Medicine or Placebo? Joette Calabrese Makes the Case for Homeopathy After 200 Years of Controversy

And I have to say that Rockefeller was behind a lot of this and I think it's fascinating because he believed in homeopathy. In fact, he never traveled anywhere without his homeopathic medical doctor. But he also knew that there was something to be said about petroleum-based drugs, which he turned that corner and never turned back around again for the regular populace. Not for himself, but for everyone else. Few areas of healthcare generate as much controversy as homeopathy. Is it an overlooked healing tradition, a misunderstood complement to modern medicine, or simply the placebo effect at work? Today we're joined by Joyet Calabrese, founder of the Academy of Practical Homeopathy, to explore why this 200-year-old practice continues to inspire fierce criticism and devoted followers alike, and what the debate reveals about trust, choice, and the future of healthcare. This is Bay Area Innovators and I'm your host, Steve Vispas. Joyet, welcome to Bay Area Innovators. Thank you for inviting me, Steve. I've been looking forward to this for some time. Well, awesome to have you here. Where are you now? I know you're usually in Florida, but I think you're somewhere else now, right? Yes, my husband and I live in Florida, but we have a cottage in Canada and we spend a few summer months there and that's where we are now. That's fantastic. That makes it more of an international program. Well, we're going to talk about homeopathy. That's what you're an expert in and you're a prominent voice. First question, what is homeopathy? Well, I like to say that homeopathy is the medicine we've all been looking for because it's so in tune with nature and often, not always, but often curative. Let me be a little more specific. Homeopathy is a system of medicine that stands in beautiful contrast, but sometimes may even be used in tandem with conventional or allopathic medicine. It's quite different. There are opposites in many ways, but they can be used in tandem. Where mainstream approaches often focus on suppressing symptoms, like quickly shutting down a fever or silencing a cough or blocking inflammation, homeopathy gently digs deeper. The aim of homeopathy is to correct the underlying imbalance that gave rise to those symptoms in the first place. We look at symptoms as not worthy of removing, although they can be uncomfortable or painful and trying, and we do need to do something about it, but we don't want to silence them. We want to use them and determine what medicine, what homeopathic remedy is best used to approach that set of symptoms. That's what really allows for true correction to unfold from within. Give us a bit of a sense of how it works and what are the principles of homeopathy. At heart, this medicine rests on one of, I think, the most elegant principles in medicine of like cures like. So simply put, a substance that can produce certain symptoms in a healthy person, when it's in gross form, when pharmacologically and mathematically prepared, and it is done according to specific rules and laws and all regulated by the FDA, I might add, help to cure those same symptoms in someone who is ill. So let me give you a classic example. The same thing that makes your eyes water and your nose run when you chop onions can also become a trusted homeopathic remedy for hay fever or colds with identical symptoms. The difference is when we use it homeopathically, we call it Allium sepa, we always use the Latin name, and it has been diluted mathematically, pharmacologically, diluted and diluted and diluted until it gets to a certain point where it now becomes curative. So that is where the brilliance lies in this medicine, is how these remedies are made. And it is a meticulous process of repeated dilutions and vigorous succession. And it gets what is potentially toxic and makes it a powerful medicine and is amplified and curative in its, I know it sounds contradictory, but by diluting it many, many times, what we have done is reduced its toxicity and brought forth its curative aspect. So what remains is on a cellular level, an ultra gentle medicine with no side effects. And they are, and what's fascinating about it is also remarkably inexpensive to purchase these medicines. What is it being diluted with? Is it water or what is the dilution? It's diluted with either water or alcohol, grain alcohol. And it is, I've, I've been to many of the homeopathic manufacturing pharmacies in the U.S. and I have observed the meticulous work that these pharmacists use and the regulations that are extremely highly regulated. I would say they're as regulated, if not more, than the conventional pharmaceutical industry. Now, as far as the element that causes the problem, fixing the problem, isn't that similar to how vaccines work, except the dilution part, but isn't similar? In principle, in basic principle, it is similar. However, the difference is in vaccines, they don't go far enough. They don't go to the molecular level. They dilute and dilute, but they don't go far enough. And what remains is still not only the additives, the adjuvants, but also there's still remaining a good measure of the original substance, the virus or the bacteria or whatever that they're using. In homeopathy, it is so highly diluted that it is difficult to observe unless using a specific kind of microscope. And only recently have we noticed that this can actually be seen in water or in alcohol. Interesting, fascinating. Can you give us some examples of some of the diseases or symptoms that is able to cure something that maybe you have been involved with directly? Yes. Well, one of our most common illnesses in the U.S. today is arthritis. And it's a real difficult issue because it can be a little annoying all the way to downright crippling. And so we use a medicine called Roos Toxicodendrum that is actually made, and I know this sounds wild, but hear me out for a moment. It is actually made from poison ivy. So in the pharmacy, the poison ivy has been procured and it is put into an alcohol to make into a tincture. And it sits for approximately a fortnight. I don't know the exact numbers because it is very mathematical. After that time, they get a drop of that. Now they've got the original. They get a drop of that and dilute it. And a drop of that and dilute again. And a drop from that vial and dilute again. Because if someone were to get into poison ivy, of course they're going to get pustules. They might get itching. They might be restless. Not unlike what poison ivy would cause. But if gotten into a number of times, if being exposed to it a number of times, we find that people will get joint pain. So if we use the homeopathic version of it called Roos Toxicodendrum and use that for someone who has arthritis more often than not, in fact in about 80 to 85% of the cases that have this condition, as long as it's osteoarthritis and not rheumatoid. Rheumatoid arthritis is a different set of homeopathics. If it's osteoarthritis, it often relieves, sometimes even aborts the whole concept fully. Sometimes only for months. Sometimes for years. And I personally have had experience with this. When I first tried this, my mother, who was a very energetic woman, in her 70s this happened. She cleaned the garage. Then she cleaned the basement. Then she cleaned the garden. And by the time she finished at the end of the day, she was in tremendous pain when she finally sat down. So she got into the bathtub and couldn't get out because her joints were so inflamed. Her muscles, her joints, her tendons, everything was so inflamed. My father called me on the phone and said, I can't get your mother out of the bathtub because she's in such pain. What can we do? And I said, dad, give her Roos Toxicodendron 200C. Now it's been diluted 200 times to the hundredth power. That's where that C comes from as well. And he gave it to her, a couple of doses, and she got out of the bathtub. Now she was still pretty beat up. She was still in a lot of pain, but she went to bed the next morning. She was up and finished the garden. So that's pretty remarkable. Normally what would have happened for most people, and including my mother, because we've had this experience with her in the past, she would not have been able to do any of that the next day. And she would never have slept that night. She would have been restless and in pain and for days and days and maybe even weeks and have gone to the chiropractor and perhaps taken Advil and all. No, by the next day she was not perfect, but she was good enough to be able to get back to her tasks. Wow. Well, there's clearly a results here. Now, these days there's a huge amount of money being spent on medication, on insurance companies, in the health industry. It's a huge industry. How much of a dentists homeopathy making into this? Are we able to find these? Are we going to be able to go to Kaiser and get some remedies in this way? What are your thoughts on that? Well, we're not going to find homeopathy used readily by medical doctors or in the medical system in North America. It's not going to happen. It hasn't happened. It used to be up until the 1940s homeopathy was one of the major medical methods. In fact, up until that time, we had about a hundred homeopathic hospitals throughout the US. I've actually written a little pamphlet on it. At the same time, there were about 96, 97 hospitals that were conventional. There was a time when doctors were using clinics and hospitals were counting on homeopathy pretty heartily. Not so since the 1940s. Because there was a concerted, I might say brilliant, if I could give that word to the side that did everything it could to deter people from ever using it on the other side, because it was all about market share. Now, not so in Europe. In England, in Spain, in Italy, in France, in Switzerland, in Germany, in Portugal, and in India, and in certain countries in South America, homeopathy is used not only by families at home, but often by medical doctors. In fact, in certain countries in South America, medical doctors use homeopathy side by side with conventional drugs and most people don't even realize that they're getting homeopathy when they're being treated by their medical doctors in those countries. Tell us a bit about your journey. How did you get involved? How did you learn about it and how did it become your passion? Well, not unlike many other folks, when you're not well, you start looking for answers. It's either you, or your spouse, or your child, or your elderly parent, or your pet, whatever it might be, you start looking for solutions because we've all become, not all, but many people have become so disappointed in the conventional methods. And we know that one drug leads to another, which leads to another and another, and we really want to see an uprooting. We don't want to see something that's just kicked the can down the road. And that's the kindest way of putting it because usually the side effects that erupt from using a drug will cause often a new condition. I've got this wonderful quote that I have here. It was written, I've got it right here on my desk. It was a quote by Dr. William Osler, actually Sir William Osler, who was an MD. One of the men who founded Johns Hopkins said, when a person uses medicines, and he meant of course conventional petrol-based synthetic drugs, when a person uses these, they must recover twice. Once from the medicine, and once from the condition. And that is not so with homeopathy. Homeopathy uproots it. It's a natural method. There are no additives. It's not synthetic. And I might add, they're not patented. And that is the key as to why homeopathy has been overrun by conventional methods. So my journey, you asked me about my journey. I was very sick. I had environmental illness. I had severe chemical sensitivities and allergies and food intolerances, migraines and insomnia, et cetera, et cetera, anxiety attacks. I mean, I could keep going. The list was when somebody falls apart, they fall apart often in a grand way. And that's exactly what had happened to me. Now I had been married to a doctor in my twenties. And so I believed in that paradigm fully. I took meds anytime I was told to. I adhered to the rules and the regulations for what I should be doing. And I just got worse and worse and worse. And finally, one day I said, you know, now I'm not suggesting that people necessarily do this, but in my case, I was able to do so. I said, I'm sick with the drugs and I'm sick without the drugs. I think I'll stop the drugs. And so I did it cold turkey. I said, no more, not a single, nothing. I don't care if I have a headache. I don't care if I'm nausea, nauseous and vomiting. I'm not taking anything anymore. I will figure this out on my own. So not unlike others, I circuitously went around and went to changes in diet and I went to supplements and vitamins and herbs and all kinds of methodologies within the so-called holistic world. But it wasn't until I was pregnant with my first son, some 38 years ago, and I went to a lecture. The reason I went is because I was interested in learning what I could do about my child in terms of his injections after he was born. Could we perhaps postpone them? Could we perhaps isolate them one and maybe another one later and, or make sure that they made sense in every, in all of the stages of my forthcoming child's life. So I went to go see a pediatrician. I talked to him about it, told him what I, what I wanted to do. And although he said, yes, I should have picked up on this, he rolled his eyes. It was only a split second, but he rolled his eyes. I should have known. So once I had my baby, I went back, foolishly in my estimation, when I think back, I went back and for that first well baby checkup, and mind you, my baby was perfectly well. I needn't tell someone that he was well. He was well. The birth was natural. It was simple. It was good. And so as I held my newborn, who was six weeks old, in trotted the nurse and plunked something in my child's mouth. And I said, what was that? I mean, I wasn't using any meds or drugs or anything. Without asking you anything. Without asking, without saying anything. And it was supposed to be on my chart that we were going to discuss what came first and then another, et cetera, et cetera. And she said in a sing song voice, oh, just his polio vaccine, comma, dear. I was livid. I was incredulous. I was speechless. I didn't say anything. I left and I made a resolve, I will never return again. Now that's not the end of the story. A few days later, my baby got a fever, 105.5. He was very sick, in my arms, six weeks old. Now I have to add, there was no one in that waiting room, my friends. There were no other children around. He was only six weeks old. I did not take him out grocery shopping. I kept him home for the most part. We played in the backyard, but that was about it. He never went anywhere at that age where he might have contracted something. His fever was 105.5. I knew that if I contacted that pediatrician that I would be going down the same path that I had gone down. I would have gotten on that freight train and gone just as fast, if not faster. So I said, after that, I had gone to a lecture on homeopathy before, and I had purchased a simple book and a couple of homeopathic medicines and a little kit. And I said, I'm going to try to do this with this medicine I just learned about. And I plucked one of the medicines out of the box of remedies, chose it for an unusual reason. He had this extremely high fever and had a strange odor to his breath. And for anyone who knows anything about homeopathy, it will make sense to them that the remedy that I chose was sulfur 30X. And I put the remedy into his mouth. After two and a half days of this extremely high fever, he was not nursing. I realize now he was probably becoming quite dehydrated, and I was stubborn enough to not do anything about it. I mean, I tried to nurse him. He would not nurse. And I plopped in three of the little pills into his mouth. My mother and my friend were in the kitchen with me. And as I held him, the fever adroitly melted away within, I don't know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, something like that. And he commenced nursing, and it was over. Right before our very eyes, it was over. And I said, is this stuff? What did I buy? What book did I own? I have got to know more about this. And so I raised him and his two siblings that came after him. And to be honest, I never took them to a pediatrician. We never went for a well baby checkup. We never went for a well child checkup. I did it all by studying and learning how to use homeopathy. We used some chiropractic. I made all my food from scratch at home. And that's the way I raised my kids. That's an amazing story. And well, it sounds so useful in many ways. There's just so much damaging stuff out there for kids and for adults as well, especially in food and other things. Now, please talk to us about India. You went to India, and I think you've got some knowledge there regarding this. Can you share with us what happened there? Yes. Well, I'd been practicing homeopathy as a lay practitioner for a number of years, 15 years, full time. I had a very busy practice. And I was using a method that is kind of what I would kind of call rather an outdated method of homeopathy that many homeopaths still use. And I realized that I needed to be able to come up with better solutions, even within the homeopathic methodology. And I also needed to teach mothers and grandmothers how to use this. So I learned about these two doctors in India. I heard about them at conferences, homeopathy conferences. And I would hear, you know, there are these two doctors, father and son, that are in India. And they treat 100 patients per day using only homeopathy. And they are medical doctors. First time I heard it, I was incredulous. How could that be? How could you take 100 cases in a day? It didn't compute for me. So then I heard it again. About a year later, another conference, I heard it again. And then about a year after that, a professional friend of mine came to me and said, you know, Joette, you know those two doctors in India, the father and son team that treat 100 patients per day per doctor? Well, he said, I'm from India. And I knew that. He said, I'm bringing them into our area. And I'd like you to come to the conference. And I'd like you to meet them. So, oh, my goodness. Thank you. That's exactly what I wanted to do. So I met Drs. Prasanta and Dr. Prateep Banerjee in Buffalo, New York. We had lunch together. Upon talking to Dr. Prateep Banerjee, their goal was to get their method, which is a different method of using homeopathy, where there are actual specific protocols for specific conditions. And he was teaching. He was going to Roswell Cancer Institute in Buffalo and Anderson Cancer Institute and many other cancer institutes all over the U.S. He and his father were meeting with oncologists and describing what they were doing because they were taking a lot of cancer cases. And they were particularly known for glioblastoma, cancer of the brain, a deadly cancer. Yes, I'm very familiar with that. And so when I met with them, I told Dr. Prateep Banerjee that I wanted to teach mothers and grandmothers. I felt that this was important, that the more simple conditions could be learned by mothers and grandmothers, given that we can use specific protocols and it's not as complex as the old method of homeopathy, and I wanted to bring it to that world. And he said, I'm bringing it to the oncologists and the medical teams in general, and you bring it to the mothers and the grandmothers. And we made this kind of friendly little, I don't know if I'd call it a pact. Perhaps that's the way I saw it. But we agreed that that was going to be our missions, our prospective missions. And so I asked if I could join him and his team in Calcutta. And he said, absolutely, come in and meet with us. So a year later, there I was. I worked with him side by side with him and also with his father. And we oversaw a hundred cases per day, per doctor. Whoever I was with, they saw a hundred cases. I was right there observing and recording. And I did the first round was 13 weeks. Then I went back a year later and I did it eight times in seven years I was there. And I recorded, observed, and handwritten recorded 7,280 cases using strictly homeopathy. So the information that they were so willing to share with me, their largesse was to this day, I'm still impressed with their generosity. And they let me observe and record so that I could bring this back to the US and teach others how to use this. So in those cases, what percentage or how many of those people got better? What was the result? Well, that's an interesting question because we were seeing all kinds of cases. So Prateep was in his chambers. I was perhaps in with Dr. Prasanta Banerjee in his chambers. And there were 11 other doctors in the clinic. So a total, let me just parenthetically say, each of those senior doctors received a hundred patients per day. So they were seeing 1,200 patients per day. At the end of the week, it was 7,200 people. So in their recordings, they noted that for most of their conditions in which they used protocols, they found that approximately 80 to 85% of those people who had that particular condition and used this particular protocol, these particular medicines, they saw improvement. Now, was it a hundred percent cure? No, we don't always see a hundred percent cure. Often we see an extended life. Often we see a resolved suffering at least. And for glioblastoma, their numbers were very high. I think it was close to 80% for glioblastoma using their protocols. Wow. Amazing. Who's the founder? What's the name of the founder? Dr. Samuel Hahnemann. Now he's very pale looking because he died in the 1800s. What I'm trying to understand is, so it's a 200-year-old practice based on Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, but does it go beyond that? I mean, as the people from India, did they learn from him or is it go further back in history and he just kind of put it together? Well, he put it together. It has been noted that your poison is your medicine long before that. So was it Paracelsus? I think that was Paracelsus who may have said that. And so he understood that. He was a scholar. He was a pharmacist, a medical doctor, and he knew, I think it was six languages. And with those languages, he had a very prominent practice in Germany. But he was so dismayed with what he was doing. They were using mercury and for just about everything, bloodletting, leeches, et cetera. And he was very dismayed. He said, I just can't do it any longer. He had a large family. I can't do it any longer. So he then decided he was going to translate medical journals and medical books into other languages. So he was hired to do so. And in doing so, because he had such a plum with many languages, he came across a statement that was said by Dr. Cullen, whose book he was translating. The statement was, cinchona bark is very useful for malaria because it's an astringent. Oh, excuse me, for cholera. It was not malaria, cholera. And so Dr. Hahnemann said to himself, there are many astringents and we've never found astringents to be necessarily useful in treating cholera. Why would it be that it's that property? And so he deduced, I wonder if it has more to do with dilutions, how far it's diluted and how frequently it's administered after it's diluted. And so he did an experiment on himself. And today we call these provings. He did an experiment where he got the substance, the Peruvian bark or cinchona bark and made it into a tincture and then diluted it and then took it himself. And upon taking it himself, he came down with symptoms just like cholera. And so when he stopped taking it, the symptoms went away. He took it again and the symptoms came on again. So he could induce the symptoms, including the fever and the chills and everything that is associated with that particular disease. And so then, because he was associated with universities, he employed many of his students, because he had been a professor there for years, to do the same. And he got them to do, of course, the same thing. And they created provings and determined how these medicines, if they're diluted, how they can be, if they're used in the gross form, they cause this condition. If diluted, they can undo that condition. Wow. Can you talk a bit about similarities and differences, of course, but I think the dilution maybe is the main difference, but between herbal medicine or Chinese traditional medicine, are there similarities? Well, the similarities arise from the fact that there are botanicals that are being used. And homeopathy certainly does use botanicals. Cinchona bark or Peruvian bark is a botanical. Poison ivy, ruse, toxicodendron is a botanical. Now, it's not something that an herbalist could use because it's too toxic and they would have to dilute it in the homeopathic formulation in order to be able to use it. But we also use many of the similar plants such as chamomilla and there are many. A good amount of the homeopathic medicines are derived originally from botanicals. The difference is homeopathy can use what is originally in its gross form, such as poison ivy, ruse, toxicodendron. It can be used with impunity because it's been so highly diluted that it becomes a medicine where that is verboten for an herbalist, whether Chinese or European or an American herbalist. So, it's based on similar ideas. Generally, the constituents of the plant are much appreciated in both paradigms, but used in a very different way. Now, there's a lot of skeptics out there, of course. Probably a lot is being fueled by the pharmaceutical and health industry, but let's talk about the skeptics. How do you answer to them? And I think probably one of the main things they talk about is the placebo effect and how you think you're being healed, you're actually being healed. Now, in my own opinion, if that works, that's great. If you have the mind control to heal yourself, why not? But tell us more about that. Why not? Let's just go for it. A bottle of a homeopathic medicine costs about $15, and if that's how much it costs to get a placebo effect, I'm in there too. I'll take it. But we have homeopathic research institutes. Actually, there's one called the Homeopathic Research Institute, HRI, and I can give you the link for that where the research has been done. There are many skeptics that when they're suffering or their loved one is suffering, they might find themselves willing to try just about anything. And when they do, and if they try this and they find relief, that can turn a light bulb on. We need to be open to these ideas. Science is not settled. It's never settled. And so to coldly and blankly say that this can't be, it can only be placebo, then why can't we call any other drug only acting in placebo? Now, having said that, I've treated newborns. My baby was only six weeks old. I don't know, does my thought process kind of infiltrate my baby's head and make him better within minutes? I've treated camels and cows and goats and chickens. I've treated my mother who was actually unconscious in a specific moment in time. I've treated people who had no idea that I was administering a homeopathic remedy to them, or they didn't care, or it was a child and had no idea. So if that were so, and we gave Tylenol to a child and there was no reaction, or there was a little bit of the pain was removed perhaps, but in using Tylenol, it can cause asthma in a child, sometimes within hours or even minutes of administering it, or even in the long run. Whereas with homeopathy, our placebo doesn't have side effects. Yes. Fascinating. What is your hope with your academy, with the teaching, what is your dream as far as homeopathy and getting it to more people? These protocols that I have gleaned from the generosity of the Dr. Spanergy and others, I've been working, I've been collecting protocols for a very long time. There are French protocols, there are other protocols throughout the world, and I've been collecting them because they are reproducible, they're clinically found useful, and so that I collect them and then teach them. I believe that at some point, if the world goes in the way that we all pray it will, that this will be incorporated in some medical settings. But my first hope, that's not my grand hope. My grand hope is that I can offer this information as true health freedom for families. Families need to have their hand on the pulse of what's going on in their children, in their spouses, in their dogs, in their livestock's lives. We need to bring it back into the home, and what I call it is back into the kitchen table, where that's where the mother observes what's going on with her daughter who's having menstrual cramps, or her husband who comes home with a headache from a very dizzying day of work, or the son who's just had an injury on the soccer field. She needs to be able to know what to use, how often to use it, and have it right there with a plum, with confidence. Now, this does not mean that she skips using the modern medicine and getting a good diagnosis. A good diagnosis can be very useful, and if that son who got injured in the soccer game, it looks like it could be a break. Of course, you need to find that out. On the way, though, on the way to the hospital, she can be administering a homeopathic medicine for the pain and the shock, and once the x-ray is determined that, yes, indeed, the tibia is fractured, okay, now in come the doctors. They perform the surgery, or whatever needs to be done, the pins, the plate, whatever needs to be done, and now she starts administering the homeopathic medicines again to protect against infection, to protect against further injury, and so that the bone can heal more quickly. So, we can use these medicines in tandem when it makes sense for conventional medicine to be used, and for when homeopathy medicine makes sense to be used. Thank you so much for that. Now, for audience who are interested in finding out more, or even looking for products to buy for different ailments, or to learn more, what do you recommend? How can they look into this or purchase items for their health? Yes, well, I have a blog, and it's free, and I've been authoring it for close to 14 years. Every Sunday night, and on that blog is always a condition, and then what the homeopathic medicine is that can often be used for that condition, and then we put a little link there as to where to purchase that. I don't have any affiliate programs with anybody on Amazon or any pharmacies. This is strictly for people to have information, and so if they click on that link for the name of the homeopathic medicine, sometimes it takes them to a pharmacy, sometimes it takes them to Amazon. They click on that, and they can purchase the medicine themselves, and following the information that I've given, and then I believe they really should be reading up a little bit more on it. I have lots of free information all over my site. I do not only the blogs, but Monday Night Lives on social media. I've been doing that for five years. I've got podcasts and so many methods that people can learn, and I always tell people, take it slowly. Just learn a little bit, a little bit at a time. Take whatever I've got for free and just use it. You could make a practically a lifetime of education from just my blog, and then keeping a record. We have little cards that people can download, and then they can keep these little, they're kind of like recipe cards, so that people can keep the information at hand, either virtually or download it and put it in a little recipe box, and so that's where I think most people should start. We're going to put the link like right here. Now, can they search for different symptoms? Yes, they may. Yes, yes, absolutely. What they do is, let's say your husband comes home, and he's got shin splints after running. Joette Calabrese shin splints, or your niece, you just find out she has Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Joette Calabrese Irritable Bowel Syndrome. So yes, you can look up the name of the condition, and if I've written about it on the blog, it's there. If I've not written about it on my blog, I also have more in-depth courses, should people be interested, and when it's something that's a little more in-depth, then I urge people to dive in a little bit more deeply. You can get so much done just by hanging around that blog. And Joette, thank you so much for sharing that with us. It's fascinating. Any final thoughts, anything you'd like to add? After what we in the world have gone through in the last many years, and leading up to this as well, this is the most powerful expression of medical freedom I know. The freedom to decide what we want to use on ourselves and on our children, on a system that doesn't prioritize profit over people, in a world that so desperately needs more real solutions, genuine solutions. I believe that homeopathy in the way that I teach it, practical homeopathy, offers that path that's safe and affordable and deeply empowering. I think this resonates more often with women because we naturally have the desire to take care of our families on a deeper level than we've been actually allowed to do so for quite a long time. I will tell you that my father was one of the greatest skeptics of homeopathy for the longest time. And he, late in his life, when he had, I would call crushing angina, he was being given a drug that was doing no good. It was only making things worse over many months. He was suffering horribly. And I said, dad, would you be willing to take this homeopathic? And he said, yeah, I'd guess. And he took it and it relieved him of the angina enough that he lived another many years without that horrible suffering. It didn't take it completely away, but it was no longer plaguing him all day and in such a great depth of pain. So he was a skeptic for a long time. Many people are skeptics and you know, I understand why. I was skeptical too. What? How could this possibly have been? How could this have turned that 105.5 fever around within minutes? It blew my mind. But it would be foolish of me to have observed something like that and not taken it one step further to find out if I could use it for something else. We are conditioned in so many ways to think that only some things have effect or, you know, all the drugs, all the pharmaceuticals, you know, they are the answer to everything. So it's part of growing up. Everyone hears that. So it's hard to think otherwise. It is. It's been on television commercials. If you go through a woman's magazine, even if it's a fashion magazine, every other page is two or three pages long on drugs. There's no doubt that the corner on the market is the pharmaceutical industry. There's no doubt about it. And I have to say that Rockefeller was behind a lot of this. And I think it's fascinating because he believed in homeopathy. In fact, he never traveled anywhere without his homeopathic medical doctor. But he also knew that there was something to be said about petroleum based drugs, which he turned that corner and never turned back around again for the regular populace, not for himself, but for everyone else. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. Steve, it's been great. Thanks. You've asked some good questions. I appreciate it, too. Thank you, Steve, for inviting me. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.