Foreword by Val Allen - Some time ago, when Kitty Campion and I were discussing the possibility of her coming to Australia and joining our PNMC team, I asked her if she could summarise her most interesting career path. This is her response :-
"What I find fascinating about life is the accumulation of all those tiny choices one makes which change the path one treads forever.
Someone mentioned that the University College of Wales had the best American literature library in the country, which is why I chose to do my BA and MA there. I could have done my PhD on a scholarship at East Anglia or Keele Universities and chose the latter because East Anglia was so bleak and windy. While writing my doctorate I used the British Museum for research (now the British Library) and examined the illustrated manuscripts in the Anglo Saxon section for a bit of light relief outside of my chosen subject about modern American Poetry. For the first and only time, the dead languages I was forced to learn at school proved useful and I could use Latin and Anglo Saxon to translate.
I was fascinated by their weird combination of superstition and herbal lore and began experimenting with some of the skin care recipes. A few of them turned out to be rather good, so to supplement my scholarship I set up a small business over a chemist shop mixing creams and skin tonics myself and marketing them in gift shops throughout the UK. The business grew like topsy and suddenly I was employing forty outworkers making herbal pillows and pot pourri and a team of sales people. When we reached million pound turnover we were in severe difficulty due to over-trading (the business was so successful we couldn't get the money in fast enough to pay for the next orders). So I put an advert in the Financial Times looking for funding, found it, but was made to give up my majority shareholding and was forced out the company just before it was floated on the stock exchange and made the other participants millionaires; but the seed had been planted. I had developed a passion for all things herbal.
I then went on to train as a medical herbalist but during my clinical training couldn't see the patient across the room because of the heavy smoking of the practitioner. Disgusted, I then trained with the School of National Healing, founded in America by Dr. John Christopher. He'd hired a college at Cambridge University to run a summer school there. The School was a radical one and I loved it. Highly experimental (we had to taste all the herbs in question, forage for as many in the wild as we could find, put them in teas, pessaries, poultices and try them out on ourselves) and if skin brushing was on the curriculum we had to buy a body brush, use it and report back with results. When juice tasting came up we all did a week's juice fast together. I was practically vibrating with joy.
Dr Christopher did his diagnosis with iridology so it seemed logical to go on and study iridology and as I went deeper with it I studied with Harri Wolfe from California who'd been trained in the German model which led me to train with Willy Hauser, Joseph Deck's assistant, in the then biggest iridology institute in the world at Essinglen in Germany.
I even had the pleasure of meeting the great Australian herbalist, Dorothy Hall, at a week-long iridology seminar she was invited to run in the UK Lake District and although she's now retired, we've stayed in touch.
With the accuracy of the European model of iridology and the passion of American herbalism, my practice expanded very rapidly, but about 6 years in I realized I needed more. European iridology taught me that all good health begins in the bowel, so I went on to train in colonics which became an invaluable asset to my clinic. I also profoundly recognised that energy needs to move through a body uninterrupted and in good order for a body to heal properly so I then went on to train in Manual Lymphatic Drainage (the Vodder method in Austria), traditional medical Thai healing massage (no not the sort offered in the brothels in Bangkok!) Bowen and Reiki.
Fifteen years into my practise I became hurtingly aware that iridology by way of diagnosis was not fully adequate for problems like heavy metal poisoning, vaccine damage, parasitic and other infections so I took up bioresonance training and attended week-long seminars in Germany for 6 years as well as shorter ones in the UK.
Twenty years into practise, it became more and more obvious that I needed to train in metaphysical and spiritual counselling and went on to train with Psychology of Vision for 6 years at seminars held all over the world. I did a course with a doctor in the UK pioneering human potential coaching (a very holistic form of life coaching) and it was he who introduced me to Val Allen and the Perth Natural Medical Clinic which is how I landed up working in Perth.
All these tiny choices leading to such unfolding joys and miracles! My book writing has come about in much the same way. Before I ever qualified, I was doing a broadcast for the BBC about herbal skin care and was approached by a publisher who asked me to write a book about it. Hence my first book in 1979 published by Penguin.
Eight more followed with various editions and publishers and while at a month-long silent retreat at a Buddhist monastery in the UK in November 2009, I was inspired to begin a tenth which will be my first Australian publication. I'm so excited to be here I suspect this book will be the first of a few.
Teaching seemed to arise with the same series of small choices. I was awarded my PhD in herbal medicine in 1984 and was at the same time asked to run the British Branch of Dr. Christopher's America School which I did for 20 years adding colonics and iridology to the herbal prospectus. The books also lead to lecturing in America and a television series in the UK.
My decision to come to Australia was based on my thirst for justice and my involvement with Amnesty International and herbal medicine in Europe is, in my opinion, being intentionally decimated by the European Union and vested pharmaceutical interests reducing the level of herbs I could actually practice with almost nothing.
I'm South African by birth and East African by upbringing which
has instilled in me a great sense of adventure and a desire to see
more of the world. For pleasure and as part of my studies I've been
to most of Europe, the Middle East, Russia, China, Africa, North
America and New Zealand. My base here opens up the possibility of
Japan, the Pacific and Indonesia. I've travelled to all the big
cities in Australia in a book-signing tour 20 years ago, except
Darwin, but of course Australia in depth will be my very first port
of call - and my pleasure."
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Dr Campion's remarkable
success treating a case of heavy metal poisoning