Joette Calabrese Podcast

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

02:52    Journey to Homeopathy

14:32    Homeopathic Success Stories

20:45    Where to Get Information for the Protocols

29:00    Advocacy

33:15    Words of Wisdom

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Joette’s Study Group: Find your new Study Group Friends Facebook page

Allergic?! Escape Allergies, Sensitivities, and Intolerances, with Homeopathy.

Prenatal Preparation with Homeopathy: The Best Gift You Could Give!

The Secret Life of a Colicky Baby

Americans for Homeopathy Choice

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 109.

Joette:  Joette Calabrese here, folks. I’m happy that you’ve joined me for my podcast today. You’re in for a treat. From my virtual classroom, I’m privileged to see how homeopathy is transforming lives all over the globe. Their successes inspire me. They’re glorious and powerful, and I can’t keep their triumphs a secret. I want you to hear the excitement my students experience, too. So, you can be inspired by their unique stories.

With the help from Kate, my reporter, I bring you a podcast series I call, “Moms with Moxie.” Sometimes we even interview “Dads with Audacity” or “Teens with Tenacity.” See how regular mothers and others — average folks who love healing those around them — have gone from freaking to fabulous by simply applying what they’ve learned using what I call Practical Homeopathy®.

Kate:  Welcome back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. I’m Kate, and I’m here today with a Mom with Moxie. She is a wife, a mother, homemaker, an educator. She loves her grandchildren. She’s a fantastic study group leader. She’s also an amazing advocate for homeopathy. But we’ll get into that in just a little bit. First, I want to welcome Cathi to the podcast.

Hi Cathi!

Cathi:  Hi Kate, thank you so much for having me.

Kate:  Yes, I’m very excited to get to know you. We both lead study groups, so I feel like I know you from seeing you a lot on Joette’s Find Your Study Group page.

Cathi:  Absolutely. I feel like we’re kindred spirits.

Kate:  Yeah, yes. I’m excited to hear your story. Just to give our listeners a little heads-up: One of the big things that you’ve used homeopathy for that you’re going to talk about is allergies.

All right, so let’s get started. Cathi, tell us a little bit about yourself if you would.

Cathi:  Yes, I am a wife and a mother. I’ve been married to my high school sweetheart for 32 years. I have four children — two married with their own families and two still living at home — and I have four beautiful grandchildren. I’m really blessed they all live close by.

There have been times where one of my daughter’s family lived further away. That’s a really a neat part of my homeopathy journey in that I was able to help her with my grandson with a situation. It was so empowering because we just did a few texts. I knew what to do because of my study group, and I was able to help her help my grandson get better.

Kate:  Awww, now tell us about your journey to homeopathy.

Cathi:  Well, you mentioned allergies. It is kind of funny that my journey to homeopathy was in a large part because of the allergies that run in my family. When I was a young mother, I did my very best to keep my children healthy — to keep my family healthy — but they were prone to allergies. As I said, it is common in my family. My husband has environmental allergies, and all four of my children had allergies.

I remember in the early days when I was a young mother trying my best to use the over-the-counter medications that I knew of to treat their symptoms. What usually happened was I would seemingly treat a symptom, and then a short time later, it would come back with a vengeance. Before you knew it, we’d end up in the pediatrician’s office, and more often than not, they would be on another antibiotic.

As I look back now, I think we were just on an antibiotic merry-go-round. It would be one antibiotic after another after another. What eventually happened was that the symptoms continued to grow worse. We were referred to a specialist — actually a couple of different specialists — one of them being an allergy specialist who recommended allergy shots, among other things. And we did that whole recommendation. We didn’t see any improvement. Probably we saw worsening along the way.

At one point, I remember being referred to a specialist for my four-year-old daughter. It was recommended that she had surgery, and she was scheduled to have her sinuses scraped. That was a big deal! Because being four years old, she had to be put under. Even just doing the MRI ahead of time, they had to put her under so that they could have her completely still to do the MRI.

It just seemed that we were constantly in the offices of the doctors and the specialists with these appointments. Kate, I was so disheartened because at one point after my daughter’s surgery (I think it was probably like the six-week follow up), we went back, and they looked at the MRIs. They gave me the news that the surgery had been unsuccessful, and it would have to be repeated.

I just remember at that point thinking that they did not really know what they were doing. They were making their best effort, but in my mind, it wasn’t helping. It seemed to me that it could actually have been making things worse.

We went back to the specialist after the surgery. It had been six weeks, and we were doing a follow-up appointment. My hopes? I thought that things were going to start to improve at that point. But I was told that the surgery had been unsuccessful, and that it would need to be repeated.

I remember thinking in my mind that they may have been giving their best effort, but it wasn’t helping, and it could very well have been making things worse. It was time for me to do some research and take matters into my own hands.

So, I told the specialist that we would not be having a second surgery. They weren’t happy with me at all. Actually, they made me feel pretty bad about myself as a mother for deciding that we would not continue forward with their recommendations.

But at that point, I just decided I would put all my time and energy into learning a better way. With some help from friends at church and other mommas who introduced me to more natural approaches to health, I was able to learn a little bit about nutrition and natural alternative medicines such as herbalism and essential oils.

That’s where my journey took me in the next stages.

Where we ended up going after a number of years was … I was introduced to the Weston A. Price Organization. It really transformed my thinking about nutrition and food as a means to help. So, I got very involved with learning the principles of the Weston A. Price Organization and scouring the “Nourishing Traditions” book, which is really a textbook/cookbook written by Sally Fallon.

It’s really funny because I homeschooled all four of my children. And at this point, the two older children were probably … I don’t know if they were upper elementary school age maybe even early middle school age, and then I had two smaller children as well. But I remember after breakfast every morning, we would do our lessons. Part of our lesson was to read another few pages in “Nourishing Traditions” so that I could learn the principles of traditional health, and I would be teaching them right alongside me.

My eyes were really opened at that point to a lot of mistakes that I had been making, nd we really did see our health turnaround.

What happened after my children were grown, and two of my daughters were married, and they had children of their own … when my grandchildren came along, they had very severe food allergies. I remember thinking that everything that I had learned up to that point was not enough. I was literally, Kate, I was literally praying one day to the Lord that he would open my eyes to whatever it was I needed to learn to be able to help, in particular, my granddaughter because she has life threatening food allergies. I was just praying for answers.

Amazingly, in a short time after that — and I can’t tell you what the timeframe was, but it wasn’t very long after that — I remember taking notice of Joette Calabrese. I don’t know exactly how she came to me. I think it was through one of my Weston A. Price pages that I followed. But something that she had posted just went off like a light bulb. It really caught my attention when I read it. It said something to the effect that herbs and essential oils were her gateway to homeopathy, but homeopathy trumps them all.

I remember thinking that I had heard of homeopathy, but I had kind of thought it was just home remedies, and that it was one big umbrella for anything natural and holistic. I decided to check her out and find out what she had to say.

That was the beginning of just a life changing journey in learning homeopathy that I’ve had with Joette and since I’ve met her and started taking her courses.

Kate:  Now homeopathy is a huge part of your life from what I’ve seen you doing?

Cathi:  It absolutely is. I remember reading Joette’s blog, going to her web page and seeing that there was a lot of material just there to read — for free — right on her blog. I just started reading everything I could get my hands on as much time as I can devote to it.

Then I discovered that she had podcasts, which I think is really fun, because here I am on a podcast. Who would have thought? But several years ago, when I first started listening to the podcast, I would just put my headset in and go for a walk in the morning or go for a light jog. Joette was my companion — along with you and the other interviewers.

I’ve listened to every single podcast and just tried to absorb everything that I possibly could like a sponge. But it has just transformed my thinking and has just been a godsend to my family in the way that we’ve been able to help ourselves with homeopathy.

Kate:  You started leading study groups. Was that right away after you learned about homeopathy, or how did that come into play?

Cathi:  Well, as soon as I discovered homeopathy, I became super-excited and super-passionate about sharing it with everybody I knew. I had two adult daughters with children of their own. So, of course, I wanted to introduce it to them as quickly as possible. I also have a large family with sisters-in-law and nieces and nephews. I wanted to just share my excitement!

So, really, probably within the first year of me discovering Joette, I took my own study group with another study group leader. Went through Gateway I and just loved it — loved everything that I was learning. It was probably a few months after that that I decided to organize — with my daughters — a study group that we could lead and invite all of our friends and family.

My first study group was rather small. It was mostly just people that I knew. We did end up doing it on Zoom. But it was funny because this is a couple years ago when Zoom wasn’t really “the thing” yet. Not many people that I knew of were using Zoom. So, I had to kind of go out of my comfort zone and figure out how to do this Zoom thing. But we decided that would probably be the most practical way for us to meet.

So, we had a small group that met on Zoom, and we went through the material. You know, every time you go through it, you get more and more from it. It was a just a great experience.

Then I ended up posting on the Find Your Joette Study Group that I was going to lead another one. Then I had people I didn’t even know contact me and say they’d like to be a part of it.

At that point, I decided to charge a small instructor’s fee and be able to earn some income and make it sustainable so that I could continue to take more of Joette’s courses!

I enjoyed it so much that I think the past couple of years, I’ve taught probably four … I say “taught,” but it’s actually leading and guiding a study group. I think I’ve done four study groups a year, maybe five? I’d have to go back and count.

But I’ve done the Gateway I, Gateway II, several times in the past couple of years. I’ve also led an Allergic?! guided study group twice. The reason I decided to do that is because we’ve had so much success with my family using the Practical Homeopathy® for allergies that Joette teaches that I thought it would be helpful for me to lead other ladies through the curriculum. So, that’s been really beneficial as well.

Kate:  Since you’re such an experienced study group leader, I would love for you to encourage those who might be listening and considering leading a study group?

Cathi:  Absolutely, it’s not a difficult thing to do. Whenever I lead a study group, I always encourage every one of my study group members to consider leading their own study group. Because think about all the people that you know that don’t understand homeopathy.

The world needs homeopathy!

We need to get this message out that this is just a gift from God that we have, that we can avail ourselves of. I absolutely think that we all need to be starting study groups. There are so many people that we need to reach.

But I just would encourage them that it’s not difficult — that you’re not the expert. Joette is the expert. You’re just the facilitator. So, when you lead a study group, you’re going to go through her material. And you’re going to help the participants get through the curriculum in a way that’s fun, that is helpful — because it helps keep you accountable but also because you are able to get encouragement from the group and help one another!

So, it really becomes a group of friends, and that’s the way my study groups have evolved. Again, my encouragement is you don’t have to be an expert to lead a study group. Joette is the expert. She’s already done that part for us. All we need to do is just be the guide.

Kate:  You just need an excitement to learn homeopathy and facilitate an environment where others can learn about homeopathy as well. Like you said, you can all research together if you have questions. It’s not that you have to be an expert. So, thank you. That’s excellent advice!

Next, I want to get into some of your homeopathic success stories — of which you have many. Maybe let’s start off if you don’t mind with the allergies because I know that you have a lot of different family members with those.

Tell us some of the things that you’ve done — especially the anaphylactic reactions because I know that that’s horribly scary. My daughter has had them as well, and it’s pretty amazing what homeopathy can do. Tell us what you’ve done.

Cathi:  You’re exactly right. Kate. It is so amazing. Really, the most amazing story that comes to mind is a time a couple years back when my granddaughter (who was, I think, about two years old at the time) was with us on a family vacation. I want to say it was like Fourth of July weekend, and so it was a nice gathering of the family cooking out in the back area and just enjoying some good food and good fun.

Well, we had brought out a special dessert that was being passed around to all the family members. I remember telling my daughter that I was going to run back inside and get her special dessert that was allergy-friendly that she could have. My brother-in-law looked at me and said, “Oh, she can’t have this?”

I looked at him, and everybody who had been listening who knew what was going on, our eyes grew very large. He said, “I just gave her some.”

As we looked down at her, she was already gagging and starting to vomit. My daughter just scooped her up, my son-in-law as well. They were very in tune with her situation. They realized real fast what was going on, and the three of us just ran her into our little vacation apartment.

My son-in-law ran to the diaper bag to get the EpiPen. My daughter and I had her over the sink because she was gagging, and her throat was swelling and closing, and she was crying.

I grabbed my homeopathy kit and grabbed Apis 200 which was in my kit and just gave her a pellet. It probably just went inside of her mouth just to touch the mucous membrane. I don’t even know she actually swallowed it. But it touched the mucous membrane. And Kate within seconds, she started to calm down.

Emotionally, we saw her stop panicking and stop crying. And because it was sweet … and think of a little two-year-old putting something sweet in their mouth … she kind of noticed that it was sweet. She took note of that, and her whole demeanor changed.

Then within just, I mean, seconds, and then minutes, we just saw the symptoms melt away. By the time my son-in-law — I mean, it was just again a matter of minutes — by the time he had the EpiPen out of the diaper bag and ready to use, my daughter said, “Wait, look, she’s okay.”

We just watched her recover. We never had to use the EpiPen. She was completely okay.

To me, it was a miracle!

I just want to say that because of homeopathy — and what I’ve learned from the Gateway classes and Joette’s Allergic?! course — we’ve been able to handle every situation that’s come up like that for my granddaughter.

She is now almost five years old, and she has never needed to use the EpiPen, and she’s never been hospitalized. Even though she has these severe allergies, we believe that they are improving. And any time that she’s been exposed to an allergen, we’ve been completely able to handle the situation. I just couldn’t be more grateful.

Kate:  That’s so amazing. I know myself; I’m so comforted knowing that my daughter also carries that Apis with her at all times. We, as well, have never had to use an EpiPen or go to an emergency room. Thank the Lord! Just so thankful for this medicine and what a great story. Thank you for sharing.

What else with the allergies have you done?

Cathi:  So many. Again, I’ve got a family full of allergic people. It’s given me a lot of opportunities to see successes, and it’s been great.

But I think I’ll mention one of my other grandchildren next. That is my youngest grandchild. He is just a year old now. He was born cesarean section. He was breech.

It’s kind of funny because it was a great pregnancy. My daughter had used Joette’s cell salt regimen for pregnancy, and she had the best pregnancy. It really, really went wonderfully. But just at the last minute when it was time — getting close to her to deliver — he was breech. He had turned, and she used Pulsatilla, and he actually turned and then turned back again.

So, unfortunately, she did have to have a C-section which was a little bit disappointing. But we’re thankful that that is available to us, and it was able to be there for us when we needed it.

He was born just fine. But when you’re in the hospital, you receive antibiotics and different medications. It didn’t take very long to realize that he had some gut issues. Even as a newborn. He was very colicky. He was constipated, and he just wasn’t a good sleeper, and he just wasn’t a happy baby.

We used Joette’s protocol for colic, and we saw a lot of improvement over just a number of weeks. He got so much better and was not as colicky. He was sleeping better, not constipated, and we were very thankful for that.

But what we noticed was that after his digestive issues cleared up, he started to develop eczema. The way I understand it now with the principles that Joette has taught, that very likely whatever was going on in his body was healing from the inside out. Now, the issues that he had were on his skin.

Thankfully, I knew now not to suppress the eczema. Years ago, we would have probably been giving him medications and creams and different things. But we saw the eczema as progress.

Instead, we use the principles that I learned in the Allergic?! course, and we treated the eczema with the practical protocols that Joette teaches for allergies and for eczema. Over a number of months, we saw slow but gradual improvement.

I’m just so happy to say that at a year old now, he has beautiful skin. He’s just doing so much better, and his health is great. That to me is just an amazing success that I understood the principles of healing, and that we were able to use homeopathy to help him along.

Kate:  Yeah, for those who suffer with eczema, homeopathy, and those practical protocols are amazing.

Say there’s someone listening who says, “Oh, that’s a problem that I or one of my family members have.” What advice would you give them as far as where to research or where to get this information for the protocols that you used?

Cathi:  I would say that there is much that you can learn just by searching Joette’s blog. Whatever the issue is, if you put in “Joette Calabrese” and the issue and do a search through Google, you’ll get to things that Joette has written about on her blog. And that may be enough.

For instance, for the colic, that would be something that you could find just on Joette’s blog. But when you get into the chronic allergies, they are more complicated. I have found that the Allergic?! course was really necessary for me to go through and understand in order to be able to address the more chronic issues.

And I didn’t just go through it once, Kate. But I studied it, made notes — actually made my own PowerPoint slides! I had taken other study group members through it. By leading an Allergic?! study group caused me to really deeply go through the material thoroughly and understand it in a comprehensive way so that I was able to use the principles to help my grandson.

So, I would say you should look into the courses that are applicable to your family issues. But study them well and go through them thoroughly because there’s a lot of information in those courses.

You can’t just take a protocol from the course and just start throwing it at an issue. You really, really need to understand the principles behind the methods that Joette is teaching if you’re going to try to take on and tackle a chronic issue.

Kate:  Cathi that is very well-spoken. I love that you’re leading people through that Allergic?! course. I assume you’re the same way … every time that I go through another Gateway to Homeopathy study guide with a group, I remember something that I had forgotten, or I pick up new little tidbits of information. So even though it may have been 30 times that I’ve read that book, I’m still learning things.

Cathi:  I couldn’t agree more.

Kate:  Then tell us about your husband.

Cathi:  Well, my husband has had environmental allergies. We keep those under control pretty well throughout the year by being careful with our diet and just watching what he eats and not triggering too many intolerances.

But in Florida where I live, there’s a couple times a year where there’s a lot of pollen in the air. So, usually in the spring and in the fall, he gets hit with some pretty nasty allergy symptoms.

What I had done in the past was pick a remedy that matched his symptoms classically and address it that way. That brought some help, but I really wasn’t able to uproot it completely.

After going to the Allergic?! course a couple of times over the past couple of years, I really did start to understand just the bigger picture of how to address allergies. So, this last allergy season, not only did I address the symptoms-specific part of his allergy picture, but I also addressed some of the underlying conditions that Joette teaches us in the course.

For example, he was taking a protocol that included Arsenicum album and Antimonium crude, and that was for the sneezing and itchy, watery eyes and the congestion.

But in addition to that, we also did Calc carb 200 every other day. Joette teaches us how to do that in the Allergic?! course. And, we did that for my husband’s allergies, and this year, he had the best allergy season of our lives. We were really thrilled about that.

Kate:  Well, you’ve really tackled allergies, it sounds like, well in your house. That’s very exciting. I know that that’s not the only thing that you’ve used homeopathy for. So, share a few more things if you wouldn’t mind.

Cathi:  Okay, sure. One of the other great successes that I’ve experienced with homeopathy is being able to help my mom who is elderly and has some of those issues of aging — in particular arthritis.

I’ve been able to help her with homeopathy in managing her stiffness and her pain and just helping her feel better with using the protocols that I’ve learned from Joette. That’s been really exciting.

She is one of my biggest fans at this point. She tells everybody she knows about homeopathy, and that they need to take one of the Gateway classes because homeopathy just made her life more pleasurable because she’s not in pain all the time.

Kate:  That’s awesome.

Cathi:  Another way that homeopathy has served us well is, just recently, we’ve had some sickness go through my family. You know that virus that’s going around was pretty yucky.

At first, my daughter and son-in-law got it. Then I got symptoms, and it was no fun. But we were able to use homeopathy to manage our symptoms and to get through it and get well. I’m just so thankful.

I just have to say that homeopathy has just given me peace of mind and confidence. I know I’ve heard Joette say, “Be prepared, not scared.” And I can honestly say that through this whole situation that we’ve all been going through over the last number of months, this past year, I have not felt scared; I have felt prepared and confident.

And when the need arose, we were able to employ homeopathy, and we were able to do just fine. I’m just very thankful for that peace of mind.

Kate:  Oh, I agree with you. Homeopathy does give you that confidence. I always had, I guess, a fear of “What if something happened? What if some illness or injury …?”

But now I feel empowered, and I hear that over and over again from moms. So, I’m just so thankful that homeopathy gives us that confidence?

Cathi:  It surely does. When I didn’t know about homeopathy, symptoms instilled fear and panic in me.

But now, because of what Joette has taught me, I see symptoms as a gift and a guide. It just is my roadmap — just a completely different way of looking at illness. It’s very empowering.

I just remembered that I wanted to share a fun story about how homeopathy helped my family when my daughter’s family lived far away.

I live in Florida. And at one point, my daughter and her family lived in Tennessee. It was really neat one time because she sent me a late evening text with a picture of my grandson. And I could just distinguish the concern and the fear in her text because in the picture he was looking very not happy. He was laying on the couch. He was just red as could be and looked very just lethargic. And like I said, not happy.

She sent the picture and said, “Mom, he’s really sick. Do you think we need to go to the doctor?” Of course, it’s after hours. So, it would have meant finding an after-hours clinic to go to. I know that she was just really fearful and scared.

Amazingly, I had just gone through Gateway I and learned some of the key remedies for illness. It was such a clear picture of the Belladonna fever. He had the red face; his eyes looked really glassy; his pupils were dilated, and it came on suddenly. She said it was a high fever.

I texted her back and said, “Call around. See if you can find a health food store and locate Belladonna. This is a classic Belladonna fever.”

Long story short, they were able to get some Belladonna with no problem. Gave him one dose of it, and she just watched him improve. He just fell asleep. The redness started to subside, and he just got better from there on. He went to bed that night, woke up the next morning, just ran out completely better and just a happy, little boy.

It was such a great feeling to be several states away from my daughter and my grandson, and to be able to help her in that way because I knew what to do. That was just solely because I had just gone through the Gateway course and learned that information.

So, I just can’t recommend enough how wonderful these Gateway classes are because you’ll learn information that you’ll be able to use right away.

Kate:  That’s great that you were able to do that, Cathi. Thank you for sharing that.

I realized that we never got to talk about your advocacy, and what you’re doing for homeopathy. Can we talk about that just for a few minutes? Can you share what you’re doing to advocate for homeopathy?

Cathi:  Yes, I would very much like to do that.

Very shortly after I started learning about homeopathy — and as a matter of fact, it was while I was taking my very first Gateway to Homeopathy study group — I learned that the FDA had come out with some new restrictions on homeopathy that actually could threaten our access to homeopathic remedies.

Without getting into too many details, I learned that the FDA had always protected homeopathy, and actually it was written into the law that homeopathy would be protected as its own system of medicine under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act since the 1930s.

But recently, the FDA had come out with a new draft guidance and some new recommendations that literally could threaten our access to homeopathic remedies.

I could not believe it! I had finally found these answers I had been looking for, and homeopathy could be taken away.

So, I determined that I would do whatever needed to be done to help protect this system of medicine for my family — and especially for my children and my grandchildren. I became involved with Americans for Homeopathy Choice, and I’ve been working with them for the last couple of years in advocating for homeopathy.

Last year, I had the honor and privilege of traveling to Washington, DC with many, many volunteers from all over the country who flew in for an event called Homeopathy on the Hill. We met with our legislators. We went into their offices and met with their staffs and told them our stories about homeopathy and why it’s so important to us.

Since then, I’ve been very active with the Homeopathy Action Team. We call it “HAT” for Short. I’m on the leadership team for HAT. Right now, we are needing volunteers to help us with our congressional advocacy efforts. We are coming out with legislation that will protect homeopathy. So, what the volunteers are doing is meeting with offices all over the country so that they are familiar with homeopathy and understand how important it is to their constituents.

At this point, we’re really excited about the upcoming year and with our new efforts to expand our volunteer force and to meet with the offices of our Congressmen and women. We could use help. We could use more volunteers. So, if anyone is interested in getting involved, you can go to homeopathychoice.org, and you can sign up. There are a number of volunteer positions that you can help with.

But if you would like to work with me and the other volunteers who are part of the Congressional Advocacy Effort, be sure to click on the tab that says, “Homeopathy Action Team” under “Get Involved.” You can sign up to be a congressional lead, work with your senator’s office, or your US representative’s office. We will train you and teach you and help you and hold your hand every step of the way so that you can build a relationship with your leadership and help them to understand how important homeopathy is to so many of us and why it needs to be protected.

Kate:  Sounds like very interesting work that you’re doing. Thank you for doing this, because it’s very important that we still have access to homeopathy. Anyone who is interested in getting involved, I just really want to encourage you to check out homeopathychoice.org.

Let’s finish up this wonderful podcast. We could go on for hours and hours sharing stories back and forth. But before we leave, I would love for you to share any final words of wisdom or tips that you have for the listeners.

I was thinking that maybe if you could share looking back at your journey, and someone who might be just starting out with homeopathy or maybe even someone that’s used it for a while, what words of wisdom do you have for those people as far as how they can learn more about homeopathy?

Cathi:  I think the most important thing I can advise anyone who is interested in learning more about homeopathy is to read Joette’s blog and listen to her podcasts. Listen to them more than once because there’s a wealth of information, and each time you listen to it, you’ll gain more from it.

The other thing I would recommend is that you join a study group. I think a study group is so beneficial in so many ways. Not only will you go through the material and learn the information, but you’ll have a support network in place who will be there to encourage and help you along the way.

Then I think finally own a homeopathy kit. I think what I did for my family was super-beneficial in that we started out by getting a homeopathy kit that had a lot of the main remedies. Then I purchased a cell salt kit for each of my daughter’s families. They began to learn the cell salts and use those and Joette calls the cell salts, the “Easy Homeopathy.” We go through the cell salts pretty thoroughly in Gateway II. That was a really great way to help my family learn homeopathy and start to use it.

Kate:  Cathi, thanks for your words of wisdom and sharing with us everything that you’ve done and your journey. For those of you wanting to join a study group, I’d encourage you to check out Cathi’s study groups or other study groups. There’s lots of leaders and like Cathi said, it’s a great way to get plugged in — not only to learn about homeopathy but to meet other like-minded people and really form relationships and help one another out. With that, I just want to say, Cathi, thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

Cathi:  Thank you so much for having me, Kate. This has been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

In these podcasts, I focus on those students of mine who have already tunneled in and learned how to take care of themselves, family, friends, and pets, and even livestock using homeopathic medicine. Many of these students began their education by participating in one of my Gateway to Homeopathy study groups. And now, after taking one or more of my courses, they’re well-trained to use my specific brand of homeopathy.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you to follow in their footsteps. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

03:36    Alternative Routes and Other Background History

10:04    Recovery Process

14:57    Headaches

20:04    Dog Story

22:52    Feeling Empowered

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

The Survivalist Guide to Homeopathy: https://survivalmedicine.joettecalabrese.com/survivalist-guide-to-homeopathy/

Allergic!? Escape Allergies, Sensitivities, and Intolerances, with Homeopathy. Practical Protocols to Get Your Life Back: joettecalabrese.com/allergic

The Antibiotic Alternative: Balance Your Bugs Without the Drugs: joettecalabrese.com/aa

Good Gut, Bad Gut: A Homeopathic Strategy to Uproot Seemingly Unrelated Illness in Body and Mind: joettecalabrese.com/ggbg

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 108.

Joette:  Joette Calabrese here, folks. I’m happy that you’ve joined me for my podcast today. You’re in for a treat. From my virtual classroom, I’m privileged to see how homeopathy is transforming lives all over the globe. Their successes inspire me. They’re glorious and powerful, and I can’t keep their triumphs a secret. I want you to hear the excitement my students experience, too. So, you can be inspired by their unique stories.

With the help from Kate, my reporter, I bring you a podcast series I call, “Moms with Moxie.” Sometimes we even interview “Dads with Audacity” or “Teens with Tenacity.” See how regular mothers and others — average folks who love healing those around them — have gone from freaking to fabulous by simply applying what they’ve learned using what I call Practical Homeopathy®.

Kate:  Hi, this is Kate, and I want to welcome you back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. Today is another Mom with Moxie podcast. I have a wonderful mom here whose name is Lisa.

Lisa has a story that I believe a lot of you have as well. If you feel that you’ve tried so many things … You’ve tried essential oils; you’ve tried herbs; and you’re stuck. You just don’t know where to go. You still have issues, and you’re not getting to the point of healing that you want to be at.

I think you’re going to want to hear Lisa’s story because that’s exactly what happened to her. With that, I want to welcome and invite Lisa to share her story with us.

Lisa, so thankful that you’re here today.

Lisa:  Hi, Kate. Thanks for having me.

I have a long history of holistic medicine as well as traditional Western medicine. I went to school to become a registered dietitian, and I worked in hospitals for about 10 years. Then I moved into education.

I have had lots of health problems that started from infancy that continued on well into my 50s.

One of the exciting things that happened to me is when I was at my last legs of feeling like I was never going to regain my health, I heard a summit where Joette was speaking. (And to be honest with you, I don’t remember which it was. I think it was probably around gastrointestinal health.) She was talking about IBS and some other protocols.

From there, I connected with her. Then that was the beginning of the improvement of my health. Without homeopathy, I can’t imagine that I would be where I am today.

Kate:  Well, I’m anxious for the listeners to get to hear more about how you have gotten to that place of healing today and more about your time with Joette. But I want to step back for just a minute and talk about your history and how you grew up — because you have actually a pretty fascinating history with your parents and their interest in alternative medicine.

So, give us a little background here about your grandfather and your mother, and what they did.

Lisa:  Sure. My grandfather was, I consider, a visionary. In the 1940s, he went to Chicago to study to become a chiropractor. Back then, chiropractors were actually part of physiotherapy or what we now call physical therapy.

But he came back to New Hampshire after that training, and he raised my mother and her sister in a more of a holistic manner. So, my mother grew up in that alternative medicine background.

Then when I was young, and my brother was young, we were both having health issues. Mine were related to bowel, and my brother’s were related to chronic ear infections.

She figured out that it was food-related — specifically dairy — and she was having a hard time finding whole foods in the area that we live. So, she decided to open a natural food store. I was seven years old at that time, and I grew up in the health food industry.

One of the things that was interesting about growing up in the health food industry in the mid-to-late 70s and the 80s is that if you went to a health food store at that time, you were thought of as being a “hippie.” I’m dating myself with that term, but a hippie!

What was interesting is the town I live in has federal offices, and from time to time someone would come in to make sure my mother wasn’t selling marijuana in the store because that’s what they thought about the health food industry back then.

But I had all of those experiences working in the store from the time I was quite young. But one of the things I realized at that point was that I wanted to kind of be more legitimized after watching my mother kind of be also a visionary in this field.

That’s when I’ve decided to go the traditional medical route.

I did that for quite a long time. But I always had my alternative roots, right?  My alternative roots never go away. One of the things that … I wouldn’t advertise it because if I said something to a medical doctor or whatnot, that I was afraid that they would not treat me with the same level of respect. But people knew.

I had my own little posse of other employees who would come and knock on the door and peek their head in and say, “Hey, got anything in that drawer for me.”

Maybe it was Rescue Remedy − that was one of my early dabbles in homeopathy-like medicine; or maybe it was supplements or charcoal for gas and bloating or whatever it was. I had my usual pile of things in there.

I can still remember the first time I was dealing with a patient who had had chronic diarrhea (and it’s what we see frequently now — C. difficile — in hospitalized patients), and the diarrhea was endless … going up to a physician and saying, “Would you ever think about using probiotics?”

I mean, this was in the early 1990s. He said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Nowadays, it’s fairly commonplace to use probiotics as one of the mechanisms to dealing with chronic diarrhea. In some ways, I was trying to introduce it, but I didn’t get very far.

Once I left healthcare, I went into education. From there, I started to experience some of my own health problems. My bowel-related issues continued to worsen. After the birth of my last child, I was put on IV antibiotics. That was the last straw.

From there, I started to have such severe IBS that it became debilitating.

I was a dietitian, I knew all about food, right? I knew how to modify all those things. Despite my best efforts — no matter what I did nutritionally — I couldn’t seem to get off the steaming train that was going forward that where my intestinal system was just getting more and more inflamed. It got to the point where I couldn’t really eat very much and couldn’t take much for supplements.

Kate:  In fact, I think you told me earlier that you could only eat about 25 foods.

Lisa:  Yes. I had really narrowed down. Anything that had any kind of fiber in it, I couldn’t eat it. And vegetables!

Again, here’s me, the dietician: I can’t eat any beans; I can’t eat any vegetables; I can’t eat any … no fruit whatsoever — the fruit was the worst, right? My diet was just getting narrower and narrower and everything. I couldn’t even take probiotics; they were actually aggravating it.

Everything that I knew how to try had either worked in the short run and then stopped, or I found that no matter what I did, there seemed to be an aggravation.

I used to liken my health to … I’m sure everyone brought their kids to like a water park where they’ve had the little fountains or the little water things where the water squirts up from the ground. If you step on one hole, then the water comes up somewhere else.

Kate:  Right.

Lisa:  That’s exactly the way it felt like with my health! I would take something, and I said, “Oh, this is starting to make me feel a little better.” And then something else would pop up. It just never felt like I was getting off the hamster wheel with it.

Kate:  That’s a great visual, Lisa. I love that! I bet a lot of people feel that way actually.

I was just talking to my mom today. I said, “I feel like things keep happening in life.”

And to some extent that is just living life, right? Things are always going to happen and pop up, and it’s never where we’ve reached optimal health, and that’s where we stay!

Joette and I talked about that as well. I know she’s mentioned that as well that that is just living life. Things happen.

But I want to hear where are you’re at today, Lisa? Can you eat more foods?

Lisa:  Oh, yeah. I would say I’m at 98% recovery. It’s taken several years, but now I am eating pretty much everything. I still have some slight gluten sensitivity, so the volume of gluten I eat has to be monitored. But aside from that, I am back to eating everything.

Kate:  How long of a process was that?

Lisa:  Well, I would say, for the big shift in my IBS, it took about a year.

The one thing that I’ve learned about homeopathy is that there’s often steps forward and then a step back and then a step forward. So, it’s not a continual linear line. If you look at it through the big window, you see that where you’re at is better than where it was six months ago, but it’s not linear.

I did work with Joette with this. It took us many remedies to figure out what the right combination was that was going to be the difference. It was significantly better in, I would say, a year. And then in another year, it’s probably was where I’m at now. It took a good solid two years to get back to eating pretty much everything that I wanted to, but there were improvements along the way.

I will say after the better part of 10+ years dealing with that, there was — a lack of a better description — there’s a lot of PTSD around it. I became really afraid of food. I became afraid of what the ramifications were going to be if I were to eat that.

So, I was very, very slow at reintroducing things. Perhaps it might have been a little bit quicker, but I would say it was a solid two years before I was feeling as good as I am now.

Kate:  Lisa, you are just imparting lots of wisdom for the listeners today because I feel that our expectations are that once we start taking a homeopathic protocol or remedies, that we should expect a huge shift in two months even.

I love what you said that it’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not just a straight line, linear progression of getting better and better and better. You do have those two steps forward, one step back. I think that is so important to remember, especially when you’re dealing with chronic issues such as food intolerances and allergies. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Lisa:  I agree.

Kate:  Yes.

Lisa:  It does take patience. But the good news was there was enough good things going on, that it encouraged me to stay the course, right? We would flare, and then I would just have to trust.

Sometimes, you just have to trust the process. My system is extremely sensitive even now. I’m somebody who’s likely to aggravate on a remedy when somebody else doesn’t. One of the things I’ve learned is if I feel like something is aggravating, stop and wait, and let it settle out, and then try it again.

That took a lot of time for me to feel comfortable with. My first reaction is to stop it because I’m aggravating. But then the question is, “Should I have continued to take it?” right? But I learned with me, it’s better to stop and reassess. Then try again, and if it happens again, then go looking for another remedy.

Kate:  Oh, good. That’s wonderful advice too: evaluate and try it again. Don’t be afraid to try it again. But if it happens again, then it’s really time to think about, “Is this the correct remedy for me?” I love that. Thank you.

You’ve been healed, for the most part, and you still have a few things you’re dealing with you said. But I want to hear now about some of your family members, because you have some great stories. Your co-workers used to call you “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” Now you are! You’re helping other people. You’re that healer in your community.

Why don’t you tell us about some of the people that you’ve helped, and what you’ve done?

Lisa:  Well, what’s interesting about working with homeopathy is that I always … when someone has not had experience with homeopathy, I have a tendency to just kind of throw out in the middle of the room: “This is going to feel a little bit like ‘woo-woo’ medicine. But if you’re willing to try, then it might help, or it might not (if I pick the remedy right or not), but it’s not going to hurt you. So, are you willing to go with me?”

And because of that … I’ll start with some co-workers first because, honestly, I find treating my co-workers a heck of a lot easier than treating my family.

My family looks at me, and I try and ask them to describe their symptoms, and they’re like, “Mom, get the heck away from me. I’m miserable. I don’t want to tell you where the head hurts,” or wherever it is. Right?

I find picking remedies for myself to be hard. If my family members aren’t willing to talk to me, I find them difficult. But I work in a public health department. So, I work with a bunch of people who are also very health conscious who have no trouble giving me whatever information I need.

Some of my favorite stories actually surround headaches. I know for a lot of people, headaches are tricky to find the right remedy. I’ve had quite a bit of success with that — with headaches — for everyone but myself. I still have one kind of headache I’ve still not figured out how to treat.

But for example, I can go back a couple years. I had a co-worker who had had a really bad cold, respiratory infection, and a headache that would not go away. What I gave her was the Banerji protocol, Sanguinaria and Belladonna, and within 24 hours the headache was gone.

That same remedy has worked for sinus headaches for my mother. That also has worked well.

I’ve given that one to my husband as well who has a tendency to get sinus headaches after a cold. Generally speaking, it’s been pretty effective across the board when I know I’m truly dealing with a sinus headache — you know, something that is related to either a cold or allergies. So, that worked pretty well.

I also recently had one of the same co-workers who has had a history of migraines. About a year ago, we were in a meeting, and I said I’m trying to get an idea where the headache was.

We tried Belladonna, and Belladonna helped a little bit, but it didn’t completely go away. Then of course, off we go into the wild blue COVID hole of never seeing each other right. So, when we got … this is about three weeks ago … I walked down the hall, and I peeked in her office, and the light is off, and she’s got indirect lighting on, and I said, “Oh my God, do you have a migraine?”

She said, “Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you. I have a migraine every three days, the first three days of my menstrual cycle ever since my son was born, which is a little more than a year ago.”

So, I kind of was paying attention to what was going on. Last time she had the headache, in the back of my head I’m thinking Bryonia. That’s what I’ll try next time. But of course, we didn’t have a next time.

I went ahead, and I gave her the Bryonia at this time and within a half hour, she told me that the headache was better. She only took two doses. I gave them to her within an hour. Two doses within an hour because the headache was really bad.

I got an email later that night that she said she was substantively better, and she woke up the next day with no headache. That was day one of the three-day migraines she’d been having for 10 months. Is that uprooting the problem? Probably not. It sounds like its hormonal. It’s probably worth a chronic remedy — a chronic look at it. But for right now, it got her out of that pain. We’ll see how what happens next month when it pops back up.

My last headache story was actually my daughter in high school started to get these chronic, well, these headaches that would show up. It was like a cross between a cluster headache and not quite as strong as a migraine but a little bit like a migraine and would go on for weeks — low-grade headache that would go on for weeks. It was one where as soon as she went to school, she would read. She’d think it would get worse.

I tried a bunch of different remedies. Eventually, I thought, you know, there may be an anxiety or fear component there. So, I gave her Ignatia for those headaches. They went away, and they have never come back. That was three years ago at this point.

Kate:  Wow.

Lisa:  I mean, she’s young, right? I mean, there’s an opportunity to uproot things fairly easily when you’re young. It wasn’t a long-standing issue. It had happened previously six or eight months before.

But yes, she doesn’t get that type any more. But I mean, literally, those headaches would go on for four or five weeks. It wasn’t debilitating, but it was just chronically there.

So, anyway, the headaches have been one of the areas where I’ve had some luck with — even though I know that for others, finding headache remedies can be a bit of a challenge.

Kate:  Yes, those are great stories. I love that. For those of you who may be newer to Joette and newer to homeopathy, a good way to find some information on what remedies you might use for headaches is just to go to JoetteCalabrese.com.

In the upper right-hand corner, there’s a little search box there and you can type in “headache”, and it will bring up all of the blogs and podcasts and articles that Joette has written where she talks about headaches and what medicines to use for those.

So, if you’re new and you’re looking for ways to find what information there is on treating headaches with homeopathy, or some of the remedies that Lisa was talking about just now, that information can be found on Joette’s website. Check that out.

Lisa, you have a dog story that I think illustrates how homeopathy is not only effective in helping to heal our bodies, but it’s also cost-effective. Tell us that story.

Lisa:  I have an older dog who loves to run around. She tore what I know the “cruciate,” I think it’s called, but it’s basically the doggy ACL.

When I brought her in, they were telling us that what we should do is operate on her, and it was going to be $3,000. Of course, she was already 12, almost 13, years old. To me, it didn’t make sense to do that.

I decided that I was going to look around. In looking around, I used the internet largely to get ideas, and there are homeopathic vets that have some stuff online.

I ended up selecting two remedies, Ruta grav and Rhus tox, and I put it in a 6C. For the dog itself, I diluted it in water. What I did is I was giving that to her three times a day.

What was really interesting about it is because I had it in a water bottle, I would shake it. I would do the succussions.  I would shake it. What was fun was that the dog would hear me start rapping the bottle on my hand, and she would come right over, looking for it. I mean, she sensed that that was making a difference. We did give that to her for months.

Then when she was getting better, I think she kind of self-selected when she was done with the remedy because she stopped coming when I was bashing the bottle.

Kate:  Wow.

Lisa:  At that point, I decided she probably had better knowledge about what her body needed than I did. We stopped, and she’s good. I mean, she’s running around. She’s really old. But she’s not running around so much anymore. But she’s not limping. We never had to go through and have the surgery.

Kate:  You talked earlier about those remedies probably cost you about 20 dollars or so (maybe a little bit more), versus the $3,000 to get the surgery, and that didn’t include the MRI.

I love what you said about how that paid for your homeopathic education. Is that correct? Tell us that.

Lisa:  Right. I mean, just having that cost savings meant that I could take additional courses. Three thousand dollars pays for a lot of homeopathic classes. I’ve done several of Joette’s classes. I’ve done the Survivalist class, the Allergies, the Antibiotic class, Good Gut, Bad Gut. So, I’ve had the opportunity to do that, as well as the two Gateway courses, and I believe still I’m well under that $3,000.

Kate:  Right and bought some remedies.

Lisa:  I bought some remedies.

Kate:  Yes. It’s so cost-effective. That’s one of the things I love about homeopathy.

Lisa, would you be willing to share with us some final thoughts or advice that you have drawing from your experience with homeopathy?

Lisa:  Well, I think one of the thoughts that’s been in my mind for the last several months as the world has dealt with this pandemic is how much of a peace of mind knowing homeopathy has given me. While everyone else is feeling victimized, or that some mysterious virus or ailment is going to attack them, I know that I have tools and my homeopathic remedies, and I don’t have to be afraid.

Kate:  Yes, that’s what I hear over and over again from these moms and dads that I interview, is that they feel empowered, and they don’t have as much fear. I think that’s just a great way to wrap this up to know that by learning these skills — learning about this medicine — that it will empower you.

Lisa:  Absolutely.

Kate:  Thank you Lisa for being willing to share your experience with us today.

Lisa:  My pleasure, Kate.

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

In these podcasts, I focus on those students of mine who have already tunneled in and learned how to take care of themselves, family, friends, and pets, and even livestock using homeopathic medicine. Many of these students began their education by participating in one of my Gateway to Homeopathy study groups. And now, after taking one or more of my courses, they’re well-trained to use my specific brand of homeopathy.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you to follow in their footsteps. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

01:21    Side Effects of Supplements, Vitamins and Medications

16:13   Have More Than a Doctor on Your Team

22:09    Sobering Effects from Drugs

33:37    In a Nutshell

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Podcast 23 — Moms with Moxie: Snap! Broken Bone. (the x-ray referred to in this podcast)

Feminopathy: How You Can Correct Female Ailments Using Safe, Inexpensive and Effective Homeopathy

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Joette’s Mighty Members   ‘Want to take a slightly deeper dive and discuss topics that risk censorship on Facebook? – join me on my Mighty Membership site.   Hosted safely on a private server away from Social Media and public membership site’s prying ears.

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 107 with Joette Calabrese.

Joette:  This is Joette Calabrese, and I’d like to welcome you to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. Women and men worldwide are taking back control of their families’ health and learning how to heal their bodies naturally, safely and effectively.

So, if you’re hungry to learn more, you’ve come to the right place. Stay tuned as we give you the tools — and the inspiration — you need as I share my decades of experience and knowledge using this powerful medicine we call homeopathy.

Kate:  Hi, this is Kate. I want to welcome you back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. I’m here today with Joette. We are going to talk about regaining wellness with homeopathy.

But how do we get started? And it’s not what you might think.

I feel like I say that often, Joette: “But it’s not what you might think.”

We’re going to put a little twist on that today and take a step back and look at the whole picture. Tell us what that means, Joette? What are we going to talk about today?

Joette:  Well, the biggest picture that I would like to look at today is the side effects of supplements and vitamins and medications, of course, and how they reveal more than we think they do. If we’re paying attention, we can see aspects of our health diminishing as a result of them.

Kate:  In fact, that might be the very thing that’s standing in the way, and so to speak, “blocking” us from progressing in our healing.

Joette:  You bet. In homeopathy, we have a phrase called, “There’s an obstacle to cure.” I’ve seen it happen far too many times with medications, but I don’t know that people think much about vitamins and certain supplements.

Now, not all supplements. Let me also say that if the supplement is made up of 100% … I don’t know … honey, or made from some ground-up dehydrated vegetables, we’re not talking about that. I’m talking about supplements that have synthetics in them and ingredients that are difficult to pronounce. That’s when I pull back and say, “That’s not such a good idea.”

First, let me say that we can start with meds.

There’s no such thing as a conventional drug without side effects.

Just because you’ve become accustomed to it doesn’t mean there are no side effects. I’m going to say it again: there is no such thing as a conventional drug without side effects. There must be side effects. Otherwise, the drug will not act.

Now, that sounds maybe like it’s flying in the face of logic. But if you’re using something that is of gross substance (meaning it’s not diluted such as homeopathy and then succussed and diluted and succussed and diluted and diluted, et cetera) what remains in the original substance has to have a downside to its upside.

It doesn’t mean that conventional drugs don’t have value. It just means you have to kind of weigh it out. Because if you have surgery coming up, you’re going to have to have, perhaps, general anesthesia. I don’t think I’d want surgery without general anesthesia, but there’s a downside.

The downside is you might have headaches; you might have long term brain fog.

Kate:  Nausea.

Joette:  Nausea, neuropathy, there are many side effects that are associated with general anesthesia. But if you need that surgery, then you just have to accept it.

That’s where I say let’s save those meds for those times — because you don’t know what’s forthcoming.

You don’t know if you’re going to have an accident. You don’t know if you’re going to fall off a cliff or get hit by a Zamboni. You don’t know what’s going to happen in your life … fall off a horse, like you did, and break your arm in two places, et cetera, et cetera. You don’t know when that’s going to happen, so you want to save — if you possibly can — the use of conventional drugs for those times in which they’re truly needed.

What I find, however, is that folks use drugs and take them every day for chronic conditions — sometimes conditions that aren’t even medical, as far as I’m concerned, such as high cholesterol.

I’m sorry, I don’t buy that high cholesterol is a disease. It’s based on the lipid theory, and the keyword here is “theory.” These statin drugs have caused … and from what I have read, and what I’ve observed (and I observe it frequently; I have a very busy practice and a lot of students). I will tell you that what I observe is that folks suffer from these statin drugs just to keep a cholesterol number down.

How do they suffer?

Well, for men, it ruins their ability in the bedroom. For women, it makes them goofy — because we need the cholesterol that our bodies make and good food produces in our brain and in the reproductive organs.

Also, I find (not so much women, I find it in men), they get leg cramps and pains in their legs and weakness in their legs. Many times, they end up in wheelchairs because they can’t function.

If you check what they’re taking on a day-to-day basis, you find out, indeed, often (not always, often), they’ve been taking statin drugs for years.

So, when I take a case or when I teach folks how to take a case, I always urge them, and I remember myself, to look at the entire picture — the entire case. Not just “what do we do for this condition, what remedy do we use?” Then we just use that remedy, and that’s all there is to it.

No, we have to look at the drugs the person’s taking because the drug might be the cause of the condition. If that’s the case, then a more prudent way to approach this is to halt the use of the drug.

Kate:  When you say “drug,” Joette, I think there are times when people don’t think of it as a drug, but it is, indeed, altering their chemistry. Maybe give us an example of that situation.

Joette:  Yes, it’s good point. Because some people don’t think of taking a lozenge, for example, that has estrogen and progesterone in it. They’re thinking of it more as something that you just suck on a couple times a day. But it is designed to affect the estrogen and progesterone amounts in a woman’s body.

Kate:  Or what about like that cream that you applied when you were younger?

Joette:  Yes, yes. Yes, well, because it’s applied to the skin. Years ago, when that whole estrogen-progesterone thing came out on the market, I had a friend who was very involved in studying how we can use estrogen or progesterone as we enter menopause.

I was pretty pre-menopausal. It was good 26-27 years ago when she was studying this. We were all in a group together, studying together. We were studying homeopathy and other modalities. And she came to the group with this information.

She was a physician’s assistant for a naturopathic doctor. She was very excited about this breakthrough of using estrogen or progesterone. It was touted as natural — perfectly natural.

We all took tests, we took saliva tests, and it showed that … it was so long ago, to be honest, I don’t remember exactly what it showed. But I believe, as I recall, it showed that I was too low in progesterone.

So, I ordered the cream through her — through the doctor. It was supposed to be rubbed on the skin, so I did that. I used it for, I think, two or three days, and I went into severe depression.

Now, all of us have experienced depression from time to time. But no, this was different.

This was, “Oh, my gosh!” I couldn’t think; I couldn’t do. I had a small child. I didn’t make meals for two or three days. I didn’t get dressed. In the morning, I didn’t eat. I had a rocking chair in my kitchen, and I sat in the rocking chair.

Thankfully, my parents live next door. My mother came over and said, “What’s going on?”

I said, “I don’t know mom, something really strange. I want to die. I don’t want to be here anymore. I just have to get out of here. I just have to get out of the state of being.”

And it came on pretty quickly — within two or three days.

My mother said, “What? Did you take something? Did you to eat something funny?”

I said, “Well, I put this cream, this progesterone cream on my abdomen.”

She said, “Get upstairs right now. Go shower it off.”

My mother, who never went to college, was a very wise woman. She knew the answers to many things — as many women do, who don’t necessarily go to college.

I went upstairs, and I showered it off. By the time I came downstairs, I felt improved. Now, I wasn’t myself yet. I would say improved maybe, I don’t know, 20% or something like that. But there was improvement.

I said, “Yes, I feel better.”

She said, “Okay, now wash your hands again. Let’s wash even though you just showered. Let’s wash your hands again.”

I washed my hands in the sink, and I kept washing and washing and washing.

Then a few hours later she said, “Go back upstairs, wash it off again. Take a shower, get a washcloth and really scrub it off”.

So, I did it again. I came downstairs and there was an additional improvement.

The word is, it was “natural.”

What’s natural progesterone? I mean, I don’t even know what that is. “Natural progesterone” to me means that it’s got progesterone qualities, or it’s progesterone.

If it’s progesterone or estrogen qualities, then you could say that’s perhaps wild yam or those kinds of plants.

But it’s not actually the substance. It’s not from a plant. It’s synthetically derived. It’s chemically made in a pharmaceutical industry’s laboratory. So, that’s a lot different than natural, at least most people’s understanding of natural.

Back in the ’70s, they were using progesterone (or was it estrogen? Now I can’t remember which one it was), and they actually got it from pregnant mares. They would harvest that and use that in medicine. And then it stopped. I don’t know what happened. So, that would have been natural progesterone or estrogen because it was from an animal.

But if I had not had my mother there, or I had not figured it out, I would have called myself suicidal. If I had gone to a medical doctor, the doctor would have said, “You’re suicidal? Okay, here take this psychotropic drug.”

Kate:  Right.

Joette:  I would have had another drug on top of the first drug. Then the second drug would have caused more side effects.

I, maybe, would have started to gain weight. Then, they would have checked my thyroid and said, “Look at this, your thyroid is low.”

Then I would have had another synthetic drug on top of the second and the third drug, and we would have kept going and going and going.

It’s only when we know enough to step outside of the box and say, “Well, what is that I’m taking?”

I mean, I’m working with someone right now who has very severe psoriasis. One of the drugs that she’s taking, the first side effect is psoriasis.

She said, “But I have, I’ve had psoriasis for a lot longer than I’ve been taking the drug. That’s not uncommon to hear that, but never to that degree.

What drugs do is they get what you’ve already got — your weakest link — and drive it to a deeper state.

Now, the psoriasis, instead of being a tiny patch is blanketing her entire scalp. It’s maddening. It’s itchy. It’s embarrassing. It’s uncomfortable. It’s unsightly.

The drug that she’s taking, I believe, is superfluous.

But I am not a medical doctor. I don’t ever tell people, “Get off your drugs.”

What I do instead is educate them like I’m doing now. Saying, first of all, “If you’re not on a drug, try to stay away from it.”

When I say try, I don’t mean, “Gee, I don’t want to take that, but I’ll take it because there’s no other choice.” But rather, “Gee, I don’t want to take that, let’s find a solution. I will find the alternative.”

If there’s anything I’ve learned in life, there’s always an alternative. No matter what it is!

Even though it’s presented to us as, “this is the only way,” that’s just an opinion! I believe that there is always an alternative.

All we have to do is know that, understand that, and then seek it.

It might mean suffering for a while, but it might be worth it. Because once you step onto that conveyor belt of drug, synthetic drug, synthetic drug, after drug, after drug, it’s very hard to turn that around.

It can be done! I’ve seen it done. It can be done. But it takes a long time. It takes some not just time, it takes a reset in our thinking. With that reset might, also come the fact that that person has to find another doctor.

Kate:  I was just going to say that, that we should talk about how you want to find somebody that’s going to be in your corner and really willing to sit down and take a look at all those things with you, right?

Joette:  Yes, so what you’re doing is when I discuss this with clients, I tell them, “It would behoove you to work with your doctor to see if you can get off of this medication because now the homeopathy is acting, and it’s taking up the cause. As the homeopathy continues to act, then you can back off of that medication, but you need to be working with your doctor.”

But if the doctor believes deeply in that modality, that’s going to be a hard thing to convince him or her. So, now, the client or student needs to disassociate themselves with that particular doctor and find a new one. We’re asking a lot of that person. That’s really asking an awful lot of them.

That’s why for those of you who are not taking drugs or have only been taking one drug, let me give this to you as a warning: that it’s better off not to start in the first place — because it’s not as sweeping a shift in your thinking and lifestyle and way of experiencing life.

But in the long run, the difference between being drugged — taking drugs on a day-to-day basis — and not is night and day. You can see it in someone. You can see it by their activity level. You can see it by the sparkle in their eye. You can see it in their ability to think.

You can see those people. If your eye is educated, you can often see who is drugged and who is not. And it’s a travesty.

I hate to see that it’s happened to so many people. It’s happened to many of my relatives. That’s, of course, when it hurts most — when it’s someone close to you.

Joette:  We were also talking Kate, because you had that pretty traumatic experience when your horse fell on you.

Is that what he did, or she did? Rolled on you and broke your arm?

Kate:  She stepped on my arm.

Joette:  Oh, my goodness. If you folks could just see this X-ray.

Kate:  It’s on podcast, you can see the X-ray right there.

Joette:  That’s right. That’s right. It is. Yeah, it was pretty severe.

Then I mentioned to you — and practically simultaneously with you mentioning to me — that you need to have more than a doctor. You need to have a chiropractor in my estimation. You need people in your court. Then the other person that I think is really valuable is to have a pharmacist on your team.

Kate:  Absolutely! Because the pharmacists are the ones that know about these medications.

The doctors don’t have the time to do all the research about every medication. You had said earlier, Joette, when we were talking, that these drugs … there’s new ones coming out all the time. How can they possibly see their patients and know everything about all the side effects of the drugs?

So, I have several pharmacists, actually, that I call whenever! For instance, my mom might be possibly needing to start a medication for, say, seizures. (Well, we know there’s homeopathy. But you know, we have to work at these things, little by little.)

So, I have pharmacists that are in my corner that I know that I can contact and say, “Tell me all of the side effects.”

But I can look those up myself, too. You have some tips for the listeners on how to do that. What would you tell them?

Joette:  Well, I do have tips. But we still have one hand tied behind our back with this because we don’t have the database available to us that pharmacists have. They have everything all put together, and they can look it up. And they know — they talk to the patients who walk into the pharmacy. If it’s a small enough pharmacy, then it’s likely that they’ve gotten to know what the side effects are just by observation.

But here’s my one tip, and that is when you get a new drug, don’t throw that insert out. Get a micro… (I was going to say a microscope). Get a magnifying glass. (I happen to have one with a light on it. You flick it on, and it’s nice and bright, and it’s got the magnification.) And read the side effects.

The reason you need that magnifying glass and light is because there are so many side effects. They’re tiny. The print is very minute. That font is practically illegible.

That’s one place to start. Don’t ever throw that out. You keep that.

The other is that you go online, and you don’t look up what are the side effects of my statin drug. No, no, no. Instead, you look at what are you experiencing.

Let’s say you’re experiencing pain in the legs. You wonder, “Could it be from a drug or is this just because I’m getting old?”

(Everyone thinks it’s because they’re getting old, but that’s not necessarily so.)

You look up online: “leg pain” or “cramps in calves” or “tendon pain”, et cetera, “caused by statin drugs.”

Now, if you go to the first page, those first entries are going to be the pharmaceutical entries. They have trolls who go through this and lead you to believe that that’s what you’re going to be looking up, and then when you get to the body of the article or the discussion, it has nothing to do with that title.

You’re going to have to go to page two, page three, page four, more likely page four or five and then start looking.

I don’t hear people talking about chatrooms anymore, but that’s the page that’s valuable with people talking about their experience with that particular drug, or with that particular condition related to drugs. That’s where you’re going to get the information.

It’s anecdotal. No doubt about it.

It’s so fascinating because modern medicine loves to disregard anecdotes. But I’m afraid that doesn’t make any sense to me.

Anecdotes are very valuable.

I mean, I know that if I put the key in my car and turn it, it starts it up. That’s an anecdote. That tells me, “Oh, my gosh, look, I’m going to be able to drive.”

Did I need a double-blind test to prove to me that by putting the key in my car, I’ll be able to start it up and drive? Of course not.

Life is all anecdotes.

Are double-blind studies valuable? Of course, they are — because that’s what homeopathy is based on is double blind studies. That’s what provings are.

But on a day-to-day basis, if you’re not willing to read up on the provings of each of these homeopathic medicines, but you use this drug, or you use this homeopathic medicine, you see the results. After a while, if you can step outside of the box — the box usually is your doctor knows best, and this is the drug for you, and off you go. That’s the box we want you to step outside of.

Instead, I want you to think, “The doctor has prescribed this. What other alternative do I have, and how bad is this drug?”

Or, if you are already taking the drug: “I have this condition and now it’s time to find out whether or not it’s actually a side effect of a drug that I’ve been taking.”

So, you’re looking under “leg pain”, “leg cramps”, “pain in calves”; you’re looking for synonyms — “caused by” then the name of your drug.

Kate:  Joette, you have a list — some examples in front of you, I think (at least last time that we talked). And you could tell some other examples of some side effects from some drugs that people usually don’t see.

Joette:  Well, this one everyone saw back when I was a child and earlier. But I’m going to start out with it because it is the most infamous of all drugs that cause such serious problems.

The drug is thalidomide.

If you’re from the ‘40s or the ‘50s or the ‘60s, you might remember that this was a drug that was given to pregnant women for nausea. It was when they also had anxiety, or they felt down during their pregnancy.

What it did was, they delivered babies that had deformed limbs. Some of them had no limbs. Or their hand was attached to their shoulder, and there was no arm. It was often multi-limbed, so that it was perhaps all four limbs, or just two of them were deformed.

I’ve known people who were babies of this drug. So — thalidomide. Of course, they assured these mothers that this was safe. But how do we know that it’s safe until it’s been used for a few years or so?

Kate:  Right.

Joette:  But then there’s Accutane. That’s a name that many folks might, and that was for acne. That caused birth defects as well. That was a pretty dangerous drug, and it was yanked off the market.

Then there are fluoroquinolones, and that’s Cipro. It’s an antibiotic, and it was used like candy.

“Oh, you got an ear infection. Here you go.” (Instead of thinking about Hepar sulph or Chamomilla or something like that.) “Here, take this.”  

And that caused tendon ruptures.

I had one particular client that I remember — and others as well, but one in particular. It was a young priest who came to me with tremendous pain in his tendons. He couldn’t wear shoes. He could only wear sandals because the pain was so severe in his feet, but mostly it was in his legs. He was suspicious that it was a tendon.

And later on, we found out that he had taken fluoroquinolones, and at that time, they were just becoming suspect in rupturing tendons especially of the legs.

Tendon ruptures — because he had a urinary tract infection. Instead of taking Cantharis, he took something that caused his tendons to rupture.

Then there is Viox which was for arthritis. That’s V–I–O–X, and that caused strokes and death.

Let’s see, balance that out.

Arthritis on one hand, stroke and death on the other hand!

These are extremes. These are not what I would call side effects, folks. I would call these sobering effects. Because each of these conditions were not that dangerous to start with that these drugs were treating, and instead the outcomes were much more severe.

How about Raptiva? That was for psoriasis, and that caused fatal brain infections. Who has brain infections? That’s not very common, but Raptiva caused that.

Then there was Zelnorm, and that was for constipation. It caused 500,000 strokes in … I don’t know if it was North America, I don’t know where that was totally … but 500,000 regardless of where that is, that’s a lot.

Kate:  Right. But you didn’t have the constipation anymore?

Joette:  No.

Kate:  Oh, my gosh. It’s just maddening!

Joette:  I know. Constipation. So, prunes! I mean, if you don’t know anything about homeopathy.

How about Nux vomica 30 for constipation? How about Mag phos 6? How about Plumbum? How about Lycopodium? There are so many beautiful homeopathic medicines that correct constipation.

Then there’s my all-time favorite: Depo-Provera. What that is − is an injection that was given and still is given, only now, it’s not exactly Depo-Provera. They have offshoots of it, where you get an injection, and then for one year, you don’t get your period.

Can you imagine that? You don’t get your period for an entire year because of a synthetic progesterone.

It keeps you from getting pregnant: the one thing that women are really great at! I mean, men aren’t any good at it. This is a woman thing. It is a very important thing in many women’s lives. Also, the menses is also very important.

Kate:  I guess you better not change your mind during that year.

Joette:  Oops, yes. Maybe I want to get pregnant and no — no go. I’ve had lots of stories about Depo-Provera shots. But there was one in particular where a young woman came into my office — I was telling you about this earlier, Kate. She was about 32 years old, and she had this tremendous lower back pain.

She’d been to chiropractors and urologists and neurosurgeons, and no one could figure out what the problem was. But the pain was constant and pretty severe. She had not had any injuries. She had no problems with her spine. There was no spine deformation or anything like that. When I take a case, I always ask folks, “What medications are you taking?”

Now, she hadn’t thought of this as a medication because it was a shot she had gotten a year ago — just about a year ago.

I said, “So, how are your periods?” (That’s a very important question to ask a young woman.)

She said, “Oh, I don’t get them.”

“Why don’t you get them?” I asked.

She said, “Well, because I got the Depo-Provera shot, and it keeps me from getting my period.”

Of course, you know, I’m flabbergasted by that — every time I hear this kind of thing. I don’t show that to the client.

She was sold a bill of goods in my estimation. Her doctor was a woman, and her doctor said, “This stuff is great, you don’t get periods.” The doc said, “I do it, too. I get that shot myself! Who wants to get a period?”

To me, that’s a very strange way of looking at life. But at any rate, that was her story.

One of the main medicines that we know — and I teach a lot about this in Feminopathy, my course Feminopathy, but you can learn about this on my blog as well. This main medicine that we teach that deals with hormones that have been tinkered with. Whether it means a mom who’s just had a lot of kids — and that’s not tinkering. That just means the hormones have been utilized heavily recently. Or for a woman who’s been on birth control pills for many years and has problems as a result of it, or who has had a suppressed menses.

Now, Depo-Provera shots suppress the menses. The remedy is Sepia, and it’s a great medicine. We use it in a 200 potency.

She was just at the end of that first year and was about to go back to the doctor and get her next shot of Depo-Provera and decided, indeed, she was not going to do that once I explained to her how this works. And so, she didn’t.

She started using Sepia, and the backache was gone in very short order. As I recall, when I met with her in about six weeks, the pain was completely gone.

When we step outside of what Mother Nature has planned for us — when we tinker with the human body — we are playing with fire. We think we know more. You think you know Nemo, but you don’t!

We think we know more than what the human body knows, but the body has innate intelligence. And it comes from our Maker! There’s no two ways about it as far as I’m concerned. So, that’s another example.

But I can give you a lot more. We won’t go too far with them, but I will tell you this. This is one that is more common. (Not everyone gets Depo-Provera shots. Thankfully, they’re not even used that often so much anymore.)

But Tylenol. How about Tylenol and ibuprofen?

Tylenol, folks don’t know this already. It’s been published many, many times. You should always know whatever you’re putting in your mouth on a day-to-day basis … what it causes.

Tylenol causes liver damage.

And haven’t we eaten or taken enough toxins in our lives to maybe want to protect our liver? It’s very important that we do that.

The very same people who will only buy organic, because they don’t want the toxins often are the ones who will take Tylenol if they have a headache. There’s kind of disconnect, and I’m encouraging people to make that connection — to make sure that whatever you decide you want in your life that you take it to the fullest.

Then one last one, and that is ibuprofen. This one particularly because it causes such a sobering condition especially in children.

Ibuprofen has been shown to cause asthma in adults and children but particularly in children. It doesn’t take a lot. I’ve actually had cases come to me where the mother gave the child ibuprofen — maybe a day or two of it — for a fever or cold or aches and pains or whatever it might have been. After the third day of taking ibuprofen, the child developed asthma for the first time in his life.

That is horrible.

Asthma is a chronic disease, and it’s a frightening disease if it gets very severe. I’ve had asthma in my life, and I can tell you it’s not nice. And so, I would rather see a child live through a cold or flu, or aches and pains, or fever for a short period of time than to have a long-standing chronic disease.

Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, the Father of Homeopathy, when he studied and worked on this back in the late 1700s, early 1800s, he noted that when we treat symptoms — when we suppress symptoms by using something that just addresses the outward expression of the condition — it often causes a deeper condition to arise.

As we suppress that cold or fever or menses or nausea during pregnancy or skin conditions/ acne or that urinary tract infection, it releases the weakest link in the person’s physiology. Even if that person has had some of those conditions in the past — a milder version — you can pretty much be guaranteed that the drug is going to get that condition and drive it to a much, much deeper state.

That is one of our main aphorisms in the Organon that Dr. Samuel Hahnemann put together for all of eternity, as far as I’m concerned, and for those who are astute and interested in learning how to address disease using homeopathy.

Kate:  We’ve covered a lot, Joette, a lot to think about and a lot of homework for some of us to do on what we might be taking in and what side effects that might be causing.

Why don’t you just kind of reiterate to us the main points of what we’ve covered so we can lock it in?

Joette:  Well, the first thing I would urge you to do is to go online and figure out whether or not any of the conditions that you have might be related to the drugs you’re taking.

Then if your doctor argues with you, that’s time to find a new doctor.

The way you find a good doctor is you start asking around. You don’t want the guy that’s necessarily done all the publishing at the university. You want the guy who is open-minded and has lots of clinical experience.

The way that I have found doctors and dentists, et cetera, is to go to my local health food store and ask people there. Ask the owner if they have anyone. Then I might go to my co-op. And if I have a chiro-specialist, my chiropractor, et cetera.

You want to work with a doctor who has a reputation for looking at health in a more holistic manner.

Then I would say, enlist the help of a good pharmacist. Make banana bread and take it to your pharmacist and make that pharmacist your friend. Don’t ask them questions at their busy time … you know, at five o’clock, six o’clock when everybody is there picking up their medications. Go to the pharmacist when he or she is not so busy. Maybe call, you know, around 11 o’clock at night when they’re all alone.

In essence, it means you have to do research. You have to do a little extra work because, to be honest, there’s no one out there who’s going to do this but you.

This is not the doctor’s problem. This is your problem.

This is not the chiropractor’s problem, it’s yours.

They may be there to try to help. But in the end, you’re the one who goes home with the pain. You’re the one who goes home with the asthma. You’re the one who goes home with the breathlessness, et cetera.

So, it’s up to you. It’s up to each of us to do our homework.

I guess I would say the last point is to step outside of the box. Whatever they’re telling you on television, do the opposite. Whatever they’re telling you in women’s magazines, well, first of all, close that women’s magazine. Don’t even go there because it’s all advertisement for the industry and so are all the commercials on television.

For the younger listeners here, who don’t even use television — they don’t even go to them, they just go online — be careful of what you’re reading. And make sure you trust who is telling you what. And go deeper and deeper until you find the true answers for yourself and your families. You will be a much healthier and much happier person in the long run and much more independent.

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.   And when I want to take a slightly deeper dive and discuss topics that risk censorship on Facebook join me in my Mighty Membership site.   Hosted safely on a private server away from Social Media and public membership ship site prying eyes.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you to follow in their footsteps. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

03:24    With a Moo-Moo Here …

12:24    And a Cluck-Cluck There …

24:30    Everywhere a Meow-Meow …

31:35    Treating Animals and Humans with Homeopathy

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Calcarea carbonicum (for milk fever in cattle)

“Fowl Cholera Epidemic! Homeopathy Averts a Catastrophe in the Flock.”

Cuprum metallicum 30C (for fowl cholera)

Sulphur 30 (for foul odors/illness in feral or barn-raised animals)

“Homeopathy is Purr-fect”

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 106 with Joette Calabrese.

Joette:  This is Joette Calabrese, and I’d like to welcome you to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. Women and men worldwide are taking back control of their families’ health and learning how to heal their bodies naturally, safely and effectively.

So, if you’re hungry to learn more, you’ve come to the right place. Stay tuned as we give you the tools — and the inspiration — you need as I share my decades of experience and knowledge using this powerful medicine we call homeopathy.

This podcast was recorded after the Ultimate Cool Kids’ Guide to Homeopathy course semester began. So, depending on when you’re listening to this recording, the course may or may not be open for registration. But not to worry — new semesters open regularly. So, stay tuned.

And now, let’s get started with the podcast:

“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O …”

Kate:  Welcome back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. I bet you’re wondering what Old MacDonald’s farm and homeopathy have to do with one another. Well, I actually just wanted to listen to Joette sing again.

Welcome, Joette, to the podcast today.

Joette:  I love working with you, Kate.

Kate:  Because we’re silly, that’s why.

Joette:  Yes, I know it’s fun. To do this or not, the podcasts must go out!!

Kate:  So, we’re going to talk about animals and homeopathy today.

Just a little teaser, if you haven’t seen it already, by the time this podcast is aired, the kids’ curriculum that you’re producing should be out and have started. We’re pretty excited about that. We’re in the mode of talking about animals and what homeopathic medicines to use — along with the medicines for humans as well. But in this course, we are going to be discussing a lot of the homeopathics for animal issues.

So, we’re going to focus in on that today, right?

Joette:  The Ultimate Cool Kids’ Guide to Homeopathy: Become a Revolutionary, Independent Thinker with Practical Homeopathy®. Kate, you’re giving yourself too little credit. Kate is the lead person who is organizing and putting this all together and helping me produce it. Basically, you’re producing it, and I’m helping you.

Kate:  I’m just using your materials to put it together, so, we’re a good team. I’m super-glad to be doing it.

Today, Joette, I want you to share some of your stories of how you’ve used homeopathy in the past with some of your animals — of which you’ve had many. Let’s start off with a cow story. How about that?

Joette:  Yes, well, so I want to put it in perspective because if anyone’s been following me, then you know that I live in South Florida, and I don’t treat animals so much anymore.

But we raised our children in the country, south of Buffalo. And we had a small farm — 15 acres — and it was kind of a “hobby” farm of sorts. We had ducks and chickens and goats and down the road were llamas, and cows and horses. And so, it was really a great place for me to learn how to treat animals, and to live around animals! Even though I’ve always been a city girl, it was a great opportunity for me. You want to hear a cow story?

Kate:  Yes, I know you have a lot of stories with animals. But I think there’s one in particular about a cow that it was a dire situation, and you helped the cow.

Joette:  Yes. Let me also preface this by saying that for those who believe that homeopathy is just placebo: I don’t know how a cow would be able to pick up on the intention of the farmer giving a specific homeopathic medicine. So, if it shows anything, it shows the efficacy of this medicine, and that it is absolutely not placebo.

So, one day, I got a call. At that time, I had a brick and mortar office, and I got a call from someone I knew whose cow had just birthed its calf and was dying.

This farmer was a seasoned farmer and had seen this happen many times: It’s called milk fever. The medical term is hypocalcemia. I was unfamiliar with it; I’m not a vet; I don’t have a lot of experience. My study was in anatomy, physiology and pathology for humans, certainly not veterinary study.

I didn’t know what it meant, and he said, “Well, it’s a fatal disease.”

It’s a metabolic disease that occurs when the blood serum — I’m reading this now because I jotted it down — blood serum of calcium drops to below normal levels. If it’s not handled properly, a cow can go from healthy to dead within a matter of hours.

And as I said, this farmer was very seasoned and had seen many cows die from this. He was, you know … I don’t know if I’d call him panic-stricken, but he was certainly pretty worried. The calf, of course, was fine. But the cow was breathing heavily, and he said, “She’s collapsed, and it’s a calcium drop.”

So, without knowing about protocols, specifically — because I didn’t have a protocol for that, and it was many years ago —the first remedy I thought of was I have to come up with a calcium medicine. Not only is it a calcium medicine, but it’s got to be a calcium medicine that has collapse, and something that has to do … that’s metabolic.

The first remedy, I thought it was Calcarea carbonicum. For short, it’s Calc carb. It’s one of our first medicines that we ever learn in homeopathy: Calc, C–A–L–C, Carb, C–A–R–B or Calcarea carbonica, C–A–L–C–A–R–E–A and carbonica.

This farmer had a homeopathy kit, thank goodness. Because otherwise, if he had to order it online or had to run to a health food store hoping that they had it, it would have put him in a great disadvantage. But he had the kit.

He said, “Okay, so what do I do?”

I said, “Open up the bottle. Pour some of the contents into the cap.”

Normally, we use … that happened to be, I think he had the Washington Homeopathy kit. In that case, you would use maybe six pills.

But no, this is a big cow. It’s a big animal, hundreds of pounds. I said, “Just fill up the cap with the medicines. Open up her mouth and pour it in.” If you can get it under her tongue, then she won’t chew it, and it won’t go away.”

Not that you need … let me parenthetically say … you don’t need to put it under the tongue. But in this case, it was such a dire situation, we want to make sure that we put it in the most efficacious location in the animal’s mouth.

He lifted her tongue and inserted the pills under the tongue and then gently closed her mouth. He said that her eyes were rolling back; she was going to die. He said, “She looks like she’s going to die within minutes.”

I stayed on the phone with him for a little while. But then I had other calls I had to take, and so I left. Within about — it’s hard to remember this was, I don’t know, 25 years ago — but I stayed on the phone only for a short period of time.

When he called me back about 20 minutes later, he said, “You’re not going to believe this.”

Whenever I hear that, I say to myself, “Oh, yes, I am.”

He said, “She stood up. She’s fine. She’s absolutely fine. I can’t believe it! It’s like a miracle! She just stood up! And now the calf is nursing.”

I said, “That doesn’t surprise me. But it always gives me goosebumps.”

It always gives me … what … thankfulness for this medicine. This is God’s medicine, folks. I don’t know any other way of saying it.

How is it that a medicine without side effects, a bottle that costs $12, could cure a cow — save the cow and the calf and the farmer from expense and time? How could that be? Because this medicine is something everyone needs to know about.

He said, “So that’s it? That’s all I do?”

I said, “No, well, no. Watch her. If she starts to look weak, her eyes look like they’re sinking back again, or they’re rolling back in her head, or she starts to fall back down again, you give her another dose. To be honest, I think that you should be giving her two or three doses every day for about three days.”

And he did. And, in his gratitude, he named the calf after me. So, the calf’s name is Joette.

He sent me a photograph of her and for the longest time, I had it as my front page of my desktop. Then when we moved, we lost it, unfortunately. The computer we had was probably corrupted or something. But anyway, the photograph was lost. So, the calf Joette is now just a distant memory.

But that’s how homeopathy works.

Now, some people say, “Well, yes, but I’ve had this condition for many years.” (Not that kind of condition.) What I’m saying is that speed depends on the … what’s the word … the more dire the condition, the faster the medicine will act, generally speaking.

This cow needed it. She was going to die as witnessed by this farmer time and again. She needed this medicine immediately, and so it was used immediately.

I’ve seen that at births. I was at a friend’s birth, and she was hemorrhaging. Somebody would say, “Well, how do you know it’s going to work very fast?”

“Well, because she needs the medicine so badly.”

I will never forget that I administered this medicine to my friend, and she was hemorrhaging terribly, and she had two previous …

This is a side story, but it illustrates more thoroughly. She had had two previous births where she hemorrhaged and had to be taken to the hospital and given pints of blood.

This situation was the first time I was with her at the birth, and we use the homeopathic medicine for her at that moment. It was actually Pulsatilla, and it brought her around. It aborted the hemorrhaging — within seconds — because that’s what was needed. It needed “in-second” speed and action.

That’s something that you will observe time and again as you use these medicines: that the more serious that condition — the more dire it is — the faster the medicines work.

How is that?

It’s God’s medicine. What can I say?

Kate:  So, Joette, I know people are wanting to ask this question. What potency did you use with that cow? Do you remember?

Joette:  Yes, it was a 200.

Kate:  Okay.

Joette:  So, hypocalcemia or milk fever is the name of the condition. If any farmers out there need to know what to do… If you go online and look at milk fever, you’re going to see that they die within minutes of falling to the ground. That’s the key, they fall to the ground, and then they die within hours, sometimes minutes.

Kate:  One more thing I want to talk about is when you were telling us how you told this farmer to dispense those pellets in the cow’s mouth. You were talking about whether you would use four or five pellets or a whole cap full.

I just want to clarify for a second there, because I’ve used just two pellets of Arnica, say, on my horses, and they worked — seemed to work — great.

So, I would think that what you’re saying is that you just want to make sure that the medicine gets in the mouth and is absorbed into the body, right?

Joette:  That’s it. Exactly. Two pellets, would they’ve worked? Possibly but we didn’t have time to check it out.

I would use two pellets if I didn’t have very many, and I had to treat more than one cow at the same time, and we had to distribute accordingly. But because this cow was on her deathbed, then it was important that we just give it to her and not worry about being sparing in our usage of our pills.

Kate:  Okay. I just wanted to clarify that for those who are listening that you didn’t have to … it’s not a higher dose because that’s a larger animal. It’s just that you just want to make sure that this medicine got into that animal.

Joette:  Well, I did allude to that a moment because the cow is big. I found it goes that generally you can get away with just a few pills for even a large animal. But at that moment, I was calculating in a way just to be absolutely certain. But you’re right, two pills probably would have done it.

Kate:  Yes, that’s what I’ve used with my horses, and I just kind of hold their mouths to make sure that the pellets stay in there. Because inevitably, this cow was down, and she was probably easy to get the medicines into her mouth. But when you have a horse that seems fine, and you’re putting that medicine in, they toss their head around, and those pellets just come popping right out.

Kate:  So, let’s move in Old MacDonald’s farm to chickens.

Joette:  Well, when we bought our land south of Buffalo, I knew that we wanted to raise chickens. It was more of a hobby. I wanted our children to have that kind of responsibility of raising animals. I wanted fresh eggs. And I thought it would be a nice family project.

So, we bought our chickens, and this was the first flock that we had. We bought … I think it was about 40 chickens at the time. We learned later you don’t do this with chickens. But we got them as chicks, and my sons were young, and they named some of the chickens — some of their favorite chickens — Gloria and Rosie. It was Dolores. It was very sweet.

But you learn not to do that with chickens because they die so readily by either a fox or a possum or something like that or diseases, that it’s foolish to name them because then you become too emotionally attached, and then you lose your pet. So, it’s best not to name them, but we learned that years later.

One day, one of my sons came in the house and said, “Mom, this chicken just died. I just watched her. She just fell over. She couldn’t walk for a while. She was actually walking in a strange fashion, and I saw her lay down, and then she just died!”

I said, “Oh my.”

Then my other son came in and said, “Mom, there’s another chicken acting really weird.”

And so, they were saying — they were coming back and reporting — “Oh my gosh, these chickens are really sick. They’ve got diarrhea, and they’re dying.”

I think we lost a few. It’s been a long time, so I don’t remember. But we lost a few before I said, “Uh-oh, something really serious is going on here.”

So, I called a vet who was a friend of mine. I described to her what was happening. She said, “They have diarrhea, right?”

I said, “Yes.”

She says, “They have a strange gait, right?”

I said, “Yes, that’s true.”

She said, “It sounds like cholera — fowl cholera. Not cholera that can be transmitted to humans or vice versa, but it is a disease that will kill them all.” She said, “They’ll probably all die and probably within just a few days.”

So, I said, “What can I do?”

She says, “There’s really nothing you can do. The few that survive will not lay eggs any longer once they survived this because they will have gotten it, and they will have chronic fowl cholera.”

I went to my chicken health handbook — believe it or not, I had one of those — and I looked up fowl cholera. Indeed, everything she said was absolutely true. It said that there are antibiotics that can be administered, but they’re really basically of no use, and the chickens all die.

Now, I know about cholera. Cholera is one of the first diseases that was treated by the homeopaths back in Europe. And I knew that the medicine that was specific for cholera was Cuprum metallicum. In the back of my mind, I knew that.

But what I did instead is, I opened up my repertory — because I was not a practical homeopath at the time; I was still using only classical. I opened up my repertory and looked under cholera. Indeed, the medicine that was the most valuable was Cuprum metallicum. So, once you determine … I can’t remember maybe 30 medicines named under the disease of cholera, and you have to choose which one is it (in classical homeopathy). Not only do you have to choose what the medicine is, you have to determine what potency, and then how frequently to use it.

But I looked at Cuprum, and I said, “I know Cuprum!”

Cuprum metallicum is medicine not only for cholera, but it’s also a medicine for spasms … so that someone walks with a strange gait.

So, I cracked open my materia medicas and looked it up just to be certain. There, indeed, was Cuprum metallicum, and it has a strange walk AND diarrhea.

So, there it is — strange walk (spasmodic walk), diarrhea and cholera. I said, “It’s got to be Cuprum metallicum.”

There was a clear pattern that was developing in each of the chickens. First, we saw them with diarrhea; then we saw the strange gait; then we saw them kind of sit down without interest in pecking on the ground; and then they would fall over and die.

The first one that they brought to me, after a few of them had died, was, I think, Gloria.

Kate:  Actually, for those of you who are interested in reading about the story, it’s published in Homeopathy Today and in Wise Traditions and the article is called “Fowl Cholera Epidemic! Homeopathy Averts a Catastrophe in the Flock.” There’s more information in that article.

Joette:  It’s right. I forgot that it had been printed in Homeopathy Today as well. That’s right. Homeopathy Today and in Wise Traditions, so you can look it up and read more about it.

But, the first chicken was one of my son’s pets. He loved Gloria. He said, “Mom, Mom, it’s Gloria who’s sick now! They’re all dying, and Gloria’s the next one!”

So, he grabbed Gloria. I opened up the bottle of Cuprum metallicum 30C, poured some of the contents into the cap, took out two pills. We pried open her little beak, and we stuck it in her mouth and then clamped down her little beak with our fingers.

Kate:  I’m just fascinated by this story of you actually putting this … I can’t imagine putting this into a chicken’s beak.

Joette:  Yeah, well, you have to be careful because if you’re too forceful, you could hurt the chicken. So, he didn’t want to put her down because it was his pet chicken. But I said, “No, Peter, you got to do that. You got to go on to the next one.”

Then they brought … Giuseppe meanwhile, got the next chicken, brought her in. We did the same thing. Opened up her little mouth, put in two pills of Cuprum, put them back onto the grass. Meanwhile, what we did is we gathered up all the other chickens and instead of inserting a couple of pills into each one’s mouth, we simply put it in the water.

Now, here was the problem with that: They would drink it if they were still well enough to drink. But for those who were so sick — and the disease had already progressed to the point where the diarrhea was so severe, and they were so dehydrated and so weakened that they couldn’t get to the water — we had to administer it to them one by one.

By the time we finished treating or putting the remedy in the water, and administering to those two, Gloria stood up. I couldn’t believe it! I mean, the cow stood up, now Gloria! Joette’s mother stood up, and Gloria stood up.

Indeed, they were coming alive again.

But this is one of those situations that I actually expected to happen to the cow that didn’t happen to the cow and, instead, happened to the chickens. By the time we got the remedy into all the other members of the flock, the first one, Gloria, started to go down.

You could see she was going down again. Okay, administered it again.

So, that’s our key. We have to determine how often to use it because we can see the symptoms now becoming more prominent again. So, we gave it to her again. We gave the next chicken again. Now, we’re putting Gloria and the two chickens (or two or three chickens) that we administered directly into their mouths in front of the water so they could take sips of water.

From the time we treated Gloria all the way to the end, not another chicken died. From the time we started the homeopathy, none of them died. Those that died first were the sacrifice to determine what needed to be done.

Now, you would think that’s the end of the story. It was a great day for all of us. We were very, very pleased; we were very happy. I kept the Cuprum metallicum 30 in the water. And when we’d change the water, fresh … (and normally, we would change it only once a day — that day, we changed it twice so that the water was good and fresh, making sure everyone was getting it, and they were more interested in drinking the water). We changed it, and then put fresh Cuprum metallicum in it again. We kept it that way for a few days. We kept the medicine in there.

But that’s not the end of the story.

What’s really fascinating about this story is that none of them had any problem laying eggs. The vet warned us, and the chicken health handbook reported that these chickens will never lay eggs once they’ve been exposed to cholera.

That’s not at all what happened.

We knew that every chicken laid eggs because you know that this breed of chicken lays one egg per day. We knew how many chickens we had. You count the chickens; you count the eggs. And you know that each chicken is laying an egg because no chicken lays two eggs in a day! They produced for years. Very interesting!

So, if I were a farmer who depended on the production of my animals, I would say that was a win, win, win financially. For us, it was an emotional win because my kids were attached to the chickens.

It was also a homeopathic win, not only for me in understanding how quickly you need to use it, how you administer it to the ones that are the sickest ones who are not going to drink from the water trough, but also for my children to see that! Growing up with those kinds of experiences was a big formulation of who they are today. I’m thankful that I knew what I knew, and that I didn’t give up and say, “Oh, well, they’re all going to die, just let ‘em die, and that’s it.”

Now, when this was all done, we had to find the source of the cholera because they don’t just get cholera out of the thin air. There has to be a source. Well, it turned out there was a wild bird that had died of cholera in the coop. It had gotten into the coop and died in the straw. Of course, we had to get rid of the dead bird and then clean out the coop — fresh bedding.

Now, they also told us in the chicken health handbook that you have to disinfect the coop with — I can’t remember what it was — but it was a very strong antiseptic. We decided, instead, we were not going to do that. We decided that homeopathy was going to protect them, and it was a good decision.

We didn’t do that. We cleaned it all out, but we did not use the strong antiseptic that was recommended because we thought that was going to be taxing on them as well. So, we hosed it down, used soap and water — hot, soapy water — and then put down fresh bedding after we discarded the wild bird, and nothing ever happened again. That was it. We never saw another case of it. They were healthy and happy egg-laying chickens forevermore.

Kate:  Before we move on to another animal on your little hobby farm, I want to ask you a question again that I know is burning in people’s minds. You had this watering bowl for the chickens? How many pellets did you put in the water?

Joette:  I don’t remember.

Kate:  What would you recommend to people then?

Joette:  I don’t remember how many I put in there. We had a trough that was maybe two feet-three feet long and held maybe a couple gallons of water. I think I used a dose, maybe four or six pills, something like that. Made sure the trough was clean so that nothing else was interfering. But even if it had been dirty … to be honest, I’ve given remedies in soup to my father, and it worked.

But this was a dire situation. I want to take away all conflicting factors that might get in the way of the success of the use of this medicine. But to be honest, I probably could have put it in a muddy, dirty trough that hadn’t been cleaned in three days, if we had to.

Kate:  Joette, let’s move on in Old MacDonald’s farm to the kitties. I think you have a kitty story for us.

Joette:  I have. Many years ago, we decided we wanted a cat. We heard of someone who had a litter, and they were semi-feral. They had been born in a barn, but they’d been touched and held by humans.

There was one runt in the litter. And they were still pretty young, but this kitten was minute. The woman who had the cat said, “The mother cat is going to abandon this cat, and it’s going to die if you don’t take it.”

Holy cow. What?

Kate:  Oh, my gosh.

Joette:  What a responsibility!

Kate:  Yes. If you don’t take this cat …

Joette:  If you don’t take this kitten, it’s going to die. It was not very healthy. It looked pretty scruffy. Its fur was sticking up, even though kitten’s fur often does that, but it stuck up in a strange way. It did not have a very thick coat like the others. It was quite subdued in its behavior.

The kids said, “Mom, Mom, we got to take this kitten! We got to take this one!”

I knew we were in for trouble. But I thought, “Well, look, if we trust homeopathy, we trust it, and I would like the kids to learn. So, all right, we’ll take this kitten.”

About three or four days later, the kitten got very, very, very sick. So sick that it would not move, and I thought it was going to die.

I had given it a couple of cell salts to help build it up a little bit when we first got home, but apparently, it wasn’t enough.

The cat got so sick, that we put it … the boys had this lamb’s fur. They put it in a basket. They put the cat in the basket, and they gave it raw milk with an eyedropper. It had a very, very bad odor. The cat smelled horrible.

So, we were going to visit my in-laws and my parents in Florida. You know, we were living up in New York State, and we had to go. Well, there was no way we could leave this kitten with someone else, obviously!

So, we put the cat in the basket. We packed up the car — which is what we always did, we always drove down — and put the cat in the backseat between the boys. I thought, “This cat’s going to die on the way to Florida or once we’re in Florida. It’s going to really be not very nice.”

But I said, “Let’s give a remedy a try.” I gave the cat Sulphur 30, and I thought it’s a last-ditch effort.

The first night we finished driving, I gave it to her twice. Her name was Carmelina, by the way. (I’ve written about Carmelina and in other … in blogs, et cetera. She was really … well, I’ll tell you more about that later.) But at any rate, I gave her two doses over a period of about six hours. I said, “You know, we’ve nothing to lose here.”

We got to the first place where we stopped. I think it was … I don’t know … just south of Pennsylvania. We stopped in a motel to spend the night, and the boys picked up the cat in the basket with a little handle and brought the cat in the motel room with us, and we all got into bed.

In the middle of the night, we heard this crazy sound like a scampering or something. I thought it was a squirrel had gotten into the room. We turned the light on, and the cat was under the bed on her back, upside down, grabbing the bottom of the mattress and spinning herself all around!

She had completely revived with two doses of Sulphur 30. She came out, and she was scampering, and she was completely cured.

Two doses of Sulphur.

I thought — we all thought — she was going to die. I really didn’t want my kids to have to experience that. But on the other hand, it’s a good thing for them to see life and death. But at any rate, I was certain we were going to be having to dispose of a kitten’s body at some point.

And that’s not what happened. She lived for 16 years. She had lots of spunk. She was very skitterish and frightened, but she still was part of the family. She would climb up the Christmas tree every year. She would chase and catch mice and bring them in the house and catch snakes and bring them in the house. So, she was a very healthy cat for many, many years.

I know, isn’t that amazing?

Kate:  Yes, it is. But I’ve seen homeopathy do this with animals over and over again. It’s incredible.

Joette:  It is.

And now, I want to step back so that our listeners again, don’t read into this to mean that when you use homeopathic medicine, you only need two doses, and then they should be cured.

I’m telling these stories because they’re remarkable stories. They’re noteworthy.

But it was very severe — again, not unlike the cow situation. This was very severe; this cat was probably going to die, not unlike the cow was probably going to die. So, when you get into these very severe situations, as long as you have the right homeopathic medicine … and it’s a matter of knowing — which is not that hard to know. This is not hard to find out which medicine it is!

I went simply by the fact that Sulphur is a remedy that is very specific for strong odors.

And, I also find that Sulphur is a great medicine for feral animals: cats that are feral, dogs in Kolkata that are feral, a squirrel that’s sick or something like that. I find that Sulphur — and a couple of other main medicines that we call polychrests — are often very valuable in animal situations such as those.

It’s different when we’re treating a purebred horse or purebred dog. It’s a little bit often — not always — it’s often a little more complicated. But when it comes to an animal that has a history of living outside and not being tinkered with and not getting vaccinations, et cetera, then it’s often those baseline polychrests remedies.

Kate:  That might be a good, little exercise for the listeners to look up “what is the definition of polychrests.”

Joette:  Yes. That’s a good idea. Instead of my teaching it now, yes, look it up online, absolutely.

Kate:  We’ve been talking a lot about homeopathic medicines for animals. It’s interesting because there are actual veterinarians that work specifically with homeopathy and treating animals that way. So, if you’re interested in something like that or learning more about those veterinarians who work that way, I know there are some of them that do phone consults. So, you can always do some research and look for those veterinarians online.

Joette:  There are good homeopathic veterinary books that you can purchase. Dr. Pitcairn is a good author, but there are many others. If you have pets or livestock, by all means, I would stock up on those books. It will help you a great deal.

Kate:  Joette, as we wrap up this podcast, share with us how you compare treating animals with homeopathy to humans with homeopathy.

Joette:  It’s pretty much the same. With an adult, if you’re taking an adult’s case, they’re going to give you verbal answers. When you’re taking the case of an animal, you have to just observe — not unlike if you’re treating your infant or someone who’s unconscious. You have to hone your observational skills.

That’s another characteristic of being able to take the case. It’s also a wonderful human skill to be able to look at someone, pay attention. Are they acting weak? Are they thirsty? Can you see anything there — anything that you can detect —that will help you determine which homeopathic medicine to use.

With Carmelina, all I had was that she was very, very sick, weakened by something — I don’t know what, and she had a very strong odor. Strong odor — not always, but more often than not — indicates the use for the remedy, Sulphur. And 30 or 200 would have would have acted, I’m certain, in about the same fashion.

I like when people treat animals because it gives them a lot of experience. It also affords them the opportunity to take note of details.

Kate:  I almost feel like those Moms with Moxie that I talk to — the ones that have farms or a lot of animals — that they learn homeopathy at a much greater pace.

Joette:  Faster! There’s more velocity! Absolutely. So, if you have a farm or small farm, or if you have a lot of animals — if you have an opportunity to treat animals, wildlife — by all means, hop right in. You will learn a lot faster. Certainly so.

So, Kate, I guess what we end with is that homeopathy is, as I said earlier, God’s medicine. It’s intended for humans and animals and pets across the board, across this earth.

What I love about it is that as we learn this medicine, and we learn it together, mothers and grandmothers usually — although can be men sometimes, it’s more often women folk — we should think in terms of linking arms across the earth. It will give us the strength to know that this is something we want to pass on, not only to our children and grandchildren, but to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our church mates, people we run into, anyone who might be interested, anyone who can be helped.

You want to help others. It gives us purpose in life to be able to give to someone else. It’s the greatest purpose of all!

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you to follow in their footsteps. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

04:49   Introduction to Homeopathy

11:20   A March Virus

17:44  Fire Ant Story

22:29   Miscarriage

26:13   Lessons Along the Way

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Good Gut, Bad Gut course

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 105.

Joette:  Joette Calabrese here, folks. I’m happy that you’ve joined me for my podcast today. You’re in for a treat. From my virtual classroom, I’m privileged to see how homeopathy is transforming lives all over the globe. Their successes inspire me. They’re glorious and powerful, and I can’t keep their triumphs a secret. I want you to hear the excitement my students experience, too. So, you can be inspired by their unique stories.

With the help from Kate, my reporter, I bring you a podcast series I call, “Moms with Moxie.” Sometimes we even interview “Dads with Audacity” or “Teens with Tenacity.” See how regular mothers and others — average folks who love healing those around them — have gone from freaking to fabulous by simply applying what they’ve learned using what I call Practical Homeopathy®.

Kate:  Welcome back to the Practical Homeopathy podcast and another great Mom with Moxie episode.

It’s about to get personal and real on this episode of the podcast. I think it’s safe to say that our guest on today’s podcast has had times of heartbreak, which have taught her more about homeopathy and inspired her beyond what she could have ever imagined when she first learned about homeopathy.

With a super-interesting background and now a life changing passion for homeopathy, she is excited to share her successes and challenges with us — and anyone who will listen. I’m thrilled that she’s willing to share her story with us today. I want to welcome you to the podcast, Erica.

Erica:  Thank you. I feel so honored to be here. Thank you.

Kate:  Let’s start off by getting to know you a little bit, Erica. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your family.

Erica:  Sure. I’ve been married to my husband for just about nine years. We are blessed with two children, a three-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy. We also have an eight-year-old Schnauzer mix who is actually our first baby.

I graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from college, also where I met my husband. During college, I started interning at NASA, and I went from college to NASA and became a flight controller for the International Space Station.

After I got married to my husband, I left NASA and joined my husband’s company which is an oil and gas company, so we could travel the world together. We lived in both South Korea for a bit and Japan.

Now, I’m working in the Digital Transformation Group and managing the development of a software platform that has the potential to change the way that our project teams work in the future.

Kate:  I have so many questions for you, Erica.

Erica:  Okay.

Kate:  I’m going to start with: how did you come to join the NASA team? Did you just wake up one day and decide, “I want to work for NASA!”?

How did that happen? I’m so curious.

Erica:  It really was a lifelong dream because I have always been interested in space. I did high school reports on NASA. When given the opportunity, I would always pick a space topic. When I was in college — it was in my sophomore year — I went to the career fair at school. And I decided, “Why not talk to the NASA booth?”

They called me back for an interview. Then afterwards, I got a call saying, “Would you like to come intern at NASA down in Houston?”

I said, “Yes.” So, that’s how it started.

Kate:  That’s pretty exciting.

Erica:  Yes, and just such a fun place to work — just the dream job.

Kate:  Yes. Another question that I had that came to mind was with your engineering background, were there any obstacles that you had to overcome to really start to study and use homeopathy?

Erica:  The fact that homeopathy is science-based really resonated with me. Once I learned about homeopathy and realized what it could do, it’s been so wonderful and there is no barrier at all.

The funny thing is that I never heard about homeopathy until the last couple of years when one of my church friends introduced me to it. Since then, I just can’t get enough.

Kate:  I think that’s important for people to understand because I hear the word “energy” being thrown around a lot. While we know that everything is created with energy, to me, it makes it sound a little more, I don’t know, “New Age-y.”

I like the fact that you said it is science-based. That’s what I see, too, because everything that is created is science-based, right? The world.

Erica:  Absolutely.

Kate:  You mentioned a friend introduced you to homeopathy. Were you doing anything natural for your family before homeopathy as far as medicine or foods? I just want to hear a little bit more about that introduction to homeopathy if you don’t mind.

Erica:  Sure. I have always been interested in natural ways to help the body. So, one of my passions as well is nutrition and feeding my family from natural, simple foods. That started back when I was a teenager. I’d be reading recipes and cooking and all that.

But I also had some health issues as I got into my 20s and into my 30s where I was trying other methods because I’m very sensitive to medication — that when I take medication, there would be something else that would come up from the medication. So, I really tried to avoid as much medication as possible. I was trying other things, and I tried nutrition-based healing; I tried acupuncture; I’ve tried other methods, but nothing has worked so impactfully as homeopathy.

Kate:  How did you come to learn about Joette?

Erica:  I think this is an interesting thing, Kate. This church friend actually introduced me to homeopathy well in advance of my first experience with homeopathy because she was talking about it in our church group.

I said I was interested in homeopathy. She’s like, “Oh, did you have a kit?”

I was like, “I don’t know what a kit is!”

So, I Googled a kit, and there was all these different sort of tubes with these really difficult Latin names. I was like, “Oh, my gosh! This is way too complicated for me.

I kind of just closed it up, set aside and continued to move on with my life.

It wasn’t until my son got sick. It was honestly a couple of months later. He was having some reoccurring ear infections. We were going back to the pediatrician, and we were getting different antibiotics to try to take care of it.

We actually went into an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist, and he was about to get tubes if this next round of antibiotics didn’t work. She sent me a link to Joette’s website saying, “You know, I think you should look into this. This might be something that could help him out.”

So, I took that time to go ahead and do some research and my mind was blown. I was like, “Where did this come from, and how have I not heard of this before?” because it was so science-based.

I ended up giving my son Hepar sulph 30C, and I gave him about two doses a day for about five days. The ear infection was gone, and it hasn’t come back. It’s been over a year. To me, that was just a fascinating introduction to homeopathy.

Kate:  After that ear infection and your success with that, you started studying more about homeopathy at that point, or what happened next?

Erica:  What happened next is I started honestly binging on Joette’s podcasts. I think I listened to every one of them within a couple of months. I just couldn’t get enough. So, I was using those podcasts and using the free material on the blog trying to get educated on what this is.

Then I decided that I wanted to start taking care of some of my own issues because I was dealing with several chronic issues at the time. I thought a lot of them were gut related, and they are. So, I ended up taking Good Gut, Bad Gut course — which is so jam-packed with material. At the same time, I started contacting Joette’s office to start consulting with her.

Kate:  Do you mind sharing with us? How are those issues going for you, or what progress are you making?

Erica:  Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I was dealing with is that after my daughter was born, I ended up getting some pretty severe postpartum depression. It came with insomnia which I was not expecting. After you have a child, you’re expecting, yes, you’re not sleeping because the baby’s not sleeping — but not that the baby’s sleeping, and you can’t sleep. So, that was really challenging time for myself and my husband and my family.

I tried conventional medicine, and I tried acupuncture. It gave me some results, but not what I was looking for. Even though the depression kind of went away over time, the insomnia kind of stayed consistent. Throughout my consultation with Joette, I started taking Sepia 200 and Coffea cruda 200. Between those two, they’ve taken care of those hormonal issues and also the insomnia — which is a lifesaver.

Kate:  I love Sepia.

Erica:  Me, too.

Kate:  It has to be every female’s … one of their favorite remedies because it’s just so incredible. I don’t think I slept through the night ever since my kids were born until I spoke with Joette, and she suggested taking Sepia. Then I remember that being the first time I actually slept through the night. And, oh, it changed my life!

Erica:  It is life changing when you can sleep.

Kate:  Yes.

Erica:  About the same time I started consulting with Joette, I started getting some pretty severe acid reflux and such a bad taste in my mouth that I could hardly enjoy eating anymore. I started losing a good amount of weight. By taking Lycopodium 200 mixed with Arsenicum album 200, and also Nat phos 6X before meals, that acid reflux has been managed. And I’m back to being able to eat as I would like to eat and not restricted — which is also life altering.

Kate:  It sounds like you are on the right track, and your body’s healing, and you’re doing well.

Erica:  Yes, it’s amazing. I haven’t felt this good in a really long time.

Kate:  I know homeopathy is so exciting! I love talking about it, and I love hearing the stories.

Tell me about the Gateway to Homeopathy Study Groups that you and your friend started together, and how that’s going because you have some interesting things to share with us.

Erica:  Yes, we started the Gateway to Homeopathy I group right around the March timeframe. I gave her a call after I got back from Japan and said, “I really think I’d love to create a group where we could start learning together, and let’s try this Gateway to Homeopathy I.”

She’s like, “Great, I’ve already done it once. Let’s co-lead this.”

My mom and I joined the group, and she brought along another ten people. We’ve been meeting for the last few months on the weekly, and it has just been so enjoyable to meet with like-minded people and learn together because the experiences that everybody brings to the table just makes it a more holistic picture.

Kate:  Yeah, and then you have those people that you can connect with and share your experiences with and help one another out, right?

Erica:  Absolutely.

Kate:  Speaking of the March timeframe, I know that your family struggled — or you, specifically with an illness. I think it’s interesting to hear how you navigated that. If you wouldn’t mind sharing that experience, I would love to hear it.

Erica:  A couple of months ago, we ended up coming down with a virus. The symptoms for me were a loss of taste, headache, sore throat, congestion, a cough, body aches and fatigue.

My children and husband had something. It was more congestion, sore throat and minor fatigue, but they got over it a lot faster. They were done within two to three days, but mine lasted for about 14 days.

I took that opportunity to go ahead and try out some homeopathy.

The first week, I mainly took Thuja 30, twice a day, for the viral aspect. I also took Aconitum 200C mixed with Bryonia 30 every four to six hours. It worked, but it wasn’t giving me the results as the symptoms continued to progress.

About a week in, is when I started developing a lot of mucus that would run down my throat. The next day, it wasn’t just mucus; it was extreme sinus pressure and bone-breaking fatigue.

I broke it down into two at that point. The first was I needed to take care of what felt like a sinus infection. I had actually taken Sanguinaria 200C mixed with Belladonna 3C in the past that really helped me take care of sinus infections. So, I did that again, and I felt a gradual improvement that resolved itself within three days. The pain reduced. It wasn’t gone immediately, but it took about three days to disappear.

Kate:  Did the Sanguinaria help with all of the extreme mucus production as well?

Erica:  It did. It was not only the reduction of the sinus pressure, but it also cleared up the mucus in my sinuses as well.

Then the second part was a bone-breaking fatigue. I can remember very clearly that I got to the point where I was just lying on the couch. I told my husband, “I need help with dinner.”

He’s wonderful. He usually does dinner as well. But he was in the kitchen, and I said, “You know, I’m going to go take Gelsemium 200, see what happens.”

And I took it. I was on the couch, and no kidding, within 30 seconds, I felt good enough to get up and start helping with dinner as well — which was absolutely incredible. The fatigue wasn’t gone. It was just good enough that I could do what I needed to do.

Kate:  So, you continued on with the Gelsemium then for a while?

Erica:  I did. I did it for several days until I started feeling much better.

Kate:  Okay. There was another aspect that I would love for you to talk about. You said around Day 10 that you had some rattling in your chest, and the mucus was yellow and clear. You did something interesting at that time that I would love to hear about.

Erica:  While it was fatigue, I took the opportunity to take naps. While I was taking a nap … and getting ready to take a nap … I pulled out the Gateway to Homeopathy II book because we were going through session two, which goes through cell salts.

I was reading through the description on Kali mur that it deals with yellow and yellow mucus. I just decided to give it a shot and took Kali mur 6X, about twice a day, and within a day or two, the cough was gone. That was just incredible and really helped out by not having that lingering cough that I was expecting through this process.

Kate:  The overall virus lasted about 14 days, and would you say that you feel like you navigated it pretty well with homeopathy — like it wasn’t ever super-concerning? I mean, obviously, you felt, it sounds like, pretty miserable, but you feel like you managed it pretty well with homeopathy?

Erica:  With this virus in particular, I felt that it was really helpful to have some knowledge about homeopathy and have the remedies on hand. I had to navigate the symptoms as they presented in the virus and adapt as the symptoms changed. By the end of the virus, I felt that even though the duration wasn’t lessened, the severity of the symptoms were lessened such that I could live my life, be with my family and continue my work.

Kate:  Did you work during this time too? Not every day, I suppose?

Erica:  I worked most every day except for when the fatigue got really great. I felt like it was time to really take a rest and prioritize sleep.

Kate:  Wow. That’s incredible!

Tell us about some of the other things that your family has encountered and how you’ve used homeopathy to handle those situations.

Erica:  Yes. My son came down with some eczema. He had it all over his legs, his stomach, his back, and his arms. And I didn’t want to use steroid cream, so I was going back through the Good Gut, Bad Gut course and found the protocol on eczema.

The one that I used was Arsenicum album 200 mixed with Antimonium crud 200, and his eczema went away within a couple of months. So, I took notes and took pictures and saw that there was a progression, so we kept with it. I’m super-glad we did because he’s still free of it as of now.

Kate:  Oh, wonderful. Eczema is so painful for those little ones. I have it. So, it’s great that you were able to do that on your own.

Erica:  Some other big “aha” moments was when I first started learning about homeopathy, my mom was over and helping me with the kids, and she said that she was having a canker sore. I was like, “Okay, let me just explain to you what homeopathy is. Why don’t you try some Merc sol 200 and see if that helps you out?”

She took it and within one dose, it went away. She was actually flabbergasted. She was like, “I can’t believe this worked. What is this stuff?”

Now, my mom and I are studying together in the Gateway to Homeopathy group. It gives us something really wonderful to talk about on a daily basis as well.

Kate:  It keeps you connected.

Erica:  Absolutely.

Kate:  One dose, that’s pretty fantastic! That’s why she got ten ladies interested in the Gateway to Homeopathy Study Group.

Tell us about the fire ant story.

Erica:  Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, we went to a friend’s house, and there’s a lot of fire ants in Texas. My daughter had run outside with one of their daughters, and she ended up standing on a fire ant hill. I was going out to take a picture but noticed there were ants on her legs. And I ended up having to go in there, and I got a couple of bites myself to get her out.

They’re pretty painful. They’re just stings with redness that just burn a bit for a while. I immediately got the Ledum 200. I gave that to Anne. She never really complained. The pain went away. For me, I noticed when I took it, it took about 30 minutes to be resolved — that burning sensation. So, I take that as a win.

Kate:  That happened to my son, too. I think I used Apis at the time. But yes, I think, you know, for bites you think of Ledum or Apis for that reaction to a bite as well. Good thinking!

I know you’ve talked about UTIs, right? You had a niece with a UTI. What did you use for that?

Erica:  My sister called me and told me that her niece who is about the same age as my son was complaining about symptoms that resembled a UTI. So, I went into Joette’s blog, and I did some research — my mom and I both did.

We decided that Cantharis 30C is probably the best bet. She ran out to the store and got Cantharis 30C, gave it to my niece, and the next day, I got a call saying it worked!

It just makes me so happy when you hear those stories.

Kate:  Yeah, it does for sure! I want to hear, too, about your housekeeper.

Erica:  My housekeeper is wonderful. When we came back from Japan, she started helping us out again. When I saw her, she had noticed that we had a bunch of remedies around the house. She was interested to know what they were for, so I gave an explanation about homeopathy.

She told me that she’d be interested in trying to see if it could help her with shoulder pain. She was having a hard time sleeping on her shoulder at night, and she was having a hard time lifting her hands over her head. So, I did some research. I looked on the blog about Symphytum. I gave her a few remedies to take with her including Arnica and Hypericum.

I saw her the next time about four weeks later when our schedules lined up, and she just was floating around the house. She said, “You know, I feel so much better. I’ve been sleeping on my shoulder. I just feel wonderful. Thank you so much. I know that this works, and I want to tell my friends about it.”

Kate:  That’s so fantastic. I love that! When someone like your mom, your housekeeper, they have these great successes, and then they start sharing it — which is actually what you’re doing. You told me recently about how you want to share this with people who have never even heard about homeopathy. That’s pretty exciting — your vision.

Erica:  I really believe in homeopathy, and I can’t help myself talking about it. Just when given the opportunity, it’s just such a great experience to teach people about it if they’re willing. If they are having things that they’re dealing with, I usually give them Joette’s websites and a link to her podcasts, so that they can go ahead and search — to look at it if they’re interested as well.

Kate:  Yes, that’s what Joette suggests is to send people to the website because then they can do the research and learn as well. Because I think if we just give things to people and they don’t read about it or learn about it … I don’t know, I’ve just found that they’re less likely to actually take the homeopathy and use it if they don’t know about it.

Erica:  I agree.

Kate:  Let’s talk about one more experience with homeopathy, and that is a teacher in Japan with strep throat. What happened there?

Erica:  Yes, my son’s teacher in Japan — she was not feeling well for a couple of weeks. I asked her, “How are you doing?”

She’s like, “Oh, you know, I have strep throat, and I’ve gone to the doctor and medications are not helping. It’s just pretty painful.”

Again, I couldn’t help myself — talking about homeopathy. I explained again what it was, and I sent her to Joette’s blog about strep throats. I left her with some Hepar sulph 200. A few days later when I saw her again, she said, “It’s all better!” I was super grateful because another one for homeopathy!

Kate:  That’s great. It’s like you have a little bulletin board, and you’re like, “I’m putting these hash marks on there. Win, win, win!

Erica:  Win for homeopathy!!

Kate:  One other thing I want to talk about, it’s kind of personal, and, hopefully, you don’t mind sharing with us. But I think it would be really helpful to those women who are listening who are younger and still having babies. You had a miscarriage, and you have some great things to share about how that unfolded. I’m so sorry for your loss, and it’s a difficult thing to go through. But I think it would be helpful if you wouldn’t mind talking about it.

Erica:  Yes, sure. It is not the most pleasant thing to talk about, but it happens. And I’m happy to share. I had a miscarriage a few months ago. It was my first miscarriage, so I had no idea what to expect.

Went in one day after I started bleeding — for about 24 hours of bleeding — and the doctor confirmed that the miscarriage did happen. She gave me three options:

She said, “I can give you a pill to induce the clearing,” (which was not an option for me, and so that was off the table).

The second option was, “I can perform surgery.”

The third option was to let nature take its course at home. This is what my gut instinct was: is that because I had hormonal issues — postpartum prior — I wanted to do what my body needed to do naturally, if possible.

The good news is that I brought Ignatia 200 right away. Then as I got home, I started to do a lot of research and looking up the options on what the surgery was. I started to look into homeopathy about if there was anything that could help me.

I found some information on the Facebook group, the Students of Joette. I found a protocol, and I confirmed it by another Banerji book that I have.

I also wrote Joette an email because I do consult with her.

Even before she got back to me, I ran out to the store, and I grabbed Pulsatilla 30 and took that every six hours. No kidding, within three doses of Pulsatilla, the clearing commenced, and the pain was fully managed by Arnica.

That was my experience is that it wasn’t the most pleasant, but I was able to do it at home and naturally — how I had wanted to.

But I want to be really clear that without my doctor’s support, I’m not sure I would have been able to do that on my own. She gave me her phone number, and we talked that night after the doctor’s appointment that I wanted to try this naturally. We discussed the potential risk which is hemorrhaging. I said, “You know, I understand that, and I’d like to continue to try this.”

She agreed. I was to inform her when the clearing started — which I did send her a message — so that if I did need to go to the hospital, that she could call it in, and she could meet me there. We really worked as a team, and I felt that that teamwork made it a better experience for me.

Kate:  What kind of doctor did you have? Was it a midwife or …?

Erica:  My doctor is an OB-GYN, and I’ve been seeing her for over a decade. She also delivered both my children. So, we have a history there, but she’s just the best. I have not found somebody that I work so well with as her.

Kate:  It’s wonderful when you find a doctor that is willing to let you try natural methods and still work with you knowing that sometimes you do need a physician, a doctor, to handle things. We have a doctor like that, and she’s incredible. So thankful for those doctors, for sure.

I’m sorry that you went through that but thank you for sharing your experience and what worked for you. I think that was important what you said about having that team alongside with you as you handle this — that you can call someone right away if you get into trouble or need help. Thank you.

Something I don’t normally ask on these podcasts, but I think it’s kind of interesting is: Tell us about the mistakes that you made, or something that you learned along the way and experienced that didn’t go so well that it taught you something about homeopathy.

Erica:  Yes. So, usually, my mistakes are not having the remedies when I need them. Recently, actually last weekend, we went to the beach. And I had recently listened to the Facebook Live with Joette about jellyfish stings with Urtica urens as being that great remedy to help with them.

Kid you not: I left the house, and I was about 10 minutes down the road, and I said, “Oh, I forgot my Urtica.” And I didn’t turn back. But I should have because half the group that went into the water got stung, and it would have been really helpful to have that with me.

Kate:  Did you use something else instead of Urtica?

Erica:  No.

Kate:  No.

Erica:  I was like, “It’s not bad enough.” But it would have been great to try to help with the sting.

Kate:  Yes, I think that’s a really good point — not having the remedies — for sure.

Erica:  Even now when I travel — and when I was in Japan in particular, when I travelled with my family — I always struggled with what remedies to bring because I never knew what would come up on our vacations. We end up doing a lot of different things outdoors. So, I ended up just honestly packing all my kits eventually and just taking up the space in the suitcase. But I still need to work on trying to manage the ones that I need to bring with me.

Kate:  Yeah, you’re like me. I bring a ton of remedies because you don’t know what you’re going to encounter especially when you’re traveling, you know, overseas. It’s difficult.

All right. Let’s end the podcast with some advice that you have. You have some things that you would like to share about homeopathy, and we would love to hear those.

Erica:  Yes, I’m going to give a recent piece of advice because this happened this week. It’s something that I have a really hard time doing — that I know is easier to say than to do — and that is to give the remedies a chance to act.

This week, my husband woke up with a sore throat, and it was really painful. So, I went on and grabbed a Banerji protocol from the Gateway II course, Lesson 3, which was Hepar sulph 200 with Sanguinaria 200 (which is a Banerji protocol that I learned from the Gateway II course). He had drainages, and that’s why I chose it.

He did not see any changes and I was like, “Okay, you need to wait four doses.”

He waited four doses (which was almost a full day) to change up the remedy, and then I gave him the next remedy on the list, which was Merc sol 200 with Belladonna 3C, and it started acting after the second dose that evening.

It is difficult to wait when you want to see results, and your family member is hurting, but it’s really good to know what works and what does not. I was glad I was able to do it, but it took a lot of willpower to make that happen.

Kate:  I agree. It’s hard — hard to wait.

Erica:  My advice is to stick with the remedies for the four doses that are recommended and to give them the chance to act — and take notes so that you can figure out what works and make sure that you get your family on the right track.

Kate:  Erica, it has been a pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate you opening up and sharing your experiences. I look forward to seeing what you do in the future and maybe a second podcast interview.

Erica:  We’d love to. This has been such a great experience.

Kate:  Thank you, Erica.

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

In these podcasts, I focus on those students of mine who have already tunneled in and learned how to take care of themselves, family, friends, and pets, and even livestock using homeopathic medicine. Many of these students began their education by participating in one of my Gateway to Homeopathy study groups. And now, after taking one or more of my courses, they’re well-trained to use my specific brand of homeopathy.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you to follow in their footsteps. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

01:00   Classical or Practical Homeopathy®?

18:56   What’s a “Simillimum?”

28:46   Case Management

34:47   The Academy of Practical Homeopathy®

37:40   My Mission

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Coffea 200C (for anxiety)

Ruta 6 or Ruta 200 (for strained ligaments)

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 104.

Joette:  This is Joette Calabrese, and I’d like to welcome you to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. Women and men worldwide are taking back control of their families’ health and learning how to heal their bodies naturally, safely and effectively.

So, if you’re hungry to learn more, you’ve come to the right place. Stay tuned as we give you the tools — and the inspiration — you need as I share my decades of experience and knowledge using this powerful medicine we call homeopathy.

Kate:  Hi, this is Kate, and I want to welcome you back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. I’m here today with Joette. We have some very interesting things to talk about.

Hi, Joette!

Joette:  Hi, Kate. It’s always fun.

Kate:  Yeah! We’re going to dig deep today. We’re going to be talking about sort of a heavy subject.

So, I have a question for you. When I go online and try to look up remedies for certain conditions, I can find an abundance of information on acute conditions, but it is super-hard to find information on how to treat chronic conditions.

Tell us what your perspective is on that, Joette.

Joette:  Well, that was exactly my frustration when I was a young mother dealing with my children. I was happy to find how to treat a fever and otitis media and conjunctivitis and strep throat and an injury. But boy, when it came to food intolerances or allergies or my mother’s chronic arthritis or my mother’s insomnia, et cetera … my father’s heart condition — it drove me crazy (which is why, of course, I decided to start studying classical homeopathy).

That’s where there’s a division. Because what you’ll find online and in homeopathy books (we’re talking about books that are directed to the general public), is they’ll teach only those acute conditions. Because the goal of the classical homeopaths and the classical homeopathy schools is to encourage moms and grandmothers that the only way they can learn how to treat a chronic condition is if they become classical homeopaths.

And that is a very expensive and time-consuming endeavor. In the end, when these moms and grandmothers finish these courses, they are able to understand classical homeopathy, but they still don’t have the practical experience or results. They don’t have practical methods.

Kate:  So, you’re not saying it’s a bad thing to study classical homeopathy. You’re just saying that even though you’ve gone that route, there’s still something that’s missing.

Joette:  Classical homeopathy offers a good foundation if you want to become a practitioner.

As a practitioner, you need to understand the history of homeopathy. You need to be very familiar with Dr. Samuel Hahnemann’s aphorisms. Many of them should be memorized. You should know how to navigate a repertory (inside and out, not only manually but also in a program), medicines in the materia medica and know their keynotes. That gives a very good foundation for someone who’s going to hang out a shingle. Except that’s all it gives — is a foundation.

It does not leave the student (once they graduate) with a practical aspect of how to treat the person. That’s what’s missing.

You’re left with a very vague notion of what needs to be done. Because the goal of the classical homeopath is to find THE simillimum — the one medicine — the constitutional remedy that will stimulate that person’s ability to correct everything in that person’s body, and now you’re pretty much done.

I don’t know that very many classicals would actually agree that that is exactly what happens. But that’s the message.

Instead, what I do is I teach Practical Homeopathy®, so that the family has everyday practical ability to be able to take care of someone in their family who has food intolerances or eczema — yes, chronic conditions — or lax ligaments or chronic anxiety or chronic insomnia or arthritis, et cetera … allergies.

These are the kinds of things that … although it’s interesting to know and useful to have those acute conditions, and what to do with them that’s given to the general public, this — what I’ve just described to you — those chronic conditions  — are what everyone is suffering from.

To leave that out and to instead insist that the only way someone can get to that is to take years and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of education to learn how to treat those kinds of conditions is, in my estimation, leading someone down the wrong path.

At best, they’re over-egging the pudding. At worst, they are misdirecting. And it’s not because they’re lying. It’s because classical homeopaths in this country don’t realize how archaic classical homeopathy alone is. Useful in addition to practical, but on its own, it is fundamentally problematic.

What I teach instead is if you’ve got eczema, this is the medicine you use. It’s the potency and the frequency. In approximately 80% of those folks who have eczema, it will likely make the correction within a certain amount of time (with some massaging as well, which is what we call case management). We’ll talk about that a little bit further.

But the problem with classical is, for one thing, it’s keeping homeopathy down. You can’t get enough practitioners using classical homeopathy. Because who’s willing … not only to go through all those years — $20,000 a year — and all that time and study, and then when you get finished, you really still don’t have practical measures on how to handle a case? You’re still left in the lurch as to “What is the remedy for this condition? What’s the potency and what’s the frequency?”

But also, you’re left with a paradigm in which you must take a case that takes two hours. How could any practitioner make a living if they’re seeing a patient or a client only every two hours? And then when they finish they have more work to do in order to repertorize. That’s usually another hour. So, three hours per client (per patient) — even if nothing else that puts the practitioner at an extreme disadvantage. That’s one disadvantage of it.

The other disadvantage — which is the most noteworthy, as far as I’m concerned — is I can’t teach classical homeopathy to moms. They don’t have the time.  I could do it! I mean, I have done it. But I can’t teach enough of them so that they can utilize this in their homes.

We can skip over a lot of the fundamentals and get directly to “let’s get rid of this eczema.” If you’re so interested that you want to become a homeopath at some point later in your life, okay, now I get it! Now you want those fundamentals. Now you want some of that foundation.

But if you are planning on building a house, you need the walls and the ceiling and the roof and the electrical and the plumbing and the plaster, et cetera. You cannot go into this with just the fundamentals. You have to have practical measures and practical application for all of these.

So, not only does this affect moms because they can’t treat their families for chronic conditions unless they go to all those years of schooling, but it also keeps homeopathy away from the doctors. I don’t know very many medical doctors who are willing to set aside their 20s — sacrifice their 20s — in order to go to medical school and then go into internship, then residency. Now they owe probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they have to start their life at some point.

Meanwhile, their friends from college all started business eight years ago! Everyone else is ahead of them.

How can they possibly be willing, then, once they get out of conventional medical school to then learn homeopathy?

If, however, we can teach the doctors in the emergency rooms that when you see an injury, you give them Aconitum to start. If they’re bleeding, you use Hamamelis, Arnica or Phosphorus. And then if the person goes into shock, you give … et cetera, et cetera.

We can give them an exact method for using this. It’s practical homeopathy.

So, it’s keeping homeopathy esoteric, recherché, far away from the everyday person. It’s not practical by going after the classical paradigm.

I can say this with all confidence because I used classical homeopathy full-time, exclusively for 15 years in my practice, and it was frustrating as can possibly be.

I knew there had to be another way. I knew there had to be protocols. That’s when I decided I wanted to work with the Banerjis in Calcutta, and they allowed me to join in with them for those eight years. So, it was through that — plus, also I had learned many other protocols in addition to the ones that I learned from them. But, no one gets it as well as they do.

Once I gathered up these protocols, and I sat with them — side-by-side with Dr. Prasanta Banerji, seeing 100 patients per day, six days a week, and then Dr. Pratip Banerji, 100 patients per day, six days a week, and meanwhile in the other chambers there were 11 other doctors doing exactly the same thing, so they were seeing a total of 1,200 people per day coming through that clinic, that research center, every single day, at the end of the week, that’s 7,200 people — after a while, these protocols became very clear to the Banerjis … as to why we can count on Ruta for strained ligaments.

Every classical homeopath knows Ruta is for strained ligaments. It can be a chronic strain, or it can be an acute strain.

Kate:  Well, doesn’t that mean that classical homeopaths — even though they don’t say they’re doing it — they’re actually using a protocol then. Because isn’t that considered a protocol?

Joette:  Yes, in a way it is. The only difference is it’s not a complete protocol. It’s a name of a medicine. It’s not giving us the potency, and it’s not giving us the frequency. That’s where the total protocol comes to play.

You want the whole recipe!

You don’t want to know that it’s a cup and a half of flour and the baking soda; yet, you still don’t know what to do about the oil or the water or the sweetener or the flavor.

You’ve got to have the whole picture.

But, if you see time and time again that Ruta is for strained ligaments, after a while you kind of know: Ruta is for strained ligaments. We can do that with many, many medicines to a certain degree, and classicals know this. But they don’t put it all together necessarily into a full protocol — and a full protocol means the whole recipe.

You don’t want to know that Ruta is for ligaments, end of discussion.

“Wait a minute, what potency?

Wait a minute, how frequently?

Hold on, you’ve got to give me all this information! I’ve got to know how to treat these people.”

You don’t want to be practicing on people. You want to know exactly the protocol.

For example, for chronic anxiety, Coffea can’t be beat! There are others. We have Ignatia. We have others. But let’s use Coffea 200, for example.

I always knew as a classical homeopath that Coffea would be a good medicine for chronic anxiety. But instead of just jumping on that and seeing that that is the big condition — that’s the elephant in the room for this particular person — I instead did exactly as I was trained. And that was I cracked open my repertory and looked at alllll the other satellite conditions that this person was experiencing: what position they slept on; whether or not they had long eyelashes; whether or not they liked creamy or crunchy; whether or not they had a lot of stress in their lives, et cetera, et cetera; whether or not they had just had a cold two months ago; whether they’re prone to this or that.

Those are all important bits of history. But if the main condition is that this person is freaking with anxiety, for us to ignore that — and not know instantly we should be considering one of the top medicines for anxiety (such as Coffea), and that we should know that when we use Coffea it should be 200C, and that when we use Coffea 200C for anxiety (chronic anxiety), that it should be twice daily — that is a travesty that that is not taught in classical schools. It never will be because that’s not classical.

In other words, what I’m teaching you right now: if you go home (or you’re listening to this at home), and you know two people who have chronic anxiety, and they fit the Coffea picture …

You do have to look it up in your materia medica and do, indeed, make sure that it does somewhat fit along with that person’s presentation of the illness (such as not being able to sleep as well, or they have a busy mind, and there’s bizz, bizz, bizz in their brain all the time). If that fits, and you use that, now you have found something that’s going to be not only useful for those two people in your life, but those two people are going to tell another two people. And the word is going to get around that Coffea 200C twice a day is for people who have busy brains who are very anxious.

That’s how we get protocols out into the world!

That to me distinguishes between classical and practical.

Classical is, “Oh, you can’t do that. It’s different for every single person.”

Not really. We’re more alike than we are different, to be honest. As long as we have anxiety and busy brain and perhaps even insomnia (waking up in the night), then that is Coffea — end of discussion.

That means what I’ve just taught you is reproducible. And reproducible is what I call scientific. And that’s what the doctors are looking for. That’s what we’re all looking for. We want the formula — the recipe.

Today I can make a cake without a recipe. I know to use about two and a half cups of flour. I sift the flour. I throw in the salt. I use half a teaspoon of baking powder, baking soda. I add my sweetener. I mix in my flavor. I throw in some cocoa powder. I throw in a couple of eggs. I throw in some milk or cream. I whip it all up. I know how to do it. I know exactly how to make a cake without looking it up.

But! There was a time when I used to have to read the recipe. That’s how it should be for anyone who’s new to homeopathy. But after a while, it’s the same thing. It’s called, “anatomy of making a cake.” It’s the same basic stuff.

Now, it doesn’t mean we can’t use almond flour sometimes, and some people don’t like to use oil, so they use applesauce. Okay, those are variations on a theme.

But you don’t have to get that esoteric. If you want to bake a cake, here’s the recipe. Here you go.

These protocols are missing in the world. I have brought them back from India, and some that I learned on my own through the years, and some I learned from fellow homeopaths through the years who were practicing in Europe, et cetera.

But boy, I’ll be darned when it comes to the U.S., we just simply cannot get rid of that classical paradigm that every single person is different.

I’m sorry. I beg to differ.

You know, we need standardized treatments. That’s what conventional doctors have. That’s why everybody goes to them! We’re never going to bring people over from the conventional thinking of conventional medicine if we keep this is so esoteric and so person-specific and taking years and years of classical training and still not having an answer!

I have to tell you, when I was in my classes in Toronto, I took three years with one teacher and two years with another teacher and then another four years with another teacher. In every one of those classes, we needed to be full-time practicing homeopaths for at least five years in order to get into these courses. (They were all postgrad courses.)

I got to know a lot of my fellow students because we were there together all the time. And what I found was really fascinating. They were all there for two reasons. They wanted to learn more for their practice so they could be better homeopaths — no doubt about it. But the secondary reason — which was quite compelling in most situations — was they were all looking for their simillimum. They wanted THE remedy for themselves.

After all those years of being in private practice for five years — full-time private practice for five years — in order to get into the course (and previous courses in order to get into their practice in the first place), they still hadn’t found their constitutional!

It’s elusive!

It doesn’t mean we can never find it. But wow! What a hard thing to do when all you have to do if this person is suffering horribly from anxiety, and they’re waking at night — Coffea 200. End of discussion.

Or their strained ligaments? They’ve had chronic strained ligaments. It’s going to be Ruta 6 or Ruta 200 (we do have a choice) twice daily.

If it’s the eyes, it’s most likely 6.

If it’s around the feet or the ankles and other areas of the limbs, then it’s likely going to be 200 twice a day.

Kate:  Joette, take a step back for just a minute and explain to us what “simillimum” means? What does that mean when you’re looking for your simillimum or the “constitutional” remedy?

Joette:  Well, the simillimum is the one medicine that covers the grandest aspect of the person’s personality and condition.

So, we’re looking for the psychology, and the generals such as the “I ams” (“I am tired, I am weak,” et cetera), plus the particulars such as, “I have anxiety. I’m anxious.” Of course, that’s part of the mentals.

Plus, let’s say it’s someone who has anxiety and strained ligaments. “My ligaments ache; they’re painful.”

It’s the one medicine that will cover most everything.

I’m going to be honest with you. That’s how it’s taught. But very few classical homeopaths actually really do that. They often, because I found it out myself … I would take a case, and I would look at trying to find the one medicine — the “constitutional,” which represents the whole person, their personality, including even their inheritance to a certain degree, what may have happened to them in their history, et cetera.

Now all of that is important when we’re taking a case. I don’t want to minimize this.

But to find one medicine that’s going to cover all of this is like finding a needle in a haystack as far as I’m concerned — generally speaking. Sometimes it’s really obvious. Then of course, you’re going to go with it. That makes sense.

But to be honest, what we’re really looking for is, “What is the condition?” And the way that I work this out in Practical Homeopathy® using the Banerji protocols and other protocols is, we’re looking for “What is the condition — the main condition — that is causing you the most suffering in your life.”

“Okay, what’s the second one? Okay, what’s the third one?”

Then we may use one medicine to cover number one, number two, and number three, but by the time we get to number four, we’re going to need another medicine most likely and maybe another after that. So, then we’re stacking up the medicines and putting them into a schedule; whereas in classical you’re using one medicine.

Generally speaking, with one medicine in classical, you’re giving it one dose in the morning. (Sometimes you’ll give a split dose so that it’s also administered in the evening, and then again in the morning, so it’s a split dose over 24 hours.) And then you wait.

Nothing is given for six weeks.

Parenthetically, let me also explain where classical homeopaths are so worried about people being exposed to mint or coffee and those potential antidoting substances; whereas I don’t worry about that. Because let me just go back to why they worry … but they worry about it because you’re only going to take that medicine three times, for example — perhaps, only once! Then you have to wait six whole weeks.

If something comes in to antidote it, you can really … you can mess up the whole case! Now you’ve got to wait.

Let’s say you did it a week after the first round of the medicine. Now you’ve got to wait five more weeks to meet with the homeopath again and start all over again.

“Woah! Holy cow is that pokey?”

I like velocity. I want speed. I want someone to move along so quickly that they never imagine that their illness would move that quickly.

With the practical method, more often than not (not always — it depends on the protocol; it depends on the condition and the corresponding protocol), we use the medicine twice daily. Sometimes it’s once a day. Sometimes it’s once every three days. But they’re certainly a lot more close together in frequency than every six weeks.

So that, if someone happens to get into an awful lot of mint (and I don’t worry about it, to be honest), but if they get into an awful of mint, no problem. They’re going to take the medicine again that night! It’s not going to undo all the good that may have been accrued from taking the homeopathic medicines by inhaling a little bit of mint. It’s going to, instead, potentially only stop the action at that moment.

No worries. Take the remedy again that night, and lo and behold, we’re up and running again.

That’s actually another reason why I abandoned classical is because people would say, “Oh, my gosh! I had mint. What am I going to do now?”

I would try to decide. “Should we start over again? Should we just let it go and see how it goes? Maybe it wasn’t antidoted. Should I shake my finger at them and tell them, ‘Don’t do that anymore? Don’t be around any mint.’”

That’s not a way to run a practice.

What happens is, after you’ve been doing these 10 hours a day as I was for those 15 years (five, six days a week), and you finally get to the point where you’re saying, “This is ridiculous! It is too slow, and my results were not good enough!

And it’s not as though I didn’t pay attention, or I wasn’t studying! Because I was constantly (as I told you), I was in school in Toronto, in New York, in New Jersey, and traveling to Illinois and Florida, et cetera — wherever I could find a teacher that I could learn more from. I was happy to do that.

But boy, was it frustrating, and I was not alone. I heard the same kinds of complaints from my colleagues.

So, the fact that classical is still being pushed to this point as the only paradigm is maddening to me, because it’s leaving out the most important aspect of homeopathy in 2020 — and that is, “The Family.”

If we don’t help moms and grandmothers learn how to treat their families, homeopathy is going to die. It’s that simple. It’s already dying.

The only thing that is reviving it — and excuse me, I don’t mean to brag — but it’s only because I’ve gotten this out there to moms that homeopathy is reviving again in the United States. I know that. I see the numbers. I saw how they were. I see how they are. I see the groups of people who are studying with us, who are in the Study Groups, who are taking the courses, and I talk to these people regularly.

This is what’s going to revive homeopathy. And to ignore that and to stay with a “ceiling fan” when you should have had “household air conditioning” some 30 years ago is frustrating for me to observe.

Kate:  I think it’s important for people to know that that is your audience. This is who you’re trying to help is moms and families. You’re not necessarily trying to influence people who are wanting to be a homeopath. You want to get this out there to the everyday person so they can help their families, and I think that’s a really important point to note.

So, I’m a mom, and I want to help my child who has chronic painful ligaments. What if I use this Ruta, and it’s the wrong medicine? Should I be worried? Should I be afraid that I’m going to do it wrong?

Because I know, I hear this quite a bit from moms in Study Groups: that they’re concerned about using homeopathy, in general, and even more so when they’re treating chronics. Is it a concern?

Joette:  I don’t think it’s any different with a chronic versus an acute.

But. I do agree that we have to be careful because this is medicine.

Whether you’re treating otitis media that just started this morning, or you’re treating a strep throat that just started last night in your other child, or you’re treating a strained ligament that is a chronic condition, or you’re treating chronic anxiety. You have to be smart about it — which is why you should be taking courses. You should be studying my blog (that’s for free), my podcasts, et cetera. That’s where folks are going to get that information.

It’s important to know that anything can cause trouble. I don’t want to be facetious here, but too much water can cause trouble. Too much salt can cause trouble.

Homeopathy is only relatively safe. If you follow the rules the way that I teach them — how many times to utilize a medicine — and you don’t see a response after that certain number of times, and you don’t know when to stop, then that, indeed, can cause trouble.

You must follow the rules. It’s just simple for everything.

You go swimming, you follow the rules. You don’t go out swimming in deep water all alone in a storm. But you can swim. You’re allowed to swim. You just have to know what the rules are and to follow them. That’s really what we’re saying.

So, I do want people to be cautious. I think that’s prudent. But I don’t want them to be frightened into believing that by using a medicine twice a day, that that’s a problem. Because if that is a protocol, it has been shown time and again that that is what we need to do if we’re going to treat this particular condition.

Now where a lot of times folks go wrong is they might assume that it’s a strained ligament, and it turns out it’s not. So, they’re treating a strained ligament with Ruta, for example, 200C twice daily, and nothing is happening. Or it’s gotten worse!

What do we do if something gets worse? You stop!

You really ought to know, is this a strained ligament, or are these muscles that are painful, or are these bones that are growing too fast because the child has growing pains in the muscles, and the joints and the ligaments, et cetera, are growing differently than the bones.

You need to know those kinds of things. So, if you’re using the wrong diagnosis with the incorrect protocol, then, of course, you’re going to make a mistake.

But let me just say this. I think people are smarter than they’re being given credit for. I think that mothers can learn this. I can teach this to a child! In fact, that’s exactly what you and I are doing right now, Kate. We’re putting together a course specifically to teach kids.

So, there is no doubt it can be learned. But there can also be mistakes.

If you make a mistake, you stop. If it’s bad enough, and you feel like, “Oh, boy, I really … I really do think this was wrong,” then you use Camphor 200. I teach that right on my blog for free, and it’s in all of my courses.

Kate:  What we’re really talking about is honing our skills on case management. After we know the protocol, now we need to really learn how to tell if this medicine is working and when to stop, et cetera.

Joette:  Well, when it comes to acutes, it’s pretty easy to know when to stop. Your infection is no longer painful. There’s no more drainage. The child doesn’t have a fever. The child is back to their activities, and it’s clear that it’s over.

When it’s chronic, most people don’t know how long it takes for a homeopathic protocol to act. So, they need to learn that about that particular protocol.

I mean, how long does it take to get rid of psoriasis?

It takes a long time to get rid of psoriasis. You should see a change over many months, but you’re not going to see complete resolution like you did with the ear infection because it’s a longer-term condition.

So, it’s really about learning to think like a practitioner. That’s what I teach in my courses. I don’t teach that on the blog. I don’t teach that in the podcasts. I teach that in my courses. That means that you learn case management.

Case management means after the six to eight weeks is over with, after having used this medicine, what has improved and to what degree?

That can only be determined if in the beginning of taking the case, the person has jotted down the values of the suffering: “These ligaments, the pain is a whopping 8, and it happens most every day. The anxiety is a 6, and it’s most days. And I also have sleeplessness,” reports this person.

Now six to eight weeks later, after you’ve given the medicines that are specific for those conditions just as I mentioned, now you want to look at it. And if the person says, “I see no change,” you say, “Tell me what has changed, and what has not.”

“Nothing has changed.”

“Okay, describe to me what has happened.”

“I still have anxiety.”

“Okay, give me a number.”

“Well, it’s about a 2.”

But the person doesn’t remember that they had reported six weeks earlier that it was a 6. That was up to you to know that — to have recorded that, so that then you can overlay what they’re telling you now as to what they had said previously.

With that information, now you can determine, did Coffea 200 twice a day help this person?

The next question before you answer that for yourself, “How’s your sleep? Are you waking up at night with restlessness and a busy brain?”

“Well, I still do it.”

“How often?”

“Well, maybe twice, you know, twice a month.”

“Twice a month? It was happening every day!”

Now without knowing how to manage a case, you might think, “Well, I guess this medicine didn’t act because they still have it.”

No, that’s not what it means at all. It means that the medicine is acting, and it needs more time! We need to use the medicine. Again, that’s part of case management. It’s only a part of it, but that’s what I teach in the classes.

Look, I’m not trying to sell my classes. Really. To be honest, we are full to the brim. But the point is that if you’re going to treat chronic conditions using this method, you really do need back-up information. You need your foundation. You need some foundation. You don’t need classical, but you do need some foundation.

Kate:  Right, because we hear all the time, “What’s the protocol for X, Y, Z?”

Joette:  Right.

Kate:  You could tell them the protocol. What happens after using that protocol for a while?

Joette:  Let me put it to you this way. It’s shallow. “Here’s the condition. Here’s the name of the medicine and protocol.”

It’s too shallow when it comes to a chronic condition. We have to go a little deeper than that. We have to know, “To what degree is this person suffering?”

You also want to look at what are the drugs the person’s taking? The drugs themselves might be causing this. To be honest, it’s pretty darn hard for homeopathy to uproot the side effects of drugs that are being taken daily.

Now we have to backpedal and talk to the person about the drugs that they’re using and find a way that we can address the conditions that are requiring that this person take these drugs in the first place.

I don’t tell people to get off their drugs! I’m not a medical doctor. I don’t know drugs the way the doctors and the pharmacists do. But if there is a side-effect (such as Ruta for strained ligaments), how about ruptured ligaments can occur as a result of antibiotic use!

And even the pain can come from antibiotic use.

So, if the person is taking these antibiotics daily because the doctor is thinking, “Well, we’ve got chronic Lyme,” and now they have these ruptured or painful ligaments. Homeopathy can only do so much. We have to work on dealing with the condition at hand so that the antibiotics become superfluous. And that’s the goal!

So, managing a case is more than “What’s the remedy for …?”

It’s understandable that people would ask that question because they’ve been trained to think, “This is the drug for this, and this is the vitamin for that, and this is the supplement for this, and this is the essential oil for these conditions.”

It’s gotten to the point where people expect — and would hope for — a quick resolve or a quick answer. Sometimes we can do that.

In those cases, that’s what I do on my blog. That’s what I teach on my blog. Those conditions that I have a pretty much good amount of confidence that if someone has this particular condition, and they use this medicine, it’s likely going to do some good.

It’s when we get into chronic conditions that it’s important that folks dig deeper and learn how to manage the case. And that’s what I cover in my courses.

If you got a lot of time on your hands then learn everything you can. But if you’ve got a lifestyle that requires that you’re taking care of your kids, your husband, your household, the pets, the last thing you want to do is go down a rabbit hole that could lead you to a very frustrating several years looking for the elusive simillimum or the constitution.

Instead, you want to go after what is presenting and not make this so esoteric.

Kate:  Joette, this brings us back to the beginning when we were talking about how we can find information on using homeopathy for acute conditions but not for chronic. And then, we talked about the Practical Homeopathy®, and how we can use those methods to address chronic conditions.

But are you saying that we should not use classical homeopathy? We’re just supposed to throw that out the window, or what are you exactly saying?

Joette:  I’m saying if you’re going to treat a few conditions here and there, then I don’t see how classical is important in your life. So, you have to decide this.

But. On the other hand, if you’re planning on working with many people, many animals, and you really have the time and the curiosity to go further and perhaps someday even become a practitioner yourself, then I believe that classical has a place. It’s a good foundation. So that when you get stumped by a specific condition that the protocols that I teach are not addressing — it does happen — then you know how to go to the next step.

So, in classical, it’s not a bad idea to know how to navigate the repertory, to know the top 50-100 homeopathic medicines in the materia medica, to understand case-taking and negotiating a case, and how to know what is most important — how to decide on what the hierarchy is in the case, and then how to structure a complete schedule.

So, I believe that there are aspects of classical that need to be understood in order to delve deeply into homeopathy.

Kate:  So, in fact, Joette, you’re planning something right now that’s pretty exciting, and I don’t know if you want to talk about it at this moment. But I think it would be a great time to share with the listeners what you’re talking about doing. But it does encompass classical homeopathy, does it not?

Joette:  Yes, it does. I believe that classical homeopathy is something that can be very useful for folks who want to have the basic understanding. And then we build on that and add Practical Homeopathy®.

So, it’s going to be an integrative aspect of using classical with practical for those folks who are interested in getting the full symphony involved in their lives. Instead of being left with “just the woodwinds,” now we have the entire string section, the woodwinds, the percussionists — we have everything involved in it.

And this will also afford those who are interested in certification.

So, we’re calling it, “The Academy of Practical Homeopathy®.” And, I don’t know when it will be out — when we’ll be launching it — but it’s coming soon, and I’m very excited about it.

Kate:  Mm-hmm! So many projects going on right now. It’s really an exciting time!

Joette:  Yes. It is.

Kate:  So, Joette, let’s wrap this up with talking about what your mission is.

Joette:  It’s simple. My mission is to get this to families. It’s really that simple.

Families need this information. They need to know how to treat acutes and chronics. And it’s up to the mom or the grandmother, generally speaking, to delve as deeply as they are interested in delving.

And then they decide.

You want to use only my protocols that I teach on the blog every week for the last 11 years? Free. Beautiful.

You want to learn from the podcasts, too? Free. Beautiful.

You want to join one of our Study Groups? It’s a little bit of an investment — well under a hundred dollars. That’s a great way to meet others and continue your learning journey.

And if you want to go even further than that, then I have all of these online classes. I believe we now have ten. And that will flesh out according to your needs and your desires.

So, join me in this mission and get this going throughout the world. We can link arm-in-arm across the earth and share this with your friends, your neighbors, your relatives. And let’s see this movement move forward in a rapid pace.

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

05:45    Homeopathy Journey                                                                 

08:55    Children Using Homeopathy

23:30    Methods Used in Giving Homeopathic Medicines to Animals

29:49   Keys to Success with Homeopathy

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Sepia for Mother’s Day! This Time for Headaches

The Survivalist Guide to Homeopathy

The Antibiotic Alternative: Balance Your Bugs Without the Drugs

Make It Stop! Escape From the Prison of Chronic (and Acute) Pain Using Practical Homeopathy®: Learn Effective Methods to Uproot Pain, Often for Good

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events, and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 103.

Joette:  Joette Calabrese here, folks. I’m happy that you’ve joined me for my podcast today. You’re in for a treat. From my virtual classroom, I’m privileged to see how homeopathy is transforming lives all over the globe. Their successes inspire me. They’re glorious and powerful, and I can’t keep their triumphs a secret. I want you to hear the excitement my students experience, too. So, you can be inspired by their unique stories.

With the help from Kate, my reporter, I bring you a podcast series I call, “Moms with Moxie.” Sometimes we even interview “Dads with Audacity” or “Teens with Tenacity.” See how regular mothers and others — average folks who love healing those around them — have gone from freaking to fabulous by simply applying what they’ve learned using what I call Practical Homeopathy®.

Kate:  Hi, this is Kate. I want to welcome you back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast.

Today, I have a Mom with Moxie with me, and her name is Lyda. She’s going to share with us a lot of information. But something I wanted you to know up front — so you’re ready to take notes — is that she’s going to talk about animals today because she’s very educated and has a lot of experience on using homeopathic medicines with the animals on her farm. So, for those of you who have a farm or just animals, be ready to take some notes.

All right. Lyda, welcome to the podcast.

Lyda:  Thank you. I really appreciate you having me on, and it’s quite an honor.

Kate:  We’re so glad to have you. I’m excited for you to share with the listeners of this podcast because you have some pretty amazing stories — and one in particular I’m thinking of, but we’ll get to that in a little bit.

First, I want you to tell us about yourself.

Lyda:  We live in Western Colorado just outside of Grand Junction. My husband and I have been married 27 years. We have five kids: four boys and a girl, ranging in age from 11 to 25.

My husband has been in the printing business for 30 years, but he’s just this next week transitioning into a real estate job, so that’s exciting. He’s very supportive of me and everything I take on, especially homeopathy. He’s been very helpful in that.

We have the farm where we raise Herefords, chickens, Jersey cows, sheep, turkeys, hens, and a really big garden, and we also raise Australian Shepherd and Great Pyrenees puppies. So, we’re very busy.

Kate:  Oh, my gosh, I don’t know how you do it all. I love those Pyrenees. We talked about this earlier, but we had a Great Pyrenees, and they’re amazing dogs.

Lyda:  They are. They’re very different than any other dog I’ve ever been around.

Kate:  You use them as protection for your other animals, right?

Lyda:  Yes, I do.

Kate:  Yeah, yeah, they’re amazing. It sounds like you have a very busy life. I’d love to hear about your day. What does your day look like?

Lyda:  Oh, goodness! I start the day out milking as soon as I can — before it gets hot right now, because it is so hot.

We grass feed all of our animals. So, it’s a lot of moving animals around to new pastures. We raise the meat chickens that have to be moved (which my son does that). We put all our cows on new pasture every day; put our sheep on pasture. So, it’s just a lot of taking care of animals.

I raise pullets to sell to people — that are young laying hens — and so I take care of those. I stop somewhere in there for a meal. I spend as much time in the afternoon in the garden getting that taken care of, and then it’s pretty much supper time, and we go to bed.

Kate:  Exhausted, right?

Lyda:  Exhausted, yeah.

Kate:  Now, when you move the animals around — the Herefords — do you use horses or four-wheelers or just walking? How do you guys do that? I’m just trying to picture it.

Lyda:  Yes, just walking. I mean, we have horses. My daughter, shows horses, but we don’t use them. We only have 10 acres. But my oldest son lives right next door to us, so we use his 10 acres. The cows know that in the morning they get to go to a new pasture. They pretty much move themselves. You just open gates and close gates and away they go.

Kate:  Do you try to make most of your own food from scratch like from your garden and do you do a lot of canning?

Lyda:  I do. I don’t do as much canning as I would like just because of time. But yeah, we have, of course, all of our own different kinds of meats. We have our own milk and eggs. We do freeze and can as much as possible. I like to make sourdough bread and just try to be as self-sustaining as we can.

Kate:  What is the weather like for you in the area of Colorado that you’re in?

Lyda:  Well, we have pretty hot summers — dry. It’s very dry here. That’s the other thing I do during the day is a lot of watering. I’m watering something all day, every day.

The wintertime is pretty cold, usually in the teens and 20s during the day. That’s a four- or five-month winter. We don’t get a lot of snow, and we don’t get a lot of rain, but we do have the cold and hot.

Kate:  It’s better than Wisconsin, let me tell you.

Lyda:  Yes, we don’t have humidity, and I’m very thankful for that.

Kate:  I was thinking of the cold when it gets below zero. I think one year we had three months that it never got above zero, which was crazy.

Lyda:  Oh, my goodness! Oooh, yeah, that would be very hard.

Kate:  Let’s talk about your homeopathy journey, how you learned about homeopathy or started to use it and found Joette. Tell us a little bit about that.

Lyda:  Okay. My older sister knew more about homeopathy than I did when I got married. She suggested that I buy a Hyland’s kit, which I did. I didn’t really use very much of it, mostly Arnica and Chamomile are the two that I used the most with my kids. I didn’t really know that much about it, or what I was doing.

I did take my oldest to a homeopath when he was about a year old because he didn’t sleep. He hated to nap. He wouldn’t sleep unless he was in my arms pretty much. So, we took him in. He gave him Calcarea — and I don’t remember now if it was Calc phos or Calc fluor or which “Calc” it was. It was just a “Calc,” but it helped him. He started sleeping better, and that was a real blessing.

So, that kind of sold me on more homeopathy. But I still didn’t really learn too much about it until about four years ago when my whole family came down with the flu. I was Googling stuff trying to figure out what would be the best way to treat us. We hadn’t gotten flu that often in our lives, and so I just was trying to find some things to help relieve everyone, and I came across Joette’s website. I put in the search bar “flu” (like she always says to do).

I learned quite a few different things to try, which I did. And it ended up being the best flu we’ve ever had. It was very easy. We just watched movies and just kind of sat around and got better.

From then on, I just started reading her blogs and listening to her podcasts as much as possible.

Then I decided to do a Gateway I with my family: my mom, my sisters, and two of my kids. We all did it together, which we really enjoyed. But I wanted to go further so I did the Gateway II class with you and really enjoyed that.

Then I started purchasing the classes or the courses. I got the Survivalist course and The Antibiotic Alternative course, and then I did the live Pain course with Joette this winter.

I’ve been able to learn a lot in the last two or three years, which has been a huge blessing.

Kate:  I love that you did the Gateway I with your mom and your sisters and your family. What a great way to do that.

Lyda:  Yes, it was fun. It was nice to learn together.

Kate:  So, are they all using homeopathy as well or did it kind of stop there? How did that go?

Lyda:  No, they all use it. It’s mostly just the easy things like Arnica and different things. My folks are older and having more health issues, and so, I’m trying to help them as much as I can. It’s mostly structural things that they’re dealing with: pain from arthritis, carpal tunnel, hip problems, and things like that. They’re very open to using homeopathy for whatever I can help them with. And again, my older sister, she uses it quite a bit for her family as well.

Kate:  Your husband, is he supportive of you using homeopathy?

Lyda:  Yes, yes, very. He wanted me to use it on the kids. He was totally fine with that, but he didn’t think it would work for him for a long time. But we finally had a few successes, and he’s more sold on it working for him now.

Kate:  You have some older children, and I know you’ve talked about your sons using homeopathy. I think it’s really interesting to hear about that. Tell us about your sons, and what they consider to be their medicine?

Lyda:  My oldest son, he’s very open to it because he’s had some good successes with it. He got rid of a bunch of warts with Thuja. He gets really bad ingrown toenails. They grow into the side of his toe. He has to have a little surgery done on them to cut them back, and they just keep growing. We’re trying homeopathically to fix the problem. But until then, the last time he had surgery, he used Arnica before the surgery, and he didn’t even hardly have any pain afterwards — which was a huge change from the other surgeries he’d had in the past. That really sold him — plus just colds and flus that we’ve addressed with it.

My second son, he is a total over-doer.  He overdoes everything in his life, and he has found that Nux vomica works very well for him. He doesn’t really sleep very often. He’ll go a day or two without sleeping. He uses Nux vomica when he has situations like that, and it really helps keep him going.

Third son is the most hesitant to use it, but he had … I’m not sure if it was a strep throat or just an infection in his throat. It just started out with being painful and having white pustules in it. He had that one evening, and I gave him Hepar sulph. The next morning, the pain was gone. By the next afternoon, the white pustule was gone. That really helped him to kind of see that it actually works.

My little guy (my 11-year old, I guess he is), he gets real bad headaches. We’ve done the Belladonna/Picric with those and sometimes just Belladonna, sometimes Chamomilla — just depends on his headache. But we’ve been able to address his headaches really well with homeopathy.

Kate:  When you mention the Belladonna and Picric, that’s actually Belladonna and Picric acid, and it’s a combination remedy, a Banerji protocol.

I know Joette talks about that on a blog. I just looked it up here, and it’s called Sepia for Mother’s Day! This Time for Headaches. If you’re prone to headaches, look up that blog because it has a lot of information about headaches. And not just hormonal headaches! There’s that Banerji protocol in there for general headaches.

I know headaches can be a bit tricky. I mean, if you’re new to homeopathy, it might not be the first thing to try to tackle. But that’s a great protocol. So, look up that blog.

Lyda:  Also, two of my boys went to the March for Life in January in Washington, DC. They were around just thousands and thousands of people plus being on six different airplanes, I think. They came back, and the day after they got home, were both sick.

And that was when coronavirus was first being talked about. I have no idea if that’s what they had or not. It was just kind of a flu-type illness, but both of them came to me as soon as they started feeling symptoms, and we got right on it.

The younger one, he was in bed for a day. The other one, my older one, he was in bed for a couple days. But they got better very quickly and with not a lot of residual problems after that.

Kate:  Didn’t you say that your boys consider homeopathy to be their medicine?

Lyda:  Yes, they do. We’ve always raised our kids to try to heal themselves. Since I’ve gotten into homeopathy so much, it’s been pretty inspiring, I think, to them to do the same. Because the doctor around here is the last resort! Whatever we can do to avoid going to the doctor, we do — and they’re all in on that. They really enjoy being able to use homeopathy.

Kate:  I love that your family uses homeopathy. Because I’m sure you probably feel like I do — and Joette says all the time — that homeopathy keeps us relevant in our kids’ lives especially those who have grown up and moved out of the house. It’s another way for us to share something in common and stay connected. Isn’t that great?

Lyda:  Yes, I agree totally.

Kate:  So, let’s switch gears, Lyda, and talk about animals because you have a lot to share regarding using homeopathy and all the different animals on your farm. Let’s dive into that. Tell us some ways that you’ve used homeopathy with your plethora of farm animals.

Lyda:  Okay. Well, one of my best successes was with one of my milk cows. We had bought her from a dairy, so she was a very heavy producer. She started kicking when I milked not very long after I got her — just mainly when I touched one teat.

I struggled with that for quite a few months, and she finally quit. The next time she calved, she started doing it again. It was rather dangerous because she would try to kick me off the stool. She absolutely hated for me to touch that teat. It wasn’t like it was the pain. It was like — it was a tickle, a very annoying tickle.

The reason that it was such a success to me is a vet never would have addressed that. They would have just said, “Well, you’re just going to have to deal with it.”

So, I went and repertorized her symptoms — and mainly the skin being sensitive to touch, I think, is the one that I started with — and ended up corresponding that with loss of bodily fluids. I tried China on her.

Within two doses, she had totally stopped kicking, totally stopped twitching every time I touched it. That was the end of it. I’ve never had that problem since. That was just so amazing to me because I couldn’t have ever fixed that any other way.

Kate:  Isn’t that a great feeling?

It was something that you figured out. “Okay, what are the symptoms?” You went to a repertory. You looked up those symptoms. What medicines match that symptom and then looked up those medicines and matched that to what best fit your situation. What a great success! You’re right. Good job!

Lyda:  Then, like I said, we raise Great Pyrenees, and we have an older Pyrenees female. Well, just so anybody knows (because I didn’t know this) that dogs do not go through menopause. They just keep getting pregnant no matter how old they are.

I had thought that she was too old to get pregnant. She’s 11 years old, and that’s really old for a Great Pyrenees. But she got pregnant, and we didn’t know about it until she went into labor.

She ended up having two puppies, but she had an extremely hard labor because she is so old and arthritic and lots of different things that would make labor hard.

The first puppy came out just fine. The second puppy was blue and not breathing. So, I ran and got some Carbo vegetabilis and gave a couple doses of that to him and kind of did CPR with my thumb on his heart. He started turning pink and got completely breathing and was in great shape.

And we still have him now. He’s a big old pup now that is just as healthy as can be!

But that night after she’d had the puppies, she started going downhill very quickly. She got to where she wouldn’t get up unless we made her get up. She would not eat anything, which is very unusual for a mama dog right after they’ve had puppies. She wouldn’t drink. Whenever I’d make her go outside, she would go and strain and try and get up and go again and go again and go again and wasn’t ever going, just constantly straining.

I came in and got my books out again and started trying to figure out what could be wrong with her. So, I started with the urinating and the straining was the main symptom that I can see. I gave her Cantharis 30, and I gave her some Arnica just for the trauma of the birth.

Within 30 minutes — and I am not kidding — within 30 minutes, she was up walking around, eating ravenously, drinking, went out, went to the bathroom, everything and was totally fine after that.

I was just shocked because I really didn’t have any hope for her. I thought she was going to die before the night was out. It was just amazing how quickly she came back and had absolutely no more trouble after that.

Kate:  Wow! You saved two dogs within probably 24 hours!

I can’t get over how amazing homeopathy is,. How it can literally save whether it’s human lives or animal lives. It’s incredible! I have new people that I talk to, and they ask me, “Can this medicine help this? Can it help that?” And I kind of chuckle to myself because when people are new, they don’t have the confidence yet. They haven’t seen what you’ve seen, Lyda, that homeopathy can literally save lives — like someone that had an anaphylactic reaction to something, and we are far away from a hospital.

Lyda:  I have to with all of our animals. I haven’t had the opportunity to use it in a life-threatening condition with a human at this point, but I have with the animals, and it has definitely been a blessing.

Kate:  Yes. Tell us the story about your Hereford cow that was pregnant and what happened.

Lyda:  We had a Hereford cow that was about six months pregnant with her second calf. She had a vaginal prolapse which is extremely unusual during pregnancy. That’s not supposed to happen obviously. It just looked like a very large cantaloupe hanging outside of her.

So, I pushed it back in hoping that it would stay — I had talked to the vet — but it didn’t. It came back out again even larger. And so, he had to come out, and he pushed it back in. He said that because she hadn’t had her calf yet … normally, they would sew up the vulva area so that it wouldn’t come back out. But because she hadn’t had her calf yet, they couldn’t do that.  Otherwise, if they go into labor when they have that sewn up, it can tear them apart literally. He didn’t want to do that.

Instead, they placed a pin that looks like a spool that thread comes on, only it’s really long and really, really narrow. They go inside, and the pin has kind of a nail-like head on it. He puts that inside, goes up through the hip, out the other side on the outside of the hip and puts a cap on it. It’s like this spool that goes all the way through her flesh and holds it in so that it doesn’t have that problem anymore.

Well, he couldn’t get it in exactly where he wanted it so he put it a little further than he should have, I guess. It affected her hip terribly, and she couldn’t walk. She went for two or three days, and she didn’t move — maybe 10 feet during that time. Completely stopped eating. She was absolutely miserable.

So, he came back out, took the pin out. Now she has this gaping hole in her side, and he said, “You’ll just have to watch her very closely and make sure that if she goes into labor, take that stitch out.”

Well, that was kind of overwhelming. I wasn’t really thrilled about that, plus she was in so much pain already. It was awful. She was absolutely miserable, couldn’t move, and totally stopped eating after that even.

During those two procedures, he gave her penicillin twice I believe, and then gave me sulfa powder to give to her for vaginal infection, for possible bladder infection, for infection of the wound. She just had so many possibilities of really being sick.

So, I gave her I think one more dose of penicillin. I gave her two or three doses of the sulfa, and she just got sicker and sicker. I mean, she got really sick. I believe she had a fever. She looked like she felt bad all the time. She got a very snotty nose. All the skin came off her nose. She was just in awful shape. She couldn’t move. She wasn’t eating. She wasn’t doing anything except just laying there being sick. I could get her to drink a little bit of water.

So, I said, “She’s going to die. Why not just experiment a little bit?”

I took her off all the drugs.

I started her on Pyrogenium and Hyper/Ars combination — the Banerji protocol for infection — as well. I was alternating those every two or three hours for the first two or three days probably.

By the fourth day, she started eating, which I was absolutely shocked. But she licked up some grain that had molasses on it. That’s the only thing I could get her to eat. Then gradually she came back. She started eating hay. She started drinking lots of water. She started “going,” which she hadn’t really done much of that, and just feeling better. Her nose cleared up and all the skin came off, and then she got new skin on her nose. She was able to start getting around a little bit.

I did that for probably two or three weeks spacing it out like Joette says to do. As she got better, I spaced it out to where I was just giving it to her a couple of times a day.

She had a really bad vaginal discharge, of course, too, which was what I was most concerned about. That all cleared up. I packed the hole in her side with cayenne pepper — which is not homeopathic, but it’s a really good thing to know, because it was getting maggots in it. I packed that in there twice and killed all the maggots. And it stimulated that hole to heal so she didn’t get other infection from that as well.

She got better, and I was just amazed because the drugs were bringing her down, and the homeopathy brought her out of it.

Then after we finally got the infection conquered, I started her on Hypericum and Arnica, both 200, alternating those. That all happened in April. And today you could look at her — she hasn’t gained back all of her weight — but she looks pretty much normal. She doesn’t even hardly limp. It’s just been an amazing story!

She never lost the calf that we are beginning to think now that it’s mummified in her because she never had the calf. She probably should have had it by now. That’s our next thing to conquer is to try to get that figured out what’s going on there. But just the fact that she lived through that was, to me, the best testament to homeopathy that I have ever seen. I could not believe that we conquered that horrible infection and illness that she had.

Kate:  Yeah, that’s an amazing story!

Lyda:  It was!

Kate:  Those who are listening can visualize this. How are you giving these sick cows the remedies? What method do you use?

Lyda:  I buy little brown glass spray bottles. I get them on Amazon. You can get a whole package of them, so that I can do lots of different remedies for different ailments that we have. I fill it about a third full of vodka. Then I put three or four pellets of whatever remedy that I’m wanting to use. I shake that up and let it dissolve. Then I add water to that, to the top. And then every time I use it, I succuss it about 10 times.

Then for our cows, I can either spray it on their nose — which they hate, so it’s hard to do that — or their vulva. You just open up their vulva, and you spray it in there. That’s what I did with her the entire time. Thankfully, she was crippled enough that she couldn’t get away from me. So, I was able to treat her very easily.

But that’s how we do it on the cows.

Or if it’s something that I’m wanting to treat the whole herd — like I give them a pinkeye nosode because Herefords get pinkeye really bad — I can just put a capful of a liquid remedy into their trough, which I do get some liquid remedies from a company in New Zealand. It’s called Natural Pet.

They have remedies for cows and chickens and dogs and cats and horses and the whole gamut. And they come in liquids so they’re very easy to administer whether you have to spray it or pour it into their water or whatever.

We find that’s the best way to administer to animals.

Kate:  Now, when you were talking about succussing earlier, you basically just take the bottle of your remedy, and you hit it on your hand a few times. Is that what you do?

Lyda:  Yes. I’ve read this. Succussing a liquid remedy is a good thing to do every time you administer it.

Kate:  I just actually administered a homeopathic medicine to our cat the other day. And what I did — as you can imagine, giving a remedy to a cat is not easy unless you can get them to drink, but she was throwing up and throwing up a lot, and she just didn’t want to drink anything.

So, I put a few pellets into a little paper cup and put water in there and let those dissolve. Then I just dipped my finger in the water and then kind of stuck my finger in her mouth a little bit on her gums. Of course, she didn’t like it, but I could do that for two seconds and get away with it.

She was better after that. She didn’t throw up anymore, and she felt fine. It must have worked. I didn’t have a spray bottle, so I had to come up with something else.

Lyda:  They don’t like the spray bottle. I try to give it to the dogs, and they don’t care for it too much.

Kate:  Our dogs actually love homeopathy! They’ll come when I call them, and they sit there. I just open their mouth, dump the pellets in their mouth, and I put my hand under their chin gently a little bit — so they don’t tip their head down, and then it just falls right out. But they love the homeopathy.

Lyda:  That’s great!

Kate:  Yes. They think it’s a treat.

For your chickens, you said you just put the homeopathy in the water.

Lyda:  Yes.

Kate:  Speaking of chickens, you have a great homeopathy story with your pullets. Tell us about that.

Lyda:  Yes. I get pullets about 100 at a time, which shipping that many little tiny chickies is kind of stressful for them. They put them in one big box, but they divide them into four sections. So, they’re not all in there together, but it’s pretty stressful. We get our chickies from Ohio. So, they come a long way, but usually they’re here within 24 to 36 hours.

I take them out. I give each one of them a drink which I have Aconite in for the shock and stress that they go through from shipping.

I have always had a problem with them getting a lovely little ailment called pasty butt.  They get manure all over their rear end. It’s like they don’t eliminate completely, and so it sticks to their rear end. Then the next time they go, it just keeps building up and building up, and they’ll get a big ball of it on their rear end. And it can clog them up so bad that it kills them.

So, I have been trying to figure out what to do about that. One day for some reason, I just thought well maybe Nux vomica would help because maybe it’s “too much.” They’re getting too much stress, too much shipping, too much of everything. And being a digestive issue, I thought that would be the one to try. So, I tried it.

Before, I had been having at least half of them get it. And, you know, cleaning off 50 little baby chick bottoms is not a fun thing. So, I was really thrilled with that. I had maybe five or ten that got it. I cleaned them off once, and then that was it. They didn’t have it anymore. That was a really good find because it saved me a lot of time, hassle, and not having to do a stinky job.

Kate:  Wow, yeah! Because I would imagine you don’t want to spend your day cleaning up chicken bottoms.

Lyda:  No.

Kate:  You’d rather be out in the garden.

Lyda:  Exactly.

Kate:  Let’s do one more story about your Great Pyrenees, and then we’ll wrap up the podcast with some great advice that you have for everyone.

Lyda:  Okay, our male Great Pyrenees started walking around one day with his head hanging low and just acting like he didn’t feel good at all. I couldn’t figure out what was the matter with him. He went two or three days that way.

We had our large animal vet out for one of the cows. (This was two or three years ago.) He looked at him, and he didn’t know what was the matter with him. So, we decided, “Well, we’re going to have to figure this out for ourselves.”

We started Googling his symptoms and finally determined that he probably had a sinus infection. So, I started giving him Hepar sulph. Within 24 hours, he had definitely made improvements, and within a couple days, it was completely gone.

Kate:  That’s funny. So, the vet didn’t know what was wrong, and you Googled, figured out the correct homeopathic medicines, and he was fine!

Lyda:  Yes.

Kate:  Way to go!! Yes, that’s exciting! Awesome.

Thank you so much for sharing all your animal stories with us. I know I’ve gotten some great tips. So, I want to wrap up the podcast by you sharing with us what you called “Keys to Success” with homeopathy. Share that with us, Lyda.

Lyda:  One thing is definitely to catch things early before they get a real stronghold on an animal or person or whatever. It’s so much easier to treat it if they’re not deep into the problem already.

The best way to do that is just constant observation — which being on a farm and being around the animals all the time, I’m with them every day. I see them through the window. I’m with them, whatever. I’m watching the animals pretty much all day. So, when they do something different, I know immediately that something’s not right and can get right on it.

I have definitely found that that is the easiest and the best way to treat it is to just as soon as you see that something isn’t right, figure it out and get on it, and it’s helped me many times.

Kate:  Your first key was catch it at the beginning.

The second key, which kind of goes along with that, is observation.

We talked about that a lot in the Gateway to Homeopathy study groups. Really watching and seeing what’s going on, like you just said, is so important. Those are two keys.

What would be your third key to success?

Lyda:  Joette!

I could not have done it without Joette because she has taught me so much beyond protocols. The protocols are great. I love having those to quick reference and go-to. But she has taught me so much about just handling things — how not to panic when I see something wrong.

I used to get sick to my stomach every time one of my kids would come up and say, “I don’t feel good” or “I have a sore throat,” or I just noticed that they didn’t look like they felt good. I would just go into a panic that, “Oh, they’re going to be sick. Now the whole family is going to be sick. I’m going to be sick.”

With a farm like this, it’s hard to be sick. You can’t just lie around and get well. You still have to work. When somebody got sick, it was always a very scary thing for me.

Then Joette has also taught me that I can do this! I can heal my family. I can heal our animals. I just have to figure it out. I have to study. So, she’s given me the belief in my ability to heal.

She’s just taught me to handle life better than I’ve ever been able to do that before. I’m just so thankful to have her there. I listen to her all the time. I listen to her when I’m in the garden. I listen to her when I’m milking. I listen to her when I’m doing laundry because I don’t have the greatest memory. I don’t pick things up by reading very well. I pick things up by listening.

There’s so many times that I have just … something has just popped out of my head, “Oh, well, yes, I know exactly what to do for that” because I have listened to her, and I have instant recall in a lot of things.

That would be my biggest thing to recommend to people is just immerse yourself in it so that it just comes back to you whenever you need it. It’s been such a blessing, and I just really am so grateful for Joette.

I’m so grateful for Perry! He never gets mentioned very much. But I’m so grateful for both of them — for what they do — because I know that she couldn’t do it without him. It’s just been a huge blessing for me and my family — life changing.

Kate:  Lyda, it’s been such a pleasure having you on the podcast. I’ve loved listening to your stories and hearing about your bravery, and how it’s really changed your life. Amazing. Thank you so much for the time that you took to share with us today.

Lyda:  Well, thank you, Kate. I appreciate that, and I really appreciate you letting me share all this.

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

In these podcasts, I focus on those students of mine who have already tunneled in and learned how to take care of themselves, family, friends, and pets, and even livestock using homeopathic medicine. Many of these students began their education by participating in one of my Gateway to Homeopathy study groups. And now, after taking one or more of my courses, they’re well-trained to use my specific brand of homeopathy.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you to follow in their footsteps. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

03:55     How to accomplish things

09:40     Barnum Effect

14:12     Staying slim

18:44     Organizing the Medicines

23:41     The Ant and the Grasshopper

27:05     Use of Arnica

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:

Arnica 200

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 102 with Joette Calabrese.

Joette:  This is Joette Calabrese, and I’d like to welcome you to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. Women and men worldwide are taking back control of their families’ health and learning how to heal their bodies naturally, safely and effectively.

So, if you’re hungry to learn more, you’ve come to the right place. Stay tuned as we give you the tools — and the inspiration — you need as I share my decades of experience and knowledge using this powerful medicine we call homeopathy.

Kate:  Hi, this is Kate, and I want to welcome you back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. Joette and I are here today, and we’re going to get personal.

Joette:  Uh-oh.

Kate:  Yeah, right? You should be scared, Joette. I’m going to ask you some personal questions.

Actually, this is something I’ve been wondering for a long time. You are so busy, Joette, and you do so many things. If you don’t mind, I want to share with the listeners some of the things that I see you do. Is that okay?

Joette:  Sure. Just don’t tell them that one story … No, no, no.

Kate:  Okay, alright.

I see you stitching, fixing things, and mending things. I actually don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re doing something with a needle and a thread sometimes during our meetings. I just heard recently — you told me — that you were learning Spanish. You are swimming, now. You love to study words. You’re always talking about something that you’re learning, some person that you’re following on a podcast and something that you’re learning about. It’s mind boggling to me all the things that you do in addition to your more-than-full-time job of being a homeopath.

So, I thought it would be really interesting for your listeners to hear about your day, and how you accomplish all these things. You want to share that with us?

Joette:  Okay. I don’t know how interesting this will be, but we’ll give it a try.

Kate:  Well, I’m interested! And I figure if I am, other people are as well.

Joette:  Well, one of the things, one of the rules I have — and I was having a hard time with it for a while — was getting to bed early so that I could get up early. And my swimming has put that into place for me. I like to get to bed early enough so that I know that I’ll be up before the sun rises, and I can get started.

Kate:  Now, Joette before you go on, I want to tell a little secret. Sometimes I email you at midnight my time which is one o’clock your time, and you answer me back.

Joette:  I do.

Kate:  So … I know you’re not always going to bed early.

Joette:  No, I’m not always going to bed early. But you might note Kate that it was before I started swimming. Because since I’ve been swimming, pretty much, I am sleeping soundly. Going to bed around 9:30/10 o’clock, and it’s been really, really good for me.

I mean, I would say perhaps occasionally I might be up. But generally speaking, I try to keep that habit alive and well.

Kate:  But how can you do that when you are on live Q&As until late in the evening, sometimes?

Joette:  Those are the nights. When I’m on with the Study Groups (for example, your Study Group), and I have a lot of questions to answer, I never leave those study groups without answering every single question and make sure that everyone is satisfied. It sometimes goes to 10:30/11 o’ clock. I’ve even gone as late as 11:15 on some of those groups!

Those are the nights that I don’t sleep so well, in spite of the fact that I’ve been swimming during the day. It does take me time to wind down. And then I get online, and I see what emails I need to respond to, and invariably, there you are.

Kate:  Tell us how you accomplish all the things that you do. What’s your secret?

Joette:  What’s my secret? I established my day in advance. So, I know what I’m going to do the next day partly because I’m scheduled. I mean, my calendar is completely full. I’m scheduled all day and into the evening with appointments; with clients; with meetings with say, you or Tracey (who I collaborate with writing) or with Shannon (to discuss clients) or a meeting with my husband or a meeting with our consultant. I am scheduled all day, pretty much every day except Sundays.

Then, of course, there are my clients most of the day. From 10 AM until about 5 o’clock, I’m meeting with clients one after another. For those that I meet on the other side of the earth, then I’m up meeting with them late at night or first thing in the morning. If they’re in Europe, then I start earlier. If they’re in New Zealand — or Australia, I should say — then I’m going to be meeting with them late at night, so it’s morning for them.

So, my time is very, very scheduled.

But I also have kept my life extremely simple. I don’t buy a lot of products. I don’t grocery shop very often. I keep our meals very simple. And there was a time when I didn’t do that.

But now that my husband and I are alone — our children are all on their own — breakfast is very simple. It’s eggs pretty much every morning. Sometimes it’s burgers, sometimes it’s lamb burgers or something like that. We eat a little bit later in the morning between my appointments.

Then I’ve already defrosted the meat from the night before or that morning for our dinner that night. Everything goes on the grill if it’s meat. If it’s eggs then they’re boiled, or they’re fried in butter.

We’ll have an avocado perhaps. But I don’t chop up vegetables for salads anymore. I’ll have an avocado, or I’ll have maybe some blueberries or something like that. And I keep it ridiculously simple.

In fact, there’s so much time around our meals — especially now that my mother has passed away because she was part of our lives too, and I would feed her. That was a whole different job. Now that she’s passed away, my life in terms of “around our meals” is ridiculously easy.

So, that makes it much easier. I don’t have pots and pans to clean. I don’t prepare. I don’t make kombucha any longer. I don’t grind my own flour. I don’t soak it anymore. I don’t soak my nuts and then roast them.

Those are the kinds of things I used to do. I used to pick cardoons and pick blueberries with my kids, make my own bread from scratch. I don’t do any of that anymore. It’s very, very simple meals. So, that has made a big, big difference.

Then for cleaning my house, it’s the same idea. I keep it really simple. I only have a couple of products: Bon Ami, white vinegar, dish soap, and I call it a day. That’s pretty much how my house is cleaned. I don’t buy special countertop products.

I don’t buy shampoo; I use soap. I rinse my hair with raw vinegar. What goes on my skin is lard or tallow.

I mean, I really make this ridiculously easy. Because if I have a lot of products, then I have to order them; I have to keep up with them; I have to organize them. I don’t want to do any of that! So, that has a lot to do with it, too.

Then another part of my thinking is that I write down my ideas, and what I’m going to do in between those appointments to make sure that I get it all done. I have a lot of little slips of paper — hear that? — which are really kind of silly.

But I also have a book that I keep. Can you hear me opening and closing it? I jot down ideas. I jot down words, phrases that are going to be used in writing articles in populating my blogs, et cetera. That is all kept together so that when the time comes, and I need a reference, I’ve got it.

Now I have some of it on my laptop, and of course, it transfers over to my desktop. I do have Word files that give me my ideas, as well, to keep them organized. But generally speaking, I use these little sheets of paper!

Kate:  Speaking of organization, how do you organize your notes on homeopathic medicines? Do you keep them all in a certain book or do you write notes in your materia medicas and repertories, or how do you keep that?

Joette:  Yes, I use all three of those methods. But the main method is I have a very thick, heavy, three-ring binder book. I actually have three of those, but I have one that I’m using on a day-to-day basis.

I have it in categories, parts of the body. So, it’s “Mind,” “Head,” “Dental.” What’s the next place? It would be “Ears,” “Nose,” Throat.” All of those are in categories so that I can look up if I forget something.

I rarely forget. To be honest, I know these protocols now like the back of my hand. But once in a while, I need to refer back and see if there’s another way to do it. Because there are second and tertiary protocols as well that I don’t necessarily always have memorized. And so, I use those as well.

But also, in my materia medica, I keep lots and lots of notes. I write them — handwritten — so that my materia medica is loaded with my own handwriting. When I learn something new, or I notice something about what has happened to someone after they have used a particular medicine, and how it has helped them, I jot that down. That’s very important for me to keep up with up. Otherwise, I’ll lose it. I won’t remember it forever.

I also love to write down ideas and words.

I just came across … this is kind of fun. Do you know what the “Barnum effect” is? Have you ever heard of that, Kate?

Kate:  No.

Joette:  Barnum effect. This is so interesting because I’ve come across it so many times in homeopathy. It’s actually a psychological description of what happens to humans.

It’s a phenomenon … (I’m reading this now from my little book). “It’s a phenomenon wherein people accept personality traits that apply to most everyone as if those specific traits provide an insight into something special about them.”

I’ll continue reading.

“In actuality, the contents of universally valid statements fit any and all individuals by virtue of their triviality.”

Which means that — and this is how I see it time and again in my practice — people say to me, (I can’t tell you how often they say), “My case is really difficult, isn’t it?”

I said, “No, it really isn’t.”

“No, I mean, this is complex, right?”

“No, it really isn’t.”

I mean, I can distill it down to its most important characteristics and then assign a hierarchy to which conditions are first, second, third, et cetera and then assign the medicines accordingly.

But because they (and we, as humans) are stuck in ourselves, and we only think about that all day (especially if we are suffering), we think we’re the only ones on earth that have this kind of condition. We think that these unusual idiosyncrasies of our lives, no one else could possibly experience.

But that is so untrue. It’s extremely rare that someone has an experience that other humans have not had.

I think that’s interesting because I never knew the name of it, and I come across it all the time. And I must admit that when I was sick, and I was seeing a homeopath, I thought the same thing: “This is complex, isn’t it??”

“No,” she’d say, “No, it’s not complex.”

I’d say, “No, really, I mean, this aspect. Don’t you think that this part of it is kind of unusual?”

“No, no. Really, this is not a big deal. It’s food intolerances, allergies, chemical sensitivities. You know, it’s kind of pretty easy to figure out.”

If I had distilled it enough — actually, it was because I was distilling it too much is what caused all the problems. If I could have stepped aside outside of myself, I would have seen, for goodness sakes, of course, many people have allergies and food intolerances as shown up in headaches and asthma.

Kate:  So, what you just said they’re the Barnum effect?

Joette:  Yes.

Kate:  You do that all the time, Joette?

Joette:  All the time.

Kate:  You’re always coming up with new ideas, new words. You’re always telling me about a phrase that you’ve learned or a new word. I just don’t understand how you have time to do all this.

Joette:  Kate, my guess is you’re the same. You just don’t realize it. I think there are a lot of people who are out there who are the same as well.

But let me also say, I don’t watch television. I do watch some podcasts. I am interested in knowing what’s going on in our country politically because I think it’s going to affect all of us. It does affect all of us. I do watch those kinds of things here and there.

But we raised our kids some 25, 30 years ago, and we did not have a television. Of course, people don’t watch as much television now as they sit in front of their screens, and they’re online and YouTube. And you can easily get caught up in YouTube. Very easily.

But there’s a lot of stuff that’s interesting on YouTube that I want to learn, and so I continue with that but not to the degree that I might be prone to if I allowed myself.

Kate:  So, this is an interesting question. What is your amount of screen time every day, Joette?

Joette:  Oh, screen time is probably most of the day. Because when you think about it, I’m sitting; I’m meeting with my clients; I’m meeting with my staff. Everybody’s on the screen.

Kate:  Yes, you’re right.

Joette:  The world in which we live now is all screen time.

The only non-screen time I have is when I have my meals with my husband, when I swim (I swim every morning), and when my husband I go out to dinner, when our children come to visit. Then I’m off the screen.

But generally, this is what I do all day is sit in front of a screen. But I’m meeting with people, it’s not as though it’s inanimate. It is quite alive because I’m meeting with someone. Like right now, you and I can see each other which is lovely.

Kate:  Okay, so let me ask you this question. You are very fit. You’re not overweight. How do you stay trim Joette with all the time that you have to be physically sitting at your desk in front of a screen? Do you get up in between appointments and do some stretching? Or what’s your secret to staying so thin?

Joette:  Well, first of all, I don’t think you’ve really seen me.

Kate:  Yes, I have.

Joette:  Because it’s a constant battle, Kate. When you get to be in your 50s as a woman and 60s — and I’m only a couple years away from my 70s — it’s a constant battle.

I swim every day. I swim a mile. I’ve been swimming a mile lately. When I miss a day, I really feel it, and I don’t like the way it feels. I want to be out there; I want to be swimming. So that helps, I think that’s making a difference.

I stay away from sweets as much as I can — as much as I adore chocolate. I could live on chocolate. I could live on pastries. I used to love to bake for my kids. I gained a lot of weight because of it. So, I worked hard to get rid of that weight. I try not to eat those kinds of foods. I think that by eating the way that I eat, that makes a difference, too.

Then I ignore hunger sometimes, especially at night. I try to drink water to forget about it for a while. That doesn’t mean that I won’t eat if I’m really hungry. But a lot of times, I found that my hunger is really just thirst.

Because I’m in South Florida, and I work out — you know, I swim — and I’m drinking saltwater along the way (it gets in my mouth, and I do drink it here and there), then I’m probably more thirsty than I realize. I really need to remain hydrated.

Now, I’m not one of those people who believes you drink a gallon of water a day. I think that’s ridiculous, unless there’s a circumstance in which that makes sense — if you’re a runner, and you’re in hot weather, et cetera. But I don’t do that, and I don’t agree with that.

I try to find my thirst by forcing myself a little bit. And then once my thirst is triggered, then I can follow the sensation and then know when to drink. So, I probably drink, I don’t know, five glasses of water a day. And they’re probably not even eight ounces to be honest.

But I also love foods — and people are probably going to have issue with this — but I’m going to be honest, I told you what I generally eat. But I adore pepperoni. I could eat pepperoni — in fact, often I do — every day. One piece, that’s my snack.

If I’m really hungry in the morning, and I don’t want to wait until lunch, I’ll have a piece of pepperoni. If I could have my druthers, it would be pepperoni with great, crusty Italian bread and some fabulous cheese and some olives and maybe some calamari on the side, and I would be one happy person. But I forego the bread because of the concern about weight, and I just have one little piece of pepperoni.

Kate:  One little piece of pepperoni satisfies you?

Joette:  It holds me. No, it won’t, it will not fully satisfy me. That and a glass of water and a small cup of coffee.

When I say have a small cup of coffee … I pour an ounce of coffee — literally an ounce of made-coffee into my cup (the pot that my husband makes every day) — and I fill up the rest of the cup with hot water.

I add a pinch of salt to make it taste a little bit stronger. Sometimes I’ll add cinnamon or something to add a little flavor. But for the most part, that’s it, just so I have something hot to drink. My piece of pepperoni, my glass of water, and my very diluted coffee is my little mid-morning snack. It holds me over.

The other food that I absolutely adore is calamari. I make it every single week. It never fails. I’ll make it into a salad. I’ll make it cold in a salad with olives and celeries … and I’m trying to think of what else … bell peppers and maybe some hot peppers, pepperoncini and olive oil. And I could eat that for days. I don’t make that much of it, but that’s cold.

And then when I make it hot, I often fry or grill it. I absolutely love squid.

Kate:  That’s not something that’s super-common that people eat. Where do you purchase calamari?

Joette:  Well, it’s because my family is Sicilian, and I grew up eating it. My mother made it all the time, too. I buy it … of course in Florida, it’s easy. There are lots of fish markets. But you can buy it at most grocery stores that have a good selection of fish. So, Whole Foods and those little markets that you can find around Florida.

I used to be able to find it in Buffalo and even in Canada. You just have to kind of dig around until you find it. Sometimes you have to go to Italian grocers.

Kate:  Someday you’re going to have to share us your favorite calamari recipes.

Joette:  Yes, besides my cold salad one, right?

Kate:  Yes.

Joette, last time we were chatting about this subject of how you accomplish everything, you were telling me how you like to be prepared and to be organized. Explain to us a little bit more about how you stay organized and prepared.

Joette:  We touched on it a little bit, but I’ll tell you that I make the assumption that stuff is going to happen. And so, I know that my husband is going to get sick one of these days. Or I’m going to trip and fall. Or I’m going to get stung in the ocean. Or … I know that that’s going to happen; it’s just a given. That’s what life’s all about.

Of course, then I make sure that I know the medicine — the homeopathic medicine that I need to have on hand — and I own it.

Then I keep my medicines here in Florida, in our bathroom that has what my mother would have called a chifforobe (which is kind of French doors on top and then drawers underneath).

All inside of that are all my medicines in alphabetical order as anyone would do it. It’s not that unusual to do it that way. I use popsicle sticks to label A, B, C, D, et cetera, so that I can find the letters very readily. They’re all standing up with the medicines in clear acrylic lipstick tube holders that I got on Amazon. They hold most of the medicines that most of us purchase in each one of those cells.

Now, those that I have larger bottles of then I keep them in a separate place. But that keeps me well organized.

Now, there are certain medicines that Buster needs pretty regularly. He’s an old dog, and he has a heart condition. I’ve been treating that for some time now. I make sure that we have that on hand. If it looks like we’re getting low, then I automatically order that.

As soon as I see something’s going, well then, I order it so that there’s no time lag. I don’t have to remember it, and I can get it off my list.

Nothing new here. Nothing that I’m talking about here is any different than what anyone else would do.

But having moved from our family home, raising our sons in a 15-acre farm and a rather large house, and then moving from there to a very small townhouse forced me to make do with less, and I love what it has done for me. It’s kept me very organized. If something doesn’t fit me, or I don’t wear it anymore — if I happen to be in my closet, and I see it — out it goes! It goes to the Salvation Army or something like that. I don’t allow things to sit around any longer. I used to do that, and I don’t any longer.

Getting back to organizing the medicines, I generally don’t organize according to illnesses. I organize my remedies according to alphabetical order.

But I know that some people do, in fact, I know that you do that, right, Kate? You have a little system where you keep your box organized for specific conditions.

Kate:  Right, but I do have similar cabinet to what you’re talking about. The doors that open, and I have shelves in there, and I have the kits on certain shelves. Then on one of the shelves, I have all of my two-dram OHM miscellaneous remedies in alphabetical order. That’s probably 100 or 200 remedies that are like that.

But I have boxes that I purchased from OHM. They’re clear boxes that hold the two-dram OHM bottles. I have several cases that I have my combination remedies. So, two cases hold all of the combination remedies, the protocols.

And then I make up a box for influenza or chickenpox or whatever it might be — the thing that’s going around at the time — along with an index card of the medicines that are in there and how to use them.

Say influenza is going around, I’m going to put all the medicines that I might need with influenza in that box and write those down on the card and what symptoms that particular medicine might be useful for. So that, when I get sick or someone in my family does, I don’t have to go to my cabinet and try to figure out all the different remedies that I might use for influenza and what symptoms that they would pertain to. I just have it all in that case, so I can take it with me near my bed. I can give it to my daughter — someone that might need it — and it’s all right there and organized.

Joette:  That’s a brilliant way to do it, Kate. It keeps life much easier because when you’re not well, as we all know, our brains turn to mush. We need to know exactly where to go and what to do, and you’ve got your card right there. If you’re not well enough — I think we talked about this before — if you’re not well enough, you may not be the one going to the cabinet. It may be your children going to the cabinet for you because you’re too unwell to even get up.

Kate:  Yes, that’s happened to me before, where I was so sick for a day that I couldn’t even make it to my homeopathy cabinet. So, now, I’ve learned to have a few of those remedies in the drawer in my nightstand, accessible if something were to happen.

Joette:  You bet that’s the way to go. Well, this reminds me of a fable, “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” (We talked about this before … we were planning on talking about this, right?) Because it’s one of my favorite fables, and you were going to read it, right Kate?

Kate:  Yes, I have it right here.

Joette:  Yes, go ahead, you read it, and then we’ll talk about it. I mean, most people know it anyway. But just in case, those who are not of our culture might be interested.

Kate:  I didn’t remember this particular one, so I’ll read it.

“The Ant and the Grasshopper”

One bright day in late autumn, a family of ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer. When a starving grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.

“What,” cried the ants in surprise, “Haven’t you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?”

“I didn’t have time to store up any food” whined the grasshopper. “I was so busy making music that before I knew it, the summer was gone.”

The ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust. “Making music were you?” they cried. “Very well, now dance.”

They turn their backs on the grasshopper and went on with their work.

Joette:  So, when I heard that fable when I was a little girl, I was confused by it because my father was a professional musician. He practiced his trumpet and flute every day, sometimes an hour or two. My brother and I took piano lessons from the time that we were about six or seven years old. It was required of us to practice every day — an hour. I also took violin.

To me, I didn’t understand what was wrong. I thought you were supposed to practice your instrument. Now, I understand that you’re not supposed to practice your instrument? I don’t get it.

Well, obviously, eventually, I figured what the story was really about. And boy, I couldn’t agree more with Aesop.

We need to take responsibility for ourselves and for our own and for our own futures. It’s not up to the government. It’s not up to anyone else. It’s up to us to take care of ourselves. This is the best way I know.

In the world in which we reside now — more than ever — I can’t think of a better reason to learn homeopathy, understand what medicines you may need, buy the medicines, and organize them so that your life is easier in the future.

We don’t know what’s coming up in our world and in our country right now. We don’t know how available homeopathy will be in the future. I’m hoping that it will be fine. I’m going to make the assumption that it is — and work as though it isn’t. But it may change. So, it’s important that each of us take responsibility and own as much as we can and learn as much as we possibly can on how to take care of our families and ourselves.

Kate:  I couldn’t agree more. I think it is so important to have the remedies on hand that you need. I see that over and over again with people that I am working with, with the Study Groups. They learn these things, and then they don’t have the medicine. And then what? Now you’re stuck. So, yes, be prepared.

Speaking of being prepared, let’s talk about how we can be prepared with one remedy in particular that you’ve used a lot when you’ve been doing all the swimming lately (because we like to always talk about a remedy and how to use it in these podcasts). Tell us about what you’re using for your swimming.

Joette:  I don’t use a remedy daily for it. I use it usually afterwards. When I’m swimming in the ocean, in the open water, there are times when the waves are really powerful. I have to swim against them and even along with them, but it’s a lot of work.

I still want to swim the length that I’ve determined (from what building I’m swimming from to the next building). And I often don’t let up on myself; I just push myself. And when I get out of the water, I’m exhausted, and I trudge home along the beach. I get back home, and I just flop down, and I can feel that I’m overly exhausted.

It’s not that I’m in pain. I don’t have problems with my joints. It’s that I feel beat up or whipped.

So, I have decided that … The first time that happened I thought, “Oh, I’ll just take it easy that day.” Then by the end of that day, I said, “You know, this is ridiculous. Why am I putting up with this? I’m just too fatigued after having run that swim.”

So, I started to take Arnica when that happened. Generally, I use Arnica 200. Once in a while, I’ll use a 30 just because there it is; it’s easier for me to grab. Either one of those two potencies (Arnica 30, Arnica 200), I take a dose, and literally within — I don’t know, half an hour, an hour — I’m completely revived.

In other words, I’ve got my pep back. I’ve got my thinking back. I’m not craving going to bed to sleep for half an hour. I really can carry on with my day.

So, it’s a great medicine to keep on hand. Remember it for overuse of the body, exhaustion from overuse, feeling as though you overdid it. Some people even get a little nauseous from overdoing it. When they work too hard, physically, et cetera, it’s a great medicine for that.

Kate:  Joette, this literally just happened to me today, and I think maybe Arnica, then, from what you’re saying, would be the remedy to use. But I went to the gym and worked out. I lifted almost 200 pounds with my legs. I did three sets of those, and I was literally so exhausted afterwards. This is after having worked out for 45 minutes, and it’s really steady, quick pace. I felt so exhausted, like, weak, almost dizzy and nauseous. So, you’re saying that is the feeling?

Joette:  That’s it! That’s Arnica. You just gave the perfect description of Arnica.

Kate:  Wow, okay! Next time I’m going to bring it with me.

Joette:  Yes, well, you can take it now. If you still feel it a little bit. As soon as we finish Kate, take a dose. You probably won’t need more than one dose. But if you do, it’s okay. Wait a few hours and take a second dose if you don’t see enough of a change. But generally speaking, one dose will often do it.

That, my friends, is a protocol. It’s not a Banerji protocol. It’s a protocol that most homeopaths understand and know after having been in practice for years. That’s really where we get this information is from clinical experience — from our personal experience and clinical experience.

Kate:  Interesting because you never think of Arnica for that. You think of Arnica for injuries, bumps, bruises. Yes, we learned something today!

Joette:  Yes, good one.

Kate:  As we wrap up this podcast, just give us one more example of how you stay organized and live your life. I know you wanted to talk about time a little bit. Share with us how you organize your time.

Joette:  Well, it won’t be personal this time because I think I gave some good information on how I do it. I don’t know how valuable that is to folks.

I believe it was Charles Darwin said, “A man who dares to waste one hour of time doesn’t understand the meaning of life.”

I think that’s very valuable. Now, remember, Darwin didn’t have religion as many of us do. I wouldn’t call that the exact meaning of life. But it certainly gives us a focus on how important every single hour is.

It’s the commodity that we can never buy. It’s the commodity that we can never get back again. So, every minute, every hour of our day is important.

It doesn’t mean that we always have to be productive in the usual way. It doesn’t mean we always have to be working out or swimming or studying or learning or growing or et cetera. It could be that you need a nap, and that can be productive too. That’s all part of the balance.

But it is important that we utilize every moment of our day that God has granted us.

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

IN THIS PODCAST, WE COVER:

3:40     Journey to Homeopathy

9:47     Pregnancy 

18:38   Things Handled with Homeopathy 

24:30   Tips and Wisdom to Share

Baby Grande: sold as part of the Combo Pack (my top 7 products). Information can also be found in my free blog post series, “Birthing.”

      https://joettecalabrese.com/blog/turning-a-breech-baby/

      https://joettecalabrese.com/blog/premier-remedy-for-child-birth/

      https://joettecalabrese.com/blog/birthing-part-three-baby-is-born-but-youre-not-done-yet-neither-is-homeopathy/

Allergic!? Escape Allergies, Sensitivities, and Intolerances, with Homeopathy

Podcast 98 – How to Take Your Own Case: Prioritize!

First Aid in a Pinch (free first aid chart)

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 101.

Joette:  Joette Calabrese here, folks. I’m happy that you’ve joined me for my podcast today. You’re in for a treat. From my virtual classroom, I’m privileged to see how homeopathy is transforming lives all over the globe. Their successes inspire me. They’re glorious and powerful, and I can’t keep their triumphs a secret. I want you to hear the excitement my students experience, too. So, you can be inspired by their unique stories.

With the help from Kate, my reporter, I bring you a podcast series I call, “Moms with Moxie.” Sometimes we even interview “Dads with Audacity” or “Teens with Tenacity.” See how regular mothers and others — average folks who love healing those around them — have gone from freaking to fabulous by simply applying what they’ve learned using what I call Practical Homeopathy®.

Kate:  Hi, this is Kate, and I want to welcome you back to the Practical Homeopathy® podcast. Today, I have a wonderful friend here whose name is Chris. Chris is a Midwest gal just like myself. Welcome, Chris.

Chris:  Hello, Kate.

Kate:  It’s great to have you here. I’m so excited to hear from you today.

Chris:  It’s good to be here. It really is a pleasure.

Kate:  Tell us about yourself, Chris.

Chris:  Well, like you said, I’m a Midwest gal — born and raised right here in Central Illinois — and married to Mike for seven years. Have three kids, 2, 4, 6. They keep me very busy.

In my free time, I like to bike, hike, be outdoors, garden. My winter sport is quilting and sewing. I’ve got to do that on those cold months around here. But most of that is to keep me sane while I have my main job of staying at home, raising the kids and being a mom — which is the hardest, craziest job I’ve ever had — but I can’t see myself doing anything else.

Kate:  As you’re saying this, back in those days when I had young kids, and I feel you.

Chris:  It’s crazy.

Kate:  Yes.

Chris:  You can’t wrap that up into a sentence, really.

Kate:  No.

Chris:  It’s wonderful and still insane.

Kate:  Yes, the best, most challenging …

Chris:  … job I’ve ever had. 

Kate:  Most fun …

Chris:  Yes.

Kate:  Exactly. Chris, in your spare time, I know you are an outdoorsy kind of gal, and you like to bike ride and do a lot of things outdoors with your family. And we’re going to get into this in just a minute, but I find it kind of ironic because you have a lot of issues being outside and doing those things because of some allergies, right?

Chris:  Yes. I have some seasonal allergies as well as some pet allergies — which I don’t know if we’ll talk about this, but I don’t have any! But I usually steer clear away from animals.

Yes, being outside and being around anything in the garden, I’m usually careful about those sensitivities and asthma. I love being active and doing things, but exercise-induced asthma has been a plague in my life for quite a few years. Homeopathy has really helped out with that.

Kate:  We’re going to get into that in just a minute. But talk to us for just a few minutes about your journey to homeopathy. What did that look like?

Journey to Homeopathy

Chris:  Well, it started when I became a mom. My daughter was six months old. I think I just remember her having some pain or bruises. A friend mentioned Arnica.

I had no idea what it was, went to the local natural food store, found it — like the one place in town that had it. I didn’t even know how the heck to even open the bottle. Turn it over and twist the cap, right?

So, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even give it to her a lot. I mean, maybe it was more like one or two times I gave it to her. But other than that, it just sat on the shelf for about a year.

Then my daughter got her first ear infection. That’s when I knew there had to be something else. It just led me down that path of finding a different alternative to caring for my family as opposed to giving her antibiotics. That really was the gateway to my homeopathy journey.

Kate:  Now, talk to us for a minute about that struggle that you had when your daughter got an ear infection because you had said something when we were talking earlier, you really struggled during that time. I want to hear more about that.

Chris:  Sure. I remember that time when she got the ear infection, and the doctor wrote her her prescription. And I knew I had to give her the antibiotics (because I didn’t want her to be in pain) because I had no other way of treating her. That led to a discussion with another dear friend about alternatives, and homeopathy was that one.

That ear infection was clear because I have had enough experience with friends who had kids with reoccurring ear infections, one after the other. That just was something that they always had.

I just knew that there was something more than just giving antibiotic, after antibiotic, after antibiotic. And so, I was happy to learn something that I could control and treat my kid with — and she’s never been on an antibiotic since.

Kate:  That’s great!

I wanted you to share that because I feel like as I talk to moms, this is such a common theme that something happens with the kids. It’s what happened with me! That’s how I got into homeopathy as well. My daughter was struggling with eczema.

She was like you said, in pain, itching; we had to do something. I didn’t have an alternative at the time.

I feel like this is such a common theme for those of us who have children. That was a tipping point. That’s what led us to learn about homeopathy and other methods of healing our bodies.

Chris:  Right. It’s true. I started seeing reoccurring instances in my life with my health. But I took those as part of my life, and that’s just how it’s going to be.

When my child got sick, I knew there had to be something else.

Kate:  Let’s step back just a minute because there’s a really great story, and I want everyone to hear it about your dad. I love hearing about your dad!

I feel like you’ve gotten some of your desire to heal your family from your dad. So, tell us how you grew up with your dad and his medical interest.

Chris:  Well, I want to say that he was not a doctor and did not have medical training. However, he was in the military, and his grandfather was a surgeon around like the Great Depression time. So, I had heard stories.

However, my dad was not any doctor, yet he always treated us. He was the one giving us the first aid. He was the one saying, “Sit at the counter. Let me get to your finger under good light. I want to see how bad that cut is. I want to clean it. I want to put a bandage on it. We’re going to just monitor that and see how it is tomorrow, and is there an infection?”

He always had an eye and a consciousness of any kind of ailments — whether it was a cut on your hand, a blister, an ingrown toenail. He was always the nurse/doctor in the house.

So, I have fond memories of a time when I was struggling with an ingrown toenail. He would just, like I said, prop me up on the counter, and he wanted to take a look at it.

He would get a suturing kit out, and I’m not kidding because he had a little kit. It was the same needles and thread that he would sew up the Thanksgiving turkey with. He would put those out!

You know, he always wanted to sew one of us up, but I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen. But he was always ready!

But he had his sharp knives and things like that, so he cut out an ingrown toenail, pretty much a surgery, on the kitchen counter.

One of his sayings was “never hesitate, self-medicate.”

I’m pretty sure he was talking about pouring some whiskey as well to yourself when you’re sick and taking care of yourself that way. But also taking care of yourself in the sense of don’t just run to the doctor right away.

So, I just remember finally him cutting an ingrown toenail out of my toe and making sure that it was clean, and packed it in right, and paid attention to wound care. It was pretty remarkable, and I have very fond memories of him. He’s quite a character.

Kate:  Do you feel like you’ve grown up like him? I mean, do you feel like you have that desire as well?

Chris:  I think it’s definitely an influence in my life. Both my mom and dad were remarkable parents and are very influential in how I raise my family. I think I definitely try to keep an eye on everybody.

I know that one of my kids has a blister on his foot right now. They’ve got some splinters in their feet. I don’t know if my dad knew that to some degree, but I’m sure as a parent, we all try and keep an eye on our kids physically and mentally. I think there has been a great deal of influence in my life from him.

Pregnancy

Kate:  Let’s talk about your pregnancy. I know that was sort of a tipping point as well in your journey with homeopathy. Tell us what you did with that.

Chris:  I think you’re talking about the second pregnancy.

Kate:  Yes.

Chris:  Because I was discovering homeopathy at the time of my daughter (she’s my oldest), her first ear infection that we’ve talked about. And then I found out I was pregnant. So, it was, “I’ve got to learn as much as I can to have a much easier labor the second time around.”

I had a pretty hard time with the first one.

Kate:  Yes, you said it was many, many hours.

Chris:  I like to just say 50+ hours. It was a couple days.

I went in not knowing, obviously, what was going on but wanted — naively — to do it all naturally and did the best that I could. I got through it eventually after two days of being in labor.

I did have an epidural, but then I slept. I was nine centimeters, and I was exhausted. Then I woke up and pushed for three hours and then I had my baby. So, the epidural pretty much wore off.

You mommas out there, you’ve got to do it anyway you do it, right? I mean, there’s no judgment, no shame in the way you do it.

But I knew when I got the news that I was pregnant again, I knew I had to find a way to curb the exhaustion and the cramps during labor. So, I did that. I ordered Baby Grande, the CD Joette has, and I listened to that thing over and over again. I took notes. I did a summary page, and I gave that to my doula. I’m pretty sure I did everything to a tee. That labor was about 16 hours.

It was, out of my three births, the best one. I did the cell salt protocol my last trimester only. It wasn’t the whole pregnancy, but I did that just the third. And it was a remarkable labor. My doula was there helping me along the way. I gave her the information that I learned during Baby Grande.

I said, “Here’s the information I need. Here’s my kit.” And she was giving me what I needed. It was pretty awesome.

The nurse even said — right after he was born, and they did the checks and stuff in the room and weighed him — she said, “Oh, he has very long fingernails. You must have taken your prenatals.”

I said, “Yes. Yes, I did.”

Kate:  That’s awesome. I would love to hear some of the remedies that you used during your labor. Tell us.

Chris:  Yes. I remember — well, my doula took notes — switching between Gelsemium and Mag phos and Arnica. I think I only had 200 then.

But I also know a friend of mine said, “You need Arnica 1M as well.” I think that was in my arsenal.

So, I’m pretty sure I just switched between those during the labor.

Postpartum, I used Arnica 1M and Mag phos. I didn’t take a Tylenol after. It was all natural. I mean, in the hospital, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have any intervention. It was pretty amazing what my body was able to do. I want to just give that up to homeopathy, and the things that I learned during that time.

Kate:  Your journey with homeopathy led you next to, I think, the Gateway Study Group?

Chris:  Yes, I took the Study Group Gateway I. I knew a lot of the stuff, but it was still good to go over some of those basics.

After the Gateway I class, I took the Allergy course. That was eye opening because allergies are my most chronic issue. That’s where I started learning so much. But I felt like every single page was, “Yes, I need to take that remedy!”

I know Joette talks about, “Finish the course before you start anything!” And she says it over and over again — because you think in whatever topic you’re looking at, you think you have it all.

I’m pretty sure I’m still working through lessons. I’ve listened to them all. I’m pretty sure I haven’t sat down and taken rigorous notes on every single lesson. But that’s what I love about the courses. I own it. I can go back to it any time.

Right now, in my life, sitting down and taking a class and very heavy notes is not the season I’m in. So, if it’s something I can listen to like this podcast or anything online, it’s been the way that I’ve been saturating myself with homeopathy.

Kate:  Then you tackled your allergies. This is an amazing thing how you’ve overcome the allergies that you have. Tell us about that.

Chris:  Absolutely. So, when I was taking the Allergy course, I felt like I didn’t know which way to go because I had those chronic allergies, but I also had some other chronic mental and emotional issues. I didn’t know which way to go first.

So, I became a client of Joette’s. She really helped me overcome some of those chronic issues: the chronic bronchitis that I had, the asthma that really was impeding any kind of physical exercise. That was just a big hiccup.

Then even the allergies. I could barely set foot into my sister’s house without sneezing over and over again or having itchy eyes because of pet allergies or anything like that. Those were the things that were disrupting my life day to day. I have a much better handle on those.

I wouldn’t say they’re completely gone because I still carry some of those things when I sneeze or have some itchy eyes. But in terms of the wheeziness, shortness of breath, and the chronic bronchitis, it’s gone. It’s gone.

I didn’t have any occurrence of that in the last year. It’s been about a year, and I know what to do in the beginning of it when I start to get that sore throat. It always started in my throat, and then it would tickle.

You tell yourself, “Oh, it’s allergies.” But it really is something deeper, and then it would go into my chest. Then once it was there, it would just stick in my lungs.

Learning about homeopathy, becoming a client, and consulting with Joette, it really did help. I’ve thrown inhalers away because I don’t need those rescue inhalers anymore. I haven’t taken those inhalers anymore.

At one point in my life — this was years ago — I was on a daily allergy pill. I used to carry the over-the-counter allergy pill everywhere I would go. Now, I carry my homeopathy kit — or a small little one for itchy eyes and sneezing and my Hyland’s Allergy Relief — with me everywhere I go. It’s just been a complete relief and a game changer.

Kate:  Yes. It sounds like your life has really changed since you’ve employed homeopathy for these chronic conditions.

Chris:  For me, yes. And I realized, after learning how to take care of those acute problems in my household, I realized in order to tackle those chronic issues with anyone else, I’ve got to figure out how to get all my stuff under control. So, eventually, I’ll be able to do some chronic stuff with my husband and help with his health.

I think you just did a podcast, Taking Your Own Case. It was really trying to figure out how to take care of yourself — because you want to heal the world when you start learning about homeopathy.

When I look back at how far I’ve come in my own health over this past year and working with Joette and my chronic issues — I haven’t had any sinus infections.

I haven’t taken antibiotics for my chronic bronchitis that I would get once or twice a year. It was just a given. I knew I would be doing that. I would be going to the doctor because I couldn’t breathe, and I haven’t had that!

I can exercise frequently and with no indication of wheezing or shortness of breath. That was even on bike rides in cold weather. I remember I took a bike ride January 1st, and it was probably 40 degrees. I wasn’t wheezing! That had never happened before. I

 don’t travel with my inhalers anymore. It’s definitely changed my life and given me the strength to take care of my family.

Things Handled with Homeopathy

Kate:  Tell us about some of the other things that you’ve dealt with in your family and how you’ve handled those with homeopathy.

Chris:  Sure. With kids? Teething, pink eye, strep, wasp stings, bee stings, all those kinds of things. I don’t panic about them. It’s not something I run to the doctor for. I know how to handle it with a little bit of homeopathy that’s in my house. It’s remarkable to not have to stress out about that.

So, pink eye to me is, “Okay, I give my kids some Hepar sulph. Watch it, keep it clean, and it’s fine.”

I don’t know if that’s THE protocol, but for me, that works for my daughter. After a day of a red eye, maybe some crud, it’s gone, and she’s fine. Knowing that I didn’t give her 10 days on an antibiotic for something, and her body is stronger for using that — it gives me so much ease and confidence in healing those things.

Strep throat, she had a case of that as well. It was diagnosed at the doctor’s office. I said, “Thank you for telling me she had that,” went home, and gave her … I want to say it was Hepar sulph again. That stuff is amazing!

I could be wrong. I didn’t write that down. Take notes, people! Take notes. It is important.

But those things that happen, that feel like they can be a disruption in your family and can stop everything, it’s good to know how to handle those things that come up.

With a bee sting my son got — he was young, very little — and he came, and I saw a swollen red area. Within 20 minutes of giving him Aconitum (I believe, at first just so he would calm down) and some Ledum, he was fine in 20 minutes. There’s no swelling. He was walking around playing. He had no pain.

A little bit later, I did give him some Arnica. It was starting to get slightly red and hard, and then he was fine. I did put in my notes also that he was irritable and cranky already because he was teething. So, I’m sure I’d given him some teething tablets.

Moving right along, puncture wound for my husband and scalding emergencies.

Kate:  Didn’t your husband have some sort of major injury? What happened?

Chris:  It was a puncture wound. He was working in his wood shop, and he comes upstairs and holding his thumb.

I’m pretty sure there may be a few choice words at that time as well. I mean, obviously I knew there was an incident, so I gave him some Aconite.

We hadn’t quite figured out what was going on. I think he was stunned as well. But he was nailing something. He had a brad nailer, so it’s a pretty thin brad. He was holding a piece of wood. It hit a knot as he put the brad in. It turned 90 degrees. It came out and went in through the pad of his thumb. It came through and punctured his thumbnail.

So, I was like, “Oh, Ledum for a puncture wound!”

I’m pretty sure I gave him Hypericum as well for the shooting pain, and like I said Aconite 200 because of the shock of what the heck just happened.

Kate:  Did you take Aconite 200 as well?

Chris:  Did I? I don’t think so. I think I was like, “This is cool! Let me help you!”

I was kind of probably geeking out, at the same time knew that his hand was still intact and all that. I was giving him Hepar sulph the next couple days to keep infection out as well.

So, emergencies like that happen. and I feel prepared.

Kate:  Oh, my goodness. That was very traumatic.

Chris:  Another emergency I handled was my daughter scalded herself. My husband had some teacups. He had warm water on the counter. She pulled the water down on her chest.

I wasn’t even home. I got a phone call saying, “Where are you? Get home now.” I was 5-10 minutes away, came home, gave her Aconite and Cantharis, and externally applied vitamin E oil, and just monitored it that day.

We carried on with our regular schedule of events. At noon, I’m pretty sure in the day, gave her some more Cantharis and Arnica for the pain and the burn.

The next day, it was a burn enough where it blistered. I knew it wasn’t worse than that. It was not third degree at all. We would have definitely been going to the hospital for that.

Her blisters the next day were beginning to scab. It was beginning to heal after just that 24 hours, and then Hepar sulph to follow up and avoid infection the next couple days. I kept taking pictures of this when it happened at the time. Then 24 hours later and comparing and making sure I wasn’t missing anything. And she was fine.

Kate:  How great that you were able to handle that at home and not have to go to the doctor. Burns are really painful! Did the homeopathy that you gave her help the pain, did you notice?

Chris:  Yes. I gave her the Aconite right away to help her. That always calms my kids when they can take that Aconite, and then I can do more assessment. Homeopathy is not a magic wand. You have to work at it. You have to work at it, and you have to learn. You have to observe.

That’s really something that … I’ve been learning the difference between coughs and colds and all the symptoms. I know when I start asking my husband all the questions he’s like, “Oh, stop it!”

I’m like, “But I’m trying to assess you and your pain.”

He’s a tough cookie to figure out when it comes to homeopathy.

Tips and Wisdom to Share

Kate:  That’s a good segue actually into your tips. I want to hear what you would like to share with the listeners as we wrap up this podcast. What wisdom do you have to share?

Chris:  Keep learning. Coughs and colds are the hardest things. I just kept learning and studying and listening for different symptoms.

That’s one tip I’d say, but also always carry your remedies with you. Whether it’s a little bit in your purse, for the things that you usually encounter throughout your day, or if it’s your kit when you’re leaving town.

Take your First Aid in a Pinch. Print it out. Don’t just rely on your phone to have it.

Then also just buy all the remedies. Buy all the books. When you can afford them, do it! Like I even said earlier, I think that I don’t have all the time in the world to sit and read a whole bunch of books. But I buy them here and there. I am building my library, and I refer to them when I need them.

Trying to figure out those little acute things and gain your confidence and being able to tackle the bigger issues, it really becomes a way of life for you and your family. It’s pretty awesome.

Kate:  Thank you so much for sharing with us, being so open and sharing your struggles and your successes. It was a pleasure to have you on this podcast.

Chris:  Thank you. It was awesome and an honor to be here. I mean, it really is. I don’t think of myself as a Mom with Moxie.

There are times when you feel like you’re going to conquer the world. Then, there are times when you’re like, “Oh, what the heck do I do to get through this hour?”

But the things I’ve been learning about homeopathy and putting them into practice in my family have been countercultural — but it works, and it’s worth it!

Joette:  As I hope you know by now, on my blog, podcasts and Facebook Live, I offer as many protocols for simple conditions as I can — for free, without affiliates or advertising.

But let me be clear. When it comes to more complex conditions, it’s key that you learn how to use these medicines properly. I want you to be well-trained. So, I save discussions of the more involved methods for my courses in which I walk students through each method with step-by-step training.

In these podcasts, I focus on those students of mine who have already tunneled in and learned how to take care of themselves, family, friends, and pets, and even livestock using homeopathic medicine. Many of these students began their education by participating in one of my Gateway to Homeopathy study groups. And now, after taking one or more of my courses, they’re well-trained to use my specific brand of homeopathy.

I hope listening to this podcast has inspired you to follow in their footsteps. With the proper training, you, too, can nurture and protect the health of your family and loved ones with Practical Homeopathy®.

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 Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Blueberry, Pandora, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

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.

In this special 100th podcast, we cover:

02:05    In the Beginning …

12:30   Let It Snow; Let It Snow!

19:28    Joette and Perry’s Chance Meeting

24:48    “I Have to Write a Book!”   

29:19    Joette’s First Client — and Office

33:37    Where is Practical Homeopathy® Headed?

Links and resources mentioned in this podcast:

How I started out with homeopathy

My first book: Cure Yourself and Family

Joette’s Mighty Members (my new membership group)

My blog, podcasts, Facebook Live events and courses

Gateway to Homeopathy: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Kate:  This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 100 with Joette Calabrese!

Joette:  This is Joette Calabrese, and I’d like to welcome you to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. Women and men worldwide are taking back control of their families’ health and learning how to heal their bodies naturally, safely and effectively.

So, if you’re hungry to learn more, you’ve come to the right place. Stay tuned as we give you the tools — and the inspiration — you need as I share my decades of experience and knowledge using this powerful medicine we call homeopathy.

Joette:  Hi folks, Joette Calabrese here.

Perry:  Hi folks, Perry here.

Joette:  We are doing something a little different today because this is our hundredth podcast!

Perry:  Wow!

Joette:  Because of that, we thought we’d celebrate with something just a little different because people ask me about this all the time. And I don’t know how much I want to reveal here, but Perry is my husband. So, I am going to kind of interview him, and he is actually going to kind of interview me as well.

We are not going to talk too much about homeopathy in terms of what to use or philosophy or theory or aphorisms, or anything. Instead, today we are going to talk about where we’ve come from, where we’ve gone, where we plan to go with Practical Homeopathy® and JoetteCalabrese.com.

So, hi, honey!

Perry:  Hi, honey!

Joette:  We are going to start by talking about, I guess … people ask me when did I start teaching. And I can’t believe people would be interested in this stuff! But they have asked me to … so, we’re going to do this.

Perry:  We are going to give you a little bit of background on Joette and I because maybe that’s interesting. We don’t think it is, but let’s go ahead and try.

Joette:  Okay. So, many people may know my story and how I started out with homeopathy, and I am not going to go over that because I have written about it on my blog, and it has been published, etc.

But instead, I will start talking about something that we never really talked about that much and that was that I used to teach many study groups in people’s homes and churches and church basements and schools, all over Western New York (which is Buffalo, New York area).

Perry:  This was when the kids were a little bit older because I would go out at night as well. I owned a construction company. So, we didn’t argue about who was going to go to work. But I would come home from the day, have dinner, and plan to go back out again, and Joette would remind me, no, she had a study group to teach. I was staying home with the kids.

In many respects, I enjoyed that, but we needed to get Joette’s business up and going – or at least build her client-base — because that was what we were doing at that time.

So, she would go out, sometimes five nights a week!

Joette:  Yeah, yeah. For years I did that. I would say it was probably two years where Monday night I taught in Black Rock (which is a section in Buffalo). Tuesday night it was Orchard Park (suburb). Wednesday was the West Side of Buffalo. Thursday was Amherst, New York (outside of Buffalo). Friday …

I mean it was really like this, and I was also teaching at the same time at Daemen College. I was teaching classical homeopathy. So, it was a very …

Perry:  To the nurses.

Joette:  Yeah, to nurses. Well, they were undergrad nursing school. It was a very busy, busy time in our lives, and we were living at that time …

Perry:  In Colden.

Joette:  … in Colden, New York, which was 15-acre farm that we had put together. And, we were homeschooling our kids. We had a lot on our plate.

Perry:  Right. We did.

Joette:  When I look back at it, I say, “Wow! What great years!” But it was a lot of work. We were very, very busy. We had two goats and 30 chickens, and you and the kids were raising bees.

Perry:  Ahhh, we were raising bees.

Let me tell you about those goats, folks. We would try to pen these goats in. We had a 6-foot high electric fence. And these goats would climb up the side of the hut that I had built for the chickens and the goats, and they would leap over that fence.

Joette:  And they were Pygmy goats.

Perry:  Well, they were sold to us as Pygmy goats. Either the boys fed them too much, or we were sold a bill of goods.

Anyway, these goats would get out, and Joette would have clients at that time coming to the house during the day.

Joette:  It was an office. It was actually my office connected to the side of the house.

Perry:  One time — Joette could look out of her window, and the client was facing it in a different direction — and she saw the goat on the roof of an expensive car.

Joette:  All four legs!

Perry:  Like up on the roof of the car. And that was it.

At that time, I had one of my guys working at the house. They were fixing something — one of my construction crew. He ran out, grabbed the goat, dragged it — if anyone knows goats, they know what that’s all about — and put it back inside the fence.

Joette:  But the fence was, I mean, it was six feet when you started, but because we recognized how grandly these goats could leap, we acutally … you built a higher fence! It went up to something like 10 feet!

Perry:  Oh, my gosh!

Joette:  And it was electric! They didn’t care!

Perry:  They didn’t care.

Joette:  No, they didn’t care.

One day, we got home from church, and it was summer. And the windows were open, but the screens were in place.

Perry:  Right!

Joette:  We came home, and one goat was on the piano — a baby grand piano. Again, all four feet! (It could have been the one that leapt up on the car. The other goat was on our sofa, and it was eating a page out of my repertory. Now, I freaked out because the repertory was an expensive book! At that time in our lives, everything seemed very expensive.

Perry:  The couch was used.

Joette:  It was my brother’s couch that he gave us.

So, anyway, it was eating a page out of the book. I know this sounds crazy, but it was actually a page that was in the section of the repertory under “stomach, appetite.” And it ate that page. It was so ironic, but that’s what she ate.

Perry:  Did we tell them that the chickens followed the goats into the house?

Joette:  Yeah. That’s true. Because once the screen … what happened was the goats had pushed through the screened window in the living room.

Perry:  Leaped in!

Joette:  And then, as a result of that, the chickens followed.

Perry:  Their buds, the chickens followed ‘em. 

Joette:  Basically, we had a menagerie in our living room.

Perry:  We had a barn in our living room.

Joette:  How about the time … we just have to tell this story because it was so much fun.

We had a van, and we’d go out for the day or something and be with the kids. It was one of those slider-door vans, and the door was left open. We had emptied out the groceries. The kids had helped me empty them and bring them into the house, etc.

And I noticed a few hours later that the slider was open on the door. So, I directed one of the boys to go close the door, and he did.

The next day … and you know, every night the kids would put the chickens and the rooster to bed in their coop and close the door because otherwise the fox or possum would get in there. So, we had to be very careful of that.

So, they had put the chickens to bed, as we said, and then the next morning, they let them out.

But this morning instead of hearing the rooster crowing the way he normally did in a very bright and brilliant crow, we heard, “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”

“Something’s wrong, where is that rooster? It sounds like he is muffled like he is in a pillow or something.”

“Cock-a-doodle-doo.”  

I looked out, and the rooster was in the car — feet perched on the top of the back of the driver’s seat — crowing! And we heard him off in the distance. I can’t tell you how disgusting that car was within less than 12 hours.

Perry:  Yeah, but you know what, this didn’t teach us anything.

Because every year, we’d increase the size of our flock due to normal flock attrition. Joette found a breeder down in the southern tier somewhere that had a specific kind of chicken that she wanted the boys to experience. And so, she sent me down there in the car with boxes to collect these young chicks.

No, they were not chicks. They were …

Joette:  Teenagers!

Perry:  They were teenagers. So, I got about 20 of them in these multiple boxes in the van and closed the boxes up. Put them in the van — they were quiet — and started back on the thruway. And one of the boxes opened up, and the chickens came out.

Now, I am on the thruway, and they are flying around inside the car! People are driving by and looking!

Joette:  Well, chickens make a mess in very short order — forget the feathers, that makes a mess — but the chicken poo is not very nice to clean up.

Perry:  Horrible.

Joette:  We had bees; we had ducks; we had a pond. We stocked the pond twice — because there was a crane that every time we put them in, the crane came and just gobbled up everything.

Perry:  Ate the fish.

Joette:  So, we just gave up.

Perry:  We did.

Joette:  We just used it for swimming and forget fishing.

Perry:  Right.

Joette:  Here is the problem. We are both city people, and we wanted to raise our kids in the country. And so, that’s what we decided to do. We really were green behind the ears. We really did not know what we were doing — even though we read up on it. We tried to do the best we could! It was an adventure. It was fun. There is no doubt.

Perry:  It was fun. The bees, we have kept the bees for multiple years — through the winter.

Joette:  Lots of honey.

Perry:  And we did get a lot of honey out of them. We had a lot of experience.

One time one of our hives swarmed, went across the street and went into the eaves of our neighbor’s.

Joette:  I don’t know if people know what a swarming hive looks like or sounds like. I had never seen anything like this. You see pictures in children’s books about a swarm of bees, but you have no idea how intense it is — the experience.

All five of us were outside. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we heard this “electric” sound, and it was really strong electric sound. And we didn’t live around electricity. I mean, we had electricity, but we did not have any …

Perry:  Not high-power lines.

Joette:  Perry, I think we looked simultaneously. We looked up, and there was this, what would you call it? A column.

Perry:  Column. Black.

Joette:  Black column that had to have been 10 feet wide and about 30 feet tall.

Perry:  30 feet tall.

Joette:  It was loud, and the electric sound was the sound of the bees. They had all left the hives.

Perry:  Bees. They were following the queen. There were two queens in the hive. And the one queen decided, “I’ve had it.” So, she left, and all the bees decided to follow her.

Joette:  She needed Sepia, folks. She left the babies. She left her husband. She needed a couple of doses of Sepia 200, but it was too late because we didn’t know where she was.

Perry:  She was gone.

Joette:  So, we very carefully, without too much excitement …

Perry:  Snuck back in the house.

Joette:  We guessed, “Okay, come on boys, let us get in there. Come on, get the dog. Come on get the cat. Let’s get into the house.” We watched it, as you said, it travelled across the road.

Perry:  It went into our neighbor’s eaves.

Joette:  Yeah, we had to deal with that later on, didn’t we?

Perry:  Yeah. Right.

Joette:  We had to help them.

Oh, my gosh. So, we have lots of animal stories. You know, you don’t realize how interesting animals are, and how much they influence — how they used to influence — people’s lives until you’ve lived on a small farm like what we had. You know, lots of terms like “hen-pecked” and “ruler of the roost,” and so many … “sitting duck.”

Perry:  “Sitting duck” and “dead duck.”

Joette:  We experienced that! We experienced that a few times. We had some baby ducks. You want to tell that story?

Perry:  Oh. No, that is not a good story to tell.

Joette:  Yeah, it was kind of bad. Maybe we won’t do that … we won’t tell that. That’s not a very nice story.

Perry:  Yeah, we won’t tell that story. No. No. No.

Joette:  Alright. So …

Perry:  Do we have any winter stories they might be interested in?

Joette:  Yeah! Well, we lived on a ski hill.

Perry:  For those of you who ski, you are thinking New Hampshire, Vermont, or maybe the West. No, no, no.

This was 750 feet elevation. It was longer to come up on the lift than to ski down the hill. But it was fun, and it was right across the street.

I taught there for, I don’t know, probably 10-12 years. Enough that all three of the boys went through the program; all three of the boys were teachers. It was a great experience for them.

Joette:  Well, it gives them their social lives then because they were homeschooled.

Perry:  Social life and teaching … the whole thing. Plus, of course, the reason I did it — it allowed us to have tickets for free for the season. Season’s passes.

The boys used to just basically put their skis on in our driveway, ski down the driveway across the street (in the wintertime it didn’t really ever leave the street) and then right down the hill.

We didn’t care. It was a small enough little area. It was a family-run ski area at that time. Everybody — the ski instructors and the ski patrollers — all knew my boys, and they would have reported to us …

Joette:  So, they had lots of freedom; they just went off for the afternoon. Once they finished their schoolwork, they could just don their equipment, and off they would go for hours until dinnertime. It was a great amount of freedom for them and for us as well.

Perry:  Right! No, it was fun, it was fun. Often, I’d come home from work, and I’d just don my skis, and I’d go over. Remember that one night I went over by myself?

Joette:  I do. I knew what story you are going to tell. Go ahead, honey.

Perry:  So, I went over at night, and it’d just snowed. So, there was a little, I don’t know, an inch or two inches of powder snow. If anyone skis, they know that’s pretty exciting. So, I went over night skiing.

Now, night skiing is a little bit challenging because the light causes the trails to become very flat. You can’t see the contours. You can’t see the bumps. You can’t see anything clearly. I was skiing on a particularly steep section of this hill. As I skied down, I came over the top of a little ridge where it dropped away a little steeper, and I am going too fast.

Suddenly, I realized I am in the middle of a slalom course! Now, “slalom course” means all of the slalom gates, all of the poles — and at the time they were bamboo poles — are all over this thing like an obstacle course unless, of course, you know the pattern. Well, I didn’t know the pattern, and I’m in the middle of it and going too fast. Obviously, I fell — because I clipped the poll and fell.

In the language of skiers, when you make a terrible fall, it’s called a “garage sale” because my skis were in one direction, and my poles were in another, and my hat and my gloves — gone.

I think what had happened is I had fallen forward and not done a complete forward roll, but instead landed on my shoulder blades with my head pushed into my chest — my chin pushed to my chest. Because when I awoke, I rolled over and sat up, and the natural thing you do, of course, is you start feeling — make sure everything works.

You feel your fingers; you wiggle your toes. Everything was working, but I had no idea where I was. I was totally disoriented.

I don’t know how long I sat there, probably for 15-20 minutes, realized that my stuff was all around me, collected it, walked back up to the top of the hill rather than ski down. I walked back up to the top of the hill and walked home, put my skis down and walked in the house.

Joette:  He looked strange. His pupils were dilated, I think. Now, I don’t remember, but you had a look in your eyes as though you were not there. It looked vacant. You looked drugged or something.

I said, “What’s going on?”

You said, “I had an injury, and I think I may have injured my neck or my head, and I don’t feel so well.”

So, you laid down. I think you laid down in my office because I had a window seat there that was a good place for people to lay down. And you laid down there, and you said, “Yep, ah …” Then you were mumbling. You were speaking in a strange way.

So, I knew that there was a spine or a head injury. The first thing I did was, of course, I ran and got Arnica. At that time, I was still using Arnica for head injuries, and I would still consider using it again, but I used it in a 1M. And then I also got Nat sulph, Natrum sulphuricum. I waited a little while to see how he responded to the Arnica. I may also have used Aconitum, also very good for injuries and shock to the system.

Now, today, I would use something different. I would probably use the Banerji Protocol of Cuprum metallicum with Arnica because head injuries can result in seizures. I never saw seizures, but I would say for about an hour, you were not with us.

Perry:  Right. I had no idea, but I felt like I couldn’t speak clearly. I clearly had very little memory of what had actually happened.

Joette:  The next day, some friends came over — ski patrol friends or teachers (ski teachers) — and they said they had seen it, or they’d heard about it, and they wanted to know how you were … because they witnessed something, or somebody had witnessed something that did not look good. It definitely looked like a garage sale on top of that hill.

At any rate, it didn’t take long. You started to feel better within about an hour and a half. I kept administering the medicines. I really didn’t want you to fall asleep until we could see whether or not things were … had been moving along. So, we stayed up for a good amount of the night talking, and I was trying to keep you awake and feeding you, etc.

And you came out of it the next day. You said, “Yeah, my neck hurts a little bit,” but you were clearheaded by the next day, which was very relieving.

But I didn’t stop the medicines. I think we continued with Nat sulph. I think we gave another dose. It was a very high potency. I think I gave another dose or two over that day and into that night, and then that was it. I think it was about three doses of Nat sulph that you got with Arnica montana in a 1M, maybe every 15 minutes at the first, at the onset, and then I dropped back on that.

Perry:  Wow. Is that when you had the boys start carrying Arnica with them in their ski parkas?

Joette:  Well, I don’t know if that was the onset of it, but that is part of our family tradition was that each child had to keep Arnica 1M in his ski parka because they would, of course, ski together often. And if one of them was injured, they knew to get the remedy out of their pocket and administer it.

They never had to use it. Isn’t that interesting? In all those years. We were there for 23 years, and they never had to use it. They just didn’t get injured that way. They get injured on the property with the goats and beestings and those kinds of things. It wasn’t ever ski injuries. Interesting.

Perry:  Right. No, that worked well.

Joette:  Let’s talk about how we met.

Perry:  Yikes!

Joette:  Well, first, let me say we were both previously married. We did not have children in our previous marriages. So, when we met …

Perry:  We were both married for seven years.

Joette:  Yes, yeah.

Perry:  We were both married, Joette only a year or maybe two years before I was married. We both came out of our marriages about the same time.

Joette:  Yeah, well, you were two years later. But by the time we met, we had both been divorced for some time. We didn’t have children in either of those marriages, thankfully. So, when we met, we dated for a few years.

But we met through our friend, Louis. I was involved with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Louis was a member of the organization, Friends of the Philharmonic. I was the president of it, and we became friends. We were not dating. He was just a friend, and he invited me over to his house for dinner.

We had just finished dinner, and there was a knock at the door, and there was Perry standing there! Apparently, Perry was Louis’s next-door neighbor, and he came by to, I don’t know, why did you come by? Do you remember? I guess you had just … Oh, you had just been at that race…

Perry:  I have just come into town, and I was just checking with Louis to see what was going on — what had happened on the street while I’d been gone.

Joette:  But you were … Perry had come in, and he was all perspired and had gear on, and it was summer. I think it was June or something, wasn’t it? Well, you tell me, you know the dates.

Perry:  I don’t know.

Joette:  So, you had just completed the Bermuda race. Perry is a sailor. And he had just gotten off the boat.

Perry:  Well, let us back up a little bit. We live in Buffalo, New York, which is about 500 miles away from where the boat was actually. So, it’s not likely I would have walked into the apartment with my sailing gear on.

Joette:  Oh, maybe that was the romantic memory of mine.

Perry:  Right. Literally, I had just flown into town. I was still probably dressed in a kind of grubby sailor’s “get-off-the-boat” clothing.

Joette:  So, you came in.

Perry:  I came in.

Joette:  He started to talk to Louis. Louis, of course, introduced us and then Perry left.

I said, “Okay, Louis, here is the deal. He’s cute! I like that Perry. How about if we go out tomorrow night, and I bring my friend, and you bring Perry? And let’s all spend some time together!”

So, Louis did that. And indeed, that’s exactly what happened. The next night, Perry and I spent a lot of time talking and enjoying each other’s company, and that’s where it all started.

Perry:  Right.

Joette:  Should I tell the story about at the end of the evening?

Well, I don’t think it was that night. I actually think it was about two or three weeks later. I invited Perry up to my apartment. And my parents lived downstairs — it was their home, and I lived on the third floor.

So, I invited Perry up, and I said, “Why don’t you come over, and we’ll make flan?”

Now, I knew that he didn’t know what flan was. Nobody really knew what flan was unless you were of Spanish origin. But one of my closest friends is Cuban, and she had taught me how to make flan years before.

So, I said, “Let’s go to my apartment, and we can make flan.” So, I knew that he would misinterpret that, but I wanted to see how far I could take this little charade.

So, we went up to my apartment, and we very unceremoniously marched directly into the kitchen — and made flan.