Everything and More: a Conversation with Kim Elia (S3030)
Feb 7, 2018
Links for this episode:
I encountered my guest for today, Kim Elia, when I took my first Whole Health Now course with Will Taylor, Acute Prescribing, several years ago.
I remember Kim’s voice and speaking style being so distinctive and memorable, not to mention how he would rattle off Aphorisms of the Organon from memory without missing a beat.
I thought- who IS this guy? And is he for real? Does someone REALLY possess that kind of knowledge and reference and acuity?
The answer is, yes, yes he really does, and he is real because not only did I get to talk to him in person for over an hour in the conversation that I share with you today, but he is also one of the individuals I met at the Homeopathy-One Conference. That is why I am calling this episode ‘everything and more with Kim Elia’ because he IS everything you think he might be and he knows everything you think he might know… AND more.
And though he is as busy as you would expect for a top international homeopathy teacher and CEO of multiple companies as well as a practitioner, he granted my request for an interview, and you are all in for a treat.
I want to do justice to his experience, so I’ll share some highlights from his biographical write up which you can read in full at Whole Heath Now-
Kim has been studying homeopathy since 1987 and is a graduate of NESH with Dr. Paul Herscu where he also had a clinical practice.
He has an extensive background in nutrition, with years of training and seminars under his belt.
He both collaborates with teams on the development of homeopathic software and is a distributor and trainer.
He’s a sought after international teacher and was a principal instructor and developer of a 4 year classical program at the Hahnemann Academy in Tokyo and Osaka Japan, and of course you can access his teaching at home through DVD and online with offerings such as comprehensive MM courses like Spiders, an exhaustive History of Homeopathy course, and focused therapeutics such as Anxiety, Depression and Jealousy and Asthma to name just a few.
I think its’ safe to say that at *some point* in your homeopathic career, it would behoove you to spend some time with Kim.
Now, before I transition to the interview, I wanted to add a little piece here.
In the last couple months of 2017, I re-listened to many of the early episodes of 1M. It was really fun to go back to those shows and especially the first year when I ws constructing each show around a theme, tying in archival readings and present day interviews and materia medica.
It was a LOT of work to prepare and pull off those multi-dimensional shows, BUT, I loved the depth of them, and the whole part of being multi-dimensional and artistic in making connections.
It’s definitely easier to present just an interview.
I’ve never been one for settling for ‘easy’ though, so I’m going to try a bit of a hybrid.
As the interviews inspire me, I’d like to add on a segment, maybe an archival reading or materia medica of a remedy, but maybe something else entirely. But something that shoots off of the conversation and adds that extra depth and dimension.
So….
in my interview with Kim, right up toward the top, you’ll hear Kim say that he doesn’t ‘treat’ patients.
It kind of threw me, but I wasn’t quick enough to ask why and pursue it more. We just went on in the conversation.
I kept thinking about it though, and long after the interview ended, I wondered- why doesn’t Kim say that he ‘treat’s his patients or clients?
I let it go and then I stumbled upon something.
I was inspired after my conversation with Kim to start reading the Organon again. I took out my copy translated by Steven Decker and edited by Wenda Brewster O’Reilly, and started from the very *very* beginning- reading the introduction. And there, I think, I may have stumbled upon why Kim does not use the word ‘treat’ in relation to his homeopathy work. Or at least, I stumbled upon a discussion of some terms that shed some light on the possibility.
Wenda writes:
“another frequently encountered problem in moving from on language to another is that different languages carry different ways of looking at something, conceptuallly dividing things into smaller or larger units. Where one language may use several words , another may only use on.
For example, English has the terms ‘curing’ and ‘healing’ which originally had different meanings.
‘Cure’ referred to medical intervention while ‘healing’ referred to the human organisms’ own efforts to recover from disease or injury.
German, however, has only one term ‘heil’ that covers both healing and cure, which can refer to anything that is remedial or therapeutic. Any such differences between Hahnemann’s original terminology and the translation are presented in the Glossary.’
So- that was interesting. A cure is instigated by a medical intervention. Healing is what the human beings’ own body does, I imagine be it from the immune system or the vital force. and seeing as how homeopathy stimulates the vital force, perhaps the use of remedies is not instrumental in a cure- which implies medical intervention- but only in healing.
This still didn’t shed light on the use of the word ‘treat’ and so per her suggestion, I headed to the Glossary.
In the back of Brewster O’Reilly’s edition, Treatment is defined as such:
‘Cur’, from Latin - Cura- medical treatment. ‘Behandlung’ _german, handling or management 1) The act, caner or method of handing or dealing with someone or something. 2) Administration or application of medicines or other means to a patient or for a disease or injury; medical management. Both Cur and and Behandlung are translated as ‘treatment’.
So again, a medical management, and specifically, the application or administration of medicine.
‘Cure’ is attached to ‘Heal’ and defined as such:
‘To restore health through curative means or through the natural process of healing. To make whole again. In this translation, ‘to cure’ refers to the restoration of health brought through the use of medicines or the treatments, while ‘to heal’ refers to the body’s own processes in recovering from an injury.
Throughout the text of the Organon, Hahnemann distinguishes, in various ways, between healing and curing, however the German language has only one word- heilen, which encompasses both meanings. General references to both healing and care are translated with the words ‘medica’ and ‘therapeutic’
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So, maybe Kim is preferring *not* to use the word ‘treat’ because it implies application of a medicine for curative purproses, where as remedies stimulate the vital force to heal- it isn’t the medicine at all
Or maybe Kim is just covering his bases from a legal perspective, as treating implies practicing medicine which we are not licensed to do in this country.
I’ll have to email Kim and ask him to tell me, now that I’ve had the chance to go down my own rabbit hole, which is more fun and results in more learning for myself anyway! I’ve never thought about the differences in those words- heal and cure- before, in quite this way. I used them interchangeably, but now I can appreciate the difference.
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Enjoy my chat with Kim Elia, and I'll see you again next month!