By Luc Chaltin, ND DIHom
From early on in my youth, I was plagued by digestive problems accompanied by sinus problems. It became worse in the early 1950s for no known special reason. At that time, I was working for a Dutch scale company in Brussels, Belgium. My suffering became so visible that one of the employees, who had become a friend, said one day, “You should consult my friend who is a very gifted doctor in alternative medicine.” He offered to make an appointment for me, but I wanted to know what kind of medicine the doctor was prescribing, given my stomach problem. “He is a Homeopath” said my friend, and I immediately said “I do not believe in quackery.” Although I never had met a Homeopath personally, I had only heard about Homeopathy from people speaking about it in a negative way. I continued to suffer and my friend continued to ask me “Do I make an appointment for you?” until I finally gave in and said, “Alright, make an appointment!”
I should have known that it was not only my stomach that was in trouble, it was my whole digestive system. My “sinus” problems were not real sinus problems either. As I found out later, the sinus discharge was caused by a permanent problem in my left brain that was inflamed by the measles I had when I was about three years old. The measles had been accompanied by an infection of the brain comparable to meningitis. I remember that my mother told friends about my illness and a dangerously high fever that the doctor did not know how to treat, because in the late 1920s there were no antibiotics. I survived but I was weak and unable to play the games that normal children played. This caused me to be more or less isolated from my class mates and I spent my hours after class alone, reading books, and staying in the garden during the summer looking at the manifestations of nature. When I lay down on the grass and looked between the blades I saw the insects run and the grass roots form. This made me search for books about nature so that I could know more about animal life and plant life. I eventually asked my father if he would allow me to go to Horticulture School in Mechelen, a nearby city. I would go to that school with my bike. I was 13 years old, and for the next three years I rode five days a week to the school and back.
I got my diploma at the age of 16 in 1939, being third in my class. That same year the war broke out between England, France and Germany but it did not affect the lives of the Belgian people immediately. However, in May 1940 the German army invaded Belgium, France and Holland and drove the English and the French armies to the coast on the North Sea. My father, who had served in the war of 1914, did not want to be ruled by the Germans and decided to flee to England. But all we had were our bikes. So the four of us, including my younger brother, got on the road to Calais. We rode one day and the next day we were stopped by the German army in a small French town, about 20 miles from the coast. In the chaos that followed, there was no way to move back home. All the bridges over water and the rails were destroyed. We were stuck for about two weeks and when we finely arrived back home, our house had been ransacked as well, not by the Germans but by some of the neighbors!
Later that summer, my friend told me that he planned to go for a course in auto mechanics in another city nearby and I went with him every Sunday for several months. I got my certificate with 98 percent of the points. At that time, I could not imagine that this certificate would be more important for obtaining a job than the certificate for the three years of Horticulture school. I had a gift for mechanical constructions as well as an interest and a gift for growing plants.
Later that year, the Germans forced all men between the ages of 17 and 45 to go to Germany to work in the war industry. The instructions came from the local city administration that used the information available about every member of every family in the city. For reasons that are not clear, I never got any instruction to go to Germany but my friend did and he spent months in Germany first and later in France. Eventually he was able to get work in a Messerschmitt repair shop close by so that he could come home every day. He had worked in the shop for a few months when one day around noon, several squadrons of English planes bombarded the workshop and my friend was wounded and died several weeks later from the wounds. A bomb had exploded in a Messerschmitt plant and dozens of pieces of aluminum alloy were blasted in my friend’s back and eventually killed him after weeks of suffering.
It had now become very dangerous for me to leave my house. The Germans picked up every man between 17 and 45 years of age and sent him to Germany to work in the war industry if they discovered that he was not contributing to their industry somehow. I will never forget those four years of war. I was bound to the house of my parents where I nevertheless could be picked up by the Germans or even by the Belgian traitors if they discovered that I stayed at home. So, I made myself a secret place where I could hide if necessary and even sleep if it was needed. It was a part of the house that was not accessible because it was too low to stand upright, and it was separated from the house with a wall without a door. I made a removable panel in the wall and installed a radio in the hideout to listen to the London broadcastings.
I went through the war without trouble and after the German army had left Belgium I started trying to grow flowers for a living. I soon saw that this was not working and I got a job as a mechanic in a company that produced machines to make conserves. It was far away from my home. I was happy, after several months, to find a job in a company that made conserve tins only 20 minutes by bike from my home. In the mean time I had married and we were expecting our first baby.
A few years later the company I worked for was looking to develop a market for their products in Africa and planned a factory in what was then Katanga, the eastern province of the former Belgian Congo (now Zaire). I was offered a big raise and was promised that my family would soon follow. But after I had set into production the factory in Katanga, they wanted me to build one in Leopoldville (Kinshasa) and another close to Matadi near the west coast. It took almost a year before I saw my family again.
After staying more than five years in Africa, I came back to Belgium and started working for a scale company in Brussels, whose parent company was in the Netherlands. I was used to feeling tired often and easily, but at a point in time it became a bigger burden. It was not only caused by my health but also by the fact that I had a big family to take care of even though my wife was doing her part as well. Eventually a crisis situation developed when my oldest son became sick and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was put in a sanatorium in the east of Belgium and I started to visit him every three weeks, a three-hour drive at the time with my car. The doctor wanted to check out all my children, my wife and me as well, to find out whether we were infected. According to the doctors, all my children and my wife needed to go to another sanatorium in the east part of Belgium, only a one-hour drive from my house. It took some time before I started to suspect that this situation was created as part of a research about the infection and spreading of tuberculosis. Eventually I got tired of driving to the east or the west every Sunday to visit part of my family. I confronted the doctors one day and told them that this comedy had lasted long enough and that I was going to take my wife and children back home. Because they could not show me any proof that they were infected as they claimed, they signed a release and let them go. My son, who had visible damage in his lungs, stayed where he was and was sent home later.
The irony was that several months later I became so tired that I consulted a doctor again and was found to have my right lung damaged by tuberculosis! I did not go to a sanatorium and decided that I was going to use a homeopath to heal my problem.
I made an appointment with a doctor in Antwerp and after looking in his books for an hour he prescribed Nux vomica 200c. The remedy did not change anything and my problems persisted without change. After a while, I decided that I was going to try to cure myself with homeopathy. I looked for a book that could be helpful. I found a small bookstore in Antwerp that sold all kinds of books. It was there that I found the only book ever written about healing tuberculosis with homeopathy, as far as I know. It was written by Dr. Léon Vannier, and entitled Les Tuberculiniques.
