The editor of the online magazine FRIEDA, Beate Wiemers, in conversation with Dr. Harald Wiesendanger. The interview appeared online in June 2018.
“Conventional medicine knows 30,000 diseases. But only a third of them can cure it completely or at least significantly alleviate it, and often only with side effects, with psychological stress, and with considerable costs. Those who suffer include millions of chronically ill people – be it with heart and circulatory diseases, diabetes, rheumatism, cancer, asthma, neurodermatitis, allergies, epilepsy, or mental disorders. A shocking number are considered to be ‘resistant to treatment,’ if not ‘incurable.'” That’s what it says on the Ways Out Charity website.
Anyone who is affected by a chronic illness or knows someone close to them in such a situation may have already experienced the odysseys people sometimes have to undertake to experience relief from their symptoms or even healing. More and more often, these are very young people, children like Chris, who suffers from enuresis, involuntary wetting, or like Nick, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. After a long period of suffering, both young people were able to receive help in the therapy camp run by the Ways Out Charity. And many other people, too. In 2005. The Ways Out Charity, founded by Dr. Harald Wiesendanger, has set itself the goal of helping chronically ill children and adults in a holistic way.”
FRIEDA: You studied psychology, philosophy, and sociology and ultimately received your doctorate in philosophy. As a science journalist, you have published over 50 books and thousands of articles in newspapers, magazines, and internet portals. As a non-therapist, how did you come to set up a foundation that aims to give chronically ill children and adults access to complementary medical therapies?
WIESENDANGER: Luck obliges, and I had a lot of it. Fate gave me three perfectly healthy children who only know hospitals from the outside, and I myself have been spared severe illnesses for six decades. It fulfills me to give something back from this happiness. I can do it using so-called other medicine.
FRIEDA: Whenever the masses are sedated by the World Cup, the government passes laws that usually have a detrimental effect on the population in one way or another. During this year’s World Cup – particularly at the insistence of the SPD – it was decided, among other things, in an urgent procedure to increase party funding from the previous 165 million annually to 190 million. At the same time, the thumbscrews for alternative practitioners, for example, are being turned even tighter, even though it has been widely proven that holistic treatment concepts can be very effective, especially for chronically ill people. The Ways Out Charity has been around for 13 years now. How have you perceived the development in our healthcare system since then?
WIESENDANGER: With growing horror. The economization of this sick system continues unabated. This explains its basic principle: With ever more enormous effort – a billion euros per day in Germany alone – it produces less and less health. Gradually, I realized that in this respect, it is not a failure; That’s exactly what it’s there for, at least in the eyes of the all-powerful interest groups that pull the strings. Viewed as an economic sector, the worse off we are, the better off the healthcare industry is. It can only flourish and grow if more and more people become patients earlier and stay there longer. There is nothing to be gained from healthy people and just as little from dead people. Those in between are lucrative: the chronically ill. Nothing endangers business in medicine more than healthy people who remain so, sick people who get well again, and approaches that help them to do so.
As soon as we understand this essential system feature, the scales fall from our eyes. We suddenly see through all of its peculiarities: from overdiagnosis and over-therapy, the chemical and technology-heavy caricature of true healing art to price usury, lobbyism, and corruption, the instrumentalization of science and the medical profession to the character assassination of critics and alternative healers. A monstrous manipulation machine ensures all of this with almost unlimited advertising, printing, and lubricants. The pharmaceutical industry alone draws on a marketing pot worth several hundred billion euros annually.
Against this background, what has emerged in 28 therapy camps run by the Ways Out/Auswege Foundation since 2007 is a threat to the system: of around 500 supposedly treatment-resistant chronically ill people, over 80 percent made health progress within nine days in a way that had not been seen for years, sometimes decades – in the case of so-called “mental disorders.” “even over 95 percent. Under no circumstances should something like this get around, create greater demand, stir up and reinforce doubts about conventional medicine, or upgrade alternatives.
FRIEDA: Which people mostly come to you?
WIESENDANGER: The diagnostic spectrum is extremely broad. Almost every type of patient who has been in poor health for a long time without conventional medicine having given them relief, let alone a cure, can find a way out.
FRIEDA: Is there some common denominator among these people, most of whom have had a long medical odyssey concerning their experiences in the health care system?
WIESENDANGER: They didn’t get what they needed most: clues to the underlying causes of the disease behind the manifest symptom, the disturbed function, the damaged organ. Information about pharmaceutical-free treatment alternatives that have proven themselves based on experience. Attention, care, empathy. And impulses to finally take responsibility for your own health – to become a self-healer.
FRIEDA: Your website presents some case studies in which great successes were achieved through your therapy concept. From a human-empathic point of view, it would be desirable for such success stories to be made much more public because we all, as people and as taxpayers, should be interested in helping create the best possible framework conditions for a vital life. You yourself are a journalist. To what do you attribute the fact that most media still neglect complementary medical procedures and sometimes even defame them?
WIESENDANGER: The supposed fourth power in the state is failing miserably. Many editors, most freelance journalists, and especially inflationary bloggers are paid shamefully poorly. All too often, there is a gnawed cloth next to the keyboard. This makes you vulnerable to prostituting yourself as a typist.
To suspect media professionals as corrupt across the board would, of course, be absurd. That is the minority, especially in national daily and weekly newspapers, high-circulation magazines, and large TV channels. They become servants of the system, with the best of intentions, on a detour that their own professional ethics allow them to take. As journalists, they have learned to cross-check information using reputable sources. And what source seems more reliable than the sacred cow of modern times, natural science? Almost no one cares that their standards for evidence and truth may be inappropriate for the human subject. Hardly anyone discovers that researcher, Especially under time pressure. It is better to copy from Wikipedia, without considering that its administrators could also be bought, not when it comes to articles about watercress, the wood ant, and Lake Titicaca, but when it comes to commercially important topics. And this particularly includes entries about illnesses, their diagnosis and treatment, and about providers of medical services.
FRIEDA: You are committed to a stronger dialogue between conventional medicine and complementary medical procedures and would like to see both disciplines work together instead of side by side. What are your experiences in this regard with the doctors your patients were treated by before they came to you? Is there interest in cooperating with you, or do they react more defensively or disinterestedly?
WIESENDANGER: Partly, partly. Doctors who take their Hippocratic oath seriously are increasingly open to unconventional healing methods for the sake of their patients. Some people even stop by our camps and then volunteer. (For more information, see my book “Spiritual Healing in Medical Practice.”) But concrete-headed conventional doctors continue to predominate, doing what the system trains them to do: during their pharmaceutical and technology-heavy studies, in industry-sponsored training, through bought opinion leaders in their field eloquent pharmaceutical representatives, through PR-abused specialist journals.
FRIEDA: Of course, every medical history is as individual as the person associated with it. Are there any cases that have particularly touched you personally during your years of work, and if so, could you describe a few of them in more detail?
WIESENDANGER: As a passionate father, the fates of children are particularly close to my heart. I will never forget five-year-old Mira, a severe epileptic who had severe convulsions since she was two years old, with up to 20 seizures per day. Since then, her intellectual development has stood still. Because medication didn’t help, the mother put her last hope on a “Ways Out” therapy camp. I remember the late morning of the fourth day of camp: Mira first played soccer with me in the garden, and fifteen minutes later, she was sitting next to me at the lunch table. Suddenly, she began to twitch, rolled her eyes, collapsed – and convulsed in my arms for minutes. When her seizure was finally over, she remained apathetic and unresponsive for almost an hour. My heart was almost bleeding. This child could be my own – what would that mean for me?
After the camp ended, Mira was cared for by a healer and a homeopathic doctor from our network. After a month, the little one was seizure-free for a whole night for the first time and, after six weeks, for two consecutive days. After almost a quarter of a year, the unthinkable happened: the epilepsy disappeared. That was in 2008. Ten years later, short, mild attacks only occur two or three times a year. Since then, Mira has reduced her development gap in giant steps.
Daniel, 11, also comes to mind: extremely restless and inattentive, constantly moving, a classic case of “ADHD.” On the evening of the fourth day of camp, after a dozen healing sessions, he played mill with me for almost two hours – highly concentrated, with nothing or anyone to distract him. Like him, 37 of 39 people diagnosed with “ADHD” in our camps have become completely symptom-free under medical supervision. Ritalin, Medikinet? Superfluous. The parental home almost always proved to be the key to healing: when it comes to behavioral problems – in ADHD as well as in a supposedly pathological “depression,” an “autistic,” “adjustment,” or “anxiety disorder” – children almost always reflect an unsound environment and overwhelmed parents, serious parenting errors. That’s why we take a systemic approach and invite as many close relatives as possible.
I am particularly affected by the hair-raising fates of people who have fallen into the grind of modern psychiatry after being given diagnostic labels for “mental disorders.” During a camp, I was able to persuade the parents of a 17-year-old supposedly schizophrenic to finally bring their child home after four years of psychiatric internment with continued pharmaceutical physical abuse. In the case of a 44-year-old with the same diagnosis, we were only able to alleviate accompanying symptoms – her personality was already irreversibly deformed, and her life was a mess after two decades of long-term medication in psychiatric facilities. How did she get there? A doctor quickly admitted her after she “went crazy” because she was constantly bullied and failed her high school exams.
The Auswege Foundation/ Ways Out Charity is currently campaigning for a more humane psychiatry that finally frees itself from the grip of Big Pharma. My new book “Escaping the Psychological Trap” presents particularly impressive treatment successes for people with mental illnesses.
FRIEDA: Your treatment concept, which includes a wide range of alternative medical procedures that you offer or at least recommend, also includes spiritual healing. In England, every hospital patient already has the right to see a spiritual healer. Spiritual healers have long been working in British hospitals as permanent or freelance employees, provided they can demonstrate appropriate qualifications. Germany also lags behind in this area. At the Ways Out Charity spiritual healing plays an equal role alongside other methods. How is it accepted by your patients, and what experiences do they have with it?
WIESENDANGER: Out of deep conviction, even as esoteric converts, very few allow a hand to be laid on them. Pragmatism rightly prevails: the main thing is that it is useful. And it does so surprisingly often. In the “Way Out” camps, spiritual healing – at least when experts practice it – is one healing method that has a particularly quick and profound effect, even on stubborn illnesses.
FRIEDA: As part of annual therapy camps, chronically ill children and adults can be treated by very experienced therapists. What requirements must be met in order to take part in such a therapy camp, and what costs do participants incur?
WIESENDANGER: Almost everyone for whom conventional medicine has been reaching its limits for a long time is warmly welcome. We offer advice and treatment to minors free of charge; adults pay a daily flat rate of 40 euros. Accommodation and meals are also included.
However, I would advise against participation if you have genetic defects or severe physical or mental disabilities. Experience has shown that symptom relief is possible even in such cases – but it is more likely in the long-term care of a therapist from our network close to home than within a week of camp.
FRIEDA: What is needed for health is actually quite simple. In addition to a nutrient-rich diet low in toxins, an important role is played by the social environment, the quality of the water, the opportunity to express oneself creatively, exercise, and fresh air, and avoiding medication entirely or as much as possible. But none of this can be taken for granted today. They not only offer help to sick people when the symptoms are already severely affecting their quality of life, but are also committed to prevention. What exactly are you doing in this area?
WIESENDANGER: A lot. We strive to provide information via our extensive website, our free newsletter “Auswege Infos” (), our presence on social media such as Facebook and Telegram, with dozens of books and brochures, and through information events. We advise those seeking help not only about treatment options but also about intelligent prevention in our camps and via our telephone information service, in which around 30 doctors, psychotherapists, and alternative practitioners work on a voluntary basis.
FRIEDA: Your network currently includes around 200 selected therapists from 35 countries, but primarily from German-speaking countries. Those interested can use the zip code on your website to find out whether one of the doctors or healers you recommend is nearby. What essential criteria do therapists have to meet to be listed with you?
WIESENDANGER: First, You should work ethically and impeccably. To do this, we oblige you to adhere to an eight-part code of conduct. Among other things, it requires them not to promise anything, not to exert any pressure, not to make unverifiable diagnoses, and to make clear fee agreements in advance.
Second, You should be exceptionally capable therapeutically. We try to estimate this using a ten-part catalog of criteria. Among other things, we evaluate patient reports after we have placed them. We have filled out so-called “report forms” in which we record two dozen important details about treatment processes. Around 20 “screeners” visit practices on our behalf to check that everything is going on – undercover, ostensibly as ordinary people seeking help. Experience also counts: We do not recommend anyone who has not been practicing for a long time. We also get as personal an impression as possible. We invite candidates to information afternoons, “taster” visits to our camps, and face-to-face encounters.
None of this provides a guarantee of quality, admittedly. At least it significantly reduces the risk for those seeking help to experience their blue miracle with supposed “miracle healers.”
FRIEDA: The Ways Out Charity/AUSWEGE Foundation is supported by donations and a lot of voluntary work. Those interested can also organize events on-site. What it takes and the extent to which you offer support can be found under “Help!” on your website.
What experiences have you had with this so far? Is there increasing interest in making your work and knowledge better known in this way?
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WIESENDANGER: Unfortunately, no. Achieving a successful, highly acclaimed charity evening that is worth the effort requires plenty of time, organizational skills, and a good network of local contacts. Very few of our sympathizers bring this with them. However, we do our best to support anyone interested in the months of preparatory work.
FRIEDA: I conducted a party survey on the health system for FRIEDA-online in 2017, the results of which didn’t make me particularly happy overall. If you were the Minister of Health, what reforms would be your absolute priority?
WIESENDANGER: How many gigabytes of web space does “Frieda” have
Seriously, After many lost decades, there is so much to make up for, to counteract, to rebuild and rebuild, that I would hardly know where to start. Eighteen so-called “health care reforms” have persistently evaded the most pressing questions raised by our overpriced, inefficient medicine. One or two changes in the law hurt the medical-industrial complex a bit, but not a single one dared to approach the crucial structures, objectives, and course of action remotely. These were all self-defense reactions to extreme monetary shortages: empty public coffers, poor statutory health insurance, and overwhelmed contributors. Whenever federal governments intervened in care and regulation, it was always about curbing costs and redistributing financial burdens – on issues such as contribution levels, employer subsidies, restrictions on services, remuneration of service providers, practice fees, co-payments for medicines, deductibles, expenditure budgets, pricing, fixed amounts, Rationalization.
The state never tackled real, urgently needed reform projects: When will it finally escape the constant siege by lobbyists? When will he finally give patients the same chance to be heard as the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, representatives of doctors and pharmacists? Why doesn’t he put a stop to the routine study trickery on the part of the industry, not place research and development of new drugs entirely in the public purse, or at least subject it to strict supervision? When will he finally revise patent law to curb its brazen abuse by pseudo-pharmaceutical innovations that have a single purpose: maintaining marketing monopolies? Why doesn’t he put a rigorous end to brazen price gouging? Where is the “positive list” that has been announced for decades and tells doctors and consumers which medicines are really helpful, necessary, and inexpensive? Where is an independent “Stiftung Warentest” for the pharmaceutical and food sector? When will the state finally oblige statutory health insurance companies to stop paying for expensive originals when at least equally effective, tried-and-tested older remedies or copycat preparations, generics, would be available at a fraction of the price? Why doesn’t he drastically tighten anti-corruption and transparency laws? When will he finally hold managers personally responsible if their products cause serious, lasting damage to health? Why doesn’t he set up an independent public information system financed by possible billions in savings in the pharmaceutical sector and the corporations’ bulging marketing pot? Why does it hardly support research into chemical-free treatment approaches, helpful psychosocial projects, and self-responsible health care? Where is urgently needed intensive health education, from kindergarten to school leaving school – shouldn’t children know more about industrial ready-made food, about an excess of animal protein, hidden sugar, and salt than about the fight 333 near Issos, the 8848 meters of Mount Everest, about integral and vector calculus? When will the state finally ensure that medical training and further education become pharmaceutical-free? When will doctors finally be banned from accepting benefits of any kind from industry? When will political office holders finally be banned from switching to industry? When will Berlin finally call off the miserably failed experiment of “self-management” in the healthcare system, which for years has been aimed at the collective self-enrichment of the interest groups involved? Suppose pharmaceuticals is a multi-billion dollar business for which state institutes carry out a large part of the basic research anyway. Why isn’t it better for him to do this business himself instead of standing idly by while the self-enrichment orgies of managers, investors, and shareholders?
And so far it has never been about burning fundamental questions such as: What does health actually consist of? What does healing mean? What increases and ensures well-being and quality of life? What motivates patients beyond financial incentives to take responsibility for their own well-being and to actively contribute to their recovery? Which preventative approaches can ensure that diseases do not develop in the first place? Can helping, healing, and caring even be compatible with commerce, and should they be subject to business calculations? Are there cheaper, fewer side effects, more patient-friendly alternatives to pharmaceuticals? How do we promote and design integrative medicine that combines the best of different healing traditions and therapeutic directions? How does human medicine become more humane, how does it satisfy basic human needs?
FRIEDA: How confident are you that our healthcare system will get on the right track? What do you think the future of medicine will look like?
WIESENDANGER: On the one hand, some developments are hopeful. More and more people are no longer accepting common medical measures but are questioning them. The demand for treatment alternatives remains unbroken and continues to grow. The number of foundations, associations, academies, and institutes that are committed to a different healthcare system with a lot of passion and spirit is growing. More and more people are eating whole foods and are becoming more health-conscious in other ways. Some system-critical websites and Facebook accounts are followed by tens of thousands. The “expropriation of health” that the philosopher Ivan Illich denounced back in the 1970s is not something that will befall us as an inevitable fate. It can only happen because and as long as we allow it: through faith in experts, through thoughtlessness, indifference, and complacency, through the wrong voting decisions, and through a lack of political commitment. Synthetic medicines are only a billion-dollar business as long as we have them prescribed innocently and swallow them obediently.
FRIEDA: But on the other hand?
WIESENDANGER: Too few people continue to demand more humane, patient-oriented rather than profit-oriented medicine; they don’t do enough, they are too disorganized and financially impotent, and the countervailing forces of the system are overwhelming. And so I notice that many smart, sensitive people in my circle of acquaintances are increasingly escaping the world: the news situation is devastating, so they cancel their newspaper subscriptions and stop watching the news. Although you eagerly place “likes” and “shares” on social media, you send “spiritual energies” and “the light of love” somewhere, and you think you are already doing enough with that. People are waiting for a New Age that will definitely come on its own, like the thousand-year rule of the Almighty for a Jehovah’s Witness. You come to terms with the way things are in a neo-Buddhist way: all the evils in this world arise solely from perception and emotional attachment that prevent happiness. One prefers self-salvation.
FRIEDA: Don’t the successes of the peace, eco-, and anti-nuclear power movement, as well as the after-effects of the ’68 protests, show that you have an all too dark view?
WIESENDANGER: Mushroom clouds and dead trees spread fear and terror through powerful images that mobilize by making dangers clear. Chronic illness, on the other hand, threatens gradually. It only becomes truly tangible when it occurs – i.e., too late. To fully understand them beforehand requires curiosity and flexibility, intelligence and education, a certain level of disrespect for academics, especially the demigods in white, and enough time to get smart. When I look at the faces of my fellow human beings in the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices, in pedestrian zones, in inns, and at folk festivals, How many do I trust to understand what is necessary? How many would listen to me with an open mind for even a few minutes, stop and ponder, pick up a book, let alone give up basic attitudes, thought patterns, and habits? How many would put aside their smartphones and VR glasses and turn off their PC and TV to learn and take action? We are surrounded by five million functionally illiterate people who can only read and write single, short sentences; Another two million can’t get beyond individual words, and around 300,000 people fail even at this. According to the Federal Statistical Office, one and a half million people are considered to be severely mentally disabled. For the rest, the attention span often doesn’t extend beyond a minute, and the horizon of interest doesn’t extend beyond the special offers at the discounter, the new VW generation, and the next travel destination. Modern leisure activities tend to make Neil Postman’s book title “We Amuse Ourselves to Death” the motto of life. A football game in which 22 multimillionaires chase a ball for an hour and a half in order to kick it between two posts attracts up to 30 million German citizens to the television, sometimes with a 70 percent market share or more; most people know the names of every single kicker by heart. Shouldn’t they know better about the 22 toxins they’re injecting into their babies’ bloodstreams with every vaccination? 22 chemicals that can give you allergies, cancer, MS, dementia, and Alzheimer’s in the long run? The 22 most nutrient-dense foods?
FRIEDA: Sometimes, when pioneers move forward, the crowd follows…
WIESENDANGER: Even if tireless health activists at some point get a powerful social movement going, it will probably come too late. To honestly start with myself: Although I consider myself to be neither particularly uneducated nor uninterested nor unreflective nor irresponsible, it took decades before the light finally dawned on me until I finally made decisive changes in my own way of life. How many more decades will it take before well-founded warnings in our country lead to a change in political course – under governments with a disconcerting lack of vision and technically incompetent health ministers, surrounded by an army of lobbyists and advised by bought-off experts? How many decades until a global reversal takes place? For comparison, it took over 90 years from the first solid indications that asbestos caused serious lung diseases to a legal ban on the production and use of this devilish building material.
FRIEDA: At least something happened at some point.
WIESENDANGER: As with climate change, we don’t have decades left when it comes to healthcare, I’m afraid. A neoliberal turbo-capitalism has long since eluded the taming welfare state. Unencumbered by ethical scruples, he acts worldwide and has long since created fait accompli, whether in the energy or armaments sector, in the nutrition sector, or medicine. Genetically modified organisms, microplastics, and artificial nanoparticles have long been in our environment, our food chain, and our bodies. Mass poisoning through industrial food, contaminated drinking water, ultrafine dust, medication, and vaccines is doing the rest. It will continue. Because, as I said: It is part of a billion-dollar business model that more and more people are getting sick earlier and for longer. Fearing this, most people will welcome a digitally revolutionized hi-tech medicine that constantly monitors vital functions, but also psychological well-being, from cradle to grave in order to intervene as early as possible, ostensibly preventatively: through pharmaceuticals, through skin sensors and implants, through manipulations in the brain and in the genome. I doubt whether this will not only make Homo sapiens more controllable but also healthier. Within this century, Earth could become a planet where non-human intelligence is most likely to survive – evolution could pass over our species; it doesn’t need us. What Stephen Hawking predicted regarding AI applies no less to other celebrated key technologies, the “next big things”: robotics, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. Each “could be humanity’s greatest achievement, but also its last.”
With such apocalyptic prospects, I agree with Hoimar von Ditfurth about my Ways Out Charity: “Even if I knew that the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant an apple tree today.” However, do not father any more children.
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