Show notes
I share in this podcast the harrowing experience I had with my firstborn child and how that changed the way I raised all of my children. I explain that Homeopathy is more than home remedies, herbs, and vitamins; how it used to be prevalent in the US and is still widely used in Europe, South America, and India. Homeopathy is a simple – yet intelligent and elegant – way to physically help your family. Jendy: This podcast is sponsored by the book, “Backyard Farming on an Acre (More or Less).” Whether your goal is to eat healthier, save money, live more sustainably or a combination of these, “Backyard Farming” helps you get there. Comprehensive and detailed, it covers everything you need to know to plan, purchase, plant, raise, harvest, preserve and enjoy your own backyard farm. Narrator: You’re listening to The Mom Prepares podcast, a feature of momprepares.com, which is a modern guide to self-sufficiency, and a place to learn how to keep your family safe, fed and healthy. Jendy: Hello, this is Jendy, and I am here with Joette Calabrese from JoetteCalabrese.com, and she is an expert on homeopathy and has several courses coming out that I believe our listeners would be very interested in. So hello, Joette. How are you? Joette: Hi, I’m very well. Thanks for inviting me, Jendy. Jendy: Would you tell us a little bit about yourself? Joette: Yes, certainly. I’m an American homeopath. I’m a public speaker and an author, and I’ve studied and practiced homeopathy for about 27 years. But I was not always a homeopath. I raised my children and homeschooled them for 15 years while studying to become a professional homeopath. And I also made all my family’s foods from scratch and raised chickens and ducks, and we have bees, and we have a pond. And so, my children are all grown now. They’re adults and away from the home, but I raised my children solely with homeopathy. They just never got an antibiotic, never had a Tylenol, not even an aspirin. My oldest is 27, and we have two others just under his age, and they’ve never had any drugs at all because I counted 100% on homeopathy and homemade foods and some botanicals as well. I have been very involved with Weston Price Foundation. I’m on the honorary board of the Western A. Price Foundation, and I’m a professional speaker and present at many of their international and regional conferences. I’ve spoken internationally and have authored not only my own blog where I try to give mostly women … I skew towards moms because I feel very strongly about what I was capable of doing with my education, and I want to be able to share that with others. Jendy: I think for me, when I became a mom is when I became much more interested in what I was putting in the body. Before that I didn’t think about it, for me personally. And I love what you said about that, about antibiotics. One time I took my child to the doctor, I think for an earache, and they gave him antibiotic. And they said, “Well, that’s not really going to take it away. You’re going to have to come back and get something else.” And I was kind of like, “Well, then why do I want this?” Joette: Right. Good question. What I want to do with moms is I want them to question the authorities and not just … once you homeschool your children, for example, you can’t help but start questioning other traditional methods of raising children. Once you step outside of one box, you can’t help but note that, “Boy, that’s not right either, and maybe I should check this out; maybe I should look into this instead of that.” And it just snowballs into a lifestyle that is pure and noble, as far as I’m concerned. Jendy: So how did you first get interested in homeopathy? Joette: Well, I went to a lecture offered by a doctor, an M.D., about 27 years ago. He was traveling through my hometown of Buffalo, New York, and he was giving a lecture on vaccines, and I was pregnant with our first son. And I went to the lecture to learn a little bit about vaccinations, because I wasn’t sure. I’d read a little bit and just wasn’t certain about it. And I had no idea that this man was also a homeopathic physician. And so when I went and listened to him, I was astounded by the numbers and his data and the information that he gave this small band of mothers in regards to how every single illness that vaccines are supposed to protect us against, there’s a homeopathic medicine that’s been used for close to 200 years that has been shown to be even more efficacious. I was blown away that night. And I went home and told my husband about it and was very excited. And I bought a book, a simple homeopathy book, and a little homeopathy kit, which meant that I had a number of remedies that I could use if something happened to someone in our family, and then this book to help me determine it. And then I went and met with a pediatrician to determine who I was going to have as my pediatrician for my child when he was born. And I told the pediatrician that I was thinking about the idea of vaccination and that we were considering postponing vaccinations, or at least maybe minimizing the number in the very beginning and slowly adding them. And he kind of rolled his eyes a little bit, that should have been my first clue, but it wasn’t — I wasn’t savvy enough at that time to pick up on those nuances — but he rolled his eyes. And all my friends told me, “Oh, he’s a great guy. He’s very open-minded.” Which was another clue I should have listened to, because when you hear “open-minded,” that’s not what you want. We don’t want an open-minded doctor; we want a doctor who really gets it — not someone who will consider. No, no, you want somebody who’s already done the homework. So, my son was born, and I took him for his well-baby checkup. That was mistake number three now, okay, because there was nothing wrong with him. He was well! What did I need a doctor to tell me that he was well for? So, I foolishly did that and in trotted the nurse with a little vial and tossed it in my son’s mouth. I said, “What was that?” She said, “Oh, just his polio vaccine.” Now, he was six weeks old. He was as healthy as can be. He never had anything wrong with him; he had been nursing vigorously; he was the right weight. And there was nothing I could say. There was nothing I could do. I said, “Well, I guess that’s the way it went.” I decided though, I was pretty disturbed by the fact that they didn’t recognize the fact that on my chart, it was very clear that we were going to postpone, and we were going to talk about it before, et cetera, et cetera, and no one bothered to do that with me. And I went home deciding I am not going back to that pediatrician. Well, two days later, my son got very, very sick — 105.5 fever — he was listless. It lasted for two and a half days. And I said, “I am not going back to that pediatrician because I know what he’ll do. He’ll want to put him on an antibiotic and Tylenol, and I will be down the road that I did not want to travel ever in my life.” And he was only six weeks old, it would’ve been just the very beginning. So, I had this book — this homeopathy book — and this kit. And nothing in the book indicated where to go with something such as vaccinosis or injury from vaccine, but what it did have was a chapter on high fevers. And so, I can’t tell you precisely why I chose this specific remedy that I chose. It was an embryotic decision, but I decided to use the remedy Sulphur 30. And my mother was with me; my close friend was with me. They could see how sick my son was. He was laying in my arms, lethargic. He looked all dried out. Later, I realized I should never have been without forcing some kind of fluids in him. And he probably should have been on an IV — he was so sick — to get at least saline solution. But I lucked out. And I put the pills, four little Sulphur 30C — that’s a homeopathic remedy — directly into his parched little mouth. And honest to goodness, Jendy, it was less than 40 minutes. He became firm in my arms; he commenced nursing, and the fever was completely gone. I was flabbergasted. My mother said, “What just happened?” My friend said, “Holy cow, this is amazing.” And that’s what turned me. I said, “I must learn about this medicine. I must know what this is.” Had I gone the other route, he would’ve had an antibiotic, like I said, and Tylenol. Tylenol’s very dangerous for the liver, especially a little baby’s forming liver. Antibiotics ruin the gut, even long term. I’m not talking about even if you give them probiotics, it takes a long time to undo what antibiotics can do to a baby’s — to anyone’s gut, for that matter. And I found the answer myself in this book. I did it. I cured my son. I can’t tell you the pleasure that I had in having accomplished that. So, I got every book I could find, and there were not very many. We’re talking back in the ’80s, there were not very many books. So, I dug and dug until I found a woman who had studied homeopathy in England — because homeopathy has been big in this country since the 1940s. It’s very big in Europe and England and Germany, France, Switzerland, Greece. But she had studied there. And I begged her — she did not want to do this, but I begged her — to teach me and a band of mothers how to do this, so that we could treat anything that came our way. And we studied for four years — we met every Thursday night — studied for four years, and finally I decided to go to school in Toronto. And the rest is history, for my life. Jendy: Wow. No more antibiotics or vaccines after that? Joette: Well, he never had the antibiotic, and he certainly never had another vaccine, and we never went back to those pediatricians. Now he’s a 27-year-old man, and as healthy as can be — rarely ever gets sick, and if anything, it’s very mild. It’s a little cough once every four years or something. And so then I raised our subsequent children in the same fashion, and we just lived on the foods that we grew and the homeopathic medicine that I was learning about consistently. Jendy: So, if our listener doesn’t know what homeopathy medicine is, how would you explain it? Joette: Okay. Well, most people think that “homeopathy” means home remedies because of the prefix home in the word, but it doesn’t mean that at all. “Home,” in the word homeopathy, actually means homonym or like or similar. And “pathy,” of course, means pathology or illness. So, it means similar illness. So, let me give you an example. Let’s say we get an onion, and we chop it up. And most folks, when they’re exposed to an onion will have a cluster of symptoms: their eyes might run; their nose might run; their upper lip might excoriate; and they might even become a little jittery. So, that is a cluster of symptoms associated with the gross exposure to an onion. Now, let’s say there’s someone who says, “Every spring when the tree buds blossom, my eyes run, my nose runs and my upper lip excoriates, and I’m a little bit jittery.” That’s a similar cluster of symptoms as what an onion will cause in the gross form. But it’s not exact pathology, it’s homeo or similar pathology. Because the difference is in the first scenario, the cause of the eyes running, et cetera, is as a result of being exposed to an onion. In the second scenario, the etiology or the cause of the illness is as a result of being exposed to tree buds blossoming. So, in a homeopathic pharmacy (I might say parenthetically, regulated by the FDA — this is not underground, but in a homeopathic pharmacy), the pharmacists get a drop or a tincture — a drop of onion (of juice) and in alcohol, so now it’s called a tincture — and they dilute it many times. They dilute it and dilute it and dilute it. So, when I said that I used Sulphur 30 for my son, it was Sulphur, in that example, diluted 30 times. In the onion example, we might dilute that 30 times and “C” or “X” after it, means that it’s been diluted to the hundredth or the 10th power. So, it’s quite dilute. At a certain point in dilution, homeopathy — excuse me — the original substance becomes curative. It might cause illness in its original form, causes symptoms such as eyes running, nose running, et cetera. But after it’s been diluted a number of times —and it’s a mathematical number — once it gets to a certain level, the toxicity is minimized, and the curative aspect of the onion (or whatever plant or whatever mineral we’re using) comes to the fore. So, for that person who has the tree bud blossoming allergies, if we give them homeopathic onion that has been highly diluted — and of course we don’t use “onion,” (we don’t use that as the name). We use the Latin name because this is medicine. So, we use the name Allium cepa, which means onion in Latin. And then it gives us a number as to how many times it’s been diluted. We give that to that person with the tree bud blossoming allergies, and it uproots the allergy. It uproots it — doesn’t treat symptoms — it gets rid of it. It’s done. We’re done. I’m not saying one dose, sometimes it needs to be repeated over a period of days, and depending on the severity of the allergy for that person, it might be weeks, could even be a couple months. But when it’s done, it’s generally done. Now, we might find that two years from now when the tree buds are blossoming again, that person might again have that problem, but it will be a much lesser level. They won’t suffer nearly as much. It will last for a shorter period of time. So, then they use Allium cepa again, and it goes even deeper. So, it’s almost like pulling up the weeds in the garden. Each time you see the presentation of the weed, if you pull it up by its roots, you might find that there’s a little bit of a root left behind. And the next time round, it’ll be a weaker level of that dandelion. That’s what homeopathy is. So, I warned you. I warned you, Jendy. I told you it’s a long explanation. Particularly because most folks still believe that it means, “Oh, it means vitamin C or using home remedies or taking raw honey and vinegar for indigestion or something like that.” And all of those have validity, but that’s not what homeopathy is. It is a very specific medical paradigm. And I might also add that I think is rather interesting, is that homeopathy was very big in this country at one time. The homeopaths had 100 hospitals in our country, in about 1940. And at the same time, the conventional doctors had fewer hospitals. Homeopaths were bigger and more impressive hospitals. There were not more homeopaths than the medical doctors — about 40% of the doctors in this country were homeopathic physicians. But there were more hospitals, and they were the big, big important hospitals that you still see all around. They’re no longer homeopathic, but it was very big in this country. And then we had an infighting in medicine back in the 1940s, and it was abolished in U.S. and Canada. Again, not so in Europe, South America, India, just North America. Jendy: Is it coming back at all? Joette: I think it is coming back. I believe that the way it’s going to come back is grassroots this time. Although it was grassroots last time, too. It was mothers who wanted to learn homeopathy, wanted to be able to use it for their families because they were tired of the same old stuff we’re tired of today: the antibiotics, and at that time they didn’t have Tylenol, but they certainly had aspirin. They didn’t want to see their stomachs all turned inside out from aspirin poisoning. They were tired of the old ways, and they wanted something that was gentle, but very, very effective. And that’s the description of homeopathy. Jendy: Yeah. For you personally, do you take something from your homeopathic medicine every week, or is it just kind of like when you get sick? Joette: Well, if it’s something that is an acute — such as an ear infection, for example — then you would just take it for a few days or less than a week, and it would be resolved. And then the next ear infection — that had been historically repeate…
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