Podcast 43 – Becoming Unstoppable!

You are listening to a podcast from joettecalabrese.com where nationally certified American homeopath, public speaker, and author, Joette Calabrese, shares her passion for helping families stay healthy through homeopathy and nutrient-dense nutrition.

Joette: One of your commitments to the New Year is to learn how to crack the code for your family’s illnesses. Take it on, really make this your focus. Because it’s inevitable that if you make it into a focus, it will turn into reality.

Kate: It’s Podcast Number 43 at joettecalabrese.com. In this podcast, Joette gives us some of her secrets to setting goals and strategies to become unstoppable using homeopathy. We will learn more about homeopathy for ear infections, cold sores, deep sorrow, and how to determine when to use Aconite and Ignatia. Now, let’s get started.

Welcome, Joette. It’s a new year, 2018. I know you’re very excited about the things that you have planned for the coming year. I’m excited as well. Today, let’s spend a little bit of time just talking about goals and how to achieve those goals, and how we want to help our families.

Joette: Yes, that sounds like a great topic.

Kate: Joette, looking forward, be our visionary. Guide us as we go into the New Year in how to help our families using homeopathy.

Joette shares some advice for the New Year

Joette: Well, let me start by saying that homeopathy, classical homeopathy, and homeopathy in general is a very vast, in-depth subject. It can seem overwhelming. In fact, it is overwhelming. What my goal always is — my personal goal and my professional goal — is to make it as easy as I possibly can for my students, my clients, my readers and listeners to try to get the complex and bring it down to something really simple. There’s actually a word in Italian. The word is sprezzatura. It means getting the complex or the lofty and huge and bringing it down to a level that makes it look like it’s effortless, even though there’s a lot of complexity behind it. So, I love that word because it kind of touches on the fact that we’re getting something — human health and a medicine that approaches it so elegantly — and making it simple and doable and breaking it down and parsing it into pieces. That’s always my professional goal — not just for myself for years in the past but also now for my students and readers and listeners.

I believe that it’s very doable. We can get something that’s complex and make it simple by approaching it, not by saying, “Gee, I want to cure cancer.” You know what I mean? No, no. You want to start from small. You want to start with your own family members. I always encourage folks to number one: try to work with others, if you possibly can. Join a group. Join a study group. Start a study group. I mean, I always talk about the study groups that are available, our Gateway classes that are available through the website and then meeting with people from all over the world, for that matter, or all over the country or just those in your neighborhood, your church group. It’s not the only way to do this. There are many ways to do this. But, once you join a group or start a group, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you will accomplish what seems like the impossible.

Kate: So Joette, I want to interrupt you really quickly here because I think a lot of people are intimidated, or some people are anyway, by starting a study group. They think, “Oh, I have to be at a certain level to start a study group.” That’s really not true, right?

Joette: No. It has nothing to do with level at all. You don’t have to have any understanding of homeopathy whatsoever. All you have to have is a will to want to learn. That’s always at the core of everything is to want to improve yourself. Once you have that ability to find that in yourself and pull it out from deep inside and say, “I want to learn this. I don’t anything about it, but let’s all learn together.” Even if you bring in people who know more than you, that’s great. All you have to do is be the organizer — or join in and not be an organizer at all and just be a neophyte or whatever level that you’re already at.

My teachers always said when I was first starting to study homeopathy, they said, “The only way you’re going to learn — really, really learn — is if you step outside of your little world. Either go into practice or start treating people around you.” What he meant — it was Jeremy Sherr actually who I first remember saying that — what he meant was that the only way to learn is if you do a lot of it. You can’t just do … if you have one child, you’re not going to get an awful lot of experience in this. But, if you have a child, and a dog, and a husband, and a mother-in-law, and a sister-in-law, and a church group, or you join a group of others who are doing the same for their families, you’re going to expand your knowledge just by being exposed to other people’s problems and other people’s illnesses. It’s the only way to do this.

So, I find that the folks who learn the fastest — who are treating their families — are the ones with really large families, six kids, nine kids, twelve kids, or lots of animals, lots of livestock, lots of pets. People who are in a group, a church group, or who study together with others — those are the ones who learn the fastest. And of course, motivation! You got to have that motivation. You got to have that will, that burning desire: “I am going to figure this out! I’m tired of these ear infections in my kids. I’m tired of the chronic strep throats. I’ve had it with the boils. I’ve had it with the eczema. I have got to figure this out. I’m tired of the drugs, and I’m tired of the can being kicked down the road.” That kind of motivation is unstoppable. Once you have that fire under you … especially if it’s a mother or a grandmother. No one can stop a mother or a grandmother from being highly motivated to take care of their families. We’re like lionesses.

Kate: Right. But, you have to be determined, too. You have to have some guts, spunk, and moxie in order to do this because it’s not always easy. There are going to be times where you don’t hit it right away and get the right remedy. So, you have to set some goals, have to be determined. Right? That is where being within a group of people — whether it’s a study group or just a group of friends or your church group like you said — that’s helpful because you can bounce ideas. They can support one another. You’re not alone doing this.

Pulsatilla

Joette: Right, right. Inadvertently, you’ll learn by listening to someone else’s troubles. Your child may never have otitis media, but another mother’s children have them all the time. You think, “Oh well, I don’t have to worry about that because my kids don’t get otitis media. Instead, my kids have got food intolerances.” You’ll listen to the mother. You’ll listen to how she uses Pulsatilla for her child’s ear infection, and it works beautifully. It’s especially useful for when the child has just had ice cream or a lot of foods from restaurants. She gives her Pulsatilla, and it cures the otitis media. You know that your child has a problem with food intolerances, and you just learned that Pulsatilla is a great medicine for food intolerances, especially foods from restaurants and from too much ice cream or too much dairy or too many creamy foods.

You just pulled from the hat so to speak, pulled from your classmate’s or your friend’s experience. Then you synthesize that, and you find that Pulsatilla is great for both food intolerances that cause whatever — stomachaches or whatever — that are related to, as I said, eating too much dairy or having ice cream the night before or earing at a restaurant. Then it causes stomach issues, and it can cause ear infections by doing the same. What do you know? You now know some very important keynotes to the remedy, Pulsatilla. So, even though it may never seem as though that particular condition will come your way — that otitis media that her family is suffering — you have just learned how to apply the knowledge that she gained and is spreading through your little community and using it for yourself. It’s gorgeous.

There are unifying threads in homeopathy that can help us pull it altogether. This is the way I imagine it sometimes: a blue satin ribbon from one family to the next family to the next family. It goes round and round and it just floats between the families. And we all connect to it. It’s beautiful. So, instead of it being a burden, now it becomes an excitement. “I get it!” There’s nothing like that light bulb coming up over your head and you’re saying, “Oh my gosh! I get it. Look at what Pulsatilla does.”

Then what you do is you go to your materia medica. If you don’t own one, you go online to the free materia medicas. What should you read? Pulsatilla! What do you know? Then you learn not only is it good for otitis media after having had ice cream, or stomachaches after having had ice cream or eating at a restaurant, but it’s also great for girls who are going into menarche and had irregular menstrual cramps and menstrual periods. We can go on and on and on. Once you make that your medicine that you want to understand, you will not miss a case with Pulsatilla, most likely. You’ll know it.

So, that’s how you take off one bite instead of thousands of bites at once. You can’t cure cancer, but with a little bit of knowledge on homeopathy — although it’s done all the time at the Banerji Research Center in Kolkata — but, you can treat these kinds of conditions and learn that medicine. Now, when you finish with Pulsatilla and you’ve got that down, chalk it up and now you learn another medicine that is related to it.

How do you go about doing that? Well, let’s say that woman comes back again, and she says, “Well, my daughters are helped by Pulsatilla, but my son, boy, every time they get an ear infection, I use Hepar sulph.” You say, “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute.” Now, that’s connected. Hepar sulph helps with ear infections. What else would it help with? Then you start studying Hepar sulph. Now, you’ve got two medicines that you want to understand.

I always urge folks to write them down on 3-by-5 cards. I know that’s very retro. But, it really works. I’ve got 3-by-5 cards all over my house. I had more of them on homeopathy before. Now, they’re saying for my family and me to live by, or something I want to remember, or a word that I want to learn — a vocabulary word. Well, I’ve got them pasted up all over the house (you know, double-sided Scotch tapes, that kind of stuff).

Kate: We have those remedy cards that you can print out from your blogs.

Joette: Yes, yes, the remedy cards, absolutely. Make a copy. Put one in a book. Some people put them in a three-ring binder. These are all free folks, right on the blog. So, you can put them in a three-ring binder and organize them according to condition. Some people tell me they put them in little recipe boxes. Then if you make a double copy then you have another one because this is an important one that you want to memorize, for example. You stick it onto your rearview mirror in your car. So, every time you get in the car, you look at it again. After a while, you’ll learn it. Then all you have to do is hear someone who is helped by it and how they went about doing it, and it then becomes yours. With this, step by step, inch by inch, you’re growing your garden of knowledge in how to cure others and yourself. It’s a beautiful avocation.

Kate: I have a friend that she gets up every morning, and she has a commitment to herself to just spend — whether it’s a half an hour or an hour — just looking at remedies in the materia medica. Just learning about even one remedy like you were saying — one medicine that she just looks at every day. So, by the end of the year if you did that every day, you would know quite a lot about a lot of different medicines.

Joette: Well, I’m not so young anymore. So, I can’t memorize one and consider it committed to memory forever. I mean, now I do have them committed to memory pretty much, because I did it when I was much younger. But, I know my memory is not as good as it used to be, and I can’t hold things like I used to. So, I might need to study a remedy for two or three days if I were to start this afresh now. But nonetheless, even if you took three days to learn one medicine and just the keynotes — not the whole thing, not every aspect of it — but the keynotes and those aspects of the medicine that are useful for your family. That’s what you want to study.

You want to know what is going on in my family. My husband gets shin splints. You need to know the remedies for shin splints. Your daughter gets menstrual cramps? You need to know the medicines for menstrual cramps. Your son is prone to impetigo? You need to know the remedies for impetigo. Not just know them, you need to own them. Because what good is it if you don’t have the medicine and you got to wait a week before it comes in the mail. So, owning and understanding. Owning on that intellectual level is really key.

Now, it doesn’t mean you have to memorize constantly. You don’t have to just memorize. I mean there are books. My books? I’ve got them right there. You can just look them up. You can look these medicines up. You can look them up on my blog … what to use for impetigo, what to use for otitis media, menarche, painful menses and menarche. You can look them all up. But to know a few, a handful, of really important medicines. Like if somebody has a head injury. You don’t want to have to look that up. If your husband has a skiing accident or falls off the roof while he’s cleaning the gutters and he has a pretty serious head injury, on the way to the hospital, you don’t want to be paging through a book. You want to know you’re going to give Arnica or Cuprum or Aconitum ASAP, and continually give it, and know how to give it.

Kate: Not only that, but you have to have those in your purse, in your pocket, somewhere you have to have those remedies.

Joette: Yes. Well, if you own a kit, a little homeopathy kit — and we sell them in the office, but you can get them online, you can get them in many places with 100 remedies in it (the small) — you just throw that into your purse on the way out and into the ambulance or whatever. You should throw that in there. Now, you know you’ve got everything. You’re all set. So, no matter what comes your way, you’ve got your phone with you. You're going to look this up.

If you’re part of a study group, you can look up… We put a blog up recently of someone who had been, I think it was Portugal, and her husband — is it Portugal or Spain? Well, they were at a wine tasting event, and he cut his hand very, very severely. She was part of one of the study groups that we run. She got online and went to Facebook. She was telling people what was happening. People were responding and telling her exactly what to do! I mean, those were like her buddies for life now. These are people who she now owes a debt of gratitude, and she understands that. She really is very grateful for how responsive and helpful they were. Beautiful! You don’t even need to look it up. There’s someone right there — in there waiting.

Kate: Yes. I find that over and over again. I hear stories of that, and I see it personally. You’re out and about. You can’t keep your wits about you. You go to that Facebook page, and you just type something in and someone is always responding super quickly.

Joette: It’s great. People love to help! Because not only are they helping because it feels good to help others, but also because it’s nice to say, “Wow! I know the answer to that!” It’s like raising your hand, “I know! I got it! I got it! Ask me! Ask me!”

Kate: It’s like you’re in class.

Joette: When you accomplish something, you want to use it. There’s nothing like that sense of accomplishment, whether it’s learning how to play a sonata or learning how to make a great chicken pot pie from scratch. There’s nothing like that sense of accomplishment.

Goals or tips for the more experienced

Kate: We have a wide variety of listeners to this podcast: people who are new to homeopathy, people who have been using homeopathy for many years, people who are practitioners. So, I think we’ve addressed some of the newer students in how they might set some goals. Can we talk for a few minutes about those who have been doing this for a while? What kind of goals or what kind of tips might you have for them for the New Year?

Joette: They’re not all that different than the goals I just suggested for someone who’s a neophyte. Really, if you’re learning homeopathy, you want to know a whole array. For my exam, I had to know 300-some remedies in order to be able to pass the exam. I needed to understand all the keynotes and even the more unusual medicines. So, you still want to know these things. The more you have memorized, the more fluent you become in the language of how to handle things.

When I used strictly classical, someone would say, “Do you have a remedy for cold sores?” I would think to myself, “Oh my gosh. They think this is easy. That I just have a remedy and here you go.” But with classical, you got to take an entire case, and that can take 45 minutes or an hour. I’d say, “Oh my gosh! How am I going to do this? I can’t keep answering these kinds of questions,” (whether they’d be like a neighbor or friend or something). But, I did it anyway, because it was an exercise in repertorizing and learning how to do this. So, I was hoping to see a pattern.

Now, though, with these protocols — Banerjis and otherwise — this Practical Homeopathy® that I teach, you know, you could just rattle it right off, super easy. It’s Mercurius viv and Arsenicum. How easy is that for a cold sore? Beautiful! That’s a gorgeous thing. You can actually say, “Or you could use Rhus tox, or you could use Antimonium crud 6.” I’ve memorized those because I consider them important enough. Now, when I get an email from someone, a relative (and I’ve got plenty), and they send me an email, I don’t have to go back and repertorize. I don’t have to look in my notes. I just know which ones they are.

Kate: Right. Hypericum is another one for cold sores too, right?

Joette: Yes, it is … if it’s painful, absolutely.

Kate: Yes, that works beautifully sometimes.

Joette: Yes. For those who have been around a while, our practitioners or they’ve been using homeopathy for a while, you can never stop learning. That’s the best part! It’s like music. You never stop learning. You start by … with the center C and you then move from there. You learn the C scale, and then you’ll learn an arpeggio, C, E, G. And then even if you’re a skilled classical pianist — or whatever kind of pianist you are, a jazz pianist — there’s always more to learn.

Kate: You’re always going back to those scales. And you always need to repeat those basics, your technique.

Joette: You bet. And the same thing with cooking. Think about cooking. You could go classically French. You could be wild and woolly African. I mean, there are so many ways to go. That’s what I love. I like to know that whatever discipline I’m studying or that I’ve embraced, that there’s more to learn. Because I don’t want it to end, I want it to keep going. I want to do this well into my 90s, if I make it that long.

Listen and observe

I think it’s a good idea to make a point of being a good listener. Not only will that reap you better results, but it makes you valuable to your family member, for example. You have to listen, and you must observe. If you’re not listening, you’re not going to get the case. If you’re not observing, you’re not going to be able to pick up on what you need. And I think it’s always better that when you’re working with a family member that you don’t ask too many questions, you just mostly observe.

“Wow, that person is still getting those bloody noses, for goodness sakes.” And you’re observing. What did they eat yesterday? Maybe that was it. Or maybe it’s the cold weather. When they start to tell you … say “Talk about those bloody noses,” and they start to tell you about it, you are being a really good parent — because you care. It’s not that you can say, “Oh well, we’ll talk about it later.” Because if the child or the person has a bloody nose, you’re about to pay attention. You want to fully pay attention and not freak. You don’t want to freak out and say, “Oh my gosh! We’ve got to get to the pediatrician or the ENT.” No, no, no.

You want to stay cool and just think of where you need to go to get this information. One of them, of course, is my blog. But if you’ve got some books, you can look it up in the books. If you’ve got my Allergy course, it’s in the Allergy course. You can just go online. I mean, thank God for the internet. Let’s hope that it stays as clean as it is so far because there’s a lot of great information. It’s important that we know where to find this stuff so that when the time comes, and you need it, you’ve got that at your fingertips.

I also urge people not only to listen but to not wing it. Don’t wing it. Have a rationale. Don’t go too deep in your rationale. Don’t go too deep in terms of saying, “Well, this bloody nose is because the person has heavy metals. They have the MTHFR gene. It’s because they probably have yeast and parasites.” Wait a minute. You’ve just missed the whole point. What happened to the bloody nose?

Just use the information. “Just the facts ma’am.” The bloody nose. Now, what do you use for bloody nose — regardless of the etiology, regardless of the cause, regardless of whether or not it is from heavy metals? If you know that this bloody nose happens every winter, okay, you can say it’s from winter. Is it because the heat goes on? Well, some people assume that it’s the heat. Oftentimes, it has nothing to do with the heat. Oftentimes, it’s simply the change of the season into winter. So, don’t dig too deeply and run down rabbit holes. Stick with the facts but don’t jump on an idea and wing it. Make sure it’s substantiated to a certain degree, that you know what you’re looking at. This is a bloody nose, not hemorrhaging (unless of course it is hemorrhaging). But, you want to observe and make note and be as scientific as you can, leaving the emotion to the side.

Kate: I think that’s a mistake … well, I wouldn’t call it a mistake. But, in the beginning when I started using homeopathy, I probably drove my kids crazy with the questions. “Well, okay, let’s see. What do you feel? Do you feel better when it’s cold, when it’s warm?” When you look at this classically, there are a lot of questions that you can ask and a lot of things that you can observe. But now with the practical protocols, the Banerji protocols, I love it because, you’re right, it’s so much cleaner and easier. If I’m observant and really look at what is surrounding the circumstances of that child’s bloody nose, I don’t have to ask a lot of questions. I can just look at the protocols, observe what’s happening, and give them the remedies.

Joette: Absolutely. It quiets your mind. Those 2 a.m. disquieting moments — disquieting thoughts can drive you and your family crazy. In fact, if you’re feeling like you are going crazy, and you’re not sure what to do, you get Ignatia 200 first. It’s like being in an airplane, and you put the oxygen on your face first before you tend to your child. You need to be the nucleus and be clearheaded about this. Sometimes, if you feel like you’re freaking out, the best thing for you to do is to take Ignatia 200. So that needs, of course, to be in your kit.

Kate: And Aconite, too, because if you’ve just witnessed your child having an accident, you might be needing some Aconite first for you, and then you can think about what to do.

Joette: Well, I love Aconite as a primer. It’s one of the first remedies we always think of. If your child has just had an accident or someone has witnessed an accident, now somebody’s sick or has a condition as a result of it, Aconite is our first remedy. So, if we’re going to talk about a particular remedy, we talked about Pulsatilla and Hepar sulph already. But, I love for people to know all about Aconite, and it’s one of the first medicines in most homeopathy kits.

So, if you study anything, that’s a great place to start is with Aconitum. It’s Aconitum napellus, and we call it Aconite for short. That’s a beautiful one. And even if you have a good amount of experience in homeopathy, go back to it. Read it again. Go back to your materia medica. Read it over and over and over and over and over again because you now understand the keynotes, but what about the subtleties that you might be able to pick up on — the nuances that will help you at some point.

Kate: Right. And every materia medica will have a little bit of a different spin to a remedy. I was just reading through your materia medica last night, Joette. I forget why I initially picked it up, but I picked it up and I had to look up something. Then I just caught myself reading through all the different remedies and looking at what you had written. Like you said, I cannot probably ever look at Aconite enough in a materia medica because I’m always going to pick up something different in there.

Joette: Yes. Because as we learn, we learn a couple of pieces here and there and then other parts of what we’ve just read fall to the wayside. Next time around, we already know those new pieces, and now we can add to our knowledge. They’re building blocks. It’s the best way to learn — unless you have a photographic memory. You know, our brains turn to mush when we’re freaking out, when we see someone suffering, someone we love or even if it isn’t someone we love.

Someone was just telling me yesterday. This person is a hunter. They saw a deer caught in a fence. Although they deer hunt, the thought and the vision of that deer struggling was just horrifying for them. It was horrible. They don’t want to see an animal struggle. No one wants to see that. If that stays with that person all day and into the night and the next day, they’re still thinking about that poor struggling creature, they might need Ignatia 200 for themselves to quiet their mind or they might need even Aconitum, if it was severe enough. (By the way, the upshot of the story was that they got the deer out and he was free.)

Kate: Oh good. Let’s talk about that just for a minute, Aconite versus Ignatia. In a situation like that, what might be the determining factor which one to pull out and use?

Choosing between Aconitum and Ignatia

Joette: Yes, good. That’s great. I’m glad you brought that up.

Aconitum, I call it “first shock.” So, it comes on quickly. If someone’s driving their car, everything is just hunky-dory and they’re driving down the road, and BAM! They run into a truck. That is a shock. You don’t have to go into shock, as in what might be determined from a medical point of view “into shock,” but certainly it’s shocking. So, anything that’s shocking that comes on hard and fast. One minute everything is fine and the next minute, life is now taking on a whole new reality. That’s Aconitum.

So, that happens with accidents. It can happen with children (or anyone for that matter) who is outside in the hot sun. They get really, really warm. Then they jump into a very cold quarry or something, and they get a chill. It shakes you down to your core. Or someone who’s walking outside in the autumn wind, and they don’t have a hat on, and their coat is opened up and unbuttoned and they get a chill. Shortly after, they get a flu or a cold; that night they get a fever. Or when that person has had a good cold dive into a quarry, that night they get sick. They feel nauseous or they feel like they’ve gotten a deep chill. Those are all opportunities to use Aconitum. A cough that comes on pretty quickly, that’s Aconitum.

Ignatia, it’s more on the psychological side. It has more to do with the mind that’s very, very busy and very worried and nothing is right. Life just stinks. “What am I going to do? This is horrible. Maybe I’ll do this. No, maybe I’ll do that. I asked her what she would do, and she said this. No, but he said that.” The mind is just busy, busy, busy worrying, freaking, grieving, frightened, lots of fear, fear of this, fear of that. That is often Ignatia 200. It’s especially useful for sadness and deep sorrow and grieving.

I’ll never forget when my aunt passed away, my uncle (and he was in his upper 90s) he’d only had her all his life. They never had children. It was just the two of them. She passed away. He went into such deep grief. I’ve actually talked about this. He went into such deep grief that he was becoming delusional. Now, my uncle was a pretty sturdy guy, six feet tall, stood squarely on the ground, pragmatic. To see him crumble like this was really — talk about disquieting in my world — seeing him like this was surprising to me. But, he was really crumbling.

He was seeing my aunt. He kept saying, “I see her. I see her. She’s on the couch. There she is. She’s on the couch.” And I’d be on the phone with him. I’d say, “No, no, Uncle Tony, no. She’s not on the couch. Go get the remedy kit that I gave you. Get in that kit and get Ignatia out.” He would take the Ignatia and he’d be just, “No, I know I saw … But wait. No, it was just a raincoat. I left my raincoat there.” Then he’d come back and sit down in his easy chair. Then a minute later, he’d say, “I see her. I see her. I know she’s here.” He would be all shaking. His voice was wobbly. It was awful, awful to witness.

So, meanwhile, while we were on the phone, I would talk to him, while we were on the phone and help him calm down and tell him to take a dose of that Ignatia. Now, we waited another 15 minutes later. Normally, I don’t say to use it so soon, but in this case, he was in such a state that I urged him to take another dose in 15 minutes. After the second dose, he started to cry. He came back to his wits. He was grieving, no doubt. But it was the awareness that no, she was not there. He was no longer delusional.

We don’t know if we think of Ignatia as a remedy for delusion. But in his situation, that’s exactly what happened. Then we talked, and the crying and the sobbing would turn into just, “Oh, I miss her so much. I wish she was here.” Now, it was becoming more within the range of normal.

Then I wouldn’t hear from him for a couple of days, and then it would start off again. Only next time it wasn’t as severe. “I think I saw her. Maybe … did I see her, Joette? Just tell me. Am I seeing … I think I’m seeing things.” So, he had one foot in reality and one foot in this delusion. Then he knew that to start taking Ignatia, and he would start taking it. He took it every day then, sometimes, two, three, four times in a day when he was in really severe sadness or really more delusion, as I said in the beginning. Then later on, it just turned into sadness.

Eventually, he got over it. By eventual, I mean, it took weeks for him to get out of the heavy-duty grieving and got into “Okay, what am I supposed to do with my life now? What should I do? Should I sell the house? Should I be moving into a home for the elderly?” So, he started to become more pragmatic and get back to his old self. But Ignatia did wonders for him. It got to the point where I bought him a few bottles of it. He swore by it. He was very delighted that he had something that could help pick up the pieces.

Kate: What a sweet story though. How he missed her so much. But, what would he have done without that Ignatia? Think about it.

Joette: Oh yes. Well, he would probably become more recluse. If he were to call the doctor, he’d be on tons of antidepressants. He’d be on a lot of drugs. Then he’d have new symptoms, most likely, because that’s what a lot of those psychotropic drugs do. They just give you a new set of symptoms. He would have had sleeplessness, or constipation, or hives, or whatever else these things cause, or suicidal thoughts because sometimes those drugs can cause that. Now, I’m not saying you never ever, ever take psychotropic drugs. But that’s not the goal here. You don’t want to be propped up with synthetic stuff that causes more trouble later. You don’t want to kick the can down the road. We want to correct the problem. That’s exactly what that Ignatia did for my uncle.

Kate: I think it’s good also to remember Ignatia. I have several friends who use it every winter when they start going down that … there’s less sun; it’s just you’re inside more. They use it every winter, and it takes them out of that winter funk.

Joette: Well, you know what’s interesting about this is that if you ask a naturopath or a clinical ecologist or a functional MD, they would say, “Well, it’s just Vitamin D. You got to take more Vitamin D. You’re low in Vitamin D.” Well, what about those people who … and I get people who are really up on nutrition. They’re taking cod liver oil and eating liver and eating tons of carrots. They’re getting in the sun. They’re working out. They’re running in the outside even in the snow. And yet, there’s still a problem.

So, they come to homeopathy thinking, “I need a remedy that’s going to help me with my Vitamin D,” when really homeopathy is not about the Vitamin D (because we don’t know necessarily that is the cause). It could be something else that we don’t know about yet. We just automatically assumed that it’s Vitamin D — a loss of Vitamin D. But they come to homeopathy looking for really the bottom line — that they’re thinking is Vitamin D — when what it really is sadness as a result of the winter or sadness that happens in the winter. Maybe not even the results of … sadness in the winter.

So, what’s sadness? Often, it’s Ignatia 200, twice a day. Now, does Ignatia then increase our Vitamin D uptake so that now when we eat foods high in Vitamin D, such as cod liver oil or butter or lard or something like that, then our Vitamin D is increased or that we can absorb it now? Perhaps. But what matter does it make? Really in the end, if the condition is corrected by Ignatia 200C (a bottle of it costs what, $8, $9), they can correct that and not have problems with that — within a few days or even sometimes within one dose. What difference does it make? Because in the end, perhaps it wasn’t Vitamin D or lack of Vitamin D, perhaps it wasn’t any of those theories.

So instead of theorizing, we use what we see. That’s when I say, “Give me the facts, ma’am.” Because a lot of times, people will say, “I have a Vitamin D problem.” But what they’re really saying is, “I have anxiety and depression.” So, we give them Ignatia, and it uproots it. It’s so much cleaner. It’s so much easier because to try to figure out the cause is often running down a rabbit hole. Another way of saying it is, it’s chasing rainbows. Good luck.

I mean what’s the reason for a bird to sing? How do you know, really? How could we possibly know the physiology to that degree in a human body for every single condition? When my car is broken, and I take it to be analyzed, they can’t even figure out my car! They can’t diagnose why it won’t start. We think we can do it with a human body, and we can figure out the cause. Well, if we can, great. But if we can’t and it often happens that we can’t, that’s when homeopathy comes in.

Know the homeopathics that your family needs

Kate: So, as we come to a close in this podcast, Joette, give us some final words of wisdom for 2018.

Joette: For me, 2018 is about moving. I’ve moved from one state to another. I’m rearranging my household. So, I can’t stop thinking about housekeeping this year. So, I came up with the idea that what we really all need to do is to do some serious housekeeping this year for 2018. I urge folks to rearrange the furniture in their lives but the furniture in our minds.

In other words, don’t just question the medicine you’ve grown up with or that you’ve known for all these years. Get way past that. Rearrange your thinking and take a much bigger, giant step ahead. Make your goal this year to own at your fingertips every alternative that modern medicine has given you. Find the alternative homeopathically. There is an alternative for most everything that modern medicine has claimed is the only answer.

So, instead know that Hepar sulph or Hypericum–Arsenicum is used instead of antibiotics. That’s the alternative to antibiotics. It’s not the only — these are not the only ones — but these are the main ones.

How about knowing that Sepia is the alternative to synthetic hormones for women or that Apis is fabulous instead of Benadryl. You want to know this. You want to rearrange your thinking so that these are not only a part of your new way of looking at life for 2018 but that you know them at your fingertips, those that impact your family and you.

Kate: You just listened to a podcast by joettecalabrese.com where nationally certified homeopath, public speaker, and author, Joette Calabrese shared her passion for helping families stay strong through homeopathy and nutrient-dense nutrition. Joette’s podcasts are available on iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Stitcher, and TuneIn radio.

Thank you for listening to this podcast with Joette Calabrese. If you liked it, please share it with your friends. To learn more and find out if homeopathy is a good fit in your health strategy, visit joettecalabrese.com.

*Sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com

I am a homeopath with a worldwide practice working with families and individuals via Zoom. I'm also a teacher and most importantly, a mom who raised my now-adult children depending on homeopathy over the last 31 years. I lived decades of my life with food intolerances, allergies, and chemical sensitivities until I was cured with homeopathy, so I understand pain, anxiety, and suffering. You may feel that your issues are more severe or different than anyone else’s, but I have seen it all in my practice and in my work in India. My opinion is that nothing has come close to the reproducible, safe and effective results that my clients, students and I have achieved with homeopathy.

Call today and learn how homeopathy might just be the missing piece in your health strategy.

Joette is not a physician and the relationship between Joette and her clients is not of prescriber and patient, but as educator and client. It is fully the client's choice whether or not to take advantage of the information Joette presents. Homeopathy doesn't "treat" an illness; it addresses the entire person as a matter of wholeness that is an educational process, not a medical one. Joette believes that the advice and diagnosis of a physician is often in order.

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The Author disclaims all liability for any loss or risk, personal or otherwise incurred as a consequence of use of any material in this article. This information is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.