Podcast 2 – How To Start Learning Homeopathy And Why

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In this podcast, we cover:

1:07 What conventional medicine is great for

4:32 Using homeopathy versus conventional medicine

10:14 Chamomile and its uses

15:35 Poison Ivy: From poison to homeopathic medicine

18:48 Homeopathy is medicine, not supplements

21:30 Hypericum for cuts

25:46 Take advantage of available resources to study homeopathy

I’ve just recorded my second podcast. I hope these podcasts will become a valuable resource in your audio library.

Every two weeks we will post the latest podcasts here. Very soon you will also be able to find these on popular sites like Itunes.

I promise to bring you useful content in my weekly blog, on my community page and now in this new podcast format.

Each podcast will include a new section on “Remedies You Need to Know” designed to help you start treating your family’s everyday conditions right now with homeopathy.

Here are some of the topics we discuss on this week’s podcast:

• Why today’s health care limitations provide strong reasons to learn homeopathy.
• Why you need to re-train yourself in how to use a doctor as an occasion aid and not the first line of defense.
• How to use the Internet as a health resource tool.
• Why you need homeopathy if you love freedom.
• How you can get started by treating acute illnesses, easily and inexpensively and avoid being overwhelmed.
• What is Practical Homeopathy? Why it is important for you and your family?
• What does 30c or 200c on a homeopathic remedy mean?
• Relatively safe: safeguards to follow when making your remedy choices.
• How to get started learning because you will fall in love with homeopathy.

And here are the remedies you might want to add to your medicine cabinet:

• Sore Throat: Hepar sulph 30 or Belladonna 30
• A good cold remedy: Coldcalm® from Boiron (available at Walmart!)

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.

Jendi: Hello! This is Jendi and I’m back again with Joette Calabrese from JoetteCalabrese.com. Today, we want to kind of go back to the basics and talk a little bit about what homeopathy is. Good morning, Joette! How are you?

Joette: Good morning, Jendi. This is so nice doing this together.

Jendi: It is fun. I enjoy talking to you and my family reaps the benefits of it as I reiterate everything that I learn from you, and I’m learning so much because until I talked to you, this was totally new to me.

Joette: Great! That’s what I love to do, is to turn people onto this, especially families.

Jendi: Yeah, and mothers.

Joette: Yeah.

Jendi: I am already like questioning my doctor.

What conventional medicine is great for

Joette: Well, let’s use that. Let’s use that as a springboard. That’s a great way to look at this. I don’t tell people that they should not have a doctor. But I do believe that the mom should be the first doctor. And doctors are great for diagnostics. If you have a lump, you need to know. Is that a cyst? Is that cancer? Is it a boil? You need to know what it is. And without a lot of experience, it would be great to have a doctor that you could go to and say, “Okay, doc, what is this?” And that’s what I love them for. They’re also very good for emergencies. If you’re in an automobile accident, for goodness sakes, you don’t go to a homeopath. You get yourself to an emergency room. And then I also believe that modern medicine is excellent for surgery. I cannot say enough, obviously, about organ replacement and the kinds of surgical procedures and plastic surgery and heart surgery. We might not even have my father today if it weren’t for surgery. So I believe that surgery is very useful.

The problems lie in the degree to which we count on these methods. We’ve got it upside down. What we should be looking at is, “What can I do at home first? I’m the mother. What can I do with nutrition?” Let’s say if somebody has a fever or something, “How can I change the environment for this child or this member of my family? What homeopathic remedies can I use?” And if you’re stumped, then you move on to someone else and look at that possibility. What I don’t like is the idea that we mothers have been “trained” to go to a doctor for every single ill. I think that is far too much dependence on someone whose interest in our lives is not as great as our own interest in our lives.

I think surgery is performed too frequently. There are a lot of surgical procedures that I think truly are superfluous. But when it’s needed, we need it. I think the diagnostics are used too frequently. I think this mammogram every year is silliness. Chronic colonoscopies when there is nothing wrong, I think, is a potentially dangerous pursuit. But when there is something wrong, you need that colonoscopy, perhaps. You need that mammogram, etc., etc.

So I want to just soften the edges a little bit, get this down to the point where we’ve not lost common sense and we’re capable of making a lot of decisions on our own. And thank god for the internet because there’s a lot of great information out there. Now, be careful. I always warn people, “Be careful because there is a lot of erroneous information and there’s also a lot of information that is directed by self-serving sites. And you have to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And so you want to go to places that question the status quo, not who offer the status quo. We already know the status quo. Do we really need to know more? Well, yeah, we might need a little bit more to fill in the blanks, but for the most part, what we’re really looking for here is an objective point of view, and you have to see both sides in order to do that. 

Using homeopathy versus conventional medicine

Jendi: So then if that’s what we use the doctors for, what is homeopathy and what do you use it for?

Joette: Good question. If you need to have a diagnosis, then certainly, the doctors can be very useful for that. But there are a lot of times we don’t even need a diagnosis. My child’s got a fever. Is it viral? Is it bacterial? Does it matter? If it’s normal childhood illness and they’ve got a cold, leave it. So what? So it’s viral. So it’s bacterial. Do we need to know that it’s a streptococcal infection? Do we need to know what kind of bacteria? Sometimes it can be useful, but for the most part, a painful sore throat is often met with a simple homeopathic protocol such as Hepar sulph 30 given every three hours if the pain is horrible, or if the pain is really severe, belladonna.

So these are remedies that we ought to know on our own. And everyone out there who’s interested in this subject ought to consider getting a simple book, taking a course – you don’t have to take my courses, you don’t have to use my books, but they are available certainly on my site, but there are a lot of good homeopathy books – and learn how to treat simple acute issues, and you should own a homeopathy kit. And by a kit, I mean, it’s the top 100 homeopathic remedies that are the most useful for most families in most circumstances. Now, there are thousands of homeopathic remedies. Some say it’s about 3000, others say it’s about 6000 homeopathic remedies that are available in the world today. So when you buy a hundred of them, you’re only going to get a small sampling of what might be useful on a day-to-day level and in a given household. But it’s a very good start.

Jendi: And then the book will tell you how to use them.

Joette: How to use them, absolutely. When to use them, to what degree, how frequently, what potency, etc. And that’s where I am now working. I’ve gone down a different path than most homeopaths and what I had been doing previously for years as a classical homeopath. Classical means that you have to take a very elongated case and you have to look at the entire person before determining the remedy. And I taught that for years, and I used that methodology myself.

But having spent time in Kolkata with the Prasanta Banerji Homeopathic Research Foundation, I have to say that I have learned protocols that are very easily learned by families that make it much easier. So one does not have to go through as many mental gymnastics to determine the correct remedy. It’s as simple as if it’s an ear infection, it’s most likely to be Hepar sulph. It can also be, in some cases, belladonna, chamomilla, or Pulsatilla, but Hepar sulph, generally, is the remedy. And so I call this practical homeopathy. Instead of studying for years, you don’t have to go as deeply with it as that and you can simply look at, “Oh, this is the disease. Oh, this is most likely the remedy that will act.”

Jendi: And you can kind of get your feet wet a little bit. Like, “Okay, they have an ear infection. I’m going to treat it with this.” But you don’t have to feel like overwhelmed that you’re going to throw out every medicine right away.

Joette: Every medicine, you mean, conventional medicines?

Jendi: Yes.

Joette: Since I’m not a doctor, I’m mostly an educator, and I do work with people one on one but my goal is always to educate and to teach people how to do much of this themselves, my goal is never to tell someone to get off the drug. I never said that. That would be injudicious. If it’s something that is not a drug that’s being taken daily, let’s say it’s Tylenol – we were just talking about Tylenol and children having fevers – the comfort level with the amount of knowledge that someone has in homeopathy will determine how soon you get rid of this or that, or whether or not you ever get rid of it.

In raising my kids, I had learned just enough homeopathy when my first one was a newborn, and that was 27 years ago. And up until that time, I had gotten rid of a lot of the drugs that I had been taking all during my pregnancy. And before that when my husband and I were first married, I had gotten rid of Tylenol. I found that Tylenol caused more trouble. I had gotten rid of these products. I actually was taking a product that had codeine in it almost every day for headaches. I threw that out. And you do it as it’s called for. You say, “Oh, well, I know how to deal with a fever for my child.” “Oh, I know how to deal with pain.” And you see it again and again and again. And after a while, the Tylenol expires and it’s time to throw it out anyway.

So when my kids were little, I had herbs and homeopathics in my medicine cabinet. And even through the years, the herbs still hold a place, and some essential oils as well, but the bulk of my methodology has been through homeopathy because in my estimation, after using all three of those methodologies, I’m going to say homeopathy is far beyond herbalism and essential oils. Still valuable, they still have value, but I always count on homeopathy first. And while I’m waiting for the remedy to act, and sometimes you do have to wait, then I might employ herbs or essential oils. But I don’t use drugs. 

Chamomile and its uses

Jendi: Can you tell us a little bit more why you chose homeopathy over the herbs and the essential oils?

Joette: Yes, certainly. I can give you a perfect example. Let’s say we use the herb chamomile. You pick the flower. And I make herbs. I mean, I make the tinctures, I should say. I pick the herbs, wildcraft them from the property around my land, and I pick chamomile flowers, I pick the little buds, I dry them, and I put them in a jar. And I keep them for making teas out of them. And sometimes, I make them into tinctures which means I’m putting them into alcohol. Now, it becomes more like a medicine once it’s in alcohol. And I let it set there for, say, two weeks. They call it a fortnight in the old botanical books. And now you can decant it and use it as a tincture and closer to what you might want to consider a medicine.

But if a child has difficulty with calming down at night, let’s say they’re crying and they’re irritable and they’re fractious and they might even be teething, that could be perhaps the cause of it, you could give chamomile. You could give chamomile tea and give it to the child. If it’s in tincture, it would be in alcohol so you have to be very careful and you only use a drop or two of this alcohol tincture and dilute it much in water because you don’t want to give alcohol to a young child. And you give that to the child and it might help them fall asleep. And very likely, it will calm them down and help them fall asleep, particularly if you use it day after day.

Now, you get that tincture and this is made in a homeopathic pharmacy, and they make chamomilla 200C which means that they’ve gotten that tincture in a pharmacy, regulated by the FDA, I might add. They take a drop of it and they put it into 99 drops of alcohol, quite dilute now, we’ve diluted it, one time to a hundred; 99 to one is a hundred. So we use C as the delineation. And that dilution now is we’re getting away from the chamomile in its gross form. And then they shake that. It’s called succussion. It’s done in a special way. And they take a drop from that vial and they put it in a second vial of just that drop plus 99 drops of alcohol. Now, we’re at 2C, 2 to the hundredth power. And they do it again, shake it up in a special way. It’s called succussion. And they take a drop from that one and they put it in a third vial of 99 drops of alcohol. Now, we’re at 3C. And they do this 200 times. It’s extremely dilute.

But what it does is anything that is not positive or perhaps toxic – although I don’t know that the chamomile has toxicity; I’m not familiar with it deeply enough to know that botanically – but anything that might be toxic is now reduced and everything that’s curative comes to the fore. It flies in the face of what’s logical. But to be honest, when you think about it, this is mathematical and pharmacological, great intelligence, and it is put together in such a lovely way that when you get to 200C of chamomilla and you give that to the child, now, not only does the child fall asleep – and not because he’s forced to fall asleep but because the body can let go and do what it’s supposed to do – but you’ve eliminated the problems of teething, which means that if you give this for a few nights, the child is not fractious, he’s not arching his back angry and fighting you, he’s falling asleep readily at the right time, not because he’s forced to, this is not a drug, but more importantly, the cause of the illness or the problem or the irritability is most likely as a result of the teething. You have uprooted teething pain and teething problems.

So now, a child who might have teething pains for months, now what you’ve done is you’ve stopped the whole process of it being pathological and you have rooted out the teething issue, along with everything else that’s concomitant. So compare that herbal tincture, that original one, that herbal tea in helping the child calm down a little bit, to rooting out the very cause of the problem using this pharmacological method of great dilution and succussion, and you’ve got a medicine that goes much deeper and is very gentle and just simply stimulates the child’s ability to root out the problem.

I’ve seen it time and again. I’ve seen it in my own children when they were young. I’ve had many students/clients who have reported to me after they’ve used this method. They tried chamomile in herbal form and then they go to the homeopathic and it’s a slam dunk. It works nearly every time. So we don’t have to just use it for teething babies. We can actually use it for a fractious teenager, a 19-year-old who’s getting wisdom teeth, or even a 27-year-old who’s getting wisdom teeth and they find that they’re irritable as well. When they say, “I’m just irritable; everything bothers me; I feel sensitive to everyone; I don’t want to be around people,” then you say, “Well, so how are those wisdom teeth?” “As a matter of fact, my wisdom tooth is coming in.” They take chamomilla 200 for a few days and the whole thing is resolved. It’s gorgeous. 

Poison Ivy: From poison to homeopathic medicine

Now, herbalism then has value, there’s no doubt. But it also is quite limited. See, homeopathy uses not just plants but also minerals and toxic plants. We use poison ivy. We love poison ivy. Now, the herbalist can’t use poison ivy but we love it because what poison ivy causes in the gross form can actually be resolved in the homeopathic form. So if somebody has chickenpox and there are pustules, and they’re itchy, and it’s maddening, and they’re restless, when homeopathy is employed by using Rhus tox – which is homeopathic poison ivy and it’s diluted many times, 30 times to the hundredth power, or 200 times to the hundredth power – it reduces the toxicity and it actually even eliminates to a certain degree the toxicity of the poison ivy and brings to the fore the curative aspect of the poison ivy. So when someone has chickenpox and you use Rhus tox, the Latin name for poison ivy, you will see that the restlessness is resolved, the pustules are not as eruptive, the itching comes down tremendously, and they can get over chickenpox in a shorter period of time.

Jendi: It doesn’t matter if they’re allergic to poison ivy.

Joette: No, it doesn’t. Because there is no poison ivy left in it, pretty much. By the time you get to the 200th potency, 200 times to the hundredth degree, you have eliminated the toxicity. In fact, those who are very sensitive to poison ivy are more likely to benefit from the use of this homeopathic poison ivy.

Jendi: My oldest daughter gets poison ivy much worse than my other two children. But would that same remedy help with her reaction?

Joette: Well, that’s the way most people would think because you would say then you would use poison ivy to treat poison ivy. But remember, homeopathy, hom- in the word homeopathy means similar or like pathology. Not exactopathy; it’s homeopathy. So it’s better to use a remedy that is more closely related to the symptoms but is not actually the absolute same source. So Rhus tox, which is the Latin word for poison ivy, can be used for a case of poison ivy, but it’s not our first choice. Actually, our first choice is Anacardium because Anacardium is not exactly the same thing but it’s close enough, and in the gross form it can cause pustules, itching, restlessness, etc.

So we’re always looking for the similars. Now, it doesn’t mean we never use the exact but more often, we find in homeopathy that similar substances, or the similar cluster of symptoms, is better than the exact. And usually, the etiology is what’s different. And etiology means the cause of the disease. So if the cause of the disease is poison ivy, then that’s a different etiology than using Anacardium because it is not caused from the same reaction to a plant. 

Homeopathy is medicine, not supplements

Jendi: As a mother myself, that I’m looking into this and trying to figure that out, are there cautions that I could hurt my children by trying a homeopathic remedy?

Joette: Yes. It is relatively safe. And what I mean by that is first of all, we have to remember that homeopathy is not a supplement. Again, they’re not herbs in their gross form. It is medicine. There’s no doubt about it. And so it is relatively safe. So what I mean by that is you can do harm if you don’t do as directed. Let’s use poison ivy, for example, and you give your daughter homeopathic poison ivy, and it is not the correct remedy. It’s not acting. And you keep insisting on giving it, and give it, and give it, and give it, and repetitively. You may find that you’ll cause trouble. But that’s because the remedy is ill chosen.

So you have to choose correctly. You don’t want to go too high a potency when you’re first starting out. You want to stay maybe at 6X, 12X, 3X, 6C, 12C, 3C. Stay at those lower potencies and you’re more likely to have better results. And I always encourage parents to start out with the simplest form of homeopathy and that is the stuff that you can buy at Walmart and your health food stores. And those are a combination remedy that’s for teething, a combination remedy that is specific for leg cramps. And they give you exactly the protocol that you should be using once you find that you love this because there are no side effects. There is no danger in terms of side effects. The danger is if used injudiciously. So if it’s used correctly and you follow those directions, you’ll find that you’ll probably fall in love with homeopathy.

Jendi: So when we go to Walmart or a kind of store like that, is it going to say homeopathy on the product?

Joette: Yes, it does say that. It does say that. So you can find what’s called Cold Calm, a great remedy for when somebody’s coming down with a cold. And it’s made by Boiron. It’s one of my favorite companies. And it is a combination remedy, so I believe there may be six or eight homeopathic remedies in there. Many parents have reported to me that this works again and again and again to keep their children from getting colds. This is just to get you started because the more you learn, the more infrequently you’re going to want to go to a remedy combination such as that and you’re going to want to learn how to do this more with your own intelligence involved in determining what remedies are best chosen for your family. 

Hypericum for cuts

Jendi: And so far, we’ve talked about things on the skin or ear infections, teething pain. What if they get like a cut?

Joette: Yes. When there are lacerations and if the cut is very painful, we automatically would consider using something like Hypericum, and that would be taken orally. Certainly, wound management is very important when it comes to lacerations. You want to make sure it’s very, very clean. You want to make sure that you’re pressing so that the blood is coming out because blood cleanses injuries. And truly, it has to be cleaned extremely well. Some people use peroxide. I like to use Calendula tincture. Simple soap and water is a good idea. If the laceration is deep enough, then certainly you would get to an emergency room.

If it’s small enough and you feel you can handle it, then by all means, Hypericum is a great remedy for that. And we would use Hypericum, say, 30. It’s a good remedy to take every 15 minutes until the pain comes down, and then every 30 minutes, and then as the pain reduces even further. We’re always watching for what’s presenting and if the pain is still presenting, then we continue. So every three hours and then maybe three times a day over the next several days. And you can continue with Hypericum even if you end up in the emergency room because stitches are imminent. And you might want someone else to clean it for you because you don’t feel as though you have enough expertise in doing that.

However, I urge parents to learn that expertise. Learn it. Figure it out. Go online. Learn how to do these things. There’s nothing like being able to handle it yourself because what if you get to the emergency room and now, you have to wait four hours. You could have spent that time cleaning it yourself, and that does happen. And with our healthcare system as it’s going today, that could easily be an issue. Not that it hasn’t already been an issue at certain areas of the US and other parts of the world. So knowing how to take care of your own is more important than hoping that there’ll be someone there who’s available to help you out.

Jendi: Plus, there are all those other sick people in the emergency room.

Joette: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Now, you’ve got a laceration that hasn’t been cleaned yet and you got someone sitting next to you who’s got SARS or Ebola or something. I’m being a little fastidious here, obviously, but at this point, I might mention that at this juncture, Ebola has taken two lives in the United States so far so we still are waiting to hear whether or not that’s ever going to really manifest itself here.

Jendi: But homeopathy should be able to find a cure somewhere, right?

Joette: Well, you know, homeopathy has been around for 230 years and it’s been used in clinics and hospitals throughout the world. Millions of people have been using it – doctors, medical schools. There are homeopathic medical schools all over the world, and there were many of them in the United States at one time. And so with all of that data that had been collected and still is being collected in other parts of the world where homeopathy is still institutionalized, there’s a lot of information on just about every disease known to mankind.

Jendi: That’s all the questions I had for you today. Thank you so much. You gave me a lot to think about and implement and try. When you think about the big picture, at least when I do, I get overwhelmed. And when you spit out all these names, you know all this stuff, I’m going, “Ahh!”

Joette: Oh, I’m so sorry to do that to you, Jendi.

Jendi: No, it’s okay because it makes me aware that there is so much more to it. But then you bring it back in and say, “Well, get the common cold stuff from Walmart and try that.” And part of me cringes now when I open the medicine cabinet and go, “I know there’s a better way, but I need this right now and I don’t know what to do, and I don’t have the other one.” So if I can just kind of replace one at a time, I’d feel more confident with that…

Joette: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jendi: … and like I’m not going to hurt my family. 

Take advantage of available resources to study homeopathy

Joette: And the way you really learn this is to take courses. I have online courses. I have CDs. I have downloads that people can purchase. You can listen to them on a CD. And they are also covered. We have the text in print that can be downloaded so that you could study it. That’s the way you learn this stuff. And as you become more attuned to it and you deal with the issues that your family suffers from most, then you gain more confidence. So if there’s a family that gets colds frequently, that’s the area where you need to spend your time learning. You want to know those remedies. You want to have them on hand. You want to know how to use them, what potency. And all of that is all taught in my courses and other books as well, as I said earlier. There are many sources of good books for especially acute issues available on Amazon, etc.

Jendi: Thank you so much.

Joette: Yeah, you’re welcome. My pleasure.

Jendi: I will start figuring out what new books to put in my library.

Joette: Yeah, great. Okay, Jendi.

Jendi: Yours are on Kindle, too?

Joette: No, I don’t have any on Kindle. My books are actually not on Amazon. We’ve not set it up that way because we’ve set them up more as courses. But all of them are on my website. If people to go Products, they can click on them, and we have a first aid CD, and we have a CD on how to raise a drug-free family, a whole course on how to raise a drug-free family. And that includes DVDs and information such as that. I also talk about foods that families should be considering on a day-to-day basis. Secret Spoonfuls is the name of that one. I’ve got another one, a segment of homeopathy that’s very easy to learn. So I try to make it as family oriented and as simple to learn as possible.

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 and schedule a free 15-minute conversation.e herself.