I met with my Homeopath and the next trauma in my timeline was chickenpox, which is the same as shingles. He gave me the remedy and I slept that night and woke up fine the next day. The awful spasms never came back after that. That’s my experience with the memory in the body while working with the timeline.

AS: Do you work on birth traumas as well?

SC: Yes. The timeline takes you there. But we also do the miasims that are inherited before birth; which is, by the way, another deviation from classical Homeopathy. Physically and spiritually we have the cellular memory of all our ancestors. An ancestor might have had syphilis three hundred years ago and that will come out in this person’s life. It does not necessarily mean she will have a venerial disease. It could come out as a skin lesion or as behaviour, one of a syphilitic person.

AS: How long does this process with Heilkunst take for one person?

ME: It is a process that can take three years more or less. It depends on who you are of course.

SC My parents are in their eighties and there timelines were very short. They didn’t have vaccines and there lives were quite different and they enjoyed better food.

AS: Are there people asking for a faster regime?

SC: Yes of course everybody is so busy these days. However, if someone says to me they want to do it as fast as possible then they have to assure me that they’re going to eat right, drink right, sleep right because if they don’t take care of that part it will knock them completely out of it.

AS: Do the remedies always work?

SC: They always work. I can be wrong in giving the wrong remedy, but the remedies will always work. If a person drinks soft drinks all the time I can give her a remedy that might work but the solution to the problem is to stop drinking those. So if I can go wrong at times, the client also has a constant responsibility to do the right thing too. But we have to be patient and ask the person to take care of one bad habit at the time. It is impossible to change completely from one day to another. We know sugar is bad. But who can stop eating it? Not me, I can’t.

AS: Do you think sugar has a bad influence on people?

SC: Absolutely. The amount of time we spend eating sugar, looking for it, thinking about sugar could be used for much better purposes. We eat sweet in almost every meal. It creates obesity in children, diminishes their immune system and creates diabetes, all sorts of sicknesses. Sugar is a killer but it is probably the most difficult thing to say no to.

ME: If you can replace sugar with water your depression improves, your heart health improves, your love life improves and you eliminate future problems like arthritis. You know, many of the disease we have in our society are caused by dehydration which we don’t recognize anymore as thirst but as hunger that takes us to sugar.

AS: Do you meet with children also?

SC: Of course. A lot of traumas of children are from separations like school, divorce and vaccines. They have a tremendous impact on the body. So to get rid of the vaccines we give the remedies that would naturally be given for each trauma.

For a child the timeline could be six months depending on the number of traumas. Children that I’ve seen had no vaccine, no trauma. They came in here for one thing and that was it.
But some children had twenty-three vaccines by the age of eight years old, that will take more time to clean up. Age is not necessarily a factor for the length of the therapy. To work with children is a lot of fun. They know exactly the way it is, to a point where their parents are surprised of what they ear. I love children.

AS: Explain to us why Homeopaths do not use the Heilkunst method as well?

ME: For a long time in Europe starting in the 1920’s, Homeopathy kind of disappeared due to pressure from the Pharmaceutical Industry. In the 70’s people started to rediscover Homeopathy but what they got was the American translations, a very small part of Homeopathy, and it was a complete misunderstanding of what Hannemann had said. They didn’t have the sixth edition of the Organon that was only published in the 1920’s and it wasn’t much to read. Classical Homeopathy of the 70’s, which is not the same as the 18 hundreds, is based on the fifth edition and the sixth edition talks differently. Good translation of the Organon only came out in the late 90’s and we can work with that now.

AS: Do you mean that this sort of break changed the course of Homeopathy?

SC: Yes it did because what has been thought as of now is only part of it. When you look at the translations, the German language is very full and broad and there could be six words for vital force or disease but the English translator used only one word where there were six, a method that lost the flavour of what Hannemann said. There is only one vital force in the English translation and in Classical Homeopathy as well.

But in the German version, there are two vital forces, one for the sensitive side, which is what keeps your body balanced and takes care of the healing and one for the generative side, which fights disease and where the remedies work, the cure. There is a big difference between cure and healing. I can cure your disease in a second but the healing process that you’re going to go through can take a week, a month, one year, depending on how long your body is going to get back into balance.

ME: So the regimen is the sensitive power and the medicine is about the generative power. If I give you a remedy because you have arthritis but it is only because of your faulty regimen, it is not a disease then and it does not reside on the generative side so the remedy cannot work because it’s not dealing with disease.

AS: Ho do you put yourself into a listening state of mind?

SC: I don’t go into a trance but I completely let go and try not to think. I have to get a sense of who the person is. And I’m getting better at it with experience. I believe that in my gut feeling is generally where the truth lies. What the people’s words say is not necessarily what their arms are saying or what their energy is saying. So if I feel something from the person, I’ll go with the feeling instead of thinking too much and miss. I have to feel who I’m with, it’s much easier.

ME: This is a spiritual practice but it is based in truth rather than in dogma.

Susan Cohen and Marion Elliot thank you for this very interesting voyage into Heilkunst andHomeopathy. We wish you well.

Susan Cohen
Homeopathy & Heilkunst
514-488-1085
susan@homeopathy.com

Marion M Elliot
Lakeshore Heilkunst Center
514 426-8877
heilkunstler@sympatico.ca

Liens
About Heilkunst : http://www.heilkunst.com/
Homeopathy Internet ressources : http://www.holisticmed.com/www/homeopathy.html
Homeopathic education : http://www.homeopathiceducation.com/