The Vital Approach Introduction

-  Anne Vervarcke,
More than 20 years of studying, practicing and teaching homeopathy culminated in a personal way of case taking and analyzing which seems to be very helpful to students and colleagues as I observed in numerous seminars.

Often then the question was where to find a book with my teachings. I used to reply that there was nothing original in what I had to say since I gathered information everywhere. What I did was nothing more than a combination of the basics of homeopathy and the insights of the contemporary homeopaths with my own clinical experience. On top of that my own understanding is what one could call ‘a work in progress’. It is developing and ever changing and the truth of today may be obsolete tomorrow. For this reason I saw no point in producing a kind of ‘manual’ as to how I work.

But now you have a ‘manual’ to my approach in your hands.

The reason I finally decided to make a condense and orderly book of what I call my ‘Vital Approach’ is to give the indispensable contextual information to the schemes that I made or are produced by other homeopaths. Those schemes can be very helpful but also contain a risk: the words alone are not enough and they will lead us to many errors if we don’t take the context in which they came to us into consideration.

Another motive is that I’m convinced that the Vital Approach helps to find the similimum in the majority of cases. My daily practice stands for it and I have demonstrated in by taking cases and analyzing them in public for many groups of students in many countries. Questions of the participants gave invaluable information as to clarify step by step the case taking procedure and what information to use for analyzing.

The last motivation was that although maybe collected from all thinkable sources, my personal style and insight cannot but have that original flavor since ‘everybody is an original’, as we homeopaths know so well. I extensively studied and incorporated many masters and am grateful for their teachings. My contribution to the body of homeopathic knowledge is this book.

Where I feel I don’t have anything new or original to add, I referred to other authors. In many instances the analysis will lead to a group of possible remedies of which little is known or to be found in the repertoria. In that case we should consult our homeopathic software, provings, libraries, cases, where-ever we can find information on the remedy needed.

It is my wish that this Manual will be of help to take you to the point that either the remedy is clear or the direction in which to look for is given.

Since it is impossible to name all the bright homeopaths that helped me to develop my understanding, here’s a general but heartfelt thanks to all of them.

Leuven, 2010