Podcast 160 — Practical Professionals: Real-World Integration of Practical Homeopathy® and Conventional Care

Hi, I’m Joette Calabrese, and I welcome you to our health care movement — yours, mine and the countless men and women across the globe who have retaken control of their families’ health with Practical Homeopathy®.

So, for the next few minutes, let’s link our arms as I demystify homeopathy — what was once considered an esoteric paradigm — into an understandable, reproducible, safe and effective health care solution available to all.

This is the medicine you’ve been searching for — my unique brand of homeopathy, PRACTICAL Homeopathy®.

Real-World Integration of Practical Homeopathy® and Conventional Care

Kate: (00:58)

Welcome back to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. I’m Kate, and today’s guest is going to talk about how she integrates homeopathy into her existing health practice without abandoning the credentials, training and experience as a medical professional.

I’m thrilled to be joined by someone who embodies this balance beautifully. Michelle is a nurse and a homeopath who works alongside her physician-husband. She’s also gone through The Academy of Practical Homeopathy® and is now finishing the second year, which is the Mastery program.

So today, she’s here to talk about how to introduce homeopathy to people steeped in the allopathic world. Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle:

Thank you, Kate. It’s good to be with you today.

Kate:

I’m so glad you’re here. You have a very unique and exciting perspective, and I’m thrilled for you to be able to share with the listeners.

Michelle:

Thank you. I’m glad to be here as well.

Health care professionals seeking to incorporate both allopathy and homeopathy

Kate: (01:56)

So, tell me about what you’ve noticed. When we talked earlier, you said some things about nurses who are giving up their positions and their licenses because they’re wanting to go into homeopathy, and they’re not really sure how to incorporate both of those paradigms. Can you talk to us about that?

Michelle:

Yeah, especially through the last several months and getting to meet everyone, and there’s so many RNs. And I would say other health care professionals, too, that I’ve met along the way in my study groups, as well as the broader sense of the school, that so many of them seem to feel like they have to give up their nursing license or their doctor or physical therapy license in order to practice homeopathy because of the scope of practice.

And I don’t know the laws in every state. However, I’m in Florida. Florida’s pretty friendly with combining those. And I just find that for us in our private practice, I find it very beneficial to have one foot in the allopathic world, as I call it, and one foot in the homeopathic world — in the sense that there’s so many things, especially that you can teach patients or clients, that they can take something homeopathically and not have side effects.

Oftentimes, when they’ll come into our office, I have lots of remedies right in our office. And they can see those, and they will ask me questions about them. And we usually start with simple things like heartburn, or if they’re having issues with sleep, or as a woman with menopausal symptoms.

And Boiron does a beautiful job of making remedies sort of “shelf attractive” to people that are used to more Big Pharma over-the-counter type things. And so, I educate them on some of their choices so that they don’t have to be on more Big Pharma medicines. And the reason not to be is that there’s so many side effects with the synthetic drugs in our world today.

So, I feel like I can win more people over to homeopathy, and ultimately, it’s better for the person. A lot of people just don’t know. They’ve never heard of homeopathy, or that they misunderstand it.

They think that it is natural or herbal, and they aren’t sure. Functional medicine, I think, has come into play and confused waters even more. So, it does take some explaining. Once they see that something works for them and we have a small win, they’re ready to hear more.

Is homeopathy the same as “home remedies?”

Kate: (04:40)

When you said earlier, they think it’s natural. I want to just clear that up for a bit.

It is natural. However, I think what you were trying to say was they just think it’s a broad category of natural medicine, like herbs, and essential oils and all of that.

Michelle:

Home remedy.

Kate:

Yeah, home remedy. That’s what they think.

Michelle:

Right. Yeah. That’s what I meant by “natural” is, like, they think home remedy and homeopathy are the same thing.

Kate:

I think most people don’t really know that homeopathic medicines are regulated by the FDA. There’s the homeopathic pharmacopoeia that the pharmacies go by. So, these medicines are manufactured in pharmacies, according to strict standards. It’s very regulated. So, I just think that’s a fact that people don’t usually know.

Michelle:

And through The Academy, we’ve had the opportunity to see many interviews with the different pharmaceutical companies.

In The Academy, I was blown away by the homeopathic pharmacies that Joette actually interviewed, but we listened. And the regulations that they have to go through was unbelievable scrutiny.

I’ve never interviewed another pharmacy, but it just seemed to me like it was over the top — how much that they go through and how particular they are, and making certain that the medicines that we use homeopathically are exactly what they say they are.

A day in the life of a “combination” practice

Kate: (06:07)

Michelle, can you explain to me what happens in your private practice?

So, a patient is scheduled; they come into your office. How does that usually work as far as the balance between your husband and yourself, and the allopathic world and homeopathic?

Michelle:

Of course. We’ve been in practice for 30 years-plus now, and a lot of our patients are very well known to us. We still do have new patients, but most of them have been with us for quite some time.

And my husband has always been a minimalist as far as drugs and things. But as a physician in this world, his tools have always been pharmaceuticals from drug companies. And since learning homeopathy, we now feel so blessed because we have more tools to use.

And so, a patient comes into our office, they first come to my station — which is the nursing station — and I do the typical intake of what is currently going on with them, along with their vital signs and what they currently are taking for vitamin supplements and medications, et cetera.

They sit in the chair and right in front of them, up on my wall, I have several homeopathic remedies, specifically combination remedies for acute illnesses and things like that that we can use.

And so that oftentimes brings up lots of questions from them of something like, for example, the Acidil®, if they’re having heartburn. “Oh, is that what that’s for?”

And then we have a conversation and then go through some things, and it just puts some ideas into their mind of some things that they can take that don’t have side effects. So, that starts a discussion.

They go back to see Dr. D. He and I have an exchange of what’s going on with the patient. He goes in, sits down with the patient. He always says the patient will tell you what exactly is wrong with them if you listen.

I think this is an important lesson — as simple as it may seem to anyone working in health care, whether you’re a homeopath, a nurse or a doctor — that the symptoms that the person is describing leads us to the right remedies.

So, he will make his assessment. And as I said before, he’s a minimalist as far as drugs are concerned and tries to take people off of things that they don’t need to be on.

He will come out to me and discuss if there’s something that he thinks that we can do for them homeopathically. If so, many of those that are common that he has become very familiar with, he will go ahead and send them back to me for a homeopathic consult. And at that point, then we continue with that.

It’s not to say that we don’t believe there is not a place for allopathic medicine, especially in the diagnostics. That is especially where my husband shines, and he is very much a diagnostician, and we need him for those skills that he was well-trained and has great experience in … as well as Western medicine. We believe it’s great for a trauma situation.

Clearly, we need hospitals, and we need emergency trauma care. But other than that — and surgery — we believe that real health comes from diet and exercise, discipline, sunshine, homeopathy.

So, there is a place for both. And I think that that’s where we’re a little bit unique in that we don’t want to abandon where we came from. I think that it can add to where we’re going with a practice that is both somewhat in Western medicine as well as our tools — as much as we possibly can — have switched to homeopathy.

Kate:

I have a question. When the patients come in, and they are maybe needing a homeopathic remedy — it would be great for this situation — do they just get the homeopathic medicine (the box) from you, or does your husband write it on his prescription pad? Or how does that work?

Michelle:

So no, he does not write it. That’s when he turns it over to me, and then I guide them through the process.

If it’s new to them — which many of them now, it is not new to them — they have a pharmacy that they pick. I go through about three or four different pharmacies. I explain to them the advantages and disadvantages of some of them, whether they’re stateside or there’s one we use in the U.K.

If it’s a chronic, I try to go and help them out a little bit with that as far as one that they would need to have a more quantity from. So that’s where I guide them.

I have my own script pad, and from that point, then I write down the instructions for them, and they go forward with that. Then, when they come and return for a follow-up, the follow-up is with one or both of us.

Attention, health care workers: Stay at your post!

Kate: (11:28)

That’s great. All right. Thanks for explaining that.

So, you’ve been passionate about encouraging nurses and other health care workers to stay in their roles. Talk about why that’s so important. You talked about this a little bit earlier, but if you could share a little bit more about that.

Michelle:

There’s one person who was in my study group, our first year of APH, who is an ER physician. And she’s done very similarly to myself in being able to offer the patient an option.

It’s never forced upon them, but many of them come in very timid or leery about what might be given to them or their child if it’s in a pediatric situation, and they are asking and seeking an alternative, if you will.

Although in the homeopathic, we would tend to think we are the original, and the synthetic version of pharma is the alternative.

But what I’m saying is when you remain in the system, if you will, of our hospitals and urgent cares or physician’s offices or in places where you can meet people and present an option to them of homeopathy, I feel very passionate about it. And I feel that the more people that can learn today that we do have options that perhaps people have just never heard of.

I think it’s important that some of us can stay and perform in that role, whether it’s physical therapy or chiropractic or emergency medicine or primary care.

Homeopathy and/or pharmaceuticals

Kate: (13:24)

One of the things we were talking about earlier was when you were saying that some older patients are on many medications at a time, and sometimes, they’ve been on them for many years. And you had mentioned a couple of conditions and how they may not have been improving on those medications, yet they’re still on them. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michelle:

So, perhaps something about the years I’ve spent in the allopathic-dominant world of health care and how I often see that when patients go on pharmaceuticals, they’re on them for the rest of their lives. And those medicines, they will make them better in the short term, but they are literally on them forever.

So, it’s not curing them, rather it’s something that they must take the rest of their lives.

And, for example, thyroid or cardiac meds. Whereas in homeopathy, we have remedies that are intended to uproot the conditions that we suffer from. And eventually, hopefully, we would not require the homeopathic medicine any longer. And so, the conditions that we suffer from, and eventually we would not require any medicine, whether allopathic or homeopathic.

And that is something that I see in our practice that homeopathy is helping. It’s completely uprooting. I have many clients that I have gotten off of synthetic thyroid medications with the help of my husband, who is a physician.

So, as I give them the remedies homeopathically to correct their thyroid imbalances, then, he titrates down on the synthetic medicine to the point where we’re off completely. And then they continue for a short period of time on the homeopathy medications, and then they’re off.

And we have a person that no longer has symptoms of thyroid issues, whether hypo or hyper.

Kate:

Isn’t that exciting? I bet they are thrilled.

Michelle:

Correct. Correct. And also, takes a little bit longer and maybe a little bit more balancing, but we’re doing the same things with blood pressure and some cardiac issues as well.

So, to not be on — not only financially to be on medicines — Big Pharma medicines for the rest of your life, but also, and more importantly, for the health of your body.

Kate:

Wonderful. Exciting stories. And with acute conditions, I think you were mentioning that you usually see results more quickly.

Michelle:

Yes. I mean, it’s an acute and a shorter fix than from chronics. And I do find that when we have acute illnesses, and I can help the person feel better homeopathically, then they’re a little bit more willing to come out and say, “Hey, what do you think about this?”

And it might be a chronic problem that they’re having or suffering symptoms from.

“Is there anything available for that?”

And so again, I find it exciting to be in the position that I’m in that I can offer them some hope with their chronics as well.

Kate:

And I just want to add that we’re not saying that you alone should get off any medications. You should always work with your doctor, and that’s what Michelle is saying, that her and her husband worked together as a team in this effort.

Before we wrap up today, can you share a couple of success stories with us?

Success Story: Osteoporosis

Michelle: (17:02)

Oh gosh, yes. I have lots of them. Let me think of some of my favorite ones.

Chronically, osteoporosis, especially with women. And it might be just our practice, but I think a lot of times women end up getting diagnosed more with osteoporosis, whether it’s the years of nursing babies, having babies and things like that. They end up going for bone density scans more often than men.

But we have a beautiful protocol homeopathically that I’ve been using, and many women, their osteoporosis scores have improved. They have had falls where they don’t have a broken bone, especially our elderly women who maybe are falling a little more frequently.

You can look the protocol up. I think Joette has a blog called Dem, D-E-M, Bones, Dem Bones. “Joette Calabrese and osteoporosis.” If you even Google that into your search finder, and that’s the protocol that I follow.

Success Story: Depression

Michelle: (18:07)

Another one is depression.

We have a lot of depression within … whether it’s aging, whether anxiety leading to depression … with some of our younger people, both male and female. Again, Joette has a great blog on depression, and those are the protocols that we’ve been using homeopathically, and we’ve seen such great success with those.

Kate:

The podcast [blog post], if you want to look that up, is Homeopathy Can Spoil a Girl, and it’s medicine for depression. So, if you even — in the search bar at the top right corner of JoetteCalabrese.com — click on the search button and then type in “depression.” And you’ll see the blog posts that have to deal with depression or any other podcasts or anything.

In fact, if you want to go there and search for any condition, you can just click that search button and type in the condition or on your search engine, type in “Joette Calabrese,” and then the condition, and you’ll see all of the articles that come up about that condition.

Michelle, this has been such an encouraging conversation and enlightening.

So, your message was clear. You don’t have to abandon your license, your training, and your profession to practice homeopathy. Of course, look at the regulations, like you said, in your state, but you can stay in the field, serve your patients and gently introduce them to an alternative and let them choose.

So, I appreciate your time today, your wisdom and sharing your experience with us.

Michelle:

Absolutely. And thanks for having me, Kate.

Kate:

And thank you to the listeners for joining us today. If you are a health care professional wondering how to integrate homeopathy into your work, I hope today’s episode gives you some confidence and clarity, and we’ll see you next time.

Joette:

It’s my honor to share many lessons on this simple method of using homeopathy for free —without affiliates or advertising — here in my podcasts, but also my blog posts and Monday Night Lives.

But it’s critical that you learn how to use these medicines properly. These podcasts should serve as only the beginning of your training. Peruse JoettesLearningCenter.com to find fun study group opportunities and in-depth courses developed by subject.

So, with the proper training, you can join the thousands of students before you in developing the confidence and competence to protect the health of your family and loved ones with my brand of homeopathy, Practical Homeopathy®.

Kate:

You just listened to a podcast from internationally acclaimed homeopath, public speaker and author, the founder of The Academy of Practical Homeopathy®, Joette Calabrese. Joette’s podcasts are available on all your favorite podcast apps.

To learn more and find out if homeopathy is a good fit for your health strategy, visit PracticalHomeopathy.com.

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Podcast 160 — Practical Professionals: Real-World Integration of Practical Homeopathy® and Conventional Care

Episode Description

In this podcast, we cover:

Additional resources:

Real-World Integration of Practical Homeopathy® and Conventional Care

Health care professionals seeking to incorporate both allopathy and homeopathy

Is homeopathy the same as “home remedies?”

A day in the life of a “combination” practice

Attention, health care workers: Stay at your post!

Homeopathy and/or pharmaceuticals

Success Story: Osteoporosis

Success Story: Depression

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