Interviewer: Nyema Hermiston
Background
I started out as a pharmacist. I was working in conventional pharmacy at the very beginning of the 1980s and I started doling out pills to everybody. I’d really enjoyed studying for the pharmacy degree. It was like you’re at the pinnacle of science and everything, and suddenly you end up in a shop doling out contraceptives, and nappies, and you think: ‘Hang on a minute, what went wrong?’ Then people are coming in with the same prescription week after week after week for the same thing, and you think: ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ This is great business for the pharmaceutical industry, but they’re on a conveyer belt between life and death and I’m oiling the wheels. This is not what I had in mind for a career, yet that’s what it is. It’s very disheartening when you’re actually there and you’re literally handing out thousands of pills. I did this for about three years and thought: ‘No, there’s something wrong here,’ so I started looking at nutrition, I started doing psychotherapy courses and I even looked at Aurasoma – it’s colour therapy.
Then I got interested in homeopathy – I was working in a chain of pharmacies. One of the guys who was working in one of the other shops asked me: ‘Would like to read a book on homeopathy?’ I thought: ‘Yeah, why not? I’m completely bored with this, so I might as well read something.’ I read The Magic of The Minimum Dose and I couldn’t get on with it – there were all these strange words in it. He said: ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, there’s another book that’s just come out – I’ll send you that’ and he sent me The Science of Homeopathy by George Vithoulkas. I picked this book up and it was like a page-turner, I couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing and I thought: ‘Wow – if what this guy has written in this book is true, there is something called cure, and it’s possible – I’ve got to try it, I’ve got to see if this works or not’. In those days, there weren’t really any courses going on, and I was in a place where people were coming up to me all day long asking me: ‘What can I take for this, what can I take for that?’, so I thought: ‘Well, I’ve got to try it out’.