The Kinesiology Affair

The Kinesiology Affair

By Éric Bouzou of the CICNS (May 2005)

The procedure is by now classic. At every news item, the media rush into an attitude of systematic amalgam which makes it possible to draw a link, however distant, with a movement, a spiritual practice or an alternative health choice. As if it were necessary to find a scapegoat for the tragedies that surround us, a culprit who reassures without any further self-questioning.

These last few days, we are told of five people in the dock. But it is Kinesiology itself that is being pointed at.

Kinesiology today consists of a set of alternative care techniques. We do not wish to pass judgement on their value, but we can observe that they promote a so-called holistic vision of health. Like all new ideas, as was the case for all the sciences, it takes time to reach maturity. And there can also be branches that drift towards less seriousness. But it would be advisable to be very prudent before speaking of abuses, so thoroughly has history shown us that we are resistant to change and to ideas that disturb established knowledge.

But granting that there are a few abuses, must the trunk be cut down? Must it be cut down because some people consider they have been cheated? Is everyone satisfied with the present mode of care?

Certainly not, but nobody contemplates abolishing it for all that.

Some people are fragile. They ought to be protected against charlatans. The intention is laudable, but how far must this protection go? The arguments given by the media imply that the entire population receptive to the Kinesiology approach has neither its free will nor the intelligence to recognise what is good for it and what is not. Some say they were manipulated.

In every domain of life some people will always feel manipulated, or actually be so. If there are excesses, they must be dealt with by the courts. But those excesses must be dealt with justly.

And if it must come down to figures, let the study be done. How many deaths or illnesses from diagnostic error or poor hygiene in our health system, and how many incidents of the same kind due to a use of kinesiological methods?

The tragedy of Moëlan-sur-Mer seems to authorise every excess because a small child has died. The investigation will perhaps say in what conditions and why this child died.

But the amalgam immediately drawn between this tragedy and Kinesiology in general is not acceptable, even if these parents knew of kinesiological methods and applied them.

Many people abuse tranquillisers and damage their health, does anyone speak of the cult of the pharmaceutical laboratories?

The money argument is also put forward to discredit Kinesiology. This method is supposed to be a way of getting rich. The prices displayed in the principal schools, even if high, do not seem excessive. They become suddenly prohibitive, it seems, when someone is no longer satisfied. It is a reaction everyone knows, and in every imaginable situation. Whether in the context of a training or of a treatment, it always seems possible to go and complain to the teacher or the carer one finds incompetent (one will note that this is, so to speak, not possible in the official health system, so well protected is it).

But there is another aspect linked to money, much more insidious in our view, and which is doubtless one of the principal stakes in the hunt for alternative care methods in France.

We learn that one of the axioms of Kinesiology is that the body can “self-correct”. There is an assertion of a kind to frighten more than one person. For supposing that this were possible, even to a small degree, the allegedly excessive sums of money asked by the kinesiologist are nothing in comparison with the cost of the allopathic care of our health system. And the shortfall for certain parties would then become considerable.

In this article we have spoken of Kinesiology but, in fact, for the CICNS it is not particularly a matter of defending this method more than any other. We could replace this name with 500 others: all the movements listed in the notebooks of the ADFI while awaiting another providential parliamentary report.

The subject is fear and power. The dread of spiritual and therapeutic minorities has been developed for the protection of certain powers. The rare abuses of spiritual or alternative-health minorities are epiphenomena artificially magnified by the media and the public authorities.

It would be so much simpler to show the world the optimism and simplicity of the people who bring alive other dimensions of the human person, despite their faults and their clumsiness.

But that would require mutual respect, and confidence in a human potential without limits and rich in this diversity.

On 3 June 2005, an AFP dispatch for the anthology announces the results of the trial:

The Finistère assize court on Friday sentenced the Boucher-Durand spouses to 5 years’ imprisonment, of which 8 months without remission, covering the pre-trial detention, having found them guilty of the death by malnutrition and lack of care of their son Kérywan, aged 16 months. The spouses, who greeted the verdict with “relief”, are also subject to an obligation of care within the framework of a 3-year probationary period.

The assize court presided over by Jean-Luc Buckel also pronounced a fine of 3,000 euros for failure to assist a person in danger against the three doctors who had examined the child. The court followed the submissions of advocate general Catherine Sery-Baudry, who had recommended that the jurors pronounce a sentence remaining “within a pedagogical framework”, including probation with an obligation of care in order to continue to “keep an eye” on the couple. “I believe in their dangerousness. They have no awareness at all of what happened,” she had said with regret.

Before the deliberation, which lasted three hours, the Boucher-Durand couple expressed their regrets. “If only I had been able to understand that Kérywan was in danger and that his physical health required an immediate reaction, I really would not have reacted like that,” said Pascale Durand, affirming that since the tragedy the couple had “completely changed their life”. “We have broken every link with Kinesiology, I know how far I can interpret things in an aberrant way,” added Mrs Boucher-Durand, currently doing a doctorate in education sciences. The same regret from her husband Ronan, a former engineer, then a teacher of Kinesiology until the day of the events, and today a supply teacher of mathematics. He assured the court that he had “changed profession and diet” as soon as they left prison at the beginning of August 2001.

“Our children, at the slightest anomaly, it’s the doctor straight away (..) we have made a complete overhaul of our life (..) Kinesiology is radically behind us. We once again have a diet based on meat and fish,” he explained. Pascale Boucher-Durand also indicated that the couple was now surrounded in its daily life by a “safety net”, educators for the children, doctors, social workers. “We are seeking to surround ourselves so that there will never again be a situation of this kind,” she assured the court.

The Boucher-Durand spouses, already parents of three girls aged 8 to 14, were accused of being responsible for the death at 16 months, by malnutrition, of their last child Kérywan, who had been fed exclusively on breast milk while his mother followed a quasi-vegetarian diet, according to the investigation.

The courts also reproached the couple, who had founded in Moëlan-sur-Mer an establishment of kinesiology, a psycho-corporal practice imported from the USA in the 1960s, with not having had the child hospitalised, who could have been saved until the last moment, according to several experts.

The couple’s defenders had suggested the acquittal of their clients, in the name of the doubt that must always benefit the accused, recalled Me Vincent Omez. He notably regretted the lack of further investigations at the autopsy which, for want of additional examinations, “did not make it possible to determine the exact causes of the child’s death”, not ruling out “the possibility of a genetic or metabolic disease”. End of the dispatch.

…The return of the stray sheep to the fold of social norms, “quasi-vegetarianism” and breastfeeding elevated to the rank of dangerous practices, the arrogant assertion that “the child could have been saved at the last moment” in contrast with the defence’s argument contemplating another cause of death… these journalistic archives will one day be read as testimonies to the state of mind of our modern society.

Read August 2005 - Gilles Bottine, secretary general of the MIVILUDES, takes a position on Kinesiology

See also the video of the interview with Jean-Claude Guyard, founder of the EKMA

Eric Bouzou is an engineer. His technical career has also been punctuated by encounters with people who bring alive the spiritual dimension of man. That opened doors for him. His interest in the defence of spiritual freedom led him to commit himself actively to the work of the CICNS.