Treating Epidemics with PC Resonances: Harry van der Zee Interview

In this middle part of the interview, Harry van der Zee describes his involvement with the treatment of AIDS and malaria epidemics in Africa using PC Resonances, reporting on the impressive results he has observed. Created by homeopath Peter Chappell in order to address epidemic diseases he encountered in Africa, PC Resonances are made by imbuing water with the picture of an epidemic through conscious intent – without resorting to a starting substance and potentization. Their process of preparation resembles the genus epidemicus approach, with the crucial difference that it results in a single preparation that covers the entire totality of the epidemic rather than a group of homeopathic remedies each of which only partially covers the totality. Similarly to isopathy, PC Resonances can be prescribed without individualization by minimally trained personnel, making them suitable for treating large-scale epidemics. Peter Chappell’s book on this approach is “The Second Simillimum”.

Most homeopaths are unfamiliar with this unorthodox approach. The manner of preparation of PC Resonances is controversial even within the context of homeopathy, and insofar as it is clinically valid the question remains whether it should be considered homeopathy or something else. Nevertheless, it deserves to be more widely known and further investigated by homeopaths and other health practitioners concerned with the treatment of epidemics.

Dr. Harry van der Zee is interviewed by David Nortman

Transcript:

D: Now, could you tell us what you’ve been doing in recent years?

H: Yeah. That actually starts with a case that I saw at a conference, I think it was 2004. There was an ECCH conference in Holland, and there was one presentation by Malcolm Smith of a case of HIV/AIDS. And the patient came to him because of a severe depression. This man was deeply, deeply depressed. And, to just summarize it: this person couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever love him, and the only thing he could imagine to do in the future is just to make an end to his life, that’s how depressed he felt. And so this was a case where the homeopath had been treating him, giving him several remedies. Nothing worked. And as in Homeopathic Links at some point there had been a short article by Peter Chappell reporting from Africa that he had found a remedy that was useful for AIDS in Africa, the homeopath thought: Well, okay, let me then at least give him something for his HIV. So he gave him this remedy ‘PC1’ – and this was all on video – and this was the most impressive case I’ve ever seen in my life.

D: And what is PC1?

H: PC1 is the remedy that Peter Chappell made for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. So this was given to this depressed patient, who also happened to be HIV-positive. And this man responded to this remedy with a complete transformation. And when I saw this on video, I mean… this struck like lightning. Because this is the kind of transformation I would love to see with every patient I’m treating, and this man was explaining how, since the remedy, his whole depression cleared up. And, weeping, he said: “I love everyone, I love everyone.” So before there was this situation of the idea “Nobody will ever love me.” He wasn’t talking about other people loving him anymore – he was just full of love, for everyone. He said: “It’s phenomenal, I love everyone.”

When I saw that, first of all this is the kind of response you would love for everyone, and secondly: A remedy made specifically for a disease? A non-individualized remedy for this case, supposedly, brought about this change. So what it meant to me, this case, is that the individual problem of this patient happened to coincide with the root of AIDS, with what is the basic problem, issue, behind this epidemic of AIDS, and that it has all to do with love. If you analyze it, that’s logical: people don’t get AIDS when they take good care of themselves and of others, when you have a loving relationship, when you have respect for other people and respect their Yes and their No, there is no AIDS. So AIDS has everything to do with lack of love and human relationships. So it meant to me that this remedy that Peter claimed to be very effective for AIDS patients not only was a remedy that seemed to work well on the symptoms, but it went to the root of the problem.

So I asked him about his work, whether there was a place in Africa where I could go to objectify his results, because he was the only one reporting. And so I said that I’d be interested to publish about this in Homeopathic Links, but then I would want to be able to objectify what you have been seeing. And so that’s when I decided to go to Malawi – I went together with Corrie Hiwat, my colleague at that time – and we interviewed some 60 patients that had been treated by Peter some six months before, and we recorded all their symptoms. Luckily Peter had already used a system of rating all their symptoms when they were with him, and we could do the same, and the most objective one that we could rate was just their weight. And to my great surprise, joy, I can say that they had improved on all parameters that we were able to measure. On all parameters these patients had improved. So these were impressive results. And after having seen that and after being aware that it is possible to treat an epidemic like AIDS with homeopathy effectively, I felt that this is something I would want to support, so I linked up with Peter and we discussed how we could further implement his approach.

Now as to your question, how does he make it: We’ve had long discussions about this, because at some point he decided not to make it public how he makes them. He was in a situation in Ethiopia treating patients individually first, just giving Sepia to a Sepia, Pulsatilla to a Pulsatilla, and whatever, and he was seeing results. Not consistent, but in many cases he was seeing results, and in some cases real good results.

D: The usual kind of results…

H: The usual kind of homeopathic practice. But he realized this is an epidemic, so in principle you can use the genus epidemicus approach, meaning that you can look for one or a group of remedies that can cover the totality of this disease, and you could give it automatically to everyone where the diagnosis is being made. So, also being aware that there are some 25 million people infected in Africa, he realized that he himself could just treat a handful – hundreds, perhaps thousands, but never millions. So to really reach a much larger group of people, a remedy would have to be found that could be given to anyone. And that’s one of the great advantages to the genus epidemicus approach: you don’t need a lot of skills to apply it once someone at least has defined a remedy that works.

D: Right, and the remedy that he defined is not one of the ordinary ones used in infections?

H: Well that’s what he looked for first: he made an analysis, he took seventy cases, took all the symptoms, took out all the individual symptoms and took the disease-specific ones, and that was the ‘case of the disease’. And then he made an analysis in the materia medica, repertory, etc., looking for one, two, three remedies that could cover the totality, and he couldn’t find it. He wrote about this, wrote emails around the world: Anybody has a good idea? And nobody came up with a good idea. So at some point he asked himself: If I already know the totality that I want, would it be possible to reverse-engineer the process of making a homeopathic remedy? Is it possible to have a totality and put that totality into a bottle, into a granule. Otherwise we make a remedy from a substance, and then we do provings, and we have clinical confirmations…

D: And we determine the totality after?

H: … and then we have totality. And he said, well, if I do this the other way around: I have a totality, how do I put it into a granule? And so he pondered about that, and found a way, and asked his patients: Are you willing to try a new remedy? And so he gave to several patients this new remedy, and then after some weeks they were coming back, and then he was seeing consistent, amazing results. People that couldn’t work were back to their jobs, children that couldn’t go to school were back to school, people were increasing in weight, their pains were gone, their TB symptoms were gone: people were just thriving. So he was amazed, and he thought, I mean, the world would just go for it: I just have to announce this and people will go for it. And as we know, with homeopathy in general this doesn’t happen, and it didn’t happen with HIV/AIDS, either. So this is still something we’re working on.

D: But at this point you’ve been working in Africa and have yourself also observed results with this approach?

H: Yeah. So, first of all, I’ve done some 60 interviews with patients he had been treating before, treated some new cases there also and seen them coming back, and I remember sitting there with Cory that at some point I said: It’s crazy, but it’s easier to treat an AIDS patient here than a child with a runny nose in my practice in Holland. Because you could just completely rely on the results, and that is something which in normal practice you do not have. That is typical of a genus epidemicus approach, provided you have a remedy that really covers the totality of the disease: you can just have consistent results. It’s actually the branch of homeopathy that really pushed homeopathy forward more than a century ago. That was the golden age of homeopathy, if you like, and that was when there were lots of homeopathic hospitals, and when hospital records showed that with epidemics like cholera, yellow fever, homeopaths were having great results compared to allopathic hospitals. Now this was before the development of antibiotics, penicillin, and all of that, so allopathy found its way to having better results as well. But treating epidemics is our best asset, I’m sure.

D: And how has your experience with PC remedies been since 2004?

H: Already in 2004, when in Malawi, we also saw several patients that had been treated by Peter for malaria, because after having seen that his technology for creating a remedy for a disease totality like AIDS worked, he realized that he could do the same for other diseases, and see whether that would work as well. So one of the first remedies, perhaps the first, after PC1, was a remedy for malaria that he made. And we just saw amazing results: these were patients that had malaria all of the time, got PC-Malaria, and for six months no more malaria. And I thought, well, this might be a seasonal influence, so I dived into the records of the centre there, to see how many malaria patients were coming every month, and discovered that in the month that these patients that used to have malaria all of the time – chronic cases actually – and had no more malaria, the clinic saw more malaria cases than the rest of the year. So they were going against the trend instead of following the trend. So this was even more significant for the result.

Worldwide there are 500 million infections a year: that’s huge. One million deaths a year: that’s huge. So this is a huge disease, and what we also know is that it has been with mankind for as long as we can go back. So malaria has been there with mankind for many, many years, and is crippling Africa, you could say, because so many people get it regularly, or even have it chronically, so they can’t work properly, can’t set up a business, can’t go to school, or whatever. So this is a huge disease. It’s interesting that the first remedy that Hahnemann tested, China (quinine), is related to malaria. And as I see it, certainly in Africa, the malaria miasm is the biggest around. There are scientists that claim that since the very beginning of mankind, probably 50% of all people that ever lived on the planet died from malaria – that’s how big this disease is. Also, if you look at the miasm, that’s very interesting. From my analysis, what we’ve come to understand, is that malaria has a lot to do with the friction between the individual and the group. And so you see malaria as a disease especially in countries where there is a strong tribal culture. It is also an observation that if an individual leaves the tribe there is a higher chance of getting malaria, and when an individual returns to the tribe there is also a higher chance of getting malaria. So going in and out of the collective is an issue that has to do with malaria.

D: Which is a basic human issue, and a Lac-humanum issue, I guess?

H: It’s a very basic human issue: I and the group, a very human, basic issue. So malaria is a big disease, bigger than probably AIDS, although that makes the headlines more easily. And so it’s one of the diseases that we have decided to focus on very strongly, also, because there is a lot to be gained there. Now, besides AIDS and malaria there are other epidemics like tuberculosis, other infectious diseases, and whenever I’ve been able to use PC remedies made for that I’ve seen good results. So on the level of epidemics, we have wonderful opportunities to effectively make a change, in those countries where usually homeopathic assistance is very low if not completely lacking. In Africa there are not many homeopaths besides South Africa. So we have a low-skill level of homeopathy with great results. Also if you look at it in terms of how to be effective in approaching mankind with homeopathy, by treating epidemics on the basis of which chronic disease can flourish – that’s the whole Hahnemann’s concept of miasms – by treating the epidemics you prevent the chronic diseases to occur. So it’s also in that sense much more effective to treat the collective first instead of the individual. And then when you’ve treated the collective and the collective diseases and then individual problems remain, that’s where you can come in with classical homeopathy, and we can use the wonderful developments we’ve seen in the last decades to individualize cases as best as we can.

D: So, this is essentially like using nosodes, or is there a difference between nosodes and the PC remedies?

H: Well, I think that the fundamental difference is that the nosode doesn’t cover the real totality of the disease, whereas a PC remedy can, based on the practical experience that when you apply it you can apply it one-to-one for the diagnosis, if the diagnosis is clear. It was quite amazing to me to see how this works even with people that have hardly been trained in homeopathy, like in eastern Congo. I’ve been training nurses for three hours how to use 13 different PC remedies for 13 different indications, and after three hours they were able to treat AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, trauma, with great success. And it was very interesting to see that when I came back to evaluate their results, they said that, with malaria, if the remedy doesn’t work the diagnosis is wrong – that’s how confident they were about the remedy, because then they found out… I mean, in Africa people call all kinds of things malaria, so if they checked it, it appeared not to be malaria, it appeared to be typhoid or whatever, so they could just diagnose the case by giving a remedy.