Podcast 21-When to Use a Doctor; When to Trust Yourself

In this podcast, we cover:
02:28   What is Discernment
11:30   Have The Knowledge
16:40   Own The Remedies
21:15   Know What You’re Looking For
26:17   Diagnosis
31:10   Selecting The Right Doctor
42:03   Finding the Good Doctors

---

 

Paola: It’s podcast number 21 at joettecalabrese.com, and here’s some upcoming highlights!

Joette: There’s a lot you can take care of on your own with your family. You know, yes, cancer; yes, AIDS; yes, rheumatoid arthritis but you have to know your stuff. You can’t go say, “Oh, I can treat this” and just go by a protocol. You have to be sure you know what it is you’re treating. There does come a point when you may need more expert opinion. There are times when the people who do not know enough homeopathy that they really do need to go to someone and get perhaps conventional care, just in case. It’s nice to have that second opinion.

Paola: What I like about this podcast is that it gives you another layer of self-empowerment. Those of you who have been reading Joettes blog for a while have come to know the Banerji Protocols which greatly simplify homeopathy. Basically if you have a diagnosis or a clear pathology, you meet it with a protocol to uproot that disease, but it’s important to remember that just because you have a protocol, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the skill or the tools that you need to progress through that illness.

So in this podcast, Joette gives us four key components to help us determine whether or not we are able to complete the healing at home ourselves, or if we should seek out conventional medical advice.

Joette also gives us some great suggestions on how to find a medical doctor, should you need one. So if you’re ever in a situation where you do want that conventional medical advice, how do you go about selecting the right doctor for you.

You are listening to a podcast from joettecalabrese.com where nationally certified American homeopath, public speaker, and author, Joette Calabrese, shares her passion for helping families stay healthy through homeopathy and nutrient-dense nutrition.

 

Alright, here we go.

Hi Joette, I’m excited to be talking with you again.

Joette: Hi Paola. I love this too.

Paola: I love this podcast. It really is like talking to my wise girlfriend.

Joette: Friends, yup.

Paola: Exactly. So today’s subject that we’re going to talk about is discernment and we’ll go into what we mean by that and also selecting a doctor, an allopathic traditional doctor, right?

Joette: Yes, yes.

Paola: So let’s get started. Tell us. What do we mean by discernment? What does that mean?

What is Discernment?

Joette: I think what you and I have tried to, what we want to convey today because you and I have talked about this in the past is that we want people to understand that there’s a lot you can take care of on your own with your family. You can take care of your children, yourself. You can take care of yourself, your husband, your pets, your livestock, et cetera. But there does come a point when you may need more expert opinions and even care. I always talk about how important it is to be self-empowered but let’s not be so foolish either. We have to know what we’re capable of. When we start learning homeopathy, it is a heady experience when you start curing your family. There’s no doubt about it.

Paola: What do you mean heavy like stressful?

Joette: No, heady, heady.

Paola: Heady.

Joette: Heady experience. Well, to speak in the 70s terms, it’s a rush. It’s a high. It’s a very exciting experience to be able to cure someone. No doubt about it. But we also have to know our limitations. So homeopathy has the ability to cure all diseases. This is an actual quote that Dr. Prasanta Banerji said to me once. He said, “Homeopathy can cure all diseases but it can’t cure all people. So it means that it can. Yes, cancer; yes AIDS; yes, rheumatoid arthritis but not all people with those conditions will be relieved of them completely. So it means that it also depends on the person. There are a lot of factors involved here.

I wish I could say that this medicine is linear and is super simple and it is. We have gotten a very complex medical paradigm, homeopathy and distilled it. By we, I mean the Banerjis have done this. I have some protocols of my own as well as most homeopaths have been in practice for any period of time. But we’ve distilled it down to some real simple protocols. But you have to be sure you know what it is you’re treating.

If you’ve got a urinary tract infection and we’re going to talk about that, if you’ve got a urinary tract infection and you’ve got some urgency and some burning and you’ve had this before, even if you haven’t, you can go right to the remedies that are specific for that: Cantharis 30, Medorrhinum 200, that kind of thing and start using them. You should see some improvement within, some people report improvement within a couple of hours of taking the remedy; some people, not until the end of the day; and others not for a day or so. But if it feels like it’s going to the kidneys, holy cow.

Paola: That’s usually in your mid to lower back.

Joette: Right, right, right, right. Not that homeopathy can’t uproot that, it certainly can but you many not know the protocols well enough. You may not have the confidence or the ability to know how often to use them. There are times when people who do not know enough homeopathy that they really do need to go to someone and get perhaps conventional care. Now, I always talk about how I didn’t take my kids to the doctors while they were growing up. They’re all adults now. But it was also because they never got very seriously ill. There was one time though. I shouldn’t say I never took them. That’s really not 100% true because my eldest son broke his nose. Literally, I mean his nose was off to the side of his face. It was not in the center of his face.

Paola: Oh no.

Joette: It went off to the side. I actually was not home that night. My husband called me and said, “Oh my God. You should see our son.” So my husband is a professional skier and has been taking professional skiing. He teaches professional skiing and as all of our children. He knows what to do about a broken nose. You just push it back in place and there it is. I know it sounds horrible, doesn’t it? But you push it back in place. My son was able to breathe and he was all right. The pain had come down. We had given him Aconitum and Arnica and things were pretty good.

But I said, “Are you comfortable with this?” I asked him. He was about I don’t know 17 at that time. He said, “Yeah, I’m comfortable. I feel like this is okay.” Using Arnica was something that I knew enough to use in case there was hematoma that was internal bleeding. Who knows what could happen? The nose is awfully close to the brain for goodness sakes. Pituitary gland is right behind there. I said, “Do you want to see someone?” He said, “Well, not really mom. I trust that you and dad know.” But then we said just in case.

So we went to an emergency room that’s not too far from us. Now, we live in Farm Country. So we went to this particular one where they see a lot of farm accidents. We walked in and I said to the nurse, “This is not serious. I think he’s fine but it would be really nice if we could just have someone take a quick look.” The doctor looked and said, Yeah. It’s fine.” Nothing was done. It was just a confirmation that yes, indeed, there wasn’t anything more that we needed to do. I mean, we looked and I looked. I looked up in there with a flashlight. My husband looked. He looked fine. But nonetheless, just in case, we did use another opinion. It’s nice to have that second opinion.

Paola: One of the things that I tell people. If you go into the hospital or the ER or the doctor’s office with a situation, you do need to steel yourself to some degree because obviously a broken nose wasn’t an emergency. But I was talking to my girlfriend in the Moms with Moxie podcast that her son had a febrile seizure. She’s like, I don’t know. It was like a coordinated effort. One nurse and another nurse, and one doctor and another doctor were all trying to push Tylenol on her son. She said, “I’m sorry but he doesn’t need Tylenol. She’s a tough cookie.” But if you go in there kind of loosey-goosey and you don’t steel yourself and bolden yourself to know, I want to understand what he needs and what he doesn’t need and she didn’t feel like he needed Tylenol because she felt like the fever was actually trying to kill off an infection.

Joette: She had confidence. The reason she had confidence is because she had been doing her reading. You have to read. You have to educate yourself. You have to know your stuff. You can’t go and say, “Oh, I can treat this and just go buy a protocol.” You better know your stuff. If your family suffers from, let’s say this child suffers from febrile seizures, you better know all about febrile seizures. Better read up on them. If you give Tylenol, are there any side effects? What will Tylenol do? Are we trying to reduce the fever? Are we curing the febrile seizures? You want to know what the goal here is. Is it to treat symptoms or is it to correct the condition? There is no doubt that all of this, the discernment comes in my estimation for finding that tipping point where when it’s intelligent to make decisions on your own for your family and yourself and when it’s foolish.

Paola: Right. In her case, she had read all the books that you recommended, How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn. He does talk about febrile seizures. So the first time it happens, you don’t know it’s going to happen until it happens, right. But then she already knew and had done some homework. But going back to the benefit of going to a doctor, they told her, “Well, your son had strep throat.”

Joette: Yes, good information.

Paola: Great information, very helpful information especially because he was pretty little and he probably couldn’t articulate very well.

Joette: Right, right. He’s got a strep throat. Now this mother knows what it smells like because there is sometimes an odor to strep throat. Now that she’ll recognize that. Now she’ll say, “Okay, let’s see your throat.” She looks in there and she sees the redness with the white spots or she doesn’t see redness. Sometimes it doesn’t present that way. But if she can get that information down, now she’s learned something.

Paola: Right.

Joette: Something of true value not only for this child but perhaps the subsequent children that come along and have similar situation.

Paola: Guess what? Some of my students in my study group class, because I run a little study group class, they’re telling me that you can get rapid strep test on Amazon.

Joette: Yes, it’s a beautiful thing.

Paola: It’s really cool.

Joette: There you go. Now, if your child is prone to strep throat then you get those strep tests. Find out.

Paola: Right, I did.

Joette: Absolutely.

Paola: I have my box right here. That’s what this is. It just came in the mail because you’re all going to get it at some point.

Joette: It’s very likely, sure, sure.

Paola: So going back to that discernment, are there any guidelines we should have to know okay, this is okay for me to stay at home and wait it out. Obviously the anaphylaxis, those are very obvious that we need to go to the doctor now. But sometimes these illnesses creep up on us one day. Then you just wait a little longer and you wait a little longer and then you might be doing something foolish. So do you have some guidelines?

Have The Knowledge

Joette: Well first of all, one of the things you want to do and you just mentioned it a moment ago is make sure you’re doing your reading. You want to read Dr. Mendelsohn’s book, How to Raise A Healthy Child In spite of Your Doctor. Everyone, every mother who takes any of this seriously, who wants to do this themselves needs to buy that book. It’s a dollar on Amazon. Before you even get it in the mail from Amazon, go online and find Dr. Robert Mendelsohn and watch him on YouTube. He was an amazing man. Unfortunately he passed away a couple of decades ago. He was a pediatrician and he was a stalwart in the alternative pediatric community. Of course, he was a given a lot of heck for it. But his information is like gold.

When you finish reading that book, now, you underline the areas that are the most valuable to you and your family. Go back and look at it again and again and again. Meanwhile, he was not a homeopath. He was an MD but he did not know homeopathy. Now you figure out which homeopathic medicines can be used for that particular condition. Own them, that’s number one. Oh actually, it’s number two. To be able to discern whether or not you can do this is first of all, you have to have some knowledge and that’s what I’m talking about now. Not just homeopathic knowledge, although that’s invaluable but you need some knowledge from other people who’ve stepped outside of this proverbial box. If you haven’t done that and you haven’t done any reading like that then don’t step outside of the box. Then you still do need modern medicine because often, you got to do something, not always, not always.

Before I started learning homeopathy, I knew that there was nothing wrong with a fever. I knew that it’s okay if a child gets a cold. I didn’t have to treat them. I used essential oils here and there. I used herbs and that kind of thing and a little bit of homeopathy because I was just learning it. But I also knew you could do absolutely nothing for most childhood illnesses and they would be just fine, chicken pox and all.

Paola: I always talk about my mother in law, that her, she had the ten kids. Cumulatively I swear, they have probably, between all 10 children, taken a total of like six antibiotics while they lived with her. I don’t know what it’s been since they’ve grown up. She didn’t have homeopathy. She didn’t have essential oils. She did a little bit of garlic drops for ear infections but she just waited it out and let it go. Let the fever do its thing.

Joette: But you see, a big part of what you’re talking about here is 10 kids. In the old days, women had larger families. The families were just innately larger. So the mothers had a lot of experience. But in today’s world, if a woman has one child, she freaks over that one child. It is something that I see consistently in mothers who have one child. They cannot get over the fact that their child is sick. There’s nothing wrong with a cold. There’s nothing wrong with chicken pox. Actually there’s nothing wrong with measles. I wish my kids have gotten it. There’s nothing wrong mumps. I wished my kids have gotten. Can we get very, very, very sick with those? Of course, we can. A cold could kill you but that doesn’t mean you think it is. You just make sure that the person’s getting bone stocks and drinking properly, et cetera. There are some pretty simple common sense methods here.

Paola: Right. And just waiting it out can be -.

Joette: Yes, it can be valuable in and of itself. Now, when do you wait it out? If you’ve got a kidney infection, you don’t wait it out. That is not going to go away by itself. So you need to do something about a kidney infection for example or if it feels like it’s going into the kidneys. It’s one thing to have a urinary tract infection that’s in the bladder or the ureter or the urethra but not when it starts going into the kidneys. Now, does it mean that homeopathy can treat it? Of course, it can treat it. Of course it can uproot it. But if you don’t have that information, it can’t do it for you. So, you’ll have to have the knowledge.

Paola: I have to be honest with you. My bladder has been my struggle for many years before I met you, Joette. I talked to women who will say, “Oh, I’ve never had a bladder infection before.” My joke is always, “Well, God loved you more,” because it’s terrible. I also feel like if you’re a woman and you’re listening to this and especially if you have a daughter, count on it. Someone you know, your daughter, your sister, your cousin, someone close to you will have a UTI. So brush up on that. That’s something every woman should understand as something because our urethras are shorter so we’re going to get it easier.

Joette: Yup, yup, yup, there are a lot of yes. Certainly, honeymoon cystitis, when a woman first gets married and there’s a lot of activity sexually, that is often a time when that occurs. So we have to be prepared for that.

Paola: That was when I got my first one and boy do I wish. The remedy for that is Staphysagria.

Joette: That’s right.

Paola: Gorgeous. I’m just kicking myself that you bet you, when my daughter goes off to get married, she’s going to take Staphysagria with her.

Joette: On the honeymoon.

Paola: Yes.

Joette: A whole little kit, absolutely. So that’s the first rule in my experience.

Paola: The first two rules, knowledge and remedies.

Own The Remedies

Joette: The second rule with remedies is I often get people who call up and say my child has got this, this and this with a cold or something acute. I say well, I’ll tell you what the remedy is but if you don’t own it, what good is it or if you contact my office and it’s 5 o’clock on Saturday night and we close at a little bit after 5, Eastern Time and now what? The stores are closed. All day Sunday, your stores might be closed. And you’re certainly not going to get mail. Then you order it on Amazon or wherever from Boiron directly. It will be Tuesday when you get it.

Paola: I mean at least Wednesday I feel like.

Joette: Maybe even Wednesday.

Paola: Because they don’t even ship it out – they don’t prepare the package until Monday afternoon.

Joette: You’re lucky if you get it on Tuesday or Wednesday. That’s right. So you have to own a kit or two or three. I tell people they should own the top 100 remedies in which the potency is mostly 30s and we sell those in the office.

Paola: That’s the red kit.

Joette: The red kit, yes. Then own a 200 potency kit. That’s a little grey kit. There are 50 remedies in that. You should own every cell salt. We sell those kits too. You don’t have to buy them from me. You just have to own these remedies. We make it easy but you really need to own them. Then if there’s a remedy that’s not in those kits and of course there will be because there are 6000 remedies and we’re only talking about 150 here or 172 or something, 62, when you total all those three kits up, if you have a remedy that you know you’ll need, you better own it.

Paola: So going back to women, you’d have to have Medorrhinum. That is a big part of the protocol for bladder infections and that’s not in those kits.

Joette: That’s right, Medorrhinum 200 absolutely. It’s a beautiful remedy. It’s very important to own.

Paola: I’ll tell you what more that’s not in those kits that people often wish they had is Sanguinaria 200 for sinuses.

Joette: Yes. Camphor 200 is not in those kits too.

Paola: Those are the three that I run into the most that aren’t there.

Joette: Yes ma’am, absolutely. We need to have those. But there are plenty more. There’s Chelidonium 6 and there’s LycoArs. We can go on and on about the remedies that I use that are Banerji Protocols or even that are not Banerji Protocols that you absolutely must own, if you have proneness for one thing or another or you think someone in your family will. Here’s the problem. Most people say, “Well, I already own a lot.” You’ll never own a lot. You’ll never own enough.

When I say there are 6000 homeopathic medicines out there. I mean it. When we had to memorize materia medica when I was studying for the exams to become a professional homeopath, we had to study, we had to memorize 300, 350, something like that homeopathic medicines. We had to know them inside and out. We had to know our medicines. To not own them would be kind of goofy because then if I needed them, I certainly knew all about them. I knew what to do but I didn’t have it to use it. So that’s kind of a non sequitur. The point is that you want to own as many as you possibly can.

Here’s the thing. When people start saying that this is expensive, I want to just smack them. It’s not expensive. They’re not expensive. When you buy a kit that has 100 remedies in it and the cost is $257, that means each bottle costs $2.57. Can you find anything anywhere, essential oils, herbs, vitamins? God forbid, we’re talking about drugs. I mean EpiPens are now what, $600 or something and they are stale dated. With homeopathy, nothing is stale dated. They may put a date on it because the FDA requires it. But to be honest, I’ve got remedies here in my office that are from 1918 and they still work. I mean the bottle has stamp on it, 1918, Belladonna 30X. I have used it and it still works. So these remedies will be passed down to your great, great grandchildren. So it’s an investment.

Paola: Speaking of the FDA, the controversial with Hyland’s Teething Tablets, Hyland’s decided to remove the teething tablets from the US. Own your remedies.

Joette: Yeah, you better own them. That’s right.

Paola: You’ll never know.

Joette: That’s right.

Paola: You’ll never know what new controversy is on the horizon. Own your remedies.

Joette: That’s right. That’s right.

Paola: So let’s say, let’s go back to the UTI example. Let’s say I’m struggling with the UTI. I have the knowledge. I have the remedies and still struggling with it. What’s the next step in discernment?

Know What You’re Looking For

Joette: What you want to know is what you’re looking for. Once you’ve taken the medicine, you got to know what it is you’re looking for. If you think that it’s going to take four days for it to correct itself and you’ve got a urinary tract infection, you’re incorrect. That’s not the way it works. You should be able to take it about every, if it’s very severe, every hour even or maybe every three hours and then watch for improvement. It’s really better generally speaking to use it every about three to four hours.

But if it’s screaming horrendous, there’s a lot of pain, a lot of urgency then you take it every hour for a couple of hours or a couple of doses and then you open it up to every three to four hours. If you don’t see a change after a few doses, I mean, we’re looking even for a little bit of a change but if you don’t see a change, you know what, you may be wrong in the remedies that you’re choosing. If that’s the case, you might indeed need to get to a hospital or to a doctor because we don’t want to take a chance with an infection of that potential magnitude. Now, if it’s a cold, that’s something else. But when we’re talking about urinary tract, we don’t want it going into the kidneys.

Paola: Let me explain why I think some people don’t even realize that. When it gets to your kidneys, your kidneys are what filter your blood. So if your kidneys are infected with E. coli or whatever it is and your blood is going through those kidneys, your blood is picking up the infection and you’re going sepsis phase all over your body. Now, I’m not trying to scare people but you do need to know what we’re talking about.

Joette: Right, right. I will tell you. My next suggestion is you get your remedy kit. If you’re not sure what to do and you’re thinking, “I wonder if I should get to an emergency room, I’m really scared,” whether it’s UTI or going to the kidneys or your child or a head injury, whatever it might be, you grab your remedies. You get into the car with your child and you get to an emergency room. Oh you should bring a little bit more than that. Bring some water, maybe some playing cards, a bag of popcorn or something and you stand. You go to the emergency room but you don’t go in necessarily. I mean if you need to, of course. I mean if it’s really, really obvious, of course you’re going to go in. But park in the parking lot of the emergency room with a blanket, a deck of cards, and hang out and see how the remedies are acting. If the remedies start to act, you can go home and if you start seeing the things are moving along. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve done that with my father who thought he was having a heart attack and then in the end, turned out that he actually was not having a heart attack.

Paola: Like terrible gas.

Joette: Meanwhile, I’m in the car with him. We’ve got a blanket over his lap. He’s got his nice, warm water that he’s drinking with say Mag phos in it in a 6X and he’s sipping it. We’re talking and we’re playing classical music so we can calm down. I’m administering the remedies. I said, “Dad, at any time, we can go in but why don’t we just sit here and hang out.” He knows that he’s only 30 paces away from that emergency. How comforting is that. Now, you’ve got the best of both worlds.

Paola: It’s true.

Joette: The beauty of this is that you might be able to turn it around, go home, and he’ll never get all the drugs or she will never get all the drugs that are automatically given regardless of what’s happening, almost. You lose control in the emergency room. Sometimes you need to do that. We’re going to concede on that. Sometimes you need to do that. But too many times, it’s fear that brings you there.

Paola: Yes.

Joette: It’s not the logic. If you can see the remedy is starting to act and you’re only 20 paces away, you got the best of both worlds.

Paola: Well, I have to say -.

Joette: Park in the parking lot of the hospital.

Paola: The worst decisions I have made about my health were when I led with fear. Fear we know, it dilutes your thinking, your logic. So that’s why it goes back to step number 1, you have to have the knowledge because if you know that knowledge really well, it kicks in when you need it. It just hits. I know what to do. So the rule number three is basically following the rules of what you should expect as far as improvement goes, the length of time.

Joette: And know those, know those rules.

Paola: And know those rules. So for an acute condition, I can’t say this enough when I teach my Sunday group classes, for an acute condition, you should see some sort of shift within three to five-ish doses.

Joette: Doses, right, yes, absolutely.

Paola: That shouldn’t be spread out every 30 minutes unless you’re having some sort of anaphylactic.

Joette: Unless it’s very severe, unless the symptoms are extremely severe.

Paola: Life threatening.

Joette: Yeah, life threatening, if they’re not very severe and you’re doing, you’re administering this on the way to the hospital folks. I am not saying that you should ignore life threatening conditions and not go to the hospital. If you feel that you can’t do this then by all means, you get to the hospital. On the way, you’re administering. Maybe your husband is driving and you’re administering.

Paola: So you need to know when improvement should be, what it should look like, and how soon to come.

Joette: Right, right exactly.

Paola: What’s the fourth guideline?

Diagnosis

Joette: The fourth guideline is diagnosis because if you don’t know what it is and it can be very useful to know what it is obviously for many reasons. I mean, if it’s hemorrhaging, you need to know it. If it’s septic, the infection has gone septic, you need to know that. So a diagnosis is very valuable not only because it tells you, “Uh-oh, I need to get to an emergency room or a doctor or something.” But it also tells you if it’s not that severe and you feel as though you can handle it, what homeopathic medicines to use.

Paola: Right, right. It goes back to that story we were talking about the Moms with Moxie interview where her son had a fever seizure. When she realized it was strep throat, she was like oh. First of all, the fever seizure (and everybody agreed) wasn’t life threatening. It was just it happened. Now, I know how to take care of whatever illness this is. It’s strep. I got it. I’m going to go home. She took care of it.

Joette: Those febrile seizures are very, very scary. There’s no doubt about it. If a parent has never witnessed one, it can freak them out. So that is something to be reckoned with but really more from a psychological point of view for the parent because by the time you get to the hospital with a child with a febrile seizure, the seizures are gone. They only last a few minutes. Then when they get there, then all that is done is they just give him his Tylenol. Really, Tylenol? It’s a seizure. Well no. But the seizure’s over with.

A febrile seizure is only – if we’re talking about normal childhood illness now, we’re not talking about head injuries that causes seizure, that may cause a seizure, or a fever of 108 which is only from a head injury, or 107 that it could go that high because fever have their own level. They can’t go any higher than generally 105, 106 even for a normal childhood illness. That’s within reason to allow that to occur without treatment, without even homeopathic treatment for that matter.

I will refer you to go online and check out what American Academy of Pediatric says about fevers. They say finally, I might add, finally -. I mean the homeopaths have known this for 230 years that a fever is curative and that you should not treat the symptom which is the fever. You should allow the fever to cook off the disease, the bacteria, or the virus, so that the child can heal. But if you’re always given that Tylenol or acetaminophen every single time a child has something like this, they’re never going to be able to learn. The body’s never going to learn how to cook off a disease. You’re constantly suppressing it and not allowing it to occur.

Paola: For her, getting the diagnosis was actually helpful. He had a fever and it helped her understand the illness more fully to finish the illness. Of course the next morning, he was perfectly fine.

Joette: Yes, yes.

Paola: This reminds me of the time my son, this is like very embarrassing. He’s not going to listen to this podcast. He’s nine. He had a pain in one of his testicles, really bad pain. It just came out of nowhere. It was so extreme. He was even having to walk weird. So, I picked a remedy for him. I actually gave him Pulsatilla. It helped. We’re in the middle of getting ready to move and over I think five days, it had improved significantly but it wasn’t totally done.

I was just getting a little leery. I called the 800 that our insurance gives for the nurse line. She says it could be testicular torsion. You need to take him to the emergency room immediately because it can cut the blood supply off to the testicle and basically become gangrene. I was kind of aware that maybe this could be a big deal so I finally just said we’re going to go in. We’re just going to do an ultrasound and let’s just look. It was right before we moved. When I moved, I wouldn’t know where to go if it got serious, where to drive to. It was nice to kind of know it’s going to be fine. And they looked. She said whatever it is, his body’s working it out. I thought it was going to be torsion but it’s not based on the symptoms
.
Joette: Isn’t that comforting to know that.

Paola: It is.

Joette: Yes.

Paola: It doesn’t hurt to know a little more.

Joette: Right, right. So that’s what I like doctors for. It’s diagnostics or nurses. They’re very good at that. They don’t always get it right but they often do. They see a lot of the same cases over and over again. So I like that diagnostic. What I don’t like are some of the treatments. So we have to be careful of that.

Paola: That’s what I was saying. Steel yourself when you get in there. Embolden yourself. Know what you’re going to be okay with and what you’re not. So going to doctors, we’re saying that we are going to want a relationship with the doctor. How? Do you have any suggestions for selecting a doctor?

Joette: Yes. Get an old one.

Paola: Al old guy.

Selecting the Right Doctor

Joette: An old guy, no one under 60. Maybe I’m being a little facetious here but you want someone who doesn’t have a mortgage anymore. You want someone who doesn’t pay tuition anymore. You want someone who’s not pressured by his financial constraints in his own life and feeling overwhelmed that he has to make a decision that is in line with what the pharmaceutical rep is saying to him every couple of days in his office. You want a guy who is willing to step outside of the box. That comes not only from not being pressured financially to make decisions that are more about his state of being than yours but you also want someone who clinically speaking has seen these cases time and time again and will after a while say, “Febrile seizures, so we give the kid a Tylenol. I don’t know what good that does. That’s what I’m told to do. I learned that in medical school.” You give a Tylenol. You give acetaminophen. Then he starts asking himself what’s the point. Why am I doing this? The child’s not in pain. The seizure’s over with. He starts asking questions because he’s seen it so many times.

But a doctor fresh out of medical school is very impressed and I can guarantee here she is with his or her education. You know why they’re impressed because they spent a darn fortune on it. So when they get out of medical school in residency and internship, they have committed themselves to doing every single thing they’ve been taught because it cost so much. Now, they’re not saying it because it cost so much. They’re saying because what are you kidding me? I just spent all these money? He’s got to be right. I mean, that’s the way we all think. It’s like telling a guy who just bought a Ferrari, “No, you know? You shouldn’t have bought a Ferrari. You should have bought a Maserati.” He’s never going to say, “Oh my gosh. You’re right. I just spent $100,000 on this car and I should have bought another one.” No, it took him a long time to get to that car. He’s not going to give it up because somebody said there’s something else out there.

Paola: It’s like they’ve chosen to become indoctrinated which is funny, indoctrinated doctors.

Joette: Right, right. It is a choice. It absolutely is a choice. Look, I’m not saying medical school has no value because anatomy, physiology, pathology, all of that is very important information for a doctor. What I don’t like that they’re learning is the stuff that they get that is pharmaceutically based. That is what their professors are doing. They are teaching them the pharmacy directly from the pharmaceutical companies. That is what makes me ne