30 years of the German Heilpraktiker Day – 27 April 2013
This year the German Heilpraktiker Day celebrates its 30th anniversary and can look back on an eventful history. The congress was initiated in 1983 by the then president of the FDH, Fachverband Deutscher Heilpraktiker, Karl Friedrich Liebau, and the association's managing director, Klaus Schwarzbach. Until that time there had been a variety of regional and national association events, but no central platform that was supported by the professional associations existing at the time, and there was no organisation to carry out tasks on behalf of the associations in relation to politics and industry. To make this cooperation visible externally as well, the KDH, Cooperation of German Heilpraktiker Associations, was founded. The KDH then officially organised the first German Heilpraktiker Day in 1983 in the old Stadthalle in Düsseldorf, which was already attended by over 2,000 guests at the time. To place the event on a secure financial footing, a few years later the Deutsche Heilpraktikertag GmbH was founded, whose managing director was Werner Sandrock, who was also chairman of the Lower Saxony regional group of the FDH.
This company entrusted the organisation to the editor-in-chief of the HP-Journal, Harry Götte. After the Heilpraktiker congress was held for 11 years until shortly before the demolition of the old Stadthalle in Fischerstraße in Düsseldorf and then in the interim moved for a few years to the Hilton hotel, the cooperation decided in 1994 to organise the Heilpraktiker Day in the new Stadthalle in the CCD on the Düsseldorf exhibition grounds. When it became apparent that Harry Götte would no longer be able to carry out the growing event without professional help, the then treasurer of the Heilpraktiker Association Rhineland approached MCO to ask whether they would be interested in organising the event. The association and the exhibition company quickly reached agreement and in 1995 the first trade-fair-congress was realised jointly. Torsten Fuhrberg, managing director of the Düsseldorf exhibition company MCO GmbH, which still organises the Heilpraktiker Day and the accompanying exhibition, commented: "There had been loose contact with the FDH since 1984, even if only as a tenant of the office premises in the association-owned office building in Düsseldorf's Lindemannstrasse, but the chemistry was right from the start and so the DHT was a new and interesting challenge for MCO."
1,800 participants attended this first event under the new organisational management of MCO GmbH and just over 100 exhibitors presented their products and services. The fact that some associations that had left the KDH went on to create their own congress in Karlsruhe led to a temporary decline in participant and visitor numbers, but this was clearly recovered in the following years. The decision nine years ago to open the industrial exhibition to doctors practising naturopathic medicine has, from the point of view of the KDH and the exhibition company, helped to reduce the barriers between doctors practising naturopathy and Heilpraktiker. Peter Abels, chairman of the KDH, said: "Medicine is 90% empirical healing practice and Heilpraktiker and doctors should always be guided only by the welfare of the patient. Professional snobbery and petty jealousy have no place here! That is why I am in favour of a fair that can be attended by both professional groups." And Torsten Fuhrberg of MCO is convinced "that by opening the exhibition to doctors and organising specialist doctors' congresses we have been able to significantly increase the appeal of the overall event. The fact that we now talk about CAM, the European trade fair for complementary and alternative medicine, and no longer about the accompanying industrial fair has led to a clearer profiling of the event. Today doctors practising naturopathy and Heilpraktiker refer to their CAM fair. That is a good thing – although it took several years to get there."
Next year in Düsseldorf, alongside the Heilpraktiker Day, numerous specialist congresses will once again take place, such as the CIM Congress – the 8th German Doctors' Congress for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, the 12th German Preventologists Congress of the Professional Association of German Preventologists, the 7th FAKOM Congress, the professional society for complex homeopathy, or the annual meeting of the International Medical Society for Biocybernetic Medicine.
The congresses are all accompanied by an exhibition where again over 200 exhibitors will present their products and services. All important suppliers, from acupuncture and laboratory diagnostics, from medical technology and dietary supplements to pharmaceuticals and practice supplies, will exhibit in Düsseldorf. The official supporting organisation of the fair, the EFN, the European Federation for Naturopathy, holds its annual general meeting at the fair under the chairmanship of Peter Abels and thus ensures an international atmosphere at the event. Torsten Fuhrberg, organiser of the fair, added: "The CAM has in recent years become particularly interesting for guests from abroad. We are therefore working to continuously increase the proportion of international visitors." |
