Jean-Claude Lapraz, a medical doctor is another pioneer in aromatherapy. He created a curriculum for natural healing, Clinical Phytotherapy, which is taught in Europe as well as other places. He taught phytotherapy worldwide to doctors and researched and published a great deal on essential oils.

Jean Claude Lapraz has been a french medical practitioner for over 30 years, including the eight years that he served as an oncologist in the Department of General surgery and Oncology of a leading Paris Hospital. He runs the Phyto-Aromatherapy Institute along with Christian Duraffourd, MD.

It all started at the General Surgical and Oncological Department at the Hospital Boucicaut , in Paris where they served as oncologists under the direction of Professor Jacques REYNIER from 1986 to 1994. In this Department, most menopaused women suffering from breast cancer could not be treated with the usual « hormonal replacement therapy » because of high risk of cancer recurrences. Dr C. Duraffourd and J.C-L. Lapraz investigated on alternative therapies mainly based upon the prescription of plants.

Together, they developed a new approach to medicine, Endobiogenics, which is based on a refined view of the endocrine system in its managing role over metabolisms and functions. This approach addresses both the pathology and the patient, implementing global diagnostic techniques focused on the root causes of the pathology and phytotherapeutic treatments predisposing the body to undertake its own recovery.

It is important to note that they had previously acquired a very important knowledge in this specific field during 20 years of practice as general practitioners. They learnt herbal medicine with an early founder of phytotherapy as a science: Jean Valnet (MD) and ultimately developed a considerable medical experience, far beyond the mere traditional use of plants. Their last book on the subject have become a must for all medical professionals.

Borne out of a daily practice involving thousands of patients and a large spectrum of pathologies (including degenerative pathologies like cancer), the endobiogenic approach has yielded significant curative results through the use of medicinal plants and essential oils. Currently, the majority of their patients are cancer victims, some of whom travel to Paris from every part of the globe. When facing this challenge, Drs Duraffourd and Lapraz were looking for a way of measuring the actual biological effectiveness of the treatment they prescribed: an objective confirmation of the observations and conclusions they had reached with a clinical examination.

In 1980, they founded the French Society for Phytotherapy and Aromatherapy, which purposes to promote those therapies among medical doctors and pharmacists and to organize post-graduate education. Their association with universities around the world has established clinical training in France, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Tunisia, Mexico and the United States.

Christian Duraffourd discovered that the parameters given by a blood analysis should not be considered merely for their observed circulating level and compared to limits of normality, but rather as the resulting image, the output of the combined activities of the endocrine system and of the nervous system under its control.

At the beginning of this theoretical research, Dr Duraffourd came up with few indices: genital ratio index, genito/thyroid index, index of adaptation, and specifically the bone remodeling index giving insight on bone adaptative metabolism.

Over the years, Christian Duraffourd's investigations led him more deeply in the complexity of the endocrine system that he qualified as the manager of all the biological functionalities of the organism. At this stage, he was developing the endocrine theory of the terrain.

More indices were added, new functionalities were explored, new notions such as the differentiation between structure and function to qualify a biological function were also integrated to the theory.

In 2000, the French Society for Phytotherapy and Aromatherapy was renamed as the French Society for Endobiogeny in medicine. Christian Duraffourd (MD)President and Jean-Claude Lapraz (MD) general secretary.

Dr. Lapraz regularly conducts endobiogenics seminars in the U.S., usually twice a year.