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IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

04:19    Plantar Fasciitis

07:51    Symphytum 200 and Rhus tox 30

15:28    Celiac disease and Crohn's disease

20:43    Detached retina

22:02    Blood poisoning

 

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

 

The Weston A. Price Foundation

A Materia Medica: Practical Homeopathy® for Busy Families

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

The Survivalist Guide to Homeopathy

Mindful Homeopathy:  Practical Protocols for Mental and Emotional Conditions 

Joette’s blog posts

Joette’s podcasts

Joette's Facebook Live archive

Homeopathic Remedy Kits

 

 

 

 

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 77.

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! This is Kate. I am here with another Mom with Moxie today. Her name is Holly. We’re getting to know each other a little bit, and she’s fantastic. I think you guys will love to hear from Holly and the things that she’s doing with homeopathy. So, Holly, welcome!

 

Holly:  Hi, Kate.

 

Kate:  Thank you for being here, taking time out of a busy family weekend to do this. So, thank you.

 

Holly:  Thank you so much for having me. This is exciting!

 

Kate:  I’m super-excited to get to know you. So, tell us a little bit about yourself, Holly.

 

Holly:  Well, I am a somewhat stay-at-home mom. I home school my 13-year old son. I do marketing and communications for our family business. I have been working with homeopathy off and on for about ten years but really only seriously the last few years — maybe three years.

 

Kate:  But you’ve known about homeopathy and used it for actually a very long time. You started to use it anyway, right?

 

Holly:  Yes. Yes, I did. Actually, I came across it … we had a tragedy in our family. We lost my stepdaughter to cancer when she was ten years old.

 

Kate:  Oh, my goodness!

 

Holly:  It led me on this discovery of alternative medicine, therapies, diet, nutrition. Jordan Rubin, his book, “The Maker’s Diet” … I read … mentioned the Weston A. Price organization, so, I started reading a lot of their information. That’s actually how I found Joette and some of her early information that she had. Again, this was about 12 years ago, I guess.

 

Then I purchased a homeopathy kit after reading some of Joette’s blog posts and articles that she had published with the Weston Price organization. I didn’t really know how to use it. At that time in my life, I was so busy and absorbed with a toddler. I would just read a little here and there, and I didn’t educate myself enough. So, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and so, I would just use it here and there.

 

Thankfully, my son was really healthy. We didn’t have a lot of occasion, I guess to use it. So, it kind of went off on a shelf, got dusty, and I forgot about it for a long time.

 

Kate:  You seriously forgot about it?

 

Holly:  Well, I knew it was there, but it almost overwhelmed me, I’ll be honest. Because he would get the flu or a couple of little things like that, but I would try it. And I really only understood the classical approach at that time — even that, I barely understood. So, when you see a list of 15 possible remedies, and you’re supposed to analyze your 2-year-old’s emotional state and all of these different things, it seemed impossible to me — or very daunting, I should say that. So, I didn’t have a great success with it and hadn’t really tried to use it a lot. Like I said, I just kind of set it aside, and it would just be in the back of my mind.

 

Kate:  I understand what you’re saying, Holly, because when kids are young, they can’t answer your questions. In classical homeopathy, you really have a lot of questions that you could ask them that would be helpful for you to choose the right remedy. So, when kids can’t answer those questions, it makes it a lot more difficult, I think.

 

Plantar Fasciitis

 

Holly:  Yes. That’s how I felt. So, I was just intimidated by it. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe that it worked. I just thought, “This is probably too much for me right now.”

 

I had already, at the same time, was delving into learning about nutrition and essential oils and herbal remedies and decided that maybe that was easier for me. So, I spent many years really using oils and making a lot of things from scratch, tinctures and salves, and focusing on that area.

 

Again, the homeopathy was in the back of my mind, but I just never really went back to it. Occasionally, I would get an article or a blog post from Joette and skim through it, but it didn’t quite resonate with me yet.

 

It wasn’t until I had plantar fasciitis. I had started working out. I am not an athlete. One of my friends dragged me to CrossFit one day. I said, “Okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to really give this my all.” Well, I got plantar fasciitis. So, here I am trying to get really fit, and I can’t do anything. I look even more pathetic. I mean it was really funny.

 

The trainers were awesome. They tried to help me. Then I was doing all these stretches and different therapies and wearing a special brace at night and this sock during the day and icing it. You name it, I was trying it … different supplements for inflammation. Nothing works. I would rest and not do anything for days and just think maybe that’s it. Nothing helped.

 

I broke down and even went and saw a podiatrist and got a steroid injection which at that time I knew was not an ideal thing, but I was desperate. I thought, “Okay, I’ll just do this once.” Well, it didn’t do anything, nothing, zero. Maybe it helps some people. It did nothing for me. So, I thought, “Oh, I can’t believe this.”

 

It just happened that in my email was a blog post from Joette about treating … I think it was actually tennis elbow was maybe the focus of the article she wrote … but she mentioned plantar fasciitis in it. So, I thought, “Oh, I need to try this. I’m going to get out my kit.” I didn’t even have the exact potency at the time that was recommended. But there were two. It was mixed or two remedies, and I didn’t have the exact potency of the one, but I thought, “Well, I’ll just use what I have here.” So, even using that, it was probably two, maybe three days, and it was completely gone. That was again three to four years ago, and I’ve never had it again.

 

Kate:  Two to three days is super-fast!

 

Holly:  I know. It actually spoiled me. I’m glad it happened that way because I’m someone that likes to see results. I mean, we all do, right? A lot of us don’t have the patience we need, myself included. I needed to see results, and I did. So, I really thank God for that because, you know, I’d been praying actually about it: “I want this to be taken care of so I can attend to my physical health.”

 

So, it was amazing. So, I recommended this combination to a lot of people, and I’ll say, “Okay, it may not happen that quickly for you. So, don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t.” But it did, and it was amazing! Honestly, for acute conditions, I have found homeopathy to be so fast acting most of the time. I mean, I know that it’s not always, but it’s amazing to me.

 

Kate:  I feel like when you get the right remedy, it’s generally pretty fast acting especially with acutes.

 

Holly:  That just built up my confidence in it then, and I was totally astounded! I shouldn’t have been. Again, I shouldn’t have been, but I was astounded.

 

Symphytum 200 and Rhus tox 30

 

Kate:  I know that there is a blog post that Joette did that’s called “Homeopathy for Plantar Fasciitis.” Did you use the remedies listed in that blog post; do you know?

 

Holly:  I did. It was Symphytum 200 and Rhus tox 30 mixed, and I took it twice a day.

 

Kate:  So, after your pain went away, after the plantar fasciitis went away, did you keep taking the remedy for a little bit yet, or did you stop right away?

 

Holly:  I took it probably for another day or two. I cannot recall now, but I stopped because I think Joette was pretty clear in the post. It’s like with anything. Once it’s healed, you stop taking it.

 

Kate:  Then you’ve never had that again?

 

Holly:  Never again, yeah. I must admit, I’m not doing CrossFit anymore.

 

Kate:  That was it. That ended your CrossFit career.

 

Holly:  Well, I kept going for a while after that, but I decided it wasn’t for me.

 

Kate:  Oh, gosh, that’s funny.

 

Holly:  So, Kate, that’s actually one of my favorite combinations. I feel like I’ve used that the most and recommended that to people the most, and they’ve had a lot of success with it: the Symphytum and the Rhus tox.

 

One really fascinating … at least to me … example is my husband hurt his knee. He had jumped out of the back of a truck and landed on concrete and just landed poorly on that knee. It had probably gone on for a couple of months that he had pain. So, he was going to a trade show. We were going to be doing some site seeing, and we knew we’d be doing a lot of walking. I said okay, “You’ve got to do something about this.”

 

I thought, “Maybe we should try this combination. It worked so well for me.” So, he started taking it, and he’s a pretty disciplined person. He was taking it twice a day. I didn’t think much of it. (This was about a week before we left.) We were walking around at an amusement park, and I looked at him, and I said, “How’s your knee?”

 

He said, “You know what? It doesn’t hurt!”

 

I said, “Okay, that’s awesome!” He’d had this for months, and it didn’t hurt anymore. I said, “Well, you can stop taking that. You don’t have to take it anymore.” It was that great. So, it was just completely healed.

 

Again, the thing that is just really interesting to me is that my husband had a compound fracture, a broken bone in his wrist when he was ten years old. As the years had gone by, he has felt more pain in that — you know, obviously arthritis of some kind. At night, he would just kind of rub it. He’d lie there in bed and just say, “Oh, you know, my wrist just hurts. It’s okay.”

 

I noticed this was happening with increasing regularity over the last few years. Nd a he took that remedy, I realized that he wasn’t rubbing his wrist anymore at night. Again, same kind of thing, I said, “Wait, does your wrist hurt anymore? I don’t notice you rubbing it at all.”

 

He said, “You know what? It doesn’t! I can’t remember the last time that it hurt.” That was all we had done — or he had done — you know, is take that. So, that was absolutely amazing! Basically, a 40-year old injury … I’m assuming it was arthritis.

 

Kate:  I bet he was pretty impressed as well.

 

Holly:  Yes. I mean, it was one of those things that honestly, I was so new to working with homeopathy, we weren’t even trying to address that. I don’t know that I would have thought you could at the time. It wasn’t even a goal to heal that pain there.

 

Kate:  Right. It seems like that happens to me a lot with homeopathy.

 

I’ve been taking a combination of Symphytum and Calc phos that Joette recommended for me to help strengthen my bones, and my jaw, my teeth because I’ve been having some issues with my teeth. Prior to starting that, I was having a lot of arm pain from some broken bones that I had in my arm. I just realized — actually in the last week — that that pain that I’ve had for a while now is gone. I think it’s those remedies because that’s the only thing that I’ve changed.

 

So, yeah, Symphytum is super-powerful.

 

Holly:  You know, it’s that same combination that helped another family member of mine who’s having a lot of issues with her hip. It caused a lot of pain when she was walking and such, and that helped her remarkably. I think Symphytum is actually the homeopathic form of comfrey which is known as “knitbone.” So, it’s very interesting then that it would work that way homeopathically.

 

Kate:  So, yeah, it makes sense. While we were talking, I pulled out Joette’s materia medica, and it says also that it’s the number one remedy for traumatic injuries to the eyes. I always forget that. It says, “It can be also beneficial to other areas of the body after having suffered from blows, bruises, or broken bones.” So, it’s for bones, sinews, tendons, joints, and eyes.

 

Holly:  I did not realize that about the eyes either.

 

Kate:  I love reading materia medicas because I always learn so much, and I read about remedies. But I have a hard time then remembering it. I don’t know about you.

 

Holly:  I know. I have to write it down. In fact, it’s funny. After I had a few of these successes, I thought, “Okay, this is really powerful stuff. This is more powerful than any of the essential oils I used, any of the herbal tinctures. I mean, I have to learn more.” So, I just spent every free minute I had reading and just digesting Joette’s blog posts and taking notes.

 

Celiac disease and Crohn's disease

 

Okay, so, you’ve had some pretty amazing things that you figured out on your own that I want people to know about. Tell us a little bit about your stepson.

 

Holly:  Well, my stepson is 19 years old. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with Celiac and then Crohn’s disease. When he was first diagnosed, the treating physician said, “Listen, there is nothing that you can do — diet, supplement-wise, alternative medicine — to help this. There’s nothing. You just need to take these drugs,” which were … I believe the one was … it’s an immunosuppressant, potentially chemotherapy drug, a rheumatoid arthritis drug.

 

And, I said, “I know that’s not true. I know too many people who have been healed of these conditions or are managing them through diet, supplementation, alternative therapies. So, I think we need to at least explore those options.”

 

So, bless his heart, he was all for it. We were able to get his symptoms under control and turned around in a very short period of time. We were doing blood work. We were working with a practitioner. We were able to see drastic results in a six-week period of time. Through that, again, I was still relatively new to homeopathy. So, I did not introduce the Crohn’s protocol. I don’t think I probably even knew it existed. But I did give him things sporadically for different symptoms initially. So, of course, you have diarrhea, bleeding, stomach upset.

 

Then, probably his main thing that came back after we controlled all of those things originally was joint pain. He was in the marching band, and he was a drummer, and he would have a lot of pain — his hands, knees, ankles, elbows, wrists, everywhere. So, I put him on that combination remedy again: the Symphytum 200 and Rhus tox 30. He took Rhus tox 200, as needed, if it was really severe.

 

He was skeptical to say the least at first. What are these little, white pills that I’m going to be taking? He came back and he said, “This is amazing. I’m telling my friends about it.”

It worked!

 

I laughed because I said, “Okay, if this was placebo effect, I’ll take it! Whatever!” I didn’t think it was placebo effect, but you know what some people say about homeopathy.

 

But it’s great. This kid just didn’t want to be in pain anymore. So, he was very thankful, and he took that throughout that season, and then he was done. He actually hasn’t had joint pain since. That was just initially right after his diagnosis. Then, as I have learned more about homeopathy … I mean, he’s only had three flare ups in three years.

 

Kate:  Oh my gosh! Wow! So, what you’re doing is you’re just treating the acute symptoms?

 

Holly:  Well, that’s what I was doing initially. I wasn’t aware there was a Crohn’s protocol. I hadn’t really searched for it because we were managing individual symptoms. He was doing so well that it almost didn’t seem like there was any need to do anything else. Over those last few years then, I took Joette’s “Gateway to Homeopathy” course. I took her “Survivalist” course, and I took the “Mindful Homeopathy” course. So, I obviously learned, “Okay, there’s something we can do for this.”

 

Kate:  So now that you learned what the remedies were for Crohn’s disease, then you started implementing those?

 

Holly:  Yes. So, we added in those remedies, and Bovista to address the gluten intolerance, and a couple of others to uproot the Crohn’s. So, he’s doing very well. We’re excited to have him not have this be a lifelong issue.

 

Kate:  Yeah. Is he on diet restrictions right now?

 

Holly:  Well, he is. He doesn’t eat gluten. He eats what I would call just like a very clean diet. So low carb, low sugar. We try to make it nutrient-dense. So yes, he wants more freedom with what he eats. I think we still need to eat healthy, but we shouldn’t be in bondage to that.

 

Kate:  Right, right.

 

Holly:  He should be able to eat something not-so-clean every once in a while and feel okay. And he does, again, every once in a while. But we don’t want him to have any issues with it.

 

Kate:  Right, exactly.

 

Holly:  Freedom! That’s what homeopathy gives us. It’s so amazing.

 

Kate:  I hear that over and over again actually, when I do these interviews, that they have now freedom: whether it’s freedom from the bondage, like you said, of restrictions because you’re dealing with health issues, or the freedom of knowing that you can do something about whatever comes your way. You have some tools that you can use, and that are going to help you. So, you don’t have to have the fear, so that that gives you the freedom.

 

Holly:  Yes, this whole process has really empowered my family — every one of us because we all rely on homeopathy. So, that’s a wonderful thing.

 

Detached retina

 

Kate:  There is another example of where you’ve used homeopathy with your husband. Do you know what I’m talking about?

 

Holly:  You’re probably talking about his detached retina.

 

Kate:  Yeah, tell us about that.

 

Holly:  He had a detached retina and had to go into emergency surgery. After that, I was so thankful that I had prepared ahead of time and had what I consider like “emergency remedies” — some higher potencies of things. So, I was able to use that to completely control his pain post-surgery. He had a prescription for a narcotic, if needed, but we never filled it, and he never needed it.

 

Someone was joking with me and said, “Are you sure that he just wasn’t gritting his teeth and bear?

 

I said, “No. He absolutely would have said …”

 

In fact, he did a couple … and that’s how we knew. We went by his pain level to say, “Okay, you need another dose now.” It was amazing to see how that increased. The time between dosing increased. It was just exactly what Joette talks about all the time. It was kind of neat to see it happen almost predictably. So, it was really good, but it was amazing to see how powerful that is.

 

Blood poisoning

 

Kate:  Then there was an issue of blood poisoning. I don’t know the story, but I know you wrote it down.

 

Holly:  I did write it down. I have to say it wasn’t diagnosed as “blood poisoning” by anyone. However, it certainly presented like it was from my knowledge of it.

 

But my 13-year old is in karate. He got a rug burn, a mat burn or something like that, and didn’t tell me about it (on the top of his foot) and just kept putting a Band-Aid on it. So, you pick up all sorts of bacteria when you’re working on the mats barefoot.

 

So, one night around 9 o’clock at night, he comes into my room, and he’s getting ready for bed, and he said, “Mom, my foot really hurts.” I looked, and there is this huge wound at the bottom of his big toe. It’s red, throbbing, hot. You could tell it’s just pus-filled.

 

Kate:  Oh!

 

Holly:  His toe is swollen, and he could barely bend it. I said, “Oh, my goodness! Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

 

I go back, and I thought, “Okay, first thing to do, I need to clean this.” So, I go to get the things to take care of that. When I come back out, he’s sitting on my bed. I looked closer in the light, and it looks like there is a red line coming from the wound going halfway of his foot.

 

Kate:  Oh no!

 

Holly:  I kind of freaked out, and I said, “Wait. Did you just scratch your foot?” Because where he was standing before, I didn’t see a red line. “Did you do this? Did you just make this mark?”

 

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

 

So, I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is blood poisoning.” You know, I’m not going to mess around. Right? I’m thankful to have things to treat my family safely and effectively. But we will certainly go to the doctor or the ER, if necessary. But I had to make this debate at 9 o’clock at night: “Do I need to do this?”

 

I actually had these thoughts of, “Is this going to be the first time that he will have to be on antibiotics?” Because he’s never had to take an antibiotic his entire life, and I thought, “Oh my gosh!”

 

I remembered again another post that I had seen on Joette’s site about someone with kind of similar origin. They woke up with pain on their hands and had a red line. They put an ink mark at the end of where the red line was to see how it’s progressing. So, I was thankful to have that knowledge from that. I did the same thing. I put a little ink mark across where the line was, and I just started aggressively treating it with Pyrogenium. I didn’t have the 200 which is what the blog post mentioned, but I had 30. So, I did that, and I alternated it with Hepar sulph 200. Every couple of hours, poor kid, I kept waking him up because I wasn’t going to take any chances with this.

 

The next morning, he got up. It wasn’t worse. I couldn’t quite tell if it was a little better — possibly. He thought maybe the pain was a little less. Again, when you ask a 12-year old to tell you, you know, “Give me a number from 1-10,” it wasn’t very exact. But by early afternoon, which is kind of the amount of time that I gave myself to say whether or not I would go and do something else about this, the pain was drastically reduced. The swelling was down. The pus was coming out in a manner that looked like healing. He could bend his toe, and the line was going away.

 

Kate:  Wow!

 

Holly:  So again, I don’t know why I continue to be amazed because I know how amazing homeopathy is, but when you just see it right before your eyes like that, I thought, “Oh, my gosh!”

 

Again, you just feel so empowered. Five years before that, I would have been (if it was in the evenin) at a StatCare place or an emergency room, or certainly the next day at a physician’s office. But I didn’t have to do that!

 

Kate:  Isn’t that so exciting?

 

Holly:  Yeah, very exciting. I could tell you — my friends and family probably get sick of me telling me about it, but … I have a lot of them on the bandwagon, too, now. So, that’s fun.

 

Kate:  They’re, I’m sure, thankful that you know, because who did they call when they have a problem.

 

Holly:  Well, it’s true. I have been very intentional about keeping a diverse number of remedies and the potencies at my home. I do try to share them with people because, again, sometimes things happen, and if you’re not prepared, or you … it can be a decent investment to get such a broad array of remedies. So, I purposely have tried to keep that.

 

In fact, I have another dear friend who has gotten really interested in homeopathy. She’s taken a class of Joette’s and reads all of the blog posts and listens to the podcasts. She has the same things. So, we try to say, “Okay. Well, I may not have this, but you make sure you have it.” So, we know that we can rely on one another, if needed.

 

Kate:  Yeah, that’s really great. Good idea. I mean, it is a rather large investment. But if you think about what you would spend going to the doctor or just … not even the money but just the peace of mind and knowing that you can do it.

 

Like your son’s foot, he didn’t have to go through the antibiotics and then the gut issues that would follow from the antibiotics.

 

Holly:  Yes. I am very, very thankful that I have this resource. I would say we have a lot of tools at our disposal. So, I like to make sure that I have them with me. I have my toolkit built up in my house and ready to go in case of emergency.

 

Kate:  So, what advice would you give people who are listening to this podcast?

 

Holly:  I hear a lot of people say, “Oh, I can’t afford to take one of the study courses right now. I can’t do that.” While they’re extremely valuable, I would say there is so much free information that you can glean from the blog posts and the podcasts. I would say start with that, and again, do it in your spare time because it is worth it.

 

Kate:  And the Facebook Lives, too.

 

Holly:  Yes, the Facebook Lives.

 

And then buy a kit. Just buy a kit to be prepared because that’s actually the biggest thing that I hear. Someone will text me or call me and say, “What should I do in this situation?” Or, “What do you know about this? What have you read about this?”

 

Often, they don’t have the remedy that’s needed. So, I would just say, “Just get the kit.” There’s that 100-Remedy Kit that’s kind of that starter kit that Joette recommends. Just get that kit, and then you have a starting place. Even if you don’t have the exact potency or something, you have a starting place.

 

That was the best investment that I could have ever made. That was 12 years ago, and I’m still using that kit. I used it earlier today, in fact.

 

Kate:  Yeah. People ask quite often, “What kit do I get or what do I purchase?” That is a great starting point, that 100-Remedy Kit.

 

Well, good, thank you so much, Holly, for taking the time out to share with us your success stories with homeopathy. You’ve had some pretty incredible ones. So, thank you for encouraging us and taking the time to share.

 

Holly:  Thank you so much. You are a blessing. Joette is a blessing. I’m very grateful for the knowledge you share and for the time you all invest and giving us so much free information.

 

Kate:  Yeah, Joette is incredible with that. If you cannot take a course right now, just go through the blog posts, the Facebook Lives. There is so much information out there. Get the remedies, and then you can be prepared.

 

Holly:  Yes, be prepared! It’s a wonderful feeling!

 

Kate:  Yeah.

 

Holly:  Thank you, Kate. I had a great time talking with 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 and nutrient-dense nutrition. Joette’s podcasts are available on iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Stitcher, iHeartRadio 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 for your health strategy, visit PracticalHomeopathy.com.

 

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