Levels of Health

When I first started to practice homeopathy one thing that puzzled me a lot was how come I would put the same effort into each case, but some people would do very well, some not so well, and a small number no improvement at all. For many years now I have been working with the theory of Levels of Health, and now prefer if people commit to at least 2 years of treatment. To this end I offer a big discount if people attend 3 times, and even when people are cured I advise them to come back once a year, as these people tend to maintain better health than those who leave it to chance.

It is only really possible to assess if a) the treatment has been really successful, i.e. the patient is clearly much healthier than they were according to the LoH criteria, and b) it usually takes a couple of years for the human organism to begin move to a the level where they are having high fevers again. Healing can begin immediately i.e. an improvement in symptoms or the feeling of wellbeing, but meaningful lasting change in state usually takes time. This does not mean patients need to come and see me every month for 2 years, but it does mean a reasonable commitment to treatment. The goal is to get every patient to their own best possible level of health, which of course varies from one person to another, but which for most people will see them having a 39 degree fever at least once every few years.

Levels of Health is a theory that can apply to any medical system, and is a way of assessing how healthy a human organism is, according to certain defined criteria. The theory has been developed over the last 30 years by Professor George Vithoulkas, and is the result of over 150,000 medical consultations and 50 years experience. In 2011 Vithoulkas published a book, “Levels of Health”, co-authored by Erik van Woensel, that describes the theory in more detail.

Briefly, the idea is that we are all born at a certain level of health – there are 12 levels described in the book, divided into 4 groups, A B C & D. Most people are born in group A or B, which are both characterised by a good level of vitality and also increasingly frequent high fevers, above 39 degrees celsius, e.g. at the bottom of group B. Even someone in the top level (1) would normally have had a high fever sometime in the last 5 years. By level 6 the fevers may be coming every month, but then in level 7 they stop. They are replaced by chronic disease with and acutes without high fever. There will still be acute diseases, coughs, colds etc. but the organism has become too weak to raise a high fever which would have curtailed the acute disease, and for example killed off the virus or bacteria.

As the patient goes through life experiencing different stresses, many stop developing high fevers, but begin to experience the beginnings of chronic disease. They do not necessarily join up these 2 factors, but rather think of themselves as more healthy, but with an irritating problem that will often call for surgery or a pharmaceutical drug that the patient then becomes dependent on.

For these purposes, chronic disease is characterised by symptoms that the body is unable to resolve by itself.

Here is a brief summary of the way LoH theory defines symptoms on the 3 levels, mental emotional and physical. Those at the bottom of each column are considered less serious, and at the top more serious:

Examples:
A patient has the skin complaint eczema, but with no mental or emotional symptoms, and had a cold with a high fever last year, but no high fevers before that for 5 years. This patient is probably in group A. We would expect the eczema to resolve easily with a single remedy.
Another patient has depression and had a high fever in earlier this year, and one high fever every year for as long as they can remember. We would expect that patient to do well with one or two remedies, and to start to feel better quite quickly. Probably a group A patient again.

We can see by this that the condition is not governed by the Level of Health, i.e. someone at a high level of health may still get what is normally considered a serious medical condition, the difference is that the higher the level of health, the quicker and more easily the organism can be assisted. In some cases these are the people for whom serious problems seem to just spontaneously resolve.