Podcast 62 – Dads with Audacity: A “Guys Only” Study Group

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IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

01:51    Kevin and the materia medica

09:35    Tyler and his daughter’s concussion

14:36    Daniel and the inventory of remedies

17:53    Neil, the study group, Trent’s condition

27:05    Building a homeopathic community

40:56    Calling the doctor

43:17    Some tips on starting a men’s study group

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Gateway to Homeopathy study group curriculum

Gateway to Homeopathy II:  Only available for purchase through your resource page, after having taken the prerequisite Gateway to Homeopathy I (referenced above)

 

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy Podcast Episode Number 62.

Joette:  Each day from my office, I get to see how homeopathy is transforming lives all over the globe, and I want to share them with you. Some of my students have really caught my eye. Some of you have done all you can to learn how to cure those around you using homeopathic medicines, and your successes inspire me. They’re glorious and powerful, and I can’t keep these successes a secret any longer. So, with help from my roving reporters, we bring you a mini-podcast series that I call “Moms with Moxie.” Sometimes we even interview “Dads with Audacity.” See how regular mothers and others, average people who want to cure those around them, have gone from freaking to fabulous with homeopathy.

Kate:  Hi, I’m Kate, and we are in for a treat today! We’re going to hear from four men who are studying homeopathy together using Joette’s Gateway to Homeopathy curriculum. I’m super-excited for you all to get to meet them, hear about how this guys’ study group came to be and find out how they are using homeopathy. So, welcome guys!

Neil:  Hey, thanks for having us.

Tyler:  Thank you, super-excited to be here.

Kate:  Yeah! I’m excited, too. I want to welcome to the podcast Kevin, Tyler, Daniel and Neil. So, Kevin, you and I have been talking over the phone, organizing this podcast. You’ve been telling me about this group of men studying homeopathy together. So, give us a little bit of information about yourself, and how that came to be.

Kevin and the materia medica

Kevin:  Great! Well, first thanks for having us, Kate. I’ve been listening to the podcast for a while now. Actually, this podcast was my first introduction to homeopathy maybe only four or five months ago.

Other guys in this group … our wives have all done the Gateway I class. Some of them are doing the Gateway II class right now. The group kind of originally got together seeing our wives doing what they’re doing, saving our kids’ lives on a daily basis. We eventually started to get behind it more and more. Seeing their passion for homeopathy encouraged us, gave us something to support and something to connect with them on another level.

Kate:  Kevin, when we were talking last time, you were telling me how you and your wife are opposites in a lot of ways. So, tell me how homeopathy has brought you together.

Kevin:  Sure. I approach things from a very intellectual mindset. When I first heard about homeopathy, I, of course, was skeptical and was asking a lot of questions that my wife didn’t know how to answer or sometimes would brush off altogether.

So, I remember one time, I was laying on the couch feeling sick, called into work, and my wife, on the way to taking the kids to the bath, popped some little sugar pills into my mouth. I don’t even know what they were to this day. But, you the story — you’ve heard it before — within minutes, I was feeling better, called back into work to tell them I was going to make it, and ended up feeling just fine within maybe half an hour.

So, I started asking her questions about what was going on, what happened, “How did you do this?” She pointed me to her Gateway I book. I started reading and ended up in front of my computer with Wikipedia researching Samuel Hahnemann and these laws of cures — and had no clue what I was doing or what I was reading. My questions just weren’t getting answered because I didn’t really know where to look.

Kate:  Well, first of all, I think Wikipedia … was it a positive spin on homeopathy? I’ve heard that Wikipedia can be pretty hard on homeopathy because everything that’s positive is taken off of there right away. That’s not true? Did you find good information?

Kevin:  I would say I found both. That’s sort of the problem I have with approaching an intellectual topic like this is that I get confused because I am very willing to read both sides of an argument. Homeopathy is so vast I wasn’t really sure how to approach it. It was too complex for me. My wife’s approach was very practical, which is obviously what Joette is an expert in … is breaking it down to make it easy to understand for families. So, she is great at that. She gets the emotional aspect. She gets this mothering, nurturing way of approaching homeopathy that I don’t necessarily get. But, that has brought us to a point where if we have a problem that we come across, and maybe she doesn’t remember a remedy and something that might antidote it, or something that might be similar, or she doesn’t necessarily take into account all the symptoms, that’s where I excel in that textbook sort of recall, and we are able to assist each other really well in that way.

Kate:  Yeah. It’s interesting. So, for those of you listening, you’ll get a kick out of this. So, Kevin, what do you love to do in your spare time?

Kevin:  Oh! I know what you’re asking. Very quickly, I found that there was this thing called the materia medica and I had to get one. But I didn’t have one; my wife didn’t have one, had no desire to have one. So, I downloaded a few different apps on my phone. I just sit in my spare time — whenever that is at work or at home — I just read through the materia medica: learning about plants, the animals, the minerals, whatever, things that I like knowing about anyway, things I can teach my kids later in life when they’re older. But finding that poetry and that symmetry between how these things act in the material world, and how they act in homeopathy. It absolutely satisfies my longing to research and learn. And I love reading the materia medica.

Kate:  That is so great! I hear that now, you and your wife have something in common that you can share on a deeper level where you’re just not talking about how your day was, but you’re actually sharing this thing that you both are passionate about, right?

Kevin:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I am the sort of textbook-research kind of person. I like having intellectual conversations. Not to say that I’m smart or super academic or anything like that, but it’s just the way my brain processes information. My wife and I definitely connect in a lot of ways. We met through playing sports like volleyball and Frisbee and things like that. We love raising kids and getting into Weston A. Price kind of stuff. There’s not a lot of intellectual content there. So, having this connection with homeopathy has been great.

However, at first, there was a lot of resistance on my wife’s end because she found this new thing where she has this intellectual knowledge above what I knew. And she was very, I guess, protective of that. We eventually had a conversation when we talked about getting a guys’ group together and learning homeopathy and she was uncomfortable with it. She didn’t want me to know the things she knew, and maybe she felt that I would challenge her or steal it from her — which was totally justified for her to feel that way, absolutely.

But, when we finally broke down that barrier to understanding what my motivation was to learn about homeopathy, she absolutely accepted me into her level of intellect and understood that my approach was to not only connect with her intellectually (and I think that that has and will continue to grow our marriage), but I just wanted to be able to support her knowing that she wouldn’t do a lot of this kind of research. She was always “boots on the ground, first aid, save the kids’ lives on a daily basis” kind of mindset. She doesn’t have the time to, I guess, research like I do.

Kate:  I can imagine right now a lot of women listening to this podcast wishing that their husbands would have that desire — to really dig deep into homeopathy and to support them in what they’re doing. So, I think this is an amazing thing that you guys are doing together and learning and growing together. So, yeah, kudos to you Kevin for supporting your wife, and all of you guys who are here because I know that’s why you guys got together. You wanted to learn more and to be able to share in this and support your wives as they utilize homeopathy daily.

Kevin, thanks for sharing a little bit about your story. I want to move on right now to Tyler. Tyler, tell us a little bit about from your perspective, how you’re using homeopathy, or what you’re getting out of this study group and a little bit about yourself.

Tyler and his daughter’s concussion

Tyler:  Sure, yeah. So, my wife and I have two little girls. It seems to us that around homeopathy, there’s this ethos of everyone sharing their stories. That’s where people are connecting. So, I had a story for you if you’re interested in hearing one of our experiences.

Kate:  Yes! Of course!

Tyler:  One night, we’re at church, and it’s the middle of the service. Instead of our numbers coming up on the screen for our kids, which never really happens with ours, the children’s pastor just starts calling me. So, I know that this is serious. I told my wife, “Hey, if I need you, I’ll text you. Keep your phone visible.” I ran out there, and it turns out that the kids were playing this game where they’re running at full speed and not necessarily looking ahead of them. And her and another kid crashed onto each other, and the other kid ends up sinking some of his teeth into her head.

Kate:  Oh!

Tyler:  So, she gets a concussion. And the little boy’s parents were dentists, so they went on their merry way to take care of that. Naomi, my daughter, she’s groggy and not able to focus her eyes. Meanwhile, there’s a small group forming around her. She’s got a bloody nose. I’ve been friends with Kevin now going on about 20 years. If you glance at Kevin’s nose, it’ll start bleeding. So, he has shown me ways to try and stop a bleeding nose. So, she’s pinching the bridge of her nose, and we’re tilting her head back — which actually tilting the head was a bad idea because she’s now swallowing blood.

Kate:  Oh, Kevin led you astray?!

Tyler:  Well, this was pre-homeopathy. So, in front of everyone, she throws up blood. And we’ve got people trained in Western medicine. There’s a nurse, and there’s a pharmacist. They’re all running around like one of those old, black and white movies with no sound. They’re trying to be respectful of us in our decisions, but you can tell that they’re bothered that we’re not making a beeline for the emergency room.

So, my wife comes over. (I’ve texted her at this point.) She starts asking about the symptoms. She heads out to the car, and she comes back, and she pulls out these little white beads that look like topping to some candy. She turns to me, and she goes, “Watch this.”

She goes, “Hey, Naomi.” I know she’s not supposed to have it in her hand, but she holds the medicine out in her hand and says, “Naomi, take two of these from my hand and put these under your tongue (to see if she can follow the direction).” She very groggily does it. Within about five or ten minutes, her eyes focus; her voice clears. She says, “I think I remember what happened.” Everyone’s kind of confused, and she starts to explain how she ran into the little boy, and how she had gained her injury.

So, through the course of the next week and a half, she’s got a huge bruise on her face, and it turned into a black eye. But we were able to help her body heal — with homeopathy and bone broth and all this good stuff — within a week and a half. I’ve never seen those kinds of injuries heal that fast. I’ve had black eyes before, and I didn’t get rid of it that quickly.

So, that was really meaningful to us to see it play out in that way. It seemed in short order. It’s also curious to see when they looked back, and they described the situation, they don’t say that she had a concussion. They’ll use words like “semi-concussion,” or they’ll try and downplay it as much as they can to explain it away in their mind. That it wasn’t really what they saw with their own eyes.

But then, the fact that she had a black eye a few days earlier, and then it’s gone — there’s no really denying that.

Kate:  Yeah, thank you, Tyler, for sharing. That was great. What a great homeopathy story!

Tyler:  My pleasure.

Kate:  I want to move now to Daniel. Can you share with us a little bit about how you got involved with this group, and about your family, and how you’re feeling these days about homeopathy?

Daniel and the inventory of remedies

Daniel:  Oh sure. Let’s see. Well, I mean my wife and I have known Neil and his family for about four years now. So, that was how I first got connected with the group. As far as homeopathy, my mother-in-law has been studying and taken most of Joette’s classes (if not all of them), for a few years now. My wife started studying about two years ago.

From the first class that she took, she saw the value in it and asked about hosting a class at our home, which I was fine with. I didn’t really know much about it at the time. I was skeptical because of course … you know. I remember a 20/20 episode from about 20 years ago where John Stossel was making fun of the whole thing actually.

Kate:  Oh, wow!

Daniel:  I didn’t know it was homeopathy. But I mean, I remember him talking about the stuff that’s just diluted in water. And the more that it’s diluted supposedly, the more helpful it is; and the lower the dosage, the stronger the result. That just didn’t make any sense at the time.

But, seeing the results articulately … well, there was one lady in I think it was the second class that we hosted who had a number of health issues that has been greatly helped by it. And then, of course, Neil’s son has been tremendously helped by it. So, just having those experiences … I would say within our family, we’ve had smaller issues like Tyler had. We haven’t had any major issues in our family. But seeing it being helpful with day-to-day stuff, and then also just wildly successful with similar folks that had more serious health issues, we’re very excited about it.

Aside from being a mother and a wife, this is kind of my wife’s passion. She is really excited about helping people to having natural alternatives to the traditional Western medicine. So, she’s looking for ways to help: so, hosting classes, and also, we’ve built kind of an inventory of homeopathic remedies at our home — some of which are not necessarily available at the local store. So, that’s been, I think, just very good for everybody that we know who’s involved.

Kate:  Yeah. I heard that you guys are sort of the local go-to house when someone’s looking for a remedy, and they can’t find one. They know that they can count on you guys, usually right? You usually have it?

Daniel:  Oftentimes, yeah. Or we can put it on the next order because we have monthly orders now that we’re getting from OHM.

Kate:  That’s so fascinating what you guys are doing in your community. You’re building a resource — from what I heard, from what you described — where people know that they can count on you guys to get them what they need which is really, I think, commendable. It’s super helpful because even health food stores don’t usually carry a wide variety of homeopathic remedies, or if they do, it’s the top 20, 30. And then if you want a 6C in something or a 200C remedy, it’s hard to find those usually locally. Maybe not where you guys live, I don’t know. Where I live? Yeah, forget it!

All right, Daniel, thank you so much. So, Neil, let’s get a little bit of background from you, and how you’re feeling about this study group, and what you might be learning.

Neil, the study group, Trent’s condition

Neil:  Yeah. Thank you, Kate. Really appreciate the opportunity to share on the podcast. My wife, Danielle, she has kind of really led the way here, I think, for many of us involved here in the class and also our spouses.

Kate:  Neil, why don’t you tell us, where is your group located in the states.

Neil:  That’s a very good question. We are located in Southern Oregon. So, that’s just slightly above the California border.

Kate:  The state of Oregon is better in general as far as natural medicine goes, from what I understand.

Neil:  Yeah, absolutely. I think we kind of have that reputation, and I think we’ve earned it.

Kate:  Yeah, you’re fortunate to live there in that respect. That’s for sure.

So, Neil, tell me, how do you feel about this study group of the guys? Do you guys look forward to it? I’m wondering — okay, this might sound crazy — but I know what a women’s study group looks like. We get together, and we might have some snacks. We talk. But I’m trying to imagine, you know, I’m hanging out with the guys. What does your study group look like? Do you get right to business? Are you all pretty serious, or what does it look like?

Neil:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We definitely have snacks. We do no business until we have snacks. And then it’s straight to business after that. But that is definitely a requirement. The group, I think we all kind of came together — I might be speaking mostly for myself here — but my wife, Danielle, she’s really passionate about this. I really want to complement her as much as possible as her husband and father of our children. So, I kind of felt like I was maybe getting in the way a little bit of like an “effective” process here with the remedies.

So, with the men’s group, I really learned a lot just about the process, and kind of like, how to take a case, how to be observant in identifying symptoms, and then how to kind of work together with my wife to provide the appropriate remedies for the symptoms. So, I really learned a lot about just the process and kind of the “rhythm,” I guess, for homeopathy — and how to provide it to the family and also myself.

Kate:  I think, I’m sure actually that your wives must be super appreciative of you guys doing this. I remember hearing you guys talk about this group. There was something that you guys did when you … it’s like a club. You said, “No women are allowed!”

Neil:  Yes, yeah. Because we definitely wanted to keep, I guess, the essence of “man” here and not maybe have, like, a cross gene, I guess. But I think it was really nice to just have a guy’s group where we could get together and talk about the challenges that we might be having at our household and kind of how to maybe get some ideas from the other guys in how we could better support the family.

On a sidebar, I’m going to kind of go down this road. Just this last Sunday, my son, Trent who was born premature, and he’s had struggles with acid reflux. He has a very easy gag reflux. And he’s had some other dietary issues and some challenges. But again, I really commend my wife for leading and being a great mother and getting him a lot of good services and also bringing homeopathy to him.

But anyway, we woke up Sunday morning and noticed that Trent was not feeling well. He had some water, and then he threw up. He started to dry heave. Luckily, we were able to calm him down and kind of stop doing that. Then we took a quick inventory of kind of his symptoms and noticed that he was very cranky. He was very clingy. He was easy to gag.

So, Danielle jumped right into her homeopathic role there and started to administer some remedies. That was, like, at 7 o’clock. And then around 9 o’clock, he was very tired and lethargic still, very cranky. In fact, I was preparing some rice with beef broth on the stove. Right next to me was Trent, kind of leaned up against the refrigerator looking very unhappy, and then he started to kind of just lie on the kitchen floor.

It’s just amazing that someone that miserable at the time, within the next hour, his whole mood and personality changed to where he was smiling and happy. He had two servings of the prepared rice, and then he took a nice two-hour nap. So, kind of that image of him being miserable on my kitchen floor kind of sticks with me and just highlights the power of homeopathy. So, Danielle and I are very thankful for that.

Kate:  And how quickly he turned around and things changed, yeah.

Neil:  My wife and I talked after that, and we were both, like, “Well, that was awesome.” Because we had great communication, we were both on the same page as to why she was asking questions, and what the information was for, and how it was going to be used. We were able to kind of bring it all together to help Trent. Instead of calling the doctor and freaking out and all that, we were, like, “Hey, we have this,” with just a lot of confidence. So, definitely was excited to have an opportunity to maybe share that. I think Kevin echoed in and Tyler and Daniel also on just how we can come together and have a stronger relationship with our wives and the family.

Kate:  I think that’s key. You guys can work together then, and you’re not going in opposite directions where one is saying, “Oh, we need to get to the doctor.” Not that you don’t want to go to a doctor, obviously, if there’s a situation that requires that. But you both kept calm, and you worked together in coming up with a solution and felt confident in what you were doing. You supported each other in that. So, that is really great!

Neil:  Yeah. I mean I love it very much. There are a lot of little elements about homeopathy that I find very valuable to me. Like, it’s non-addictive. I really would hate for my son or daughter to grow up with this Tylenol or whatever. Then they kind of get that feeling that, “Oh, you know, I don’t feel good. I’ll just mask the symptoms.” Then that’s just kind of like, what they go through in life. Then we always think about, like, those pharmaceutical commercials. It’s like, “Oh! I have eczema on my skin. I get a rash. So, I’ll take this pharmaceutical.” But then I end up with side effects that I have to take more medications for and you’re just compounding the problem. So, I really appreciate that it’s not addictive, and it’s not manufactured by some large pharmaceutical company that they’re going to just kind of continue to feed us pills.

Then I also really love that it is organic, and it’s from the earth. It’s not some sort of engineered product. I always think of, like, Tylenol. I go to that because I’ll be out working, and my back will get hurt or sore. And then you take a Tylenol. The pain doesn’t go away. It’s just masked. It’s still there, and you could still get injured. At least with homeopathy, you’re actually fixing that. You’re able to live a healthier, better life because of it.

Kate:  Yeah. You have a pretty dramatic homeopathy story with your son, too, right? So, tell us a little bit about that.

Neil:  Yeah. Our son Trent, he was born premature — a month. I’m not an expert at this in any way, but he has what I think is called hypotonia. So, he has really low muscle tone. I always think kind of, like, Gumby, you know. You can just move his legs around or arms. He’s just, like, double-jointed almost and super-cute. I think that last few weeks in the womb also delayed the little valve in his throat that keeps things down and some of his other stomach muscles that might help him with potty. So, I think there’s been some delays in his development from that. So, we struggled a lot when he was young with vomiting and colic and speech and a lot of other things.

My wife shared some stories with me just to make sure I was on the same page. My wife gave Trent the homeopathic for speech. Within a day or so of administering that remedy, Trent’s speech really started to come along. The remedies have also helped kind of cure his dietary allergy to milk and dairy. It’s helped him keep his food down. One of the remedies we gave him on Sunday was for GERD. I have the paper right in front of me, and it shows all the different remedies and times that we administered it to him. It’s kind of neat to look back at that. But, I think homeopathy has really helped Trent come along and given him a better quality of life.

Kate:  Right, without medications like you said. So, that is really good. It’s not going to cause other side effects.

Neil:  Yeah, it’s great. We’re very thankful for it.

Building a homeopathic community

Kate:  So, does anyone else have a homeopathic story that they wanted to share?

Tyler:  Yeah, I got one. This is Tyler again. I shared this story about my oldest daughter, but there is another one with my youngest. She has really sensitive skin. One day, she started getting something like hives or … I’d have to check the paper because my wife takes those notes like Neil and his wife did. The coolest part of this story is I was at work and Neil’s wife, Danielle and my wife paired up and brought all the remedies they had to my work because they were out and about. They contacted Daniel’s wife, and we’ve got this group text going immediately with pictures and descriptions.

The coolest part of the story to me was the community aspect. It was not long until a strategy was developed, and we were in communication with our doctor. We had an appointment later that day to take her in, but we kept giving him updates saying, “Hey, it’s moving from head to toe. I don’t think that we actually need to come in.” We have a really supportive doctor. He goes, “That’s great! Keep doing what you’re doing.”

So, that community aspect, I think, is something that is crucial and it’s helpful and I would encourage everyone to try and plug into something like that. When Daniel was talking about the veritable lot of remedies that they have in their house, it is like, a hoard of medicine. It couldn’t be more helpful. So, yeah, having that as an anchor point to this community is very much appreciated.

Kate:  Yeah. It sounds like you guys have a really great group and the start of an amazing homeopathic community. I’m assuming you’re going to be studying together some more and reaching out to some other men. I think I heard you talk about some other men maybe wanting to join a group. Tell me a little bit about what your future plans are.

Tyler:  Yeah. I think Kevin has already taken the second class. Is that right? You already plugged into that one?

Kevin:  Yeah. Yeah, I actually … Gateway II, I think was released right when we were coming to the end of our Gateway I class. Being all gung-ho like I am, I enrolled for both. Before I finished Gateway I, I was I think two or three weeks into Gateway II. So yeah, that’s the kind of community we have here.

We had, I think, a couple of the ladies in our group ended up getting the special bonus material for being in the top 50 that signed up for Gateway II or something. So, that’s how on top of it they were, just ready to jump on that. In the country or however many people that are available to take this worldwide, they were right there at the outset and were already through four weeks of that.

So, I wanted to emphasize one thing that Neil said, which I hope would be encouraging to some of the other mothers that are listening. It’s the way that his wife has corralled some of the other people into taking these classes. It was really through persistence. I don’t think she ever even spoke to me or my wife personally. I mean, we’ve known her for a long time. But about this specific thing, it was sort of, like … we’d hear from Ty’s wife that, “Hey, Danielle is doing this class with herbs or something. You guys might be interested. You’re into natural healing and stuff.” So, I was, like, “Oh! Yeah, we don’t have time.”

And then we’d hear a couple of months later from somebody else, “Oh! Danielle’s doing another class. Is that something you’d be interested in?” Like, “Ah, we don’t have time. We’re about to have twins. We got four kids now. We can’t spend the time to do a class. That’s just crazy.”

Well, finally, another few months goes by, and somehow, I see Neil around town or something or Tyler, and they’re, like, “Hey, Neil’s wife told me to tell you to tell your wife that you have to take this homeopathy class!”

It was, like, “Oh! Well, I guess we’ll talk about it since we have to.”

So, my wife, I guess had done a little bit of research. This is maybe not even a year ago now. She did a little bit of research and said, “Okay, I really want to do this.” I think my wife called Danielle, and they talked. She was convinced, and I said, “Okay, well, here’s the deal. It’s either essential oils or homeopathy. We can’t afford both this month.” There’s an initial upfront cost to starting homeopathy. She wanted a kit and the book and a few other things. She convinced me that in the long run, it would be cheaper, so we went with homeopathy.

I guess that’s a testament to maybe the organic process. It’s going to be different for other people. But the way that Danielle went about it to get into my heart eventually to say, “Hey, your wife’s serious about this.” She finally took the time out of her day to research this even though our house was just a mess of children. It finally worked. There was never any pushiness. There was never any convincing, never sending emails or Facebook posts of, “Hey, you have to research this. Read about this. Go look in a book.” It was never any of that. It was just, “Hey, trust me. You’re going to like this.”

So, I think that was just really helpful and maybe encouraging to some other mothers. Maybe find the dad in the group that does support his wife and get him to talk to his friends or him to tell the other guy to tell his wife. That’s kind of how this came about. We just sort of started talking about it. It was, like, “Hey, there’s a bunch of husbands now that support their wives in this. None of us really feel effective in supporting our wives. Maybe we should take a class. Oh! We don’t have to pay because our wives already did? Awesome. Let’s do this!”

That probably wasn’t really a roadblock for us, but it was nice. It was just another little thing, the way Joette sets it up to say, “Hey, if one spouse pays for it, the other can join in.” That is really wise on her part to set it up that way.

So, there are some little ways, maybe some wives can nudge other people and just be persistent. It is totally worth it. I’m so grateful that Danielle took the time to just drop a line every couple of months. That’s all it took. Eventually, we had no excuse. So, we looked into it. That was it. There was never a debate at all. We still knew nothing about it, but we trusted Danielle and all these other people.

Kate:  Thank you. That is super encouraging. I think that’s a great tip for those women who are listening who are trying to figure out how to do this together in a partnership with their husbands. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. I hope that’s helpful to some of you listening today.

Kevin:  There are so many other reasons to do homeopathy obviously. But for the guy that’s maybe listening to this or maybe the wife that wants to approach her husband, it doesn’t take an argument. It’s totally not worth it. It just takes a little bit of love and patience — like with most things. You can’t change people.

Kate:  Right.

Kevin:  Yeah, I would like to share a story that maybe will characterize how my relationship with my wife has grown through homeopathy.

Kate:  Sure.

Kevin:  So, this was just a few weeks ago. I was at church helping move some furniture, and I had a long sleeve shirt on. I was busy moving. All of a sudden, my left arm started itching. Felt just like poison oak which I am very susceptible to. So, I knew that mental aggravation that went along with that. I couldn’t think about anything else. So, I went over to my wife, and I said, “Hey, note this time down. My left arm just started itching like crazy.”

She said, “Oh, okay, well, there’s nothing we can do about it right now. We’ll talk about it after church.”

Like, okay, no big deal.

It’s about 45 minutes later, we’re driving out to somebody else’s house. I have my sleeve rolled up, and we’re looking at it and trying to decide what the best remedy is. I’m thinking, “Well, this feels like poison oak.” My wife is saying, “Well, it doesn’t feel right to me because you didn’t touch any poison oak. It must have been some kind of bug,” whether insect or arachnid that was somehow in my shirt and got spooked when I was moving around and bit me. So, there’s about maybe 20 different welts going up my left arm from my elbow to my wrist.

She is looking up stuff in her phone as we’re driving. I’m just holding the steering wheel with my left hand — can’t really think about anything else but how badly this itches. She says, “I think it’s Apis because of this and this. I think it’s a bug bite. I think the redness, you know, and this.” I said, “Well, I think it’s Rhus tox. Let’s really explore this.”

So, she’s reading the materia medica on both — just to sort of appease me. She says, “Okay, after reading that …” I’m more convinced that it’s Rhus tox, and she’s more convinced that it’s Apis.”

I said, “Okay, you know what? Let’s do the Apis first. And then when it doesn’t work, I’ll take Rhus tox.”

So, she just slides it over under my tongue while I’m driving, and I start counting in my head, one, two. I get to seven, and I feel this rush of cool lymph or some kind of energy into my arm, and I feel it go up each little prickle on my left arm and just suck out the agitation and the itching. And it’s just gone! Seven seconds is when it started, and by ten seconds, I wouldn’t have even known without looking at my arm that there was anything wrong. I was shocked!

So, I started counting again. I didn’t even flinch. I didn’t say anything to my wife because, you know, maybe I didn’t want to be wrong. She was just patiently sitting there onto her next thing, probably knitting or something. I started counting again. “Okay, I’ll let her know when it starts itching again. Then maybe it will come back even stronger, who knows? I’m not sure what’s going on right now. That was weird.”

So, we finally get home, and the redness has gone. The bites are barely visible. It never came back at all. Obviously, at some point I stopped counting. So, I explained to her what happened — how quickly it happened. From that point, I was the homeopathy evangelist. I was telling people that had never heard of homeopathy how this remedy made from a honeybee took away this itching in my arm in seven seconds, and it’s awesome! You should look into it.

To be honest, it changed my language when I talked about homeopathy from calling it “witchcraft placebos” to calling it “magic pills.” (That was a compliment coming from me.)

So, yeah, I felt growth in myself, deferring to my wife. Maybe in the past, I would have said, “No, we’re going to take Rhus tox first. I want to try the wrong thing first, just make sure it’s the wrong thing.” My wife didn’t gloat over this. She was just happy my arm stopped itching. But it was such a wonderful thing to know that she has that power; she has that capability.

To put it in a slightly different perspective, I hope some of your listeners can relate to this. A couple of guys in this group, including myself, were familiar with the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University. I’m sure that some of your listeners know that feeling of going through these classes and no longer having this fear that they’re going to go bankrupt, or something’s going to pull out the rug from under them, and they’ll be left destitute. (It’s a great thing and if people haven’t heard of it, it’s worth looking into.)

But this feeling I now have with homeopathy is like medical peace — where I can have a conversation with people, and I don’t say the word fever with the same meaning that I used to. It doesn’t scare me — or broken bones, or even meningitis, things like that. It’s like those things used to really terrify me, like, “Oh! Watch out for the Listeria and watch out for the Giardia.” And it’s, like, “You know what, you got a stomach ache, you can just take this. Or if the food is spoiled, we’ll just throw some Arsenicum at you later when you’re on the couch.” I’ve had that happen which is why I can say it. I’ve had that experience where I was vomiting; I was so sick. And then all of a sudden, I was better. And reading the stories, reading the anecdotes that are on this podcast and, of course, all over the internet really helps to promote this feeling of freedom that you cannot find with the fear-based Western conventional medicine system.

Kate:  It just gives you a confidence and a sense of peace that whatever comes your way, you have tools to address the situation, and you don’t need to fear. That’s so powerful!

Calling the doctor

Kate:  So, what else might you like to share with those dads or husbands that might be listening to this podcast?

Neil:  I just think if you kind of, maybe, stumbled upon this, and you’re just kind of, like, “Oh, yeah. I’ll just call my doctor. He’s on speed dial. Just fill my prescription.” Maybe just question that a little bit and consider homeopathy as a valid alternative. It’s a much better life.

Kate:  Yes. So, at one point, were you like that where your instinct was to call the doctor, go in and get the prescription? And now you’ve changed that thought process?

Neil:  Well, in my life, in my experience, when Trent was first born, we would call the pediatrics’ office. And a blessing for us, I believe, is they were very understanding. They were almost, like, “Whoa, guys! Take a breath. Calm down! If this persists for a while, maybe come in, but you guys don’t have to come in right now. It’s normal.” They were, like, “Maybe give him some chamomile tea or something like that.” So, I was very thankful for that experience in our life. That may not be everyone’s experience, but at least that was ours.

But now, we’re kind of more confident in our own ability to handle a lot of things that come up. I know I was raised with my mother, you know, whenever something was going on, she would always say, “Oh, you got to go get a…” (What is that called? What is that called that they always say to get?)

Tyler:  Like a flu shot or something?

Neil:  Not a flu shot.

Kevin:  CAT scan?

Neil:  Not a CAT scan.

Daniel:  X-ray?

Kevin:  Where do you go?

Neil:  She’s always, like, “You got to go get an antibiotic.”

Kevin:  Oh!

Neil:  She was always, like, “You need antibiotics!” Yeah. So, I was always raised by my mother to always call a doctor and get an antibiotic.

Daniel:  Brush your teeth with antibiotics!

Neil:  Yeah. Now, she says it. And she’ll say that and, like, “You should always eat a lot of protein.” I’m kind of, like, “Mother!”

But anyway, thankfully my wife Danielle, she’s a terrific woman. I love her to death because she will just consume information and knowledge. And then when she believes in something, she becomes very passionate about it. Because of her, I’ve learned about homeopathy and the benefits of that. So now, I’m not that person who just calls up the doctor.

Some tips on starting a men’s study group

Kevin:  There were a couple of things I wanted to say to sort of summarize, I guess. One is in encouraging maybe some other guys out there. From what we understand, we’re sort of the first “guys’ group” that has done one of Joette’s study groups together.

Kate:  Yeah, you’re pioneers!

Kevin:  Yeah, which is awesome on one hand, but on the other hand, it’s sort of confusing to us. Because the guys that made up the core of this group felt like this was just a natural process. This was going to happen because we love our wives. We support our wives. It may be that there are other guys that think this is a great idea, too. They might attend one of their wives’ classes and see how its run and maybe feel like, “Eh, I don’t know if I want to do this.”

So, let’s go back to the question sort of near the beginning where we talked about how our guys’ group is. Snacks were important, but we joked a lot. From what I had heard about the women’s groups that went on, they got down to business. They talked a lot. They shared a lot of anecdotes, and they all have kids. They were talking about a lot of their own issues.

Well, we had the luxury of already being treated by homeopathy from our wives. We weren’t really the “boots on the ground” kind of stuff with our kids on a daily basis. So, when we were sitting down going through this material, we would just shoot the breeze a lot. We would joke about it. We would try to learn about it how we wanted to learn about it. We would come out with all kinds of funny stories and examples of ways you could use homeopathy, and it really helped us to remember it.

Here is a perfect example. We were having a hard time wrapping our minds around succussion and potentization. Somebody in the group started joking, “Well, if you don’t get rid of that original amount, and you keep going up more and more and more and just adding to it, eventually, you’d have, like, a pool of Arnica. Right? It’d just feel like this healing pool.”

And then the next guy is, like, “Oh, yeah! You just jump off the diving board. ‘Hey, I’m going to do a cannonball. We’re going up one potency. Everybody get ready!’”

That made sense to us.

So, we did that kind of stuff every week. It was this really lighthearted approach because maybe we didn’t have the pressure of having to figure out our families’ deepest ills in that session because we knew our wives were already on it. So, it really was nice. I would encourage if guys are going to do this again, don’t be afraid of a different format than maybe you’ve seen the other women do — because we sort of have that luxury.

Another thing I wanted to say — and this is for the men and the women that might be listening — is know your resources on homeopathy. Our local library keeps two different homeopathy books on hand. My wife and I have checked them both out more than once.

Also, phone apps. If it’s inconvenient, there’s a ton of phone apps that have repertories, and Samuel Hahnemann’s “Organon,” and all kinds of materia medicas. They just sort of simplify things in a different way. People may find something that works better for them. It’s in a better format. Maybe they use their phone a lot like I do. My wife hates using her phone. If she doesn’t have a hard-back book, she’s not going to look through it at all. She’s not going to get on a website, usually.

The other thing is the Facebook group — that kind of stuff. Our group started out with … they would text each other and have this text circle with the wives and stuff. And then they eventually started a Facebook group locally. There were times where one person would get on, and they would just get an answer from a random person who happened to be awake or available within minutes. Knowing that is available just adds to, I guess, that peace and that freedom that homeopathy can bring.

Kate:  Yeah. Good tips and information. I loved how you talked about your group being different and how you guys learned. I hadn’t thought about that before, but that is one of the reasons why you would have a “guys only” group.

Neil:  I kind of want to dovetail what Kevin was just saying because absolutely our illustration of the Arnica pool is highly effective. It does clarify, kind of, the process. I’m going to assume that if Danielle was here, and she heard that — and we were joking and kind of making light of it — that might come across as us not taking it seriously. That might result in me getting, like, “a look” or something or being questioned about, like, “This was serious, and you weren’t taking it seriously.” But it’s just kind of, I think, our way of learning and how that might be a little bit different. It did definitely make a complicated subject a lot more enjoyable.

Kate:  You guys should come up with your own homeopathic curriculum and your own illustrations, “The Guys’ Homeopathy Study Guide.” Oh, that’s funny.

Neil:  I think Joette’s welcome to use it if it helps illustrate a point.

Kate:  So, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom of the Arnica pool and so many other things with us. I know I’ve gotten a lot of tips from you guys about just how to relate this to the husbands or men out there, just a way to present this to them. So, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your stories and sharing about your group. I would love to hear about other men-only homeopathic study groups out there. So, thank you so much.

Neil:  Our pleasure.

Daniel:  Absolutely.

Tyler:  Yeah, our pleasure.

Kevin:  Thank you.

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

Thank you for listening to this podcast with Joette Calabrese. To learn more and find out if homeopathy is a good fit in your health strategy, visit PracticalHomeopathy.com

 

 

These Moms with Moxie and Dads with Audacity podcasts are designed to be inspirational, not specifically educational. No Remedy Card is provided.