Podcast 98 – How to Take Your Own Case: Prioritize!

 

In this podcast, we cover:

 

01:27    Fictional Girl Named Maddy

05:58    Number Rating System

15:58    Food Intolerance

18:58    Determining what is most important

25:06    Sprezzatura

 

Kate: This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast Episode Number 98 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. I’m here with Joette today.

 

Hi, Joette!

 

Joette:  Hi, Kate, always great to talk like this.

 

Kate:  Yes, we have so much fun on these podcasts.

 

Today, we are going to be talking about what it’s like when you first start using homeopathy, and you are so excited. Right? You finally found homeopathy, and you’re so excited. You’re trying it for some conditions, and it’s working.

 

And now, you want to treat everything, right?

 

Joette:  Now let’s make our bodies perfect and live forever.

 

Fictional Girl Named Maddy

 

Kate:  Right.

 

So, what we’re going to do today is we’re going to talk about this fictional girl named Maddy. I’m going to give you an example of a case, Joette.

 

We see this all the time. I’m sure you do. I hear people in the Study Groups who get excited, and then they want to treat everything. They want to heal every single symptom that they have, their family members have, their friends have — which is great, right?

 

Joette:  But enthusiasm needs to be tempered sometimes, and we have to pull back and be a little more logical.

 

Kate:  We’re going to flesh this out. I’m just giving you an example, Joette.

 

Maddy has osteoarthritis, right? She has pain in her joints. She has food intolerances which gives her bloating and gas. She has alopecia so maybe some thyroid issues. She has white spots on her nails. She’s 20 pounds overweight. She doesn’t sleep well at night, and she has a little patch of eczema on her neck or her back.

 

Joette:  How old is Maddy? It’s most likely that Maddy is not in her 20s. It can happen. But most likely the osteoarthritis is usually the tipoff that she’s older. She’s postmenopausal. She’s in her 60s, most likely 20 pounds overweight. All of this is super-common for someone in the late 60s, for example. (This is fictitious, right?)

 

Kate:  Exactly.

 

Joette:  Maddy is not real, so let’s put her exactly where she would fit in the scope of demographic. I would say Maddy is probably about 65.

 

Kate:  You see a lot of Maddys, I would imagine, Joette, because this may be some typical conditions that people in that age range are dealing with, yes?

 

Joette:  Yes. You know what you didn’t mention about Maddy? My guess is that she’s got anxiety, too.

 

Kate:  Of course, she does.

 

Joette:  You bet. You bet. Things that come her way or her family’s way, she worries about her grandchildren. You know, it keeps her up at night sometimes. You did say insomnia, right? Yes, she has insomnia.

 

Kate:  Maddy is really excited, Joette. She’s just taken some of your courses. She joined your Study Groups.

 

Joette:  Down, Maddy. Down!

 

Kate:  She’s listened to all the podcasts, read the blogs, and she wants to tackle the world!!

 

Joette:  Yes, yes, great! That’s good. We don’t want to extinguish this excitement!

But what we want to do is then put it all together for her so she can understand how she approaches something like this.

 

Kate:  And Maddy’s dog has a tick disease. We could go on and on, right?

 

Joette:  Yes, well, her husband’s got, you know, sciatica pain, and he’s about 40 pounds overweight. He has chronic constipation.

 

We could go on and on and on because that is the profile. It’s “baby boomer” profile. That’s basically what we’re describing here.

 

The most important thing that we have to do first is to see what is it that’s keeping Maddy down?

 

Is it the alopecia?

 

In other words, if her hair is so thin that she looks like she has almost no hair — she’s starting to wear a wig — then by all means, that’s really important to her!! That’s going to change everything for her, especially for a woman. That is a big deal for a woman.

 

But if we’re talking about alopecia in which, well, her hair’s falling out a little bit too much, and it’s thinner. It’s not the same as it was when she was in her 20s, of course. Whose anything is the same as when we were in our 20s?

 

If it was just a mild case then we can put that on the back burner for now. It’s just not as important.

 

And, it might fall into the category — like you said — it could be thyroid. We don’t know that. She has not gotten tested. We never treat just because we suspect there could be a thyroid problem. We really do want a diagnosis.

 

Whether it’s a diagnosis from a conventional doctor — which is what I urge folks to do — or it’s your own diagnosis — meaning, “I’ve got a fever, I don’t need a diagnosis to be told I’ve got a fever.”

 

Sometimes it’s obvious, and we can make our own decisions.

 

Or “My joints ache, and it’s probably arthritis because that’s the definition of arthritis.”

 

So, getting back to the alopecia; I would put that on the back burner.

 

But she also has arthritis, and we’re going to assume that it’s not rheumatoid arthritis. (It’s too big of a category to tackle on something like a podcast.)

 

But osteoarthritis is, of course, super-common in women postmenopausal, especially in their 60s. Now, that all depends too. Is this osteoarthritis absolutely over-the-top for her? Are her knees very painful? Does she have to flip around in bed trying to get comfortable because her hips ache? Is she so stiff in the morning that she can barely walk, get out of bed? And she can limber up, but there’s still no real comfort?

 

I would give it on a scale of 1 to 10 … let’s say her sufferings from this arthritis are maybe around a 6. That’s pretty significant.

 

Number Rating System

 

Kate:  Joette, you bring up a really good point: that number-rating system, 1 to 10 (10 being the most severe). That’s important, right, as we’re going through these conditions — to assign it a number?

 

Joette:  It’s important to assign a number so that the person who’s taking the case has something from which to springboard when they review the case in two months.

 

I had someone respond to me the other day, she said to me, “I hate that number system because it’s so subjective.” But that’s exactly why it’s valuable!

 

The only person who can report on it is the person who’s experiencing it. Unless you’re reporting on a dog or a baby or someone who’s unconscious, then you can give it a number based on your observation.

 

But your own personal subjective number is very valuable because when we compare it, we’re going to be comparing it back to that subjective person’s take on it. So, you want to use the same person.

 

Let’s say you’re observing — excuse me for going off on a tangent — but let’s say there’s a dog that’s sick, and the vet says, “Oh, this pain in this dog has got to be a 9.”

 

And the homeowner or the dog owner is thinking, “Well, gee, I thought it was a 3.”

 

Well, you better stick with either 3 or 9 or both, and then make sure that you’re comparing that in a month or two when you need to look over what you’ve accomplished with the homeopathic medicines.

 

Which one are you using? Use the same criteria. You need that common denominator.

 

Kate:  Okay, let’s get back to Maddy. I didn’t mean to take us on …