Jan de Vries

Tuesday 7th July, 2015

Jan de Vries, who has died aged 78, was a renowned Dutch naturopath and the foremost champion of complementary medicine in the UK.

He lived and worked in Scotland for most of his career, but had clinics all over the UK and clients all over the world, including many well-known people. He was a close friend and adviser to the television presenter Gloria Hunniford and her daughter Caron Keating, who died of cancer in 2004.

He was also a writer (of more than 40 books) and was a regular on television, appearing on the Richard and Judy daytime show on ITV and other programmes to hand out advice on complementary approaches to health problems. As his popularity and fame grew, he was always careful to propose the use of complementary medicine alongside orthodox treatments in the NHS.

Born in Kampen, Holland, the son of a cigar-maker, he spent the Second World War living with his mother after his father and older brother Nicolas were deported by the Germans after refusing to register with the Nazis. His father was taken to Auschwitz.

With her husband in a camp, de Vries's mother worked for the resistance and provided shelter for victims of the Nazis. De Vries remembers her as very daring and recalls her putting her own life at risk. "I was scared that the Germans would shoot her," he said. "I saw them with a gun at her head. But I don't know what that woman had. She had something that meant they didn't pull the trigger. She was something special."

De Vries said the fact that his mother survived the war was a miracle and promised God he would devote his life to helping people after witnessing the devastation of the war. For years afterwards, he tended the grave of a Scottish navigator, Charlie Young, whose plane came down in the river Issel.

He recalled the details in 2005: "In 1944 a plane was shot down above our place. It landed in the river, the bodies were dredged out of it and the schoolmaster asked me to look after the grave of the navigator.

"Eventually the navigator's family came over to visit the grave and they were always asking me to come and stay with them in Scotland. I said that I would but not until I'd finished my studies.

"So after I graduated I went to Scotland and was asked to a dinner where I sat next to a young lady. That lady is now my wife and has been for more than 45 years. We suffered a lot in the war but that was one of the benefits that came out of it."

De Vries's studies were in pharmacy at the University of Amsterdam where he was sceptical about alternative therapies until he attended a lecture about homeopathy. He was sitting next to an older man, who asked him what he thought, to which De Vries replied that homeopathy was good for spinsters and old wives. The man told him he must have a small mind.

"That really struck home," De Vries recalled in his autobiography. The man was Alfred Vogel, a Swiss doctor of homeopathic medicine, and he became De Vries's mentor. In the 1960s, the two men built up a series of pharmacies in Holland and a complementary therapy business, Bioforce.

Then, in 1970, Joyce inherited a large property in Troon and the De Vries family moved to Scotland, which was to be their base from then on. Bioforce UK was run from the house, where Dr Vries also saw clients. He also developed a chain of clinics in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Northern Ireland, Harley Street, and throughout the south-west of Scotland.

Inevitably, the rise of de Vries did attract critics and his talents sometimes aroused suspicion in the medical establishment, but the man himself tried not to become angry. "It has made me very sad, though," he once told The Herald, "and also I've been very often quite upset by the terrible big-headed attitude that I've found from misunderstanding."

De Vries's approach was that complementary medicine could and should work alongside orthodox approaches. "I would not say you can do without orthodox medicine, I don't believe that," he said. "It has a great big role to play." De Vries himself lived by that philosophy - he was a diabetic and managed his condition with complementary medicine and by visiting a diabetic consultant.

In the 1980s, he met the TV presenter Gloria Hunniford, who became one of his clients and a champion for his techniques. Speaking after his death, Hunniford said she had often relied on De Vries.

"Genuinely anything that's been wrong with any member of my family, the call was 'ring Jan de Vries' because he was so knowledgeable," she said. "He was so passionate about helping people and he was genuinely just an inspiring person so I'm really, really going to miss him."

De Vries also helped to treat Hunniford's daughter, the late TV presenter Caron Keating, when she was receiving treatment for breast cancer.

"He was so hands-on with Caron and he used to go and see her in her own home in Barnes when she was going through maybe the middle stages of cancer and they used to talk at great length," Hunniford said.

"He was a wonderful man with his time and spirit and I was talking to him literally up to about a week ago because he was keeping me informed about the dialysis that he was having about two or three times a week." Hunniford and de Vries later wrote a book together Feel Fabulous at Fifty.

Another of De Vries's famous clients was the Ultimo bra tycoon Michelle Mone, who credited her recent weight loss to de Vries's treatments. They later went into business together to form the company TrimSecrets.

De Vries worked hard, sometimes doing 90-hour weeks, but he also loved organic gardening and golf and had been undergoing treatment for kidney problems. He is survived by his wife and four daughters.