Authors: George Vithoulkas and Erik Van Woensel
ISBN: 978-960-87429-4-9
Softcover, 341 pages
Publisher: International Academy of Classical Homeopathy
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When I received this book as the ‘Second Volume of The Science of Homeopathy‘, I opened it with the expectation of seeing a lot of research data. To my surprise I found a book that entirely focuses on better homeopathic case management using the new ‘Levels of Health‘ proposed by George Vithoulkas.
Based on his large clinical experience, Vithoulkas has differentiated between people with different levels of hereditary predispositions and vitality. The prognosis of a case, reaction to the chosen remedies and case management varies according to the ‘level’ at which the patient is. The patients are arbitrarily divided into four groups:
Group A: belongs to most healthy people who have very occasional acutes that do not need any treatment or respond very quickly to appropriate treatment.
Group B: belongs to people with lesser vitality. They get recurring acutes, which have a tendency to linger or affect the patient as a whole.
Group C: belongs to people with chronic pathologies. They show less acutes and those that come up are ‘mild’. The body is unable to mount the defense enough to bring about high fever.
Group D: belongs to people with lowest vitality, deep seated chronic pathologies and little ability to bring about an acute.
Each group is further divided on three levels, so there are 12 levels in all. Vithoulkas has documented how to determine the level of health of a patient and how a patient at a certain level of health is going to react to homeopathic treatment. He has merged the information from Kent’s 12 observations, his own observations given in Science of Homeopathy, concept of vitality and miasms to understand how a patient at a certain level of health will respond to the remedy and how to manage cases more effectively using this new found information. The levels of health have been used to even predict the possible life span and the range of indicated potencies. Here are some insights from this work:
- The lower you go down the level of health, the more serious your disease, the lesser is your life expectancy and the more difficult to cure.
- As you go down the level of health you need more remedies to treat the patient.
- Only 3 to 5% patients get treated with just one remedy for all their complaints. (That speaks volumes about the overall level of health of our society)
- The lower the overall health, the lower the potency to be used.
There is much more but you need to read the book for that.
The book is divided into three parts: The first part provides a theoretical explanation about the levels of health. The second part has case histories by Erik Van Woensel that help us understand the practical application of the Levels of Health. The third part explains the reasons for increasing susceptibility, lowering vitality and the obstacles to cure.
This is an important work because it is the result of keen observation and analysis of cases taken over the past 50 years with very long follow-ups. The reader has to remember that the levels are arbitrary and the underlying idea is to use different health variables to assess the prognosis of a case and manage the case more effectively. I enjoyed reading the work as it left me with many clinical insights. The case histories were very engrossing and except for a place or two, the reasoning for most remedy selections was justifiable. My assessment is that after reading this work, even if you do not end up analyzing all your cases according to the proposed 12 levels of health, you will definitely take something useful back to your clinic. This makes it worth reading by all homeopaths.
