The media in front of instinctotherapy

We can distinguish in the reactions of the French media two extremely contrasting periods:

1. Until 1989, many reports presented instinctotherapy as a logical approach, based on a scientifically valid hypothesis, with remarkable results on health.
2. Then in 89, an inflammatory article published in L’Evénement du Jeudi under the signature of Anne-Marie Casteret, investigative journalist, triggered an avalanche of extremely violent attacks.

What was the reason for this turnaround? In a report published by VSD, I reported on the results obtained in 22 cases of declared AIDS. The patients had seen their condition improve quite systematically, as reported in a preliminary study by my main collaborator at the time, Bruno Comby. I even mentioned a project which seemed to me to make room for the total lack of medical research on the role of food in the evolution of the disease: the Montramé Center would have reimbursed their living expenses to AIDS patients who did not have obtained the desired results after three months of instinctotherapy. The slogan: “AIDS, cured or reimbursed” undoubtedly scandalized the medical and journalistic circles of the time, while fierce competition was playing out around vaccines and antivirals.

Anne-Marie Casteret, a former medical student converted to journalism, had just hit the nail on the head with the contaminated blood affair. Many hemophiliacs were found to be seropositive after injections of blood factors extracted without precautions. She was leading a very active campaign for justice. My proposal, which amounted to saying that the lethal evolution of AIDS depended very directly on traditional food, contradicted its action, implicitly based on the idea that AIDS had to be inevitable justifying the legal measures to be taken. she appealed against those allegedly responsible. So I was the disruptive element in her action and cast a shadow over the halo she heard withdrawing from it.

To this was added another anecdote: in her articles against instinctotherapy, Anne-Marie Casteret had cited the case of two small infected hemophiliacs, two brothers whose eldest especially had obtained unexpected results after a few months of diet. She had presented it as a sham, not being able to admit that food could play such an important role. In her outbursts of vigilante, she had neglected elementary precautions, so that the two children had been recognized and rejected by their classmates, for fear of contagion. The parents then filed a complaint for invasion of privacy or violation of medical confidentiality, I do not remember exactly, and Anne-Marie Casteret was ordered to pay a large sum (around 150,000 FF). All the more reason not to carry me in his heart.

She had moreover only to follow in the footsteps of Anne Chemin, another journalist who had published a first shocking article in 1988 “Believe in the raw”, full of innuendo. An example: she accused me of claiming to have cured my lymphoblastic sarcoma thanks to the intincto, while I have always specified the exact facts, as I reminded her in my “right of reply” that Le Monde is well kept publishing:

Besides, I have nothing against medicine, I even owe it my life: without an operation, the cancer that had reached my throat 28 years ago would have quickly suffocated me. also, you falsify my language: I do not claim to have cured my cancer by instinctotherapy, but to have probably avoided a relapse against which the medicine gave me no guarantee (20 chances on hundred of survival beyond 5 years after irradiation).

This is exactly the kind of falsification that the media would resort to more and more systematically in the following years. In 1989, the Thursday Event published Anne-Marie Casteret’s first scoop: “The guru who claims to cure AIDS by eating raw”. From this moment, a string of articles follow one another in cascade, copying each other, all talking about the “sect”, without leaving any doubt: instinctotherapy is a sect, it can only be dogma, aberration, manipulation, exploitation, fraud, endangering the life of others. No need for proof, the very image glued to it now serves as evidence, the lesson is repeated so well that the parliamentary committees in turn let themselves be taken in by it. Not to mention all the associations fighting against sects, which make it their blessed bread without understanding a traitorous word at the bottom of the process.

Another element played a major role: the media and government campaign launched at the same time against sects. Alternative medicines had known, with the wave of the New Age, an unprecedented development. Professor Pierre Cornillaut had founded at the University of Paris XIII a sub-faculty of natural medicine (where I taught instinctotherapy for several years). The public flocked to all possible and imaginable treatment techniques, as long as they were opposed to conventional medicine. This evolution can also be explained by the failures of conventional care due to the concealment of the food factor. The basis of this social phenomenon is therefore the concealment of the fundamental hypothesis of genetic maladjustment to traditional food.

In any case, the political power launched, with the media in support and under the guise of the fight against sects, a large-scale action against alternative medicine. Homeopathy and acupuncture miraculously escaped Thomas’ wedding party, finding themselves taken over by official medicine when they clearly constitute pseudo-sciences. Why this rescue in extremis? Perhaps because the public was too attached to them to accept their eradication and politicians would have lost votes. More surely because the medical corpus found in it a very profitable alternative to certain medicinal treatments less effective than the placebo effect…

All the other therapies were put in difficulty, some brutally eradicated. the “gurus” put in prison, often accused of rape. For example Engelmeier, founder of the association “Le Patriarche”, also brutally qualified as a sect, while she had worked miracles with thousands of drug addicts. Many groups have succumbed, and it is rather surprising that the instincto and the Center of Montramé are still standing. Moreover, it is not only the media that have falsified the information. Following them, a 1999 Parliamentary Report included instinctotherapy on the list of healing sects, specifying that it was a form of veganism (whereas instincto does not in any way prohibit animal products!) And that I ‘would have been convicted of fraud: I was actually indicted for illegal practice of medicine, irregular advertising and fraud, but was dismissed for the head of fraud and was only convicted for the the only illegal practice of medicine (lack of a medical diploma).

Another fact which demonstrates the extent of the media drift: the press, in particular VSD, always in the vein of Anne-Marie Casteret, spoke of “deaths in the cupboards” of the castle, therefore of deaths which would not have been declared , automatically put on the raw diet account. Eight years of investigation leading to a three-month suspended prison sentence: a scathing denial! I would obviously have been sentenced for manslaughter to several years in prison if any such liability could have been found against me. The dismissal for fraud, carefully concealed by the press, showed on the contrary that the promises of results, as I described them in my books, had been carried out systematically enough so that the investigators did not find a single complainant… For more details, see the page ‘Instinctotherapy and Justice’.

And all this was only going to become more important after the Dutroux affair. The new weapon of Anne-Marie Casteret, no doubt irritated by the failure of her first demolition attempt, this time was pedophilia. Easy weapon given that the metapsycanalysis poses the question, in itself unavoidable and unresolved, of the repression of infantile sexuality. Lethal weapon, too, because hardly anyone gets up after this kind of attack. A formidable montage on which she worked for six months, seeking all possible witnesses who were quick to fall in love with her righteous mission, which resulted in a fifteen-year prison sentence for rape of minors that I never committed…

An important hinge in the evolution of the media in the face of instinctotherapy is marked by the program “Ciel! Mon mardi” by Christophe Dechavanne on April 9, 1989, at the end of which I was arrested by a dozen gendarmes in civilian clothes spread around the room, for having spoken publicly about instinctotherapy. The examining magistrate had banned me just before the broadcast, as part of the investigation for illegal practice of medicine, irregular advertising and fraud. As you will see, I asked Dechavanne to remove this term from his show, but…

As you probably know, Wikipedia articles are written by anonymous contributors, most often without any particular expertise. This encyclopedia aims to belong to everyone, not just be read by everyone, but also created by everyone. Certain rules are supposed to ensure that contributors rely on official sources, such as scientific journals. Unfortunately, not everyone has the necessary skills to form an objective opinion on a controversial subject like instinctotherapy. People are largely influenced by the media, so much so that supposedly encyclopedic articles often contain a hodgepodge of sensationalist articles. The scientific press itself is incapable of objectivity when faced with a theory that shakes the very foundations of nutritional and medical science. This is precisely what happened throughout the history of the article on instinctotherapy. You can also follow its transformations, since my direct intervention in September 2009.

The battle is apparently not yet over: the two videos from Dechavanne’s show, Ciel mon Tuesday from April 89 were deleted in the days following their insertion on this page! A visitor to the site had fortunately taken care to record them, so that you can still see this essential document on the history of instinct by clicking on the links below: