Interview with Didier Grandgeorge

This article is based on an interview carried out by Morag Heirs (Dept of Health Sciences, University of York) with Didier Grandgeorge MD, PH on 5th October 2007. Annie Hall MCPH, RSHom translated during the interview. The interview was carried out as part of a PhD research project funded by the NCCCRD (Dept of Health, UK). Although the project is focused on the homoeopathic treatment of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, this interview also offers a flavour of Didier's unique approach to homeopathy. Didier is a qualified physician and homeopath well known for his many years of experience in treating children.

In your practice do you use homeopathy only or do you use conventional medicine as well?

It depends on the pathology. I think that in medicine there is a place for homeopathy and for allopathy. If you have a diabetic child, with a pancreas unable to make insulin, it would be criminal not to give insulin. One needs to know the limits of what homeopathy and allopathic medicine can actually treat, and to be able to use homeopathic medicines. But in mental cases I hardly ever use allopathic medicine, only homeopathy. So I'm not happy as a doctor with regular medication for ADHD. I think we're acting as a sort of sorcerer's apprentice here. And I think that children who take allopathic medication year after year can have problems with their mental health, so there's no need to use it.

So if someone came in with a psychiatric problem, in what percentage of cases would you use allopathy?

I find that in about 70 % of cases you're able to treat with just homeopathy. With a psychotic history sometimes you need medication.

I don't think homeopathy has been studied enough, and we need to start with new remedies, particularly plant remedies that produce hallucinations.

I've become very interested in Iboga; you will learn a lot about this on the internet. It's an African plant that's used during initiation ceremonies and they go into a sort of coma and they see their ancestors and the ancestors give them their name and so explain to them what they need to do here on this earth. I think this remedy can help people get out of their body, so perhaps in homeopathic doses it would help people get back into their body and in fact in psychotic cases people do get out of their bodies.

I have a spiritual view of psychiatry and I think the body can be taken over by another spirit, which can be beneficial or not. So there is an anguish of being depersonalised in a primitive society, and I saw this kind of thing cure people with spiritual methods and hallucinogenic type of drugs.

So what does the allopathic medication that's used for psychotic conditions do from your perspective as a homeopath?

These drugs are useful all the same, because they limit the anxiety of being too personalised, so they hold people together with a sort of rope or sling, so it means society can cope with them. So although it's a correct response it's not a healing one: that's one of the problems about allopathic medicines.

So allopathic medicine – medication (medicament in French) – is really about lying to the body while homeopathic remedies mean to remedy something, to actually put back together, to heal.

[Translator's note: Didier plays a huge amount with chopping up words into bits and seeing the meaning in each bit of the word. For example “medicament” (= medication) can be chopped into bits and “ment”, which is the last part of the word, is the root of “mentir”, to lie].

Allopathy has a very materialistic look on this, but psychotic problems touch the heart so the spirit needs healing. So allopathy has a great wall of incomprehension and that's why nothing goes forward.

Is there anything in particular that you are interested in with children that you wouldn't worry about or think about with adults?

So what's really interesting for me is that the child is a victim in the society in which he lives. So at the moment we're living in a very materialistic society. People need to be children and naughty children expect to have money to buy toys. The adults aren't needed so they start thinking we need children. So society at the moment tends to make people go back and regress into childhood.

For example vaccinations – children often have whooping cough vaccinations. Okay, so there's an expression in French, “être la coqueluche” (literally “to be the whooping cough”) which means “to be the centre of the universe”.

When you vaccinate, you make a shut-in wall surrounding people in the force of ego; that's why there are accidents. So the child goes back to being a foetus, can't do anything any more, can't change himself, feed himself, you have to do everything for him, he becomes completely like a child again, an encephalitis case.

As a result of the vaccine?

Yes. That's the worst case scenario in encephalitis cases. But we as their homeopaths know that illness has significance. So from the habit of tying people up in ego, the child likes to be the centre of the universe. So when he goes to school, he does naughty things the whole time so that the teacher has to keep an eye on him to form an umbilical cord with this child. So the homeopath's job is to cut that umbilical cord and antidote the whooping cough vaccine and measles. Measles is an illness that allows you to separate from your mum and with the vaccine you can't do that.

So you stay fused?

You stay fused to mum, so you stay at the oral state, so you eat especially sweet foods. So typical Americans, they put sugar everywhere, Home Sweet Home is what they put there, Home Sweet Home it was when the baby was in the womb of the mother and – that was the Home Sweet Home, when the baby was in its mother's womb with the umbilical cord, so sugar came through the umbilical cord non-stop.

That's why they have a problem with obesity in America because of this Home Sweet Home; instead of pulling people up to the top, upwards towards knowledge, towards liberty and universal love, we pull them down towards the base, egoistical and naughty things and so we have a society that doesn't work very well.

By the time a child is two in France it's had thirty-two vaccinations, EUR 500 times 800 000 children – that's a lot of money! Money pushes society but money doesn't buy you happiness.

How involved are the parents in the children's treatment when they come to see you?

Often you have to treat the parents. Because the psychodrama involves the parents, so quite often I treat the parents too because homeopathy allows people to resolve problems. These problems concern the wrong direction that they've taken because they didn't find the right solution given to them at a particular time, and with the homeopathic remedy you bring them the right solution and they can go up the steps of the ladder, so it's fantastic.

So what if a child comes to you with a psychiatric-type problem and you say the parents need treatment but the parents don't want to be treated? Can you still treat the child successfully?

Yes but I rarely find this is a problem because I go on the totality of the symptoms, so I'll notice that the mother has kept traces of being pregnant on her face, so I look that up in the consultation. So when I give a remedy to the mother, I'll say “Here, you can take this remedy because you kept some signs you were pregnant on your face and this medicine will make them go away”. So obviously she'll take it.

(Translators' note: “These marks on the face” – “mark” is “tache” in French, which is part of the word of “attachment” (attachement), it's half of the word “attache”. This is typical of the play on words that Didier goes in for all the time; he uses this to help him with remedy choice and as a sort of aide-mémoire too: it leads him to possible remedies.)

So by saying the remedy is for the marks it's actually for the attachment.

Absolutely, and that's why I'm saying the woman has these anyway because she hasn't detached. So she's kept these marks because she never realises that she's actually given birth. Why didn't she realise this? Because she didn't suffer during the birth, due to the anaesthetic, so her child is still inside her and the child is caught up inside this spider's web, fusional love.

[Translators' note: A spider is another word that he plays on and is taking to bits – “araignée” is “spider” in French, and “a reigné” means “(she) has reigned”. So the mother is like a spider's web.]

And caught in the web?

Yes, fighting and agitated obviously because he wants to escape this spider's web but he can't, so Tarantula is a big homeopathic remedy for this, to escape from this spider's web which is the mother's fusional love.

What does ADHD mean to you as a homeopath? What does the label mean?

Very agitated, completely unable to concentrate, they go from one thing to another, to another, to another and I think it's typical of the world today. Where we're all very agitated zapping from one day to another, even inside families. Families are destroyed by divorces, so we zap from one wife to another, one family to another, so the world is getting a bit mad because we're being manipulated as consumers so we have to consume, this, this and this.

So in a sense there is nothing uniquely wrong with a child who comes in with hyperactivity; they are just displaying what is within our society as a whole?

Yes, quite right.

How much do you speak to the children themselves in a consultation?

A little. Society pushes people to stay at the oral stage. So normally in the development there is a two-year oral state, a two-year anal state and a two-year Oedipus complex.

Here's an example: A kid aged 6 comes with a dummy, and a baby's bottle in his hand. Why has he still got a bottle? “It's easier in the car when he's thirsty” and so I explain that this child is no longer a baby and that the bottle is the substitute breast of the mother, and so at 6 years old he shouldn't still be suckling his mother. And so I turn to the child and say “Now you're a big boy so you're going to put the bottle in the dustbin. Look at daddy; he hasn't got a bottle, and you're going to be big like daddy. So we're going to put it in the bin.” And often the child will do that there and then, in front of me, in my rubbish bin, and I've won. This child was 6 years old. It was his first year here in the big school, and he couldn't cope with it, couldn't learn to write, and he was writing on the walls, so they sent him to a Special Needs School, and that's why the parents had brought the child to see me. Because they could see that their child was at a dead end, and they didn't want to stay in this system and nobody, not even the psychiatrists in the special school, had suggested that he stop his bottle. So at the first consultation I gave Carcinosin to the mother and the child, and then the child went back to a conventional school and left the Special Needs School.

Simple!

I'm going to tell you why you need to keep it simple! If you go to the Mount of the Beatitudes, next to the Lake of Tiberias, where Christ used to teach and his teachings have been written down … Most of the Beatitudes talk about the future: “if you do this, then you will be in paradise”, however, two of the Beatitudes are in the present – so, if you're like this, you're already in paradise. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” – a statement that looks as if it's about people who are mentally handicapped, but think it's more about people who have got this simple spirit; to be in simplicity, you have to be in synthesis. Again a play on the word “synthèse”, “Saint” and “thesis”. However in French (again a play on words) “to analyse it”, if you split it into two, gives “anal” + “lisez”, or “reading the anal” and synthesis (saint + thèse) is at the top of the pyramid, a holy thesis. When you're at the top of the pyramid, everything becomes simple.

Okay.

So you have to have a tendency to go towards simplicity. If you're reading a book by a psychologist and you have to read the page three times to understand a single word he says, shut that book. This man is not in synthesis.

When I first started medicine I went to Africa, and the first thing I did there was to visit Albert Schweitzer's hospital. When you go to the hospital you'll find he had written on the wall “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” – they already inhabit the kingdom of God and in that hospital very simple but very efficacious medicines were used. He used plants from the area. When he died, people were scandalised to find a whole load of boxes of special equipment that had been sent to him, bits of machinery from everywhere, that he'd never even bothered to use. So they installed absolutely everything and then they needed millions of pounds to keep the hospital going. It closed within six months. It had run out of money, but he'd been working for 40 years by keeping things simple.

I wanted to ask actually about the way that you chose the remedies, the ways in which you make your decisions. What information do you use? Is it proving, is it clinical reports, is it repertories?

Everything is good. I know my repertory well, so I don't use any computers because I think it's really important to know by heart the little rubrics, like you've seen the repertory, haven't you, how it's cut into bits. Well, the further you go down, the fewer remedies there will be in the little rubric and it's very specific. I'm very specific and I think those are the ones that homeopaths need to learn because that speeds the whole process up.

Here's a case: a child comes because he's getting behind at school; in France if you fall behind at school you have to take your year all over again, you repeat the year. He's hyperactive, so he can't concentrate, “persist with nothing”. Lachesis children who butt into your conversation the whole time are in that rubric, as are Lac caninum and Plantago, but he stands happily in his little corner; he looks so quiet and so I say to mum “Why doesn't he persist with anything?” and he says “I'm completely hopeless so I might as well not bother; what's the point? I'm never going to get it right.”

That's a Lac caninum case, so I give him Lac caninum. He manages that academic year and has no more problems. Then I ask the mother “Does he talk about snakes?” because Lac caninum is a remedy that often dreams about snakes. She says “But of course, because my husband is a herpetologist and every weekend we go out into the countryside to collect snakes, which you can do in the south of France of course.” I say to the woman “Send your husband to see me”. I see the father and I say “Please talk to me about your father.” “My father, we never saw him at home.” “Where has your passion for snakes come from?” “I was an adolescent, I was walking out in the countryside and I found an amazing viper.”

[Translators' note: Play on words again: “viper” in French can be cut into two parts “vi” = saw and “per” = père = father. So “I saw my father.”]

Just as he had said, “I never see my father” there was this “I saw my father” – so one minute he was saying he never sees his father and the next he uses the word viper, and that's how our brain works. So he becomes a herpetologist but he takes snakes and kills them and snakes are to do with sex. So the snake is his father whom he tries to castrate and the child has been castrated.

Which leads you into the remedy?

Yes. So that's why my prescriptions can be so quick. Sometimes I'll spend 5 minutes with somebody and get it sorted, done there and then.

Working so fast makes it cheaper for people, so I see lots and lots of people. “Vox populi – vox Dei”, so: “voice of the people, voice of God”. So if after 5 minutes it's done, off they go – 20 minutes, whatever, but it could need half an hour, three quarters of an hour. The same for a follow-up.

I'm not happy with the Sankaran way of working; it's not that Sankaran is wrong; it's just that his way is not practical. It takes a lot of time, it costs a huge amount of money for the client, and because only a certain segment of the population will have access to this, that doesn't please the gods.

Because Christ said “Why are you worrying? Look at the birds, they're fed, they're looked after, etc.” So medicine should be accessible to everybody and as soon as it's long, it's expensive and it's not good for everybody.

So it could be a useful way of working but it's not accessible enough for everybody?

Absolutely. It's elitist. It's just not a practical way of working. It's very useful to learn a remedy deeply, deeply, very well, but I think you'd learn the remedy just as easily by seeing thousands of people. Each one will have a different aspect and then we will write it down. So it's much better than spending days on one and there are lots of risks that you might lose track of where you were.

You might lose track?

Lose track, absolutely, and at the moment I think that others in a certain part of the homeopathic community are going off track, proving new remedies, for example goldfish, eagle or duck, because people during a consultation talked about ducks or eagles or whatever. It makes them doubt basic homeopathy, so they get sidetracked. We've got 3000 remedies, and we're using very few of them. I was talking this morning about small remedies and I'm saying that these small remedies are actually big remedies, because they've got pathology and we need to study that. At the moment the eagle's feather goes under the pillow, and you dream, you only get mental symptoms.

That's dream proving, isn't it?

I'm saying that dream proving is useless – you've only got mental symptoms, so I say: that's rubbish, because to be able to cure and to help with mental cases you have to be able to help with physical problems, that's Hahnemannian, and that's what helped me cure psychiatric patients. I saw the physical problem they had and so that's how it could be useful. Here is another example:

A 50-year-old man is having an affair, his wife notices, there's a scandal in the family and he feels guilty as hell, so he becomes depressed, very severely depressed. He can't work any more, he's on invalidity benefit, he can't sleep, he can't do anything. So I see him, he says he feels rubbish so it could go to Lac caninum but Lac caninum doesn't help. He's had loads of typical remedies for depression from other homeopaths but none of them does any good. So I ask him about his past pathology – when he was 20 he nearly died from an appendicitis that led to peritonitis.

So I give him Arnica 15 CH and in the next few days he comes completely out of his depression – he starts work again and he turns back into a more normal human being. When somebody has been in mortal danger with a serious infection, that's where the most basic remedy is, so that's my tactic. So that's why I don't spend so long on a case because I dive straight in.

Going back to what you said about going to conferences, you said sometimes you might take ideas/methods and sort of try them out and see how they work with you?

An example. I talked about Verbascum this morning. I'd been to a congress where I heard a man give a Verbascum case, and it was a case where somebody also had some paedophile tendencies, so I scribbled in the margin of my Kent. After that I've been able to actually check this in my practice, in a few cases, so that was a clue I got from a conference I'd been to. I'd made a note of it and I'd been able to use it usefully in my work.

But medicine is difficult. We can't do much on our own, we need help. So I think there is another world that tries to help people down on earth and we can enter into a contract with them by prayer. My normal prayer in a difficult case is the one of the Centurion: when he sees Jesus pass in front of him, he says “Don't bother to come to me, just say the word and my child will be healed.” So I think about that, just say the word, and in the next few minutes, quite often, people typically say something completely amazing.

Something that would then let you know what remedies you're looking for?

Yes, or something happens, so for instance, I had a case of a child, the one I was talking about this morning, and he was waiting in the waiting room. I was running late and he caught his finger in the door and so we had to give him the remedy Hypericum, which actually sorted out his other problems. So, something happens.

This looking for information from this other world, God, Heaven, this asking for help and seeing it happen, is that more important than listening to someone present a case?

It's the same thing. Dieu is the French word for God, and you can chop that word into bits. You can take the “di” away: “di”…eux, and the “dit” is when you say the letter “d”; it also sounds like the word “dit” = “say” and “eux” means “them” i.e. “other people”. So God in fact means “say others/think of others”.

So it's just ways of getting information but it's still coming from the same place?

Absolutely.

Thank you, Didier, for sharing your time and thoughts with us.