The Vital Approach is a condensed introduction to case taking and analysis techniques based on Anne’s understanding and experience which is close to the Sensation Method of Rajan Sankaran.
The Vital Approach is a condensed introduction to case taking and analysis techniques based on Anne’s thorough understanding and experience. It is clear, methodic and sophisticated and enables to see the beauty of the coherent pattern in every case.
This is what Christel Lombaerts, head of the CKH, says about "The Vital Approach": Ten years ago, when I attended my first homeopathy class ever, I was immediately captivated by the intriguing way in which Anne presented homeopathic philosophy. Her teaching was a living illustration of the adage that the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. She wanted us to be curious and inquisitive. She encouraged us to speak up, to argue, to question her and each other. Most of all she prompted us to make up our own minds, to deconstruct our beliefs about health and disease and to come to terms with the homeopathic paradigm – in due course.
Anne’s own unusual, investigating mind continues to question whatever is presented to her in, and outside, homeopathy. She was at the front row when new developments in homeopathy promised to make the homeopathic curriculum simpler, the material medica manageable, the homeopaths’ life easier. However, she did not assimilate unquestioningly the new insights nor did she pass them on without having them confirmed in practice. Always with her students and teachings in mind, she critically assessed provings, case-taking methods as well as theories. The Vital Approach is the result of more than twenty years of skilfully applying knowledge of materia medica, theory and philosophy, without ever losing sight of homeopathy’s protagonist: the patient.
Both in her teaching and practice Anne lives up to her own high standards of ethics, with compassion and care. In the last years Anne has become more to me than a teacher. She has become an invaluable colleague, a friend, a beacon in the turbulent waters of homeopathy today. I am challenging everyone with a passion for homeopathy, regardless of his or her background, to have Anne’s Vital Approach shed a new light on this fascinating art of healing.
- Author: Anne Vervarcke
- ISBN: 9789081001700
- 136 pages
- Paperback
- Published in 2010
- Printed in Belgium
Reprinted with the permission of The ARH, from 'Homeopathy in Practice' Journal, Winter 2010. Reviewed by Theresa Partington RMANM.
Apart from the interpretation and extension of materia medica in the light of kingdoms and families, central to Sankaran's approach is the identification of the Vital Sensation in patient and remedy. Sankaran has, of course, written much on this aspect of his work but Anne Vervarcke is primarily a teacher, and has set herself the task of presenting his ideas for the beginner.
She starts with a description of the five bodies' or levels, linking Sankaran's concepts to that of Hahnemann himself and explaining that kingdoms and miasms can only be seen at the 'vital' level or Hahnemann's level of 'dynamic disturbance', and that the same sensation must apply to the person's experience in a variety of situations before it can be identified as the Vital Sensation. She is aware of the potential pitfalls in applying the method and draws attention to them, making clear distinctions between homeopathy and psychotherapy, between indications for prescription and common aspects of the human experience and between Vital Sensation and personality.
Then she proceeds with an overview of the main kingdoms and a discussion on the miasms. Here Vervarcke believes that Sankaran has parted company with Hahnemann, concluding that his ten miasms relate to the 3rd and 4th levels (mind) whilst Hahnemann's three relate to the 1st and 2nd (physical) levels. She describes how the plant families, in particular, are cross-referenced with miasms and that even if the remedy that comes up is not represented in the materia medica we 'can still use it with confidence'. I was looking forward to hearing how such a plant / remedy could have been placed in a miasm in the first place (an obvious 'beginner' question, I would have thought) but I was to be disappointed.
A further complication, which she does address well, is the wider issue of nosode prescribing generally. Miasmatic prescriptions are distinguished from the use of nosodes in routine 'unblocking' and their use as part of the Monera kingdom, characterised by one-sided cases and a patient's complete obsession with his disease. However, that kingdom is only touched on briefly and the kingdoms of Fungi and Imponderables not really at all, here, or later when the kingdoms are revisited. I felt there was some lack of clarity at this stage of the book, a lack of clarity reflected in an increasing number of lapses in grammar and suspect translations of vocabulary. It always seems such a shame that writers in foreign languages so often don't go the extra mile and get a native to proofread.
The Periodic Table is then looked at in more detail and explained in its essentials rather more clearly than Scholten does in his own books, without the refinements of salts and impounds but including the Lanthanides. Plants get just a couple of lines here and the reader is referred to the Sankaran charts. Animals get a bit more attention but, again, the material is too sketchy to be useful in itself. Vervarcke only really looks at milks, birds and, to a lesser extent, snakes. Fortunately the bibliography which she describes as 'all but complete' (in what I suspect is a language glitch rather than an ambitious claim) is actually pretty fit for purpose and this is an introduction rather than a reference book.
She returns to form with the chapter on Anamnesis. The 'vital' approach to case-taking is an aspect of Sankaran's work (specifically) that many of us find quite hard. Vervarcke explains the necessity for repetition of questions and constant requests for definitions and gives hints on how to do it without totally infuriating your patient. The patient's initial answers will reflect his own worldview and we cannot assume he means the same things with those words as we would. He is, by the nature of things, different - that is the whole point.
We must also be wary of common symptoms; we do not give Calcarea to a child because he is childish and 'when we treat a dog we don't have to look in the rubric 'Barking'. Vervarcke returns again and again to the necessity of being selective in which information we rate highly in case-taking and sees that as essential to the success of 'vital' prescribing.
The Vital Approach is a short but wide-ranging introduction to a methodology and would be (relatively) cheap at the price if you were to decide to go no further, bearing in mind the costs of the original tomes. (She herself is convinced that not to pursue this way is tantamount to dereliction of duty towards our patients, but I suppose you don't have to agree.) You would need much, much more depth and information, obviously, if you were to get hooked and want to apply it in your own practice. As it happens, Anne Vervarcke has also produced the Families module which comes free with the latest versions of Radar and contains the themes and sensations in a diagrammatic form, linking through to the 'Families and Kingdoms' material in that program. The book would, in fact, be a useful accompaniment to her module as well as being a first primer and the 'appetiser' that the author says she intends it to be.
Reprinted with the permission of The Society of Homeopaths, from the Journal 'The Homeopath' Winter 2010. Reviewed by Margot Maidment RSHom.
Anne Vervarcke has impressive credentials and has been a teacher and practitioner for 15 years, during the course of which she has developed her own style of practice, which she calls the Vital Approach.
This book is apparently a response to a plea from her students for a place where they could 'find a book with (her) teachings'. Her initial reply to this plea was to assert that she had nothing original to say, but was merely combining the basics of homeopathy and the insights of the contemporary leading homeopaths with her own clinical experience. Evidently she changed her mind and this book is the fruit of that mental turnaround.
She is convinced that the Vital Approach is the route to finding the similimum, and acknowledges the importance of the leaders in this field but warns that conceptual schemas need to be considered in practical contexts otherwise she fears that their use is liable to lead to many errors in practice
Vervarcke offers a five level diagram as a working model by which to perceive the subtle bodies of a living being. This is reminiscent of, but not identical to, Sankaran's seven levels of experience. Like Sankaran, she sees the 'vital sensation' as being the common link between the mind/body experience.
Vervarcke makes a valuable distinction between the Energetic, her level 2 and the Vital, her level 5 (Sankaran's sensation level). It is at this level, she claims, that the uniqueness of the patient is expressed. She then proceeds to distinguish between the five levels in terms of concept and treatment. In doing this she points out that there can be a lot of confusion around the concept of energy, asserting that 'Homeopathy is not an energy medicine as such'. She points out that we all feel we somehow know to what this concept refers but this is where the problem lies. Vervarcke's distinction encourages us to be more precise in our definitions, her view being that a concept that is self evident or somehow 'obvious' is a useless generalisation for practical purposes.
One caveat to my general approval of the book is that the author does make some statements that are unexamined. For example, she states that the basic axiom, 'you are what you eat', is quite contrary to the understanding offered from the homeopathic viewpoint. This axiom holds that 'the health stores will provide all that is necessary for a strong and healthy body... and believe that all the other levels will benefit while the homeopath treats level five knowing that all other levels will benefit'. While I acknowledge the supreme importance of the sensation level or level five in Vervacke's schema, as a trained nutritional therapist and a homeopath, and having heard Jeremy Sherr on his activities in Africa relating that giving a well indicated remedy to a hungry person removed symptoms but did not make the person well, I think that adequate nutrition has to be considered seriously as an obstacle to cure or a maintaining cause.
That said the book is very readable and suitable for novices and experienced homeopaths alike. A minor caveat is that some of the grammar and language use is idiosyncratic, but I shall certainly be returning to this book to give more consideration at leisure to the insights she provides.
Reprinted with the permission of The Homoeopathic Links Journal, from their Winter, Volume 23 edition. Reviewed by Jay Yasgur, USA.
In The Vital Approach, European homeopath Anne Vervarcke attempts to describe her homeopathic methodology. Ms Vervarcke was trained originally in the arts and graduated in Oriental Philology and Anthropology and later took courses in classical homeopathy in Belgium. Later she attended the School for Homeopathy in Bloemendaal and Amersfoort in The Netherlands. She established "The Centre for Classical Homeopathy" (CKH) in Leuven, Belgium, which organizes a five-year training course, a postgraduate course, a yearly seminar and an international training course. She has been in private practice since 1989.
This is her fourth book in the English language, the others being: Behind the Class Screen: A Homeopathic Survey of Ozone (2009), The Charm of Homeopathy (2006, 2nd-2008) and The Postgraduate Annual 2006 (2007). Her 2007 tome discusses the fundamentals of her method as depicted in adult and child cases while her "Charm" book describes how she developed her approach out of Sankaran's thoughts on kingdoms and miasms in combination with Hahnemannian thought, linguistics, and phenomenology.
This 136-page quality paperback is well produced and consists of five chapters: The Five Levels of Experience, Kingdoms, Miasms, Sub-Kingdoms and Anamnesis.
The Vital Approach is the author's method of combining "new wave" homeopathy with the classical approach. These newer approaches are still in the developmental stages (so is homeopathy by the way) yet many are rushing to present their "special methods." This is all fine and good and people should be lauded for those innovations but please can we have methodologies explained methodically and clearly? Despite her opening statement (p.9) we still have yet to see a comprehensive and simple explanation in book form.
"The last decades Sankaran, Scholten and others worked those out and many homeopaths all over the world applied this new information.
Many new provings were done and many cured cases added clinical information and a better understanding of the, until then, unknown remedies. By now the validity of those so-called new remedies is so well established that I feel it is no good policy to give a remedy the homeopath knows better or is a traditional one instead of the remedy the patient really needs. If there is an emotional resistant to something new or 'experimental' in some homeopaths, one should refrain from it once this phase is over..." - p. 73
Perhaps it is I, but I have difficulty in understanding this paragraph. What do you think?
Aside from this unclear writing another fault of the book is that there are virtually no cases. One clearly outlined case showing how the "vital sensation" is present within all the levels would have gone a long way to satisfying and whetting one's appetite. And in addition, as long as the patient is a mineral remedy, why not include an analysis of where the patient is on the periodic table. After all, if one is presenting a methodology let's see it in action. Anne says "the manual is in your hands", but is it?
If we write to benefit the reader then many of us aren't doing as well as we could. This review could also serve as a call for people to do better. So allow me to make a suggestion: get a good, fair, honest and industrious editor. If everyone did this, our work would probably be clearer and, no doubt, shorter. My criticism has nothing to do with the writer's personal style. That is what makes for interesting writing, a person's flair. But do remember that verbosity is not profundity.
The chapter "Sub-Kingdom" (40 pages) discusses the periodic table and the animal and plant kingdoms. It is a bit rough in places but reasonably well explained.
We have a healing method - homeopathy - that is clear. If we innovate let's make it as clear and beautiful as that which Hahnemann gave us.
