The Collective was set up in 1990 to provide a Mobile Homoeopathic Clinic to treat people with Homoeopathy and promote Homoeopathy at fairs, festivals and other outdoor occasions.We treat thousands of people every year at many festivals including Glastonbury, Cambridge Folk Festival, and The Big Green Gathering.
The Clinic offers:
- Treatment for acute conditions, such as hay fever, sun stroke, sunburn, digestive upsets, coughs and colds.
- Advice and support for people who have chronic or more long-term disorders or diseases.
You can see a report on the treatment given at Glastonbury 2000 here:
http://www.thc.org.uk/reports.php Our practitioners work on a voluntary basis and the Collective, as a whole, is a non-profit making organization.
Travelling Homoeopaths Collective has been registered with The Charity Commission, since 1997 and our registration number is 1063247.
On Your Bike!
18 – 24th May saw 5 Travelling Homoeopaths cycle over 200 miles over 5 days through the Dutch Cities and Countryside. We all had a fantastic time and the Dutch people were very interested with what we were up too and often repairing our bikes for free when they broke down. So far we have raised £7,500 of our targeted amount of £13,000. The money raised is going towards our new project, a mobile clinic to cover town and city centres from London to Bristol! So thank you to those of you who have made a donation. It’s not too late to donate now go to www.thc.org.uk and follow the On Your Bike link, have your debit, credit card or Paypal details to hand and it will only take you a few minutes. We are aiming to have the next ride in Denmark in 2016.
Travelling Homoeopaths Collective Camp 10th-14th July 2014
Rix Pyke
Picture this: rolling English countryside, wind farm backdrop, camp fires, wood fired sauna, veggie or vegan home cooking, sweet smelling composting toilets, a wood powered shower/ sauna, gin club… Where can you get it? It’s top of the range homeo-glamping with the THC. If you were not there you missed all this and more. While London was under a dark and dismal rain storm sky, the sun shone on us righteous ones in Wiltshire – we basked in the glory that is the THC in full swing.
But that is by no means all. In the midst of this glamping idyll we were also luxuriating in the knowledge, wisdom and brilliance of some amazing lecturers. On Day 1 (Thursday afternoon) we gathered in the big canvas tent that was to be our lecture theatre for the next four days. Yubraj Sharma met us there and took us into the outer realms of philosophy and esoteric wisdom. Being present to his teaching is one of the most powerful antidotes to being jaded from the constant awareness that we are working in a field of energy medicine at enormous odds with the reality of 21st century life.
Yubraj begins with etheric energy. Also known to us as the vital force, it underlies the physical world and homeopathic remedies are part of that etheric realm. To get from the physical to the etheric the vibration of a remedy spreads literally into a thin film – which accesses the etheric. Yubraj is speaking to raise our awareness and intuition in this work.
He not only raised our awareness but I felt he raised our aspiration and intention in his talk. He introduced us to Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric understanding of the evolution of the planet and consciousness. We are at a point in our history where humanity is in its densest form. From now on we are literally en-lightening as we progress upwards. I found that inspiring, and somewhat comforting. The only way is up.
Yubraj reminded us that as homeopaths we need to remember that ‘we do not need to ‘help’ our patients. Instead our job is to ensure we show the soul how to cure itself.’ This is vitally important to understand, especially as it will help us keep our pride or ego out of the homeopathic treatment process. He also explained that ‘the simillimum is how we create a healing crisis to enable the person to understand and see their own dis-ease.’
The afternoon turned into early summer’s evening; the vibration in the tent had been raised by the information Yubraj was imparting. The journey he took us on was mind expanding and inspiring.
It was time for the gin club!
Friday morning, yoga in the sunshine, breakfast amongst friends. The programme said ‘Open mic session – talk about whatever you want.’ Then the most beautiful thing happened. Sitting in the teaching tent we gathered in an unruly circle and then began to share. Questions asked, answers offered, opinions aired, diverse opinions thrown in, no leaders, no followers, no experts, no novices, no right, no wrong. One group member described it as ‘the most perfect example of Aquarian age communication.’ We were able to pool our opinions and ideas without the need to ‘be right’ or to make another person ‘wrong’.
That led beautifully to the wonderful Astrology session taught by Mary English. We had a fantastic afternoon playing a sort of astrological musical chairs. Mary had taken all our birth chart details: date, place and time if we knew it. From that she gave us our Sun, Moon, Mars and Ascendant, if known. Then, with the aid of a brilliant large sized astrological chart and some bits of blue tack she took us through from planets, to signs, to elements, to cardinal, fixed or mutable, and by the end of the afternoon we had met our astrological companions in multiple arrangements and in myriad ways.The session was enormously informative and a lot of fun.
After a good campfire singsong followed by the sauna and a ‘wee dram o whiskey’ I went to my bed high on the fine vibration we had raised…or maybe it was the wee dram or two..?
Saturday morning was chi kung in the sunshine. Shaking down into the earth, bringing light into our bodies, opening our channels, circling chi around our orbits, alchemically joining the earthly and heavenly chi, marrying brain, breath and body – and all this before breakfast!
The morning session on Saturday was led by Phillippa Fibert who gave a most inspiring and exciting talk about homeopathic research. I cannot believe I just said that either, as I am not a great lover of the R word. It gives me a headache. Pippa got us over that. She had had no science background and had literally pulled herself up by her homeopathic bootstraps in order to find a way to make research into her ADHD patients actually work – both scientifically and homeopathically.
She demystified the MYMOP (measure your medical outcomes profile), explained the CPRS (Connors parent rating scale) and introduced us to the demands of NICE and the medics that research be ‘objective and peer reviewed’ in order to be accepted. Homeopathy is a ‘complex intervention’ and in this regard sends conventional scientific research techniques into a tailspin. There are three things going on in a homeopathic consultation: the remedy, the therapeutic interaction and the homeopathic principles at work.
What I found most enlightening – indeed a light bulb moment for me – is that to do a trial which has the homeopathic consultation and the individualised remedy in one group and set it against the control group which has the homeopathic consultation and a placebo, poses a problem in itself. It is going to struggle to show any significantly different outcomes because of the powerful nature of the consultation itself. We have to develop truly homeopathic research methodologies which allow for the complexity and beauty of the whole homeopathic process.
Delny Britton continued with the research theme, exposing the dark side of what is happening in the world of basic homeopathic research. We listened in horror as she described some of the animal testing that is being done around the world, particularly in Brazil, India and Italy. Why is this? We were incredulous. One of the very tenets of homeopathy is that we do not study cadavers or test on animals. ‘First do no harm’ seems to have been completely forgotten by medical science but what became clearer is that as mainstream science wants answers about how, why or whether homeopathy works, it will trample our principles underfoot and bulldoze the very core of our gentle and ethical discipline.
Delny explained that this is not homeopathic veterinary research, where diseased livestock or domesticated pets are, or are not, given remedies. This is rats, mice and even non-human primates. It is deliberate injuries, stress tests and squeeze cages; electric shocks; the injecting of poisons and irritants; subjecting animals to swim tests, half submerging them in cages in which they cannot move, and so on. And all for what? Everything we need to know about homeopathy can be found out by studying humans. This is a basic homeopathic principle.
The scientists carrying out this animal research seem to have little understanding of homeopathy or the role of the vital force which ‘governs without restriction’ yet can’t be measured or seen. Most of the time they are attempting to prove what we know already about remedies from provings and clinical experience. This seems more like a backward step than an advancement of homeopathic knowledge, and the cost in terms of suffering is completely unjustifiable. Mainstream science uses 11,000 lab animals a day in its industrial obsession with research. Delny explained that animals are not reliable stand-ins for humans anyway and that within mainstream medical research there are numerous new approaches being adopted including computer based models, sophisticated in vitro models and ironically, micro-dosing in human volunteers!
These two sessions on research complemented each other brilliantly. They clearly showed that if we are to develop research for our science/art we must ensure it adequately reflects homeopathy and our homeopathic principles. We need a clear ethical strategy with regard to animal research and no platform should be given to research involving laboratory animals.
As Philippa said ‘homeopathic research should be tested as it is practised in the real world’ and as Delny said ‘a materialistic view of health and disease does not take into account the vital force and research into energy medicines like homeopathy requires a new approach.’
That night the campfire songs turned to things both homeopathic and philosophical. The sauna heated up nicely and the moon was full. The nourishment we had received – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual – was beginning its wonderful digest. Sleep came rapidly, gently and (thankfully) not quite permanently this night.
Sunday was the last day of the camp. Lionel Milgrom brought his Gemini sun and his Aquarius ascendant to the teaching tent. He ran through some science history, beginning with his own. ‘I trained as a chemist. Homeopathy annoyed me. It infuriated me’. As a scientist he had to look into this annoying homeopathic conundrum and from that he developed a huge understanding of the state of modern science today. Sheldrake says science is a delusion – Milgrom concurs. The 2.68 million patients harmed by procedures and ‘side’ effects of drugs, the £8.2 billion spent on drugs and then the £2 billion spent on dealing with these so called ‘side’ effects all add up to a very, very expensive delusion. He ran us through crime after crime perpetrated in the name of medicine. From statins to Paroxetine and gun crime, to GSK selling off-label anti-depressants to minors to the abuse of the true meaning of evidence based medicine.
EBM used to be patient reported, clinically observed and research derived – in that order. Now it is the complete opposite where clinical and patient observation are downgraded and the RCT rules supreme. What is happening is, Lionel said, an evidence monoculture. He talked about fundamentalism in science – known as ‘scientism’ and referred us to the BMJ which published Smith and Pell’s ‘Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials’ – a wonderful spoof which concluded that ‘everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.’
Lionel yomped us through the ‘fascistic scientific intolerance’ to anything outside its present box. ‘Performance figures’ in hospitals overshadow ‘patient care’. The NHS total drugs budget of £8.2 billion p/a overshadows the miniscule cost of NHS homeopathy which is a tiny 0.004% of that. The mantra from scientism that if something is not reproducibly measurable and observable in the scientific sense – then it does not exist!
Finally a good joke to remember: ‘Do not trust atoms – they make up everything!’ and the last words of wisdom in relation to the state of allopathic healthcare: “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it is a nail.’
Thank you to the wonderful THC, inspiring speakers, the gods and goddesses of weather, the full moon in Capricorn and the homeopathic happy campers. See you all (plus friends and family?) next year – and many more of you too I hope.
Next year it takes place 9-12th July 2015 and the speakers are Myriam Shivadikar, Dr Nikunj Trivedi, Jerome Whitney, Oliver Dowding, Geoff Johnson, White Hawk and Open Mic.
For more information on how to book etc email [email protected] or call us on 01722 340792 see you there. Marcus and Charlotte
The Travelling Homoeopaths Collective is a marvelous grass roots program whose members not only treat people, but act as ambassadors of good will for homeopathy. It’s a wonderful way for people to be introduced to homeopathy. Kudos for Marcus Christo and everyone involved in the Collective.