FS is Frederik Schroyens
MS is Marco Spiezia
Times apply to this video interview
The choice for homeopathy
1’04” MS: Thank you Luke for the introduction and obviously Luke Norland who is one of our great collaborators and also deals with the UK for Radar Opus.
Frederik, I don't think needs any introduction whatsoever. So again, thank you Frederik for coming in today.
1’25” MS: So I would like to start by reminding everyone that what we wanted to do today was to unravel a little bit of the history of Frederik, of this company and of Synthesis as a repertory because most often when we do webinars they are normally technical and they are specific but we very seldom if not ever spoken about what happens behind the closed doors.
And so I'm going to take pleasure today in grilling Frederik and asking him all sorts of questions which may come of interest to you as well because you know every company, every group of people, every family has a history and so it's worth remembering how we got to where we are today.
So, Frederik thank you for accepting this.
2’20” MS: I'm gonna start by asking you the first question which is: “What made you choose homeopathy when you started and how has the journey been for you?”
2’33” FS: Yeah. Well, at the time I went to university to study medicine, I was 17 years old and this was 1970 and it was the end of the 60’s. And this means that that time there were lectures about everything.
There was macrobiotics, philosophy, the East was coming to the West, meditation - anything, you name it - astrology, astronomy, ... And there was also some lectures about alternative medicine. And I was just, you know, maybe even more than attending the lecture on medicine, I was attending all these evening lectures on all these topics and was interested in all of that.
3’24” FS: And then, when my studies evolved, I had a plan. I had a master plan. I had a book and a list and two big files, like 20 cm, with all types of alternative medicine that were existing. And my plan was to study all of them. And I had informational courses on this. Aroma therapy and - you name it - gemmotherapy and gemstone therapy, ... And I had all this listed.
3’54” FS: And yeah, I just see Alf Andreasson pop up there and I must say I see so many people in the list that I know and it would be like an endless interruption to greet all of them, but please welcome!
I see your names and I'm very happy to meet all of you because many of you we didn't meet in Belgium. In fact, we met ... I met you in Norway, in Holland, in Mexico, in the United States and I see all these names.
So, hello to all my friends and thank you for watching me at the time.
4’32” FS: Okay. So. And so I had this map with all these types of medicine with the courses etc. And my master plan was: I would study all of them to be like a complete therapist. And then when it came to the real courses, I saw there were two big courses. There was a course on acupuncture and a course on homeopathy. They were long courses. The other ones were like weekends or a week or whatever. It was just short.
5’05” FS: And then I had to decide: Shall I go for acupuncture or homeopathy? And the course of the faculty in London seemed to be very well organized, was full-time. So I said: “I do a lot in one year”. I had a lovely wife who had been working a little bit and a lovely family who gave me some money. And so this is why I went to London to study homeopathy down there, full-time, one year.
5’31” FS: And, yeah, the thing that changed is that I got so much absorbed and intrigued and fascinated by the study of homeopathy that I did not pick up studying acupuncture, chiropraxy, gemmotherapy and all these other things.
5’50” FS: So I was in fact ... I got stuck in homeopathy because of the experience in London with Dr. Blackie and all the other people.
5’58” MS: And thank God you did, I may add, otherwise we wouldn't have Synthesis.
6’04” FS: What'd you say?
6’05” MS: I said: ”And thank God you did because otherwise we wouldn't have Synthesis today.”
6’10” FS: Yeah, I would have been an eclectic therapist as Kent wrote. I would be, have been an eclectic.
6’17” MS: Maybe an acupuncturist. Who knows?
The Fichefet story
6’ 21” MS: So can I ask you ... this is personal: “Can you remember the first repertory that you studied on?”. I mean, I obviously can guess the answer, but ...
6’31” FS: It's very easy. It was Kent.
6’33” MS: Okay.
6’33” FS: It was Kent. In fact, I used three Kent repertories. One was stolen from me, I must say. When I returned from my wedding trip. Which means I took Kent’s repertory on my wedding trip. Interesting, eh? But it was stolen when we came back. So. But I used three Kent repertories and then Barthel and Künzli, etc, and all the repertories. Yeah.
7’ 00” MS: Okay. And so obviously, the obvious question: “How did Synthesis start?”. So you were obviously a student. You'd started homeopathy. How did it come into life?
7’ 12” FS: Yeah. Well, we were very enthusiastic young homeopaths. And I see Guy Kokelenberg is there, one of my Belgian friends who was at the same time - Hello Guy - was there at the same time and we studied homeopathy here or there.
We came together in these groups. And we were just studying, studying, studying. And there was no plan to do something of the kind that I am doing or have been doing later on. There was no such plan. But some events happened. And one of the triggers was in fact like a fairy tale ‘once upon a time’ thing, which maybe some of you know.
8’ 00” FS: The once upon a time, there was a professor who had a child with recurrent tonsillitis. A university professor in Namur. And he went to see a homeopath: Alex Jacques. Jacques was the last name. J A C Q U E S.
And that homeopath, who was a president of one of the five schools of homeopathy in Belgium at the time, gave a remedy to the child. Not only the tonsillitis was gone but it didn't return.
8’ 34” FS: And the professor was intrigued. And he saw the guy working - you know as maybe some of you have been doing - with this book, with his fingers in between two pages and then turning the pages and going back to the first one. And he asked: “What are you doing in fact with this ... your fingers, and looking at ...?”
And Alex - his first name was Alex – explained: “Yeah I'm just having remedies in this rubric. I'm crossing them with the remedies in the other rubric. And in this way I’m finding the remedy for your child.”
9’ 07” FS: And he said: “Oh!”. He was a professor of computer science and mathematics at the faculty of computer science in Namur. He said: “But this can be done by a computer much more easily.” And he says: “I can appoint the PhD students to make a program, just doing that, which is, we take the repertory and we allow - as we call it ourselves - to repertorize the symptoms.
And so that has been the beginning of Radar and in a way of Synthesis. This professor’s child being cured and the guy being curious about the whole thing. Jean Fichefet was his name. And um ...
9’ 46” MS: It's incredible.
9’ 48” FS: Yeah. And then I got involved. That's another story. But maybe too long to tell. I got involved and again fascinated. There's been a lot of fascination in my life, I must say.
And I got fascinated by this computer program.
The first digital steps
10’ 04” FS: I bought it at an incredible price. People complain about the price of RadarOpus. I can tell you: “Speak to my wife. She still has nightmares about the price at which I bought the program at the time.”
10’ 20” MS: And may I ask: Who did you buy it from?”. Because I think the person may be in the call today.
10’ 25” FS: Uh, no. There was the very beginning: The university created the project and then saw there was interest in the homeopathic community. And the university wanted to stay on the scientific side.
So they appointed a company to market, promote and distribute it. And the guy at the time was Eric, Eric Anbergen, who started to sell it and also sold it to me.
10’ 50” FS: Eric has been working with us for a number of years. But he left us after, I think, 10 years or so, he left us.
10’ 58” MS: Interesting. Okay. And so. Did Synthesis start after you had bought your first Radar? And was it first ...
11’ 07” FS: Ah, yeah yeah. Because the first Radar was with Kent’s repertory. That's clear, eh?
11’ 11” MS: Oh. Okay. Yeah.
11’ 13” FS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's clear.
11’ 14” FS: And yeah, just to tell you the story of the repertorization. You know how long the first repertorization took? It took 40 minutes.
So we took five rubrics and then we hit enter to get the results. And we had to wait 40 minutes. And in fact, in the beginning, I was against the computers. I was like, the art of homeopathy. The ART and the science. Okay?
The ART and the science. There has to be a homeopath who speaks to people, listens to people, looks at people. And I didn't believe at all that computers could be doing something.
11’ 54” FS: You must know that at that time, it was like ... the banks were not all computerized. It was like the beginning of computerizing everything: the supermarkets, the banks, the shops, ... It was the beginning of computerization. People were working with their hand with little calculators, machines with a little paper maybe to give to the client. But computers were not like ‘main thing’ and mainstream.
12’ 21” FS: And many people were against computers and so was I. And I was even more against computers because of homeopathy. They’re going to spoil homeopathy.
12’ 29” FS: And then one day I got the call from this Eric Anbergen. And he says: “We have reprogrammed Radar in machine language.”. I still don't know exactly what it means. “But the result is that we can now repertorize a case in 2 or 3 minutes. Can I come and show it to you?”
And he came and showed it to me. And I must say, that night I didn't sleep and I was speaking to my wife until maybe 2 or 3 AM.
12’ 58” MS: Poor wife.
13’ 00” FS: If they can change the program in such a way that the 40 minutes become 2, they will be able to change the 2 minutes into 2 seconds as well. And then we have a revolution. And this is why I didn't sleep. And this is why I bought the program. Because I changed: I said okay, computers is going to be the future, is going to help homeopathy instead of block and hinder homeopathy.
13’ 25” MS: And then, Frederik, if I may add: You didn't sleep that night, you embarked on the journey and you haven't slept since.
13’ 34” FS: Hahaha! Yeah, that's partially true. Yeah.
13’ 37” MS: For different reasons. But ...
13’ 39” FS: Yeah, for different reasons. Yeah. But this is how it started.
Invitation to create Synthesis
13’ 44” FS: And then, to reply to the question, that professor Fichefet one day said ... When we the program was up to speed and then everything was, it was debugged, because we had bugs at the time as well. He said: "Listen, this is a database. If you want to make changes, it's very easy. It just takes like a minute or whatever.” Ah, make changes.
14’ 07” FS: And we had many homeopaths at the time who believed Kent is final. As Kent himself has told to Frederica, his daughter: “The book is final.”. But there were also homeopaths who believed: “No, it's not final. There's information out there that should be in the repertory.”. So we had this divide between the ones who wanted to work with a virgin Kent and the ones who wanted to make additions.
14’ 31” FS: And then Barthel came. It was a big change, a dramatic change. Which is 17 or 19 sources etc. And more and more people started to believe: “No, we must not freeze Kent. We must not keep it as this. We must put more information into it.”.
14’ 50” FS: And so we started the project of Synthesis at that time. I believe it was ‘87 or so. We started to add data to Kent’s repertory and in fact create Synthesis.
15’ 05” MS: And I'm guessing you were a team of colleagues, friends. You were doing it by hand.
15’ 12” FS: Yeah. Well, no. We were ... It was a database so we could do it in the computer. But it went very, very slow. It was very, very, very stepwise. And it was ...
15’ 24” MS: Oh, sorry. Sorry to interrupt. You were doing it in the university? Or you were somewhere? Or ...
15’ 28” FS: No, no, no. We all had our so-called portable PC’s. And I was traveling to different places. I still remember. I had, the one time, I had the PC I've recently seen in a PC museum. And which I took to go to Greece to work with George. And it was like more like a knitting machine. It was like ... I don't know if you see.
Let's say three times the size of my head. And I had a trailer on which I put it. And it was carrying it behind me. That was my laptop, my portable at the time, you see. And then they became smaller and smaller and smaller.
16’ 12” MS: Incredible. Incredible.
The first printed version
16’ 13” MS: Okay. And so you obviously started with the, you know, with the additions. And the team was working with you. When ...
How did that progress into the first release of Synthesis in the program?
And then also the first printable Synthesis?
Because they were parallel jobs weren't there?
16’ 30” FS: Yeah. Yeah. There was a struggle. Because we were working and increasing the content of Kent. Creating a first version of Synthesis. Releasing it. A second version of Synthesis. Releasing it etc. And then at a certain time we started getting the demands: “Can you print it? Because our students would like to have a printed version. We would like to have a printed version.” Etc. And we said, "No, no, no. We cannot print. There's too many problems, too many mistakes and too many things we need to change still and we need to add still, etc."
17’ 03” FS: And so, in fact, it has only been Synthesis five. Version five. That was the first. That was printed in the year ‘94 in German and ‘95 in English. I must say the Germans - even if it was a translation - were faster than we, in the original English, to have the print. The Germans. Reinhard Rosé, incredibly efficient guy. He printed the first version of Synthesis version five. So there was ... In English it was in 1995.
17’ 40” MS: Wauw. I mean ... Yeah. And Reinhard was with us for a very long time. So ...
17’ 45” FS: Yeah. And that was a big success because we ... I don't know how many copies we printed the first time. Let's say 2.000 or 3.000. I don't know. And within 6 months, everything was gone. We had to reprint immediately. And then again, we had to reprint. And it was like filling up a void, filling up a need. So it was true. People were saying: “You have to print it.”. And in fact we had to do it. And Synthesis became the repertory of choice. The printed repertory of choice of many schools in a very fast way.
18’ 19” MS: Can I ask: “How did that feel?”. Because obviously that had never been done before. So you were kind of printing, hoping it was going to work and then it suddenly took off. I mean ...
18’ 32” FS: Yeah. Well, I must say - as some of you will remember - all this happened during the happy days of homeopathy. The 80’s and the 90’s were the happy days of homeopathy, where homeopathy was blooming, the schools were blooming, there were many homeopaths all over, demand from the patient was incredibly high.
Even with many homeopaths in my city, I must say I had a waiting list that once went up to two years. Patients had to wait two years before they could come for a consultation to me.
19’ 08” FS: And so when we printed it, we kind of expected it would be successful and it was. You see.
19’ 14” MS: You were riding the wave.
19’ 16” FS: If you do something now ... Then the 2000, 2010, 2020’s, they have become like low days of homeopathy. After all the fraudulent scientific research that we know of. There’s been a big change. But this beginning of the story was in the happy days of homeopathy. And so the printing was, let's say, almost an easy success.
19’ 41” MS: Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
The hardest thing
19’ 44” MS: And in those days, even if it was a success, do you have a memory of, you know, something difficult? What was the hardest thing that you had to, you know, overcome, I guess, in the first digital or physical print? Is that something that you ...
19’ 58” FS: Yeah. Yeah. The first physical print was very difficult. Because you must imagine: In the old days the people were used to type setting with - how shall I say - in the old way of printing. There was just manual work. And that is impossible. That was impossible to do even 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Because labor work was too expensive.
So it had to go through a computer program. And it was very hard to have a computer program which understood how to split a rubric in a column, let alone to the next page, how to make column headers, the indentation of the rubrics, then go to the next column and keep the indentation that this was level seven of a symptom, so it had not to be sticking to the dividing line but a little further, ... So this has been a nightmare.
20’ 53” FS: But we found a very capable guy: Emmanuel Warnier. A Walloon guy, French guy. And he helped us to make this and even successive versions of Synthesis in the layout. But that layout in the beginning was a nightmare. To have the repertory-format in a computer-wise program was really a nightmare.
21’ 18” MS: Definitely one. Hmm. Okay.
Most proud of
21’ 20” MS: And in terms of Synthesis as a product, what is the thing you're most proud of? And has this thing changed over time? Because obviously Synthesis has changed a lot throughout the years. So ...
21’ 35” FS: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the ... on our current website, even on the old website, it was like this that for every version of Synthesis, I wrote a foreword which details all the things we achieved in that version of Synthesis. So, in successive versions, you will see the successive things we did.
One of them, for example, in the last version of Synthesis, is include the Treasure of Kent. Which is like Agata Christi's story. With the help of Ahmed Currim my friend who unfortunately passed away some years ago already. But we succeeded integrating the Treasure of Kent with the help of Ahmed Currim. And so that was the big achievement of the previous version of Synthesis. So every version had a number of achievements, a number of big stories that I like very much.
22’ 29” FS: But one of the things that I'm most proud of is a change that I desired already when I was using Kent’s repertory. And those who have been using Kent’s repertory will understand. Or maybe other repertories even, today. And that is ..
22’ 50” FS: Ah no ... I'm going to tell you the anecdote, one of ... a painful anecdote. So I had a patient with a pain in the heart. And he was coming to me and I was trying to find a remedy. And I gave him a remedy because of the symptoms etc. And he went. And he was not okay. It didn't succeed helping him. It was really not okay. I'm not going to say more.
23’ 14” FS: But then later on, suddenly I found in the repertory the modality he had been mentioning. He had told me that he had a pain in the heart when he was drinking. Drinking. And of course I looked: chest – pain – heart - drinking. It didn't exist. And even if it was a clear modality, it wasn't helpful because the information wasn't available in the repertory. Okay?
23’ 41” FS: So where did I find it later on? I must check it, but I believe it is under stitching. It was: chest – pain – heart – stitching - drinking. Okay. So the drinking was dependent upon the level stitching. And the homeopaths who knew to use Kent's repertory, they were aware of this. And so we used to have all these little papers. I will take the example of the pain at the heart - drinking. And they would write down: drinking, and under ‘stitching’ there is the remedy China, and under ‘sore’ there is the remedy Bellis perennis etc.
24’ 21” FS: And we’d have these little papers all over the repertory. Rectum - pain – night. It is five remedies. But if you look at rectum - pain - stitching – night, there was two more remedies. And we had all these little papers completing the rubrics with remedies that existed. But they were just not easily accessible because of the structure. Because the descriptions of pain were always at level three in Kent. And I said: “If we could change this ... If we could change this ...”.
24’ 51” FS: And of course it took a long time also to have the resources and the time to do it. But eventually we decided to do it with version 9. Between 9.0 and 9.1, we changed the descriptions of pain to the last level of the symptom. So the symptom became, I will say, rectum - pain - night - stitching (stitching at the end) instead of rectum - pain - stitching – night.
25’ 19” FS: Which means that all the remedies with ... (Oh look, you may want to show the rubric rectum - pain - night to give an example.) ... that all the rubrics that have the modality of a nightly pain in rectum, are together. And all the remedies as well. So rectum – pain – night.
And so I think in this case it goes from five to twelve or so, more or less. Rectum – pain ... Ah yeah. And of course now with Adonis we have even more additions. Can you go to the Kent view? Kent repertory. A little up. Kent’s repertory. A little up. Yeah. No. No. The view. Yeah. Okay. Rectum - pain - night. You see? And you see there is only three remedies. Do you see it? Pulsatilla, Moschus and Oxalic acid.
But if you go a little down at ‘burning’, you see there are nine remedies under night. And cutting, there is sepia which isn’t even there yet, you see? So if you move these descriptions of pain in the other way, then suddenly your rubric with cut - rectum – pain – night, becomes much bigger.
26’ 48” FS: And I remember I explained this change, as I'm, every time when we make changes to Synthesis, I, one or another congress, I explain what we did. And I did it in Keele, in England. There was a lecture at some congress in Keele. And Frans Vermeulen was also there. And when I explained this in the lecture, there was no much reaction.
I think maybe people didn't understand the consequence of this change, which for me was quite dramatic. And Frans Vermeulen came to me and he said: “What you have changed to the repertory is very, very, very important.”. He got it, you see?
26’ 48” FS: So that's one of the changes that ... You see the software is there now. You see with the zzz. You see the zzz as the author? it means it comes from a subrubric. Up there at the main rubric, Luke. Near the 36. zzz
27’ 47” FS: So this means ... In fact, what does this change mean? It means that we believe that the modality is more important than the description of pain. And when the patient says ... sometimes they say: “It's burning in my rectum, it's aching, it's stitching, ...”. What is it? What is it? You want to know exactly: is it stitching or burning? “No”, says the patient: “It’s a bit mixed. It's all of them.”.
28’ 11” FS: So we know, homeopaths with experience they know, description of pain is very often not the decisive factor. But if the patients say: “I have my pain in the rectum mostly at night or only at night ... The time modality. This is critical. This is more important. So it is very interesting to have all the remedies with the same modality - whether they're stitching, burning, sore, etc? – together.
28’ 38” FS: And so this is one achievement that we made into Synthesis and that, yeah, I'm ... If you say: “Are you proud?”. Yeah, I believe this is a big achievement.
28’ 49” MS: And I'd add: I completely agree with you because, sure, I think we all like the idea of new features and things but in reality you just want to make a homeopath's life easier and better, which is - I think - at the heart of your work really.
29’ 05” FS: Yeah. Exactly. If I would have had that version of Synthesis - 9.1. - with the patient, with my heart, I would immediately have seen that China is there. You see? And so on and so on.
29’ 18” MS: Yeah, yeah, and ... yeah. Just makes your work easier, I guess.
The team
29’ 22” MS: So. But there was a lot of work at the beginning. I mean, how big was the team that was working with you?
29’ 31” FS: Well, again, we must make a distinction between the glory days of homeopathy and the last 20, 25 years. But in the glory days of homeopathy, we were also, we were the first program that encoded ... I believe it was Allen. I think it was Allen, was the first materia medica we had fully encoded as a database. And then we did Hering and Clarke and Hahnemann and more and more.
29’ 57” FS: But there was such a demand to have material medicas also searchable and available in the software, that we had different teams in Canada, in Romania, in the Philippines, ... And then we had all the teams working on the Synthesis, people working on the catalogues, etc.
30’ 16” FS: And I know one time we counted the number of collaborators. And there was like 120 people that were working for the totality of all the data. Only on the data. And like, we had like five or six programmers and then 120 people. Not full-time all of them. No. Some of them full-time. But 100 people contributing.
30’ 40” FS: And now, that number of course again has diminished a lot. Economy has changed, homeopathy has changed, priorities have changed, ... But yeah, there was a time there were 120 people worldwide in the team.
30’ 54” FS: And basically I had seven or eight people here in my own office in Belgium. And all they were doing was coordinating the jobs of 10 or 15 people. So we had like a hierarchical structure to increase the content of our database on all levels.
31’ 14” MS: One of the other many reasons why you haven't slept in 30 years.
31’ 18” FS: Well ...
31’ 21” MS: On and off.
Onto Synthesis Adonis
31’ 23” MS: So how has that changed? I mean, we know that the glory days were a little earlier. And then even I get asked sometimes, you know, why we didn't release something for so long. Obviously, Adonis has come out. We know it has taken, you know, years. So ... why?
31’ 45” FS: Yeah. The leap between Synthesis Treasure edition 2009 and Synthesis today ... let's say released for us, is ... content was finished in November ... but let's say 2021 ... is 12 years. It's correct.
32’ 02” FS: But that is due to a whole number of factors. It’s also due to the fact that we changed from Radar to RadarOpus, which basically meant we had to reprogram - or we chose to reprogram - everything from scratch again. Because in computer land, in computer country, things change so rapidly, you need to reprogram everything from scratch every now and then. So we had the first thing with Jean Fichefet in the early 80’s. Then in ‘95 we restarted from scratch because Windows came up as an operating system and there was like a big change. We had to restart from scratch.