Podcast 175 — Sinus Infections and Other Stuffy Situations

In this podcast, we cover: 01:00   Introduction: Sinus Infections and Other Stuffy Situations 02:00   What is Practical Homeopathy®? 03:33   A closer look at Boiron’s SinusCalm®             SinusCalm® 08:18   Using a homeopathic repertory             The Academy of Practical Homeopathy® 11:30   Closing Advice             JoetteCalabrese.com Additional resources: Joette Calabrese on YouTube (Monday Night Lives) Joette’s Learning Center Gateway to Practical Homeopathy®: A Guided Study Group Curriculum Joette’s Study Group, Find Your New Study Group Friends Joette’s Mighty Members FindAPracticalHomeopath.com Kate: This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast, episode number 175, with Joette Calabrese. Joette: Hi, I’m Joette Calabrese, and I welcome you to our health care movement — yours, mine and the countless men and women across the globe who have retaken control of their families’ health with Practical Homeopathy®. So, for the next few minutes, let’s link our arms as I demystify homeopathy — what was once considered an esoteric paradigm — into an understandable, reproducible, safe and effective health care solution available to all. This is the medicine you’ve been searching for — my unique brand of homeopathy, PRACTICAL Homeopathy®. Introduction: Sinus infections and other stuffy situations Kate: (01:00) Welcome back, everyone, to the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast. In today’s episode, Joette will be talking about how we handle stuffy situations, you know, the ones that require endless tissues, nasal rinses, maybe a hot shower to get relief from the steam, and anything else that brings comfort to help with the pain and congestion of a sinus infection. And worse yet, sometimes those sinus infections can even go to our ears and cause earaches. Joette, sinus infections seem to last a lifetime when we’re experiencing them, and if it’s allergy season, that can make it even worse. Joette: Yes, I suffered for years from allergic states, but now I no longer suffer. I don’t at all, actually. We have our homeopathic medicines that we can turn to … should I need to. But it’s so occasional now, I might use a dose or two, and it’s gone for another year. So, we don’t have to sit in a stuffy suffering or resort to drugs. What is Practical Homeopathy®? Kate: (02:00) I think you should take a minute, just talk about what is it that you’re referring to when you refer to homeopathy? Joette: Yes, because I’m not referring to just any homeopathy. This is different. What I teach is a method that I call Practical Homeopathy®. Why we call it that is because it’s straightforward. And it’s protocol driven, which means that there’s a specific condition, then we use a specific homeopathic remedy. The potency and frequency are often baked into the whole protocol. And it makes it easy for families to confidently use homeopathy instead of wondering, “Oh my. What remedy again? What potency? What frequency? How often should I be using this?” I make it extremely easy. It’s like a recipe of sorts. When the symptoms first start presenting, you can address them right away, even if you have a few remedies or a small kit at home. And I hope that, should this condition plague you or someone in your family, that you have these medicines at home already. Because there’s nothing worse than saying, “Okay, I know what to use, but, ohhhh, I don’t own it.” Kate: Right, right. So, as you listen to these podcasts, read Joette’s blogs, be writing down the names of those remedies and start purchasing them when you can. We say, Joette, that we don’t buy shoes. (Well, maybe we buy a few shoes.) But instead of buying lots of shoes, we accumulate homeopathic medicines. Joette: Yeah, it becomes a source of pride when you go to your cabinet and say, “Oh wow, look at all the choices that I have for all the different conditions that my family suffers or may suffer.” A closer look at Boiron’s SinusCalm® Joette: (3:33) So, getting back to sinus infections, let’s start with something that you can definitely find at a local drug store or even many grocery stores or even big box stores. Yes, these homeopathic medicines can be found there. And usually, they are the combination homeopathic medicines manufactured by a homeopathic pharmacy, such as Boiron. And one of my favorites is SinusCalm® made by Boiron. And yes, you can find this in grocery stores. Now I’ll share some other single homeopathic medicines shortly, but this is a great option to start with. And it’s so easy and so accessible, and it looks like any other drug of sorts because it’s not in the little blue tubes (although we also consider those), but they’re in bubble packs, and you’ll see that it’s got all the directions and everything is laid out perfectly. Kate: Yeah. I keep those Boiron combination remedies around. I like to have them on hand just in case, but I also love it because I can show people here’s what homeopathy looks like, and you can find these in stores. So, it’s helpful to be able to share with friends and family that way. Joette: Yeah. So, if you look at the homeopathic medicines on the package — if you read what’s on the package — it will actually give you the medicines that are most frequently used if you decide … let’s say you decide … No, let’s try just choosing, instead of one of those three or four medicines that are written on the back of the package, you try one of the medicines in a blue tube, and you’ll see that that may help you indeed. So, that’s how you’re going to learn about homeopathy as well. So, if you look at the homeopathic medicine, for example, in SinusCalm, it includes Belladonna 3C, Sanguinaria 3C, and Spigelia 3C. Now, what’s interesting is that Belladonna is specifically for pain and/or fever and/or redness and heat, et cetera, in the area. SinusCalm reads it temporarily relieves symptoms of sinus pressure, headaches and nasal congestion. And if you look on the box itself, what the names of the medicines are that are incorporated, there are three: Belladonna 3C, Sanguinaria 3C, and Spigelia 3C. So, I want you to consider depending on these kinds of combination medicines, but I also want you to then crack open a materia medica and look up each of these and see how they fit into this relief of sinus pressure, headaches and nasal congestion. And then that’ll help you understand why Boiron, for example, chose these three. Now this specific remedy called SinusCalm, I would use it perhaps every four to six hours, but I have to say they already tell you that on the package. They give you an idea of time. And so, if you find this isn’t acting within the first, say, I don’t know, 24 hours or so, I would consider switching to a different homeopathic medicine altogether. And we want to see a shift in the symptoms. May not be perfect, but you might find the head pain or the sinus pain is not as grand. It may not be perfect. You might still feel a little stuffy, and you still have a little headache, but you’re finding you have increased energy. And that in many ways, my friends, is the whole point of homeopathy, that we watch our symptoms and see what’s helping spur our body on to a fight against this condition. And we will see that there might be little satellite conditions that are associated with the sinus infection that you hadn’t even considered, like fatigue. You were so perhaps focused on the pain in the sinuses or the stuffiness that you hadn’t noticed that you were also fatigued. So, we’re watching for that also to melt away. Kate: Now, if it doesn’t help in the first or the second dose, would you stop using the medicine, or how long would you continue? Joette: I would go … First, second dose? No, I would carry on. First, second, third, fourth, I would definitely get a full day out of it and perhaps even into the next day. But then the next day when you wake up in the morning, that’s the time for assessment to determine whether or not there’s been any shift, even a small shift. And if there’s been some improvement but not enough, then we can carry on into the second day as well. Allopathic drugs cover up symptoms like a Band-Aid on a gash, whereas homeopathic medicines actually help the body to know how to fight the cause of the symptoms and therefore heal the body. And the reason it’s such a beautiful system of medicine is that we’re not suppressing. Using a homeopathic repertory Joette: (08:18) So, for those of you who are one of my students, especially my Academy students, I wanted to talk a bit about how you find this in your repertory. Kate: Right. Because it’s not necessarily intuitive, but this is a good discussion. And if you are not a student in Joette’s Academy or you’re not familiar with a repertory, we want to inspire you to maybe look into the tools that we use in homeopathy to figure out what medicines are helpful. So, a repertory is one of those tools. And so, Joette, how would we find sinus infection in the repertory? Joette: First of all, what is a repertory? It’s a consolidation of pretty much all of human suffering categorized in a very organized fashion. And it gives us … There are no sentences. They’re simply the names of the medicines that are used for specific conditions and/or symptoms. So, for those of you who are familiar with a repertory, what you might do (if you want to look at it that way) is to go under the category of “nose” and then “sinusitis.” And that’s where you’ll find the medicines that are considered, certainly by Boiron. They’ve done their homework. There’s no doubt about it. It will show you that the medicines that are showing up in that combination medicine are indeed listed in this little rubric. So, there we see Kali bichromium [bichromicum] is one of the top medicines, which is a mainstay medicine for sinus infections and for headaches that may come with them. Even, I might add, something that’s not necessarily an infection. It might simply be barometric pressure shift, might simply be allergies, but it feels like it could also be an infection. Kate: Oh, another one of the top medicines listed there I know is Sanguinaria, which we already talked about in that combination from Boiron. So, we’re sharing now about the other ones. Joette: And so Sanguinaria is one of our great medicines in these kinds of conditions because it is such a hyper-focused remedy on the sinuses in general — the nose and the sinuses. It’s also good to note as well that in your repertory, these medicines have other abilities. For example, Kali bichromium is also listed for bronchitis or rheumatism and, of course, sinusitis. So, if your sinus infection is accompanied by or started after those other issues, it might be smart to grab a materia medica or your repertory and think about how this medicine can help address more than one issue simultaneously — because that is often the way homeopathy works. It has such a sweeping ability in each of its medicines that you might find conditions that you thought were unassociated are indeed associated with your propensity for getting these infections. So, the medicines, in summary, that we want to consider first is, as I said, that combination medicine by Boiron, which is called SinusCalm. And if that is not available or you can also consider using the medicines that are perhaps included in SinusCalm, such as Kali bichromium or Sanguinaria or Belladonna. And so, you can see that we’ve got a couple of different avenues from which to approach this. Closing advice Kate: (11:30) Now, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re saying, “Wait, I’m not taking notes, but I want to write these things down. Don’t worry. You can go to the transcript of this podcast on JoetteCalabrese.com. Joette, this has been great. Is there anything else that you want to say as we finish up this podcast? Joette: Just that healing can be in your hands. It doesn’t have to be stressful or a rushed trip to a doctor just for them to prescribe you something that only induces temporary relief and causes new symptoms … or worse yet shoves the cause of your symptoms to become suppressed and driven to a deeper state. So, this is in our hands and the freedom — the health freedom — that this promotes in your life will be really surprising. I think many of you, if you’re not familiar with this, I encourage you to give it a try. It is a completely different system of medicine. And remember, homeopathy is not to be confused with the general category of, say, natural remedies or holistic medicine. It is its own system of medicine. Once you really learn about homeopathy, Practical Homeopathy® and start using it, nothing else compares. So, friends, if this information has been helpful to you and you know someone who might benefit from what I share today, send them this podcast and remember, stay curious. It’s my honor to share many lessons on this simple method of using homeopathy for free —without affiliates or advertising — here in my podcasts, but also my blog posts and Monday Night Lives. But it’s critical that you learn how to use these medicines properly. These podcasts should serve as only the beginning of your training. Peruse JoettesLearningCenter.com to find fun study group opportunities and in-depth courses developed by subject. So, with the proper training, you can join the thousands of students before you in developing the confidence and competence to protect the health of your family and loved ones with my brand of homeopathy, Practical Homeopathy®. Kate: You just listened to a podcast from internationally acclaimed homeopath, public speaker and author, the founder of The Academy of Practical Homeopathy®, Joette Calabrese. Joette’s podcasts are available on all your favorite podcast apps. To learn more and find out if homeopathy is a good fit for your health strategy, visit PracticalHomeopathy.com