Rix Pyke interviewed by Alan V. Schmukler

Rix Pyke

Today we chat with homeopath, activist, songwriter and singer Rix Pyke. Rix trained at the School of Homeopathy and the Guild of Homeopaths. In addition to her private practice in South London (since 2001) she has worked once a week in a mental health project nearby. In 2010 she helped form a collective of alternative practitioners that receives funding to provide therapies to people in and out of psychiatric care. She also teaches Qi Gong privately and in the acute psychiatric wards. Rix Pyke has produced four musical videos dealing with GMO’s, vaccines and Homeopathy, available onYouTube.

AS: What was your first experience with a homeopath and how did that influence you?

RP: I’d love to give you one of those amazing Lazarus stories where I arrived at the homeopath after being half eaten by a necrotising bacteria that every antibiotic had been thrown at and my skin was sloughing off and I was seeing cucumbers on the bed and I had been given 2 weeks to live and then I was given one remedy once and ping! I rolled up my bed and walked. But that wasn’t how it went. So often that is not really how it goes with our patients though is it? Less rapid, gentle and permanent – more of a slow, steady and at times turbulent re-entry into one’s own orbit followed by realisation after realisation about the true meaning of health and the magic and power of the minimum dose.

It was in March 1982 and I have seen my homeopath roughly every 6 weeks since. That adds up to approximately 9 times a year for 32 years which is a total of 288 appointments and counting. It is such a fantastic process of unfolding and healing. I loved bringing my children into the world as drug free kids. I loved turning my friends and family towards it. I loved the understanding homeopathy brought.

All the outward struggles for revolution and campaigning for equality of the 70’s slowly became inner struggles for autonomy, equilibrium and strength from within. I started to understand that to truly change the world we have to start from inside ourselves. As order returns within us we can ripple that out in whatever direction we choose to work. Homeopathy is just one little way of helping establish order from within. It is beautiful. A true combination of art and science – which surely is the finest aspiration we can hope for as humans as we journey upwards.

But homeopathy is also revolutionary. It is so subversive, so radical, so egalitarian, so subtle and so empowering. It takes the lowliest and mightiest and treats them the same – with a whisper. It is fearless. It makes friends with dis-ease and in so doing releases us from bondage to the idea that symptoms are ‘enemies’ who we must wage ‘war’ with. It is truly a pacifist medicine. No wonder Ghandi used it and respected it.

AS: Yes, absolutely egalitarian and empowering. I think that’s apparent with the first visit to a homeopath. In 2010 you formed a workers’ Coop with other practitioners and managed to get funding for your projects. What were those projects and how did you get funding?

RP: Well it’s hard being forced to be in private practice all the time isn’t it? How can someone on a low income find the money for this wonderful on-going therapy? So in 2001 I joined a very enlightened project in Peckham South London which was offering free therapies to local people suffering from any degree of mental illness. I worked there one day a week and as the years went on and the funding came and went – and after the community centre went into a bit of a decline – the 5 therapists (Massage, IHM, Reflexology, Acupuncture and Homeopathy) decided to form a co-op so we could apply for funding in our own right. Grants from Awards for All (BLF) have enabled us to build an amazing networking, information-sharing, herb-gardening, cooking, walking, talking and eating-together group of the people in the area – some of whom have suffered, or suffer, mental health issues, many of whom use our therapies.

Another bid is bringing holistic therapies (massage and reflexology and Indian head massage) and exercise (yoga, chi kung, breathing and meditation) into two acute psychiatric wards. We have aimed this bid at the staff and the patients – making no distinction between them. This will build over three years and in the third year we intend to offer homeopathy and acupuncture as well – linking to the outside community. With our next big bid we hope to set up our own clinic offering free or affordable therapies on a daily basis so building a hub for healing in our community.

The wards are not healthy places and the idea seems to be to get people ‘Managed, Medicated and Moved on’ as fast as possible. We offered the Head of the Psychosis CAG an alternative to the 3Ms : the 3D ward – this would be ‘De-stress, De-tox and De-velop’. He turned it down – unsurprisingly – but we keep it in mind in all the work we do. We’re getting there.

We prefer to work outside the medical system – so applying for funding to charitable trusts or the Big Lottery or small council grants gives us more freedom to work as we want – without having to jump through medical hoops and NHS red tape. The project in the psychiatric hospital however has been pretty amazingly free from interference. In fact we have just been invited to do a few ‘education’ sessions for the staff to talk about our approach, offering a more holistic understanding of the sympathetic nervous system and how to manage adrenal fatigue and burn-out. The mental health industry has lost any notion of health – it is completely mental! Bad joke I know – but sadly true.

AS: I love the way you’re involved in the community from the ground up. In your article “From Bedlam to Care in the Community”¹, you say that the mental health system is too focused on drugs. Could you tell our readers what’s wrong with pharmaceutical psychiatry?

RP: Aha! How long have we got?… But seriously though the only things wrong with pharmaceutical psychiatry are:

i) that it thinks its way is the ONLY way and that nothing else counts: And
ii) that – just as in pharmaceutical medicine, or pharmaceutical farming methods – you get apparent short term benefits but the long term effects are pernicious and destructive of the health of the whole system. And

iii) there is no HEALTH in mental ‘health’care.
So in that article the point I was trying to make was that the health of the individual in psychiatric crisis is being completely overlooked while their brain chemistry was being seen as the cause of their illness. Homeopaths and all other holistic practitioners know that the symptoms are not the dis-ease. But the pharmaceutical psychiatric industry keeps following the symptoms down and down into a hell hole of what we are left with, which is an epidemic of iatrogenically mentally disabled people. Robert Whitaker’s book The Anatomy of an Epidemic says it all. In the psychiatric hospitals we have worked on, we have noticed the very basics of good health: hydration, fresh food, sunlight, access to fresh air, a garden and exercise – are all basically non-existent on the acute wards. However the medication rounds go on and on, round and round, until the patients are so sluggish and dulled and overweight that they are deemed well – and released into the ‘community’. There they are visited once a day to ensure they keep taking their medication until they fall prey to the revolving door syndrome. In the past 9 months that we have been on this one psychiatric intensive care unit, we have seen 4 women return 3 times already and each time they are slightly more disturbed and less able to develop any insight.

Hahnemann knew that all illness has a beginning, an acute crisis phase and a resolution (or death). Why would mental illness be any different? Holistic and Homeopathic psychiatric support would ensure the person was kept safe during the acute crisis period. This is the true meaning of the word asylum. Supported by systems that build the overall health of the individual they would move towards equilibrium, which would be both sustainable and raise their overall health, so that when they next had an acute flare-up of the chronic illness they were at a better place and their vitality was intact and their system was primed for it and the possibility of healing could occur. Here endeth my rant! Hahnemann puts it better in Aph 228

AS: So it’s a revolving door where the patient grows worse at each turn. Dr. C.E. Gant tracked school shootings over a period of 18 years, and found that half the shooters were on prescription drugs that had homicidal or suicidal behavior as a side effect.² Do you think Pharma bears some responsibility here?  

RP: Yes indeed, the drugging of our children is a terrible and unfathomable tragedy. I hope to live long enough to see this period in allopathic history written up as a time of darkness, ignorance and fear. ‘Health’ has been bought by corporate greed and is being sold back to us as chronic illness. It is incredibly hard living as we do understanding the atrocities being perpetrated in the name of ‘health’ care. We know that to work against the body’s healing energy will only weaken and destroy health and yet we watch as the food and disease ‘industry’ markets illnesses and sells them to us. Heart disease, diabetes and the cancer industry bring in billions of dollars/pounds/euros. The second line of charities and research charities also make lots of money and employ lots of people. All these illnesses are seen as something to fight, battle, wage war on, nuke, chemo etc. But we do have a cure for cancer and chronic disease; we always have had a cure for cancer, it is called our immune system which is beautifully evolved to deal with cells that become disruptive or malignant.

In Britain our National Health Service is being dismantled to make way for privatisation – so there will be more profits to be gained from people’s ill health. It is a sad time to be watching as our NHS, which is precious but has lost its way down an allopathic one-way street, is systematically dismantled and sold off. If the NHS was a truly ‘healthy’ organism it would put the medics in the back room and flood the front line with health-building systems of care: Homeopathy, herbalism, ayurveda, acupuncture, nutritional medicine, all the massage and body working systems of healing and wisdom, all the incredible energy medicines and healing traditions which would mean that people’s acute illnesses were treated with the respect they deserve. From that place we would start to see real health returning to the population. But that wouldn’t pay the drug companies’ shareholders’ dividends now would it?

So whose responsibility is it? We are all wealthy from big Pharma profiteering. How do we counter their propaganda? From the inside out, just as all healing happens.

AS: Over the years I’ve treated a number psychiatric patients. It was quite challenging, and not the romanticized experience you see in motion pictures. Can you share what you’ve learned about dealing with those individuals?

RP: Well I know what you mean but the more I treat patients with or without enduring mental illness the more wonderful homeopathy becomes in my experience. That is to say a patient is a patient is a patient….if you see what I mean. All our patients come to us and we meet them in the present. We hear their story from the past and we support them as they journey to a future. But where we belong is in the present noticing ‘the symptoms speaking in understandable language’ (Aph 6)

We become mentally ill in the same way that we become physically ill – through a combination of raised susceptibility (via trauma and/or neglect perhaps) and a lowered vitality (through diet, medicine, environment, distress etc). The journey back to equilibrium and health is the same – through the hierarchy of symptoms – from mental, to emotional to physical etc.

When a diagnosed mentally ill patient – or a patient without a diagnosis for that matter – gets a cold or a fever or a skin eruption then we know we are cooking on gas! From in- to-out, from up to down – Hering’s law supports and we just follow the patient – regardless of their diagnosis. It’s just sometimes a slower and more chemically suppressed case and of course there is so much damage being wreaked by the psychiatric drugs themselves. But in my experience people love getting better and they love getting to understand the process and they take the right size steps for their own feet in their own time. That is the beauty of homeopathy and energy medicine as a whole.

AS:   In 2008 you began writing and singing protest songs. You’ve made videos related to Vaccines, GMO’s and the placebo effect. You’ve written funny but hard hitting lines like: “You’ll breed Frankenstein weed and pay more for your seed and your pimp will be Monsanto”. How did all that come about?

RP: Well as you can tell from my last answer I am a terrible ‘ranter’. So in an attempt to break that habit I joined with three friends who are all interested in being creative with what’s happening in our world. The result from me was that I started to channel some of the outrage into funny (sometimes) songs. One was a list of the ingredients in the vaccines which I have not yet put on Youtube properly but then we decided to make some videos to put out there in the cybersphere where we can all connect now. The YGMO video was about the threat to life that GMO farming will bring. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MBHJajRuzg . Just as allopathy gives short term relief but long term illness, so the Pharma-farming does the same: Short term amazing crop yields but long term loss of vitality in the consumers, the soil and desertification in the future. Sound familiar?

The vaccine songs came out of my practice. Seeing what happens to children and parents when subjected to the vaccine industry propaganda www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7u1Svqff04

Just as the whole Tamiflu scam was being exposed I decided to take a stage name of Tamiflu Whynott as a spoof on Tammy Wynette www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWYOuMu98SA

The Placebo song was a bit of a dig at ourselves and the sceptics www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QiF8KNe9Bk The only negative response I got was from a couple of homeopaths, one of whom said ‘we do not have the luxury to laugh at ourselves at this time.’ That says it all if you ask me – because if we have lost the ability to laugh at ourselves we are well and truly lost. And if we do not realise the skeptics are a ‘symptom’ for us to learn and develop from, then maybe we do not really understand Homeopathy.

AS: Yes, we definitely need keep our sense of humor, even if it’s dark humor. I know there is another issue that you want to address, that we don’t hear about often….animal testing.

RP: Animal testing is the tip of a rather nasty iceberg. Not just animal testing in mainstream scientific research but, most horrifically, animal testing in so called homeopathic research. Did you know that some homeopathic research is being done using laboratory animals? Now call me old fashioned but I thought one of the many wonders of Homeopathy is that it does NOT NEED to be tested on animals (and we don’t study cadavers either). I am not talking about veterinary homeopathic research on farms. I am talking about homeopathic research involving tortuous experimentation on live rats, mice and sometimes even animal primates. This is being done in Italy, Brazil, India and Russia. More importantly these vivisector’s papers are being published in our homeopathic journals and these scientists are being given platforms at homeopathic research symposiums in Europe. An excellent article about this was written by Delny Britton and published in Homeopathic LINKS here:

What this highlights to me is the danger of trying to make ourselves acceptable to the mainstream – in this instance mainstream science – and giving away our fundamental principles to ‘first do no harm’ and that to test and prove homeopathy we use ‘healthy individuals.’   If we are so desperate to be accepted that we try to ram our homeopathic round peg into the square hole of allopathic thinking we will fall into the pit that pharmaceutical medicine is digging for itself and will be lost along with them. Homeopathy is not ordinary. Let us not forget the extraordinariness of what we understand, the sustainability of what we do, the power that healing coming from within can unleash and the joy to be got from standing back and following our patients in their journeys towards whole and radiant health.

AS: Thank you for sharing with us today. Every social movement has had protest songs, to inspire and educate people. I’m glad you’re keeping up that tradition for homeopathy!  

RP: Thank you so much for your esteemed journal.

Rix Pyke trained at the Devon School of Homeopathy (qualified 1998) and the Guild of Homeopaths (2001). She works in her private practice in South London and since 2001 has worked once a week in a mental health project nearby. In 2010 she helped form a collective of alternative practitioners from the project which now receives funding to provide therapies to people in and out of psychiatric care. She also teaches Qi Gong privately and in the acute psychiatric wards as part of a wider project to promote holistic health. Rix Pyke has produced four musical videos dealing with GMO’s, vaccines and Homeopathy, available onYouTube:

http://youtu.be/C7u1Svqff04 http://youtu.be/FWYOuMu98SA   http://youtu.be/2QiF8KNe9Bk

http://youtu.be/3MBHJajRuzg