First of all, I would like to point out what Dr. Herscu represents and why he makes this argument in favour of the immunization campaign against the current pandemic. Remember, Paul Herscu is a naturopath. One day, perhaps, we should have a discussion about the impact naturopathy has had on the practice, theory, and the public perception of homeopathy and its political and regulatory implications in north America. Fortunately, naturopathy’s detrimental effect has so far being confined to this continent; Dr. Henny Heudens-Mast is also a naturopathic physician, but it has not prevented her from being one of our best classical practitioners and a brilliant teacher. In America, unfortunately this is not the case. Naturopathy has subsumed and largely corrupted not only homeopathy but all other disciplines it has captured in its regulatory grasp, such as acupuncture and herbalism, to name a few. Trained in all the major medical sciences and practicing largely as allopaths, NDs found a unique niche in the lucrative marketplace of America. They have been taught to be fluent in the lingo and passions of the holistic disciplines but are unable to grasp the latter’s theoretical foundations. Their only professional aim is to sell the drugs which they label as ‘natural’ to the public at large and their own patients. The profession has completely integrated itself into the neo-liberal capitalist environment. From their professional platform, they preach self-improvement and self-relance to the wealthy few and neglect the larger systemic and health-related issues that make us sick. In short, to the practitioners of homeopathy and acupuncture, the health systems that are not predicated on profiting from a product, naturopaths are not their comrades, putting it mildly. Therefore, no one should be surprized by Herscu’s articles.

So, I urge you to consider this before you respond to his vaccination glorifying paper because it is not written from the perspective of homeopathic theory. This is a piece penned for one single purpose: to promote his practice and his expanding ego, while simultaneously bidding for the NDs to be accepted as partners in the mammoth, exceptionally profitable American medical-industrial complex. (Note, in some of the states, NDs actually do practice as regular physicians).
A while ago, I, too, was wondering about him. Herscu had produced one of the best texts in homeopathic pediatrics, The Homeopathic Treatment of Children. Written in the style of Morrison’s Desktop Guide, only so much more extensive, it is one of our best textbooks and a reliable materia medica. But, remarkably, this is one single scholarship of excellence that he so far managed to produce in his 30 years of practice. What followed this valuable publication was not crafted in the same vein. He went down the rabbit hole of publishing questionable provings. He joined our infamous school of nonsense and created his very own theory of homeopathy, Cycles and Segments. Following this, he began producing exceptionally verbose texts on epidemics and currently presents himself as some sort of a widely accepted authority on the topic. He even quotes himself! I can’t imagine anyone being able to read his loquacious papers in their entirety. So, in the past, I often wondered, as to how he managed to write this great pediatrics book. Roger Morrison’s Desktop Guide is also a textbook par excellence, but it is constructed as an almost verbatim copy of his early lecture notes by George Vithoulkas. Straight from the horses mouth, so to speak, though without giving GV the credit. As far as I understand, Herscu never went to Greece to study. Another peculiar thing about The Homeopathic Treatment of Children is that not that many of the ‘pediatric constitutional types’ are actually there, a few of the important remedy pictures are sorely missing. Carcinosin, Mercurius, Calcaria phos, Calc sulph, Lachesis, and Hepar are a few to mention.

Dr. Tatijana Nincevic’s letter addresses one major thorn in the body of homeopathic theory and praxis. It is very important for our profession to have a coherent scholarly view on vaccination, and, I believe, we have already had it for many decades. However, there something else to consider in Nincevic’s letter here. Besides opening it by unreservedly and aggressively addressing Herscu as Mr.—which would probably assure neither he nor his followers are going to read her response—it does not exactly present a very persuasive argument. To begin with, it seems to me, Nincevic does not really understand Vithoulkas’ Continuum theory. This theory represents the essence of his Layers of Health praxis, and, in effect, is his highest achievement as a medical theoretician. It is simply brilliant. It is rooted in medical reality and supported by sciences. Nincevic, however, makes full use of Vithoulkas’s very old unsavoury vitalist ideas rather than utilizing the central tenets of the Continuum principles.
After a brief statement that immunization is a ‘mechanistic’ idea, she however doesn’t not follow this tendentious line of argument but dives deep into her own ‘mechanistic’ training at the allopathic medschool (which seems rather embedded into her own limbic system). A holistic understanding of the disease as a process and of an organism as an exceedingly complex dynamic entity are difficult subjects to gain mastery in and not that easy to operate in discourse. So we are now invited by the author into the second part of her argument, the one that is unsurprisingly wholly reductionist (pun intended). Even though Nincevic begins with this correct Hahnemannian precept, which infers a holistic understanding of the disease process:
“This phenomenon is based on the natural laws of onset and disappearance of disease, in which disease (inflammation) has its own course from the periphery (skin and mucous) to the center of an organism (internal organs).”
She then changes her course. Completely forgetting that she is supposed to defend her teacher‘s ideas from a vitalist perspective, she offers us a picture of a complex organism reduced to one single central nervous system organ—hypothalamus, all in caps. After making her rather incomplete and shambolic reductionist case that literally proves nothing, she veers back into the 1970s New-agey Vithoulkas vitalism presenting the reader with zero explanation (or understanding) of the terms she uses in her thoughtless pseudo-scientific statement:
“Everything happens on the subatomic complex of the human organism, energy.”
Huh? ‘Subatomic complex’? ‘Energy’? ‘Everything’? Seriously?
Yet another sudden conceptual swerve, and, voilà, who could have thunk it? we are invited into her religion: a disease as a sin, a ‘compromised conscience.’ Ouch. Stalin might have loved it.
“The basis of the disease lies in a compromised conscience, which cannot be found in any molecular structure of the brain. As disease is of a spiritual-dynamic nature, not material.”
But, but, what about the Limbic System? Is it spiritual or subatomic? Take you pick. OMG, is this the way to argue with the immunization diehards?

Currently, Vitalism is beginning to permeate the philosophical grounds of many practical sciences, such as anthropology, archeology, etc. Not the old vitalist idea of the organic matter being of a different substance entirely—this conceptual ghost has been dead for a very long time. Being purged and deconstructed of its religious notions, the old vitalist ideas of dynamic holism are being incorporated into the new materialism—in certain way similar to Marx rendering Hegel’s idealism palatable and workable.
The Continuum Theory of Disease states that all disease must be viewed as an inflammatory process. Vithoulkas proposes that a chronic state of inflammation is left over to linger in certain affected tissues when an acute infection is supressed and not allowed to proceed. Unless rooted out, this inflammation would persist in suspended animation and move from tissue to tissue and organ to organ, giving rise to various signs and symptoms. Pathologically and historically, this process creates the appearance of different disease entities ‘attacking’ the person. Vithoulkas tells us, however, it is all the same disease. Now, just because he calls it a vital something doesn’t mean it is some sort of a spiritual malady inflicted on us by the savage gods, an immorality of some sort. It is a singularly concrete physical process.
Furthermore, this corporeal pathological process exists at different levels of magnitude, at different organic and physical scales. On our scale, the inflammation appears as a ‘derangement’ of organs. Down a level of magnitude, it interferes with the functioning of this organism on the molecular level; we see this in blood or urine tests. Farther down the road, it affects our bodies at a subatomic level, impeding the flow of electrons and protons along their channels thus hampering the vital cellular quantum mechanical processes (the scale at which homeopathic drugs act). Are the quantum mechanical process ‘spiritual’? Immaterial? No, not at all! Electrons that our mitochondria manage are thoroughly concrete and physical. Stop all this New Age nonsense already, please! No one wants to take us seriously. We are delegitimizing our own beautiful science.

Now, I would like to see a scholarly homeopathic argument about the danger of immunization from this materialist perspective! But not by reducing the body to a single brain organ, however magical, rather by showing how immunization leads to establishing a state of subacute or chronic disease. Injected at the point where a virus is not expected by our immune system to enter, the viral proteins evade the upper-respiratory native immunity agents well-designed to handle a viral assault. The connective tissues of some individuals, whose bodies reside at a certain low Level of Health, somehow, are unable to quench this new inflammation. We should be able to show how this process develops. Yet another argument, of course, needs to be posed about the immunizations effect on the population as a whole. But there have been numerous such arguments raised inside and outside of the allopathic profession.