Homeopathy and Healing with Dr. Mitch Fleisher

Trevor:  Hi there, welcome to the Spa Doctor podcast. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. On today’s podcast, I’m interviewing the doctor who had the single biggest influence on me deciding to attend naturopathic medical school. It’s my real pleasure to introduce my guest today. My guest is Dr. Mitch Fleisher, and we’re discussing homeopathy. Dr. Mitch Fleisher is a double board certified family physician, specializing in classical homeopathy, nutritional and botanical medicine with over 30 years experience practicing integrative medicine. He attended Stanford University School of Medicine, during which time he began studying homeopathy in 1975.

Dr. Fleisher has served as an active member of the clinical faculty of the National Center for Homeopathy, a clinical instructor for the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center and at the Medical College of Virginia, where he has taught homeopathy and a complimentary medicine programs. He continues to lecture throughout the US and internationally on classical homeopathy and nutritional therapy. Dr. Fleisher is in private practice in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in Nellysford, Virginia. On today’s show, Dr. Fleisher explains how he has helped numerous patients overcome skin and health conditions with homeopathy. There are many questions about homeopathy, what it is, how it works and ways to use it at home as well as in clinical settings. Dr. Fleisher covers all of this and more in today’s podcast. Please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Mitch, it’s so great to have you back on my show.

Dr. Mitch:  It’s a pleasure to be here Dr. Trevor, you’re looking great.

Trevor:  Great, so are you as always. We’re talking today about homeopathy. I can’t believe I haven’t covered homeopathy on my show before, and you were my introduction to homeopathy and gave me so much great information and direction. You’re really one of the main people that guided me to go to naturopathic medical school, and it was in part because of homeopathy. I’m excited to talk about homeopathy today, a whole podcast dedicated to homeopathy. Let’s start with what is homeopathy. There’s a lot of confusion about what it is.

Dr. Mitch:  Okay, well that’s a big, big topic but we’ll try to condense it as much as we can. The term homeopathy comes from the words homoios pathos, Greek words meaning similar suffering because the whole system of medicine is based on the law of similars, which is a principle in nature that basically says that a substance that could cause a certain set of symptoms, physically, emotionally and mentally in a subject, like an experimental study can be used to treat or cure a similar set of symptoms if someone who has those in any disease process. That is the idea of like cures like.

It’s sort of similar to the idea that if you were to get an infection of some sort, say on your hand and it was puffy and pink, and it stung and when you put something cold on it, it felt better but if that inflamed, puffy pink thing, infection were in the heat of the sun it would burn and hurt worse, that particular symptom pattern, if you look at that, it’s very similar to what happens if you were stung by a bee. A bee has formic acid and other things in it, but it causes a similar set of symptoms. It makes the skin get puffy and pink, and swollen and baggy, and it’s better from cold and worse from hot. When you make a homeopathic preparation of the bee, [inaudible 00:03:51] and you gave it to somebody who has a very similar set of symptoms not caused by a bee sting, but caused by a different condition, in this case an infection it would stimulate the body’s innate ability and heal it.

Essentially, what a homeopathic medicine does is by taking into account someone’s specific physical symptoms, and the unique way in which they experience those physical symptoms, that is the sensations, whether it’s burning, stinging, aching, throbbing, whatever it may be and then what makes those symptoms better or worse, is it better by heat or cold, or what time of the day, all of what we call the modalities. When you look at the sensations, the modalities, the part of the body that’s affected, what makes those symptom patterns unique to that individual. You can have a dozen people with say a headache, a migraine and all of them might need a different remedy homeopathically depending on the display of the symptoms.

We look at all the physical symptoms in the person’s entire body, everything they’re experiencing, then we also look at their emotional body, or emotional symptoms. What kind of worrying they do, their anxiety, their despair, their depression their grief, their entire emotional history and the way they respond to their environment. Given situation, given stimulus and then how they respond in general. After we have the physical, emotional, we also look at someone’s mental body, that is the kind of thoughts they tend to think, their beliefs, their dreams, their daydreams, their delusions.

When we do an analysis homeopathically, we have to look at all the physical, all the emotional, all the mental symptoms, and we look at the nexus, the crossroads where they all come together. Then that group of symptoms that represents their totality of their disease process, that really is an expression of the inner imbalance in that individual. If you took one symptom away, it wouldn’t be them. Once we have that holistic paradigm, that holistic model of a given individual we then analyze it with a process called repertorization, and we also read it in the Materia Medica, which is the homeopathic book, it’s like the encyclopedia of all the remedies.

We find that one remedy that matches the symptom pattern that someone’s experiencing from their disease condition most similarly. We want to find what’s called the homeopathic simillimum or the most similar remedy. The idea of being is that simillimum when it’s really right on, exact bullseye remedy will act as a very profound, gentle and deep acting, and long acting bio-energetic, not biochemical, bio-energetic catalyst or stimulus to give your God given innate defense mechanism the energy and information to do what it would have done to begin with. The correct homeopathic remedy, whether it’s given in an acute case or a chronic, really constitutional case acts as a way in kick starting your own healing mechanism so it brings about balance, physically, emotionally and mentally over time.

I’ve found that reproduced thousands of times over my 42 year career. I’ll give you a perfect example. When I was working at the Blue Ridge Medical Center, which is an area known as the [inaudible 00:07:07] in rural Virginia, I was working there part-time as a family physician. A regular family physician and part-time as a homeopath. There were a lot of people there who were querulous, who is this homeopathic doctor there? They would occasionally bring me their cases, because nothing else would work.

One day, one of the nurses brings her little four year old daughter in to the back office area, and we had a little emergency room exit. It was right by my office. She came in with her daughter and was chatting with one of the nurses excitedly because her daughter had just been stung by a bunch of yellow jackets, and she was really concerned because the daughter was covered with hives, from head to toe. Welts, that’s what people … the medical for it is urticaria. Big, swollen, puffy, itchy, stingy lesions and she was whimpering out there. The little girl while her mother was talking, came around into my office and stood at the door because the sun was blazing in through the backdoor, the emergency room door and I noticed she was trying to get into the shadow of my room. I just looked at her and I saw urticaria, puffy hives all over her body. I overheard it was beestings, no yellow jacket stings and I noticed that she was trying to avoid the heat of the sun.

Immediately in my mind I thought, hmm, I think I know what remedy this is. I just knelt down and I asked her, “Doesn’t it feel better when you’re in the shadows?” She nodded her head and I said, “What if you put your hand in the sun?” She was no, because it really hurt her. I got a high potency 1M because the higher the potency the more powerfully it acts, and more rapidly it acts. I simply said, “I have some candy for you, would you like that?” She said, “Sure.” I gave her a couple of pellets right on her tongue, and I just sat down and watched her. Over the course of the next five minutes where her mother’s chatting with the other nurse in the hallway, I watched from above downwards as the hives slowly disappeared down the child’s face all the way down. By the time the nurse was looking around where’s my daughter? She came and saw her in my office, and looked at her with a look of surprise, what happened to you? She looked at me and said, “What did you do?” I said, “I gave her a remedy.”

I had another case if you’d like me to share. I had a young woman come to me who I’d been treating for her pregnancy. Actually, she had been infertile and I gave her a homeopathic remedy, despite her having gone to all the infertility clinics and doing all the [inaudible 00:09:49] workups and spending up to like 50 grand trying to get pregnant, they couldn’t. After one dose of a homeopathic remedy sepia, which fit her case beautifully, she was pregnant in two months.

Trevor:  Those are great stories. You know I think it’s really important to point out that homeopathy, this type of medicine is so different than other types of medicine. You being a trained as a conventional medical doctor, and then switching over to this, you definitely I’m sure have seen the very difference in these types of medicine. Even natural medicine where someone will have a symptom and will be given a herb for it, or somebody will have like kidney stones for example. There’s certain herbs that are known for kidney stones, or certain medical treatments for that, but with homeopathy it so much more than the physical presentation.

Like you’re talking about the emotional state, all the things that you observe as a homeopath. You know I have so much respect for homeopathic practitioners because there’s so much that you have to take in to understand the patient, and the state that they’re in but I think it makes it hard for people though, for the general public for conventional doctors to really embrace homeopathy because it’s so different. If you’re not trained in homeopathy and you don’t see the success stories like you and I have seen, sometimes it’s hard for people to wrap their head around this different way of treatment. I mean is there anything that you could say for those people that are watching this that are like how is this possible that this medicine works?

Dr. Mitch:  Well that’s a good point. When I first was introduced to the whole idea of homeopathy, it seemed counter intuitive to me. It didn’t make any sense because I was grounded in Biochemistry. I had a major in Biology and a minor in Biochemistry. I was grounded in traditional science and saying how could something where allegedly there’s no molecules in it at all, how that could work. I didn’t quite believe it, I wanted the Missouri idea, show me, prove it to me.

I decided I’m going to find out for myself. I started joining study groups with other doctors and medical students, and nurses to study the principles underlying it. One of the things that the instructors did that was very clever, was to say look, there are certain acute homeopathic remedies you don’t need to know a lot about to be able to prescribe to yourself. One of them was a remedy called Arnica Montana, it’s a very, very well-known remedy. It’s one of the composite family, which are known for injury.

If you were to take a material dose, a toxic dose of Arnica Montana, which is also known as leopard’s vein, it would cause the capillaries in your skin and your body to swell up with an inflamed, get it sore and leak, and you’d get bruises all over your body. This is known because shepherds in Switzerland and Austria, if they went up in the mountains and their sheep ate the arnica, they would start bleeding from their nose and be really sore, and be really, really achy. From the homeopathic perspective we know that if you have a substance that produces a certain set of symptoms, in either a toxicological study, when you’re toxified from it or in a research study to look and see what the symptoms are, you can use that set of symptoms to then give it to somebody who has the actual disease process and a similar set of symptoms. This is what’s done in homeopathic research.

If someone were to really knock their thigh against a shelf, or they’re walk into the kitchen and they really knock themselves really hard, and they know they’re going to get a bruise on their hip. Or they hit themselves in the head and say oh god, I know I’m going to get a bruise. What you can do is take a dose of arnica yourself, and you don’t need to do a big prescription about it. You don’t need to go into an in-depth case, you can take some arnica 30C, a few doses, five pellets dissolved on the tongue and watch what happens. In actuality when I used to have medical students from the University of Virginia and Medical College of Virginia, come to my office as part of their training program. There was initially an introductory program to complimentary medicine at MCV and UVA, and they would send the students down and I would give them an introduction to homeopathy like we’re doing now.

I would say well don’t believe me [inaudible 00:14:42]. I’d tell them about the philosophy and the history, and the science and how to take a case. I would show them some of my cured cases out of my thousands of records. I would say here’s some samples of homeopathic remedy. It would give them a tube or arnica and I would give them a tube hypericum, which is St. John’s Wort. I would say if you knock yourself, like you know you’re going to get a bruise, take the arnica and here’s how to take it. Five pellets dissolved on the tongue every half and hour to an hour, for about four doses until it goes away and see what happens to the bruise.

Hypericum perforatum, which is St. John’s Wort is an incredible, wonderful remedy for treating any sort of nerve or tissue that’s been injured. For example, if you’ve had the miserable opportunity of squeezing your fingertip in a car door, or kind of a closet door or anything like that, and there’s shooting pains up the arm and the nail gets bruised, you may get a blood clot under the nail and you might lose the nail. Very typical thing a subungual hematoma, that’s a pretty common experience. However, if that happens to you, whether it’s a child or adult you can give hypericum perforatum in that moment, again 30 C potency is fine, 200 if you’ve got it. Three to five pellets dissolved on the tongue, take it every 15 to 30 minutes for a couple of doses and very often the pain goes away within the first or second dose. Within a day the clot and bruising disappears and the nerve pain’s gone, and you don’t lose your nail. I have treated hundreds of cases like that, and I teach my patients to have arnica and hypericum at home just in case of these emergencies. I can have an encyclopedic book of cases of parents telling me I can’t believe how quickly that remedy worked, because it’s homeopathic to the symptoms of the case.

That’s another point I want to make. You know a lot of people, especially scientists and doctors complain, oh but there’s nothing in it, how could it possibly work? Well that’s based on the old physical paradigm of medicine, where everything’s biochemical, everything’s chemistry and working just on the physical level. Homeopathy does not work on the physical level, it works on the bio-energetic level, which is deeper. The bio-energetic level is what actually controls the structure and function moment to moment of the physical, mental and emotional body, so it’s a priori to it, it comes before.

From a clinical perspective, it very easy to ascertain the effectiveness of homeopathy using these acute remedies. I’ve been teaching homeopathic study groups for over 30 years, teaching families how to use acute homeopathic remedies and prevent a lot of emergency room visits, and prevented a lot of problems getting worse just by their own self-care. I actually have a website that teaches people how to use things for bee stings, and I have a differential diagnosis. Like I give this particular remedy and I give the description of the symptoms that you have, physically, emotionally, and mentally. If you have these symptoms try this one, if this doesn’t work go to that one, so you have a differential diagnosis of the remedies until you hit the right one.

Trevor:  What’s that website?

Dr. Mitch:  That website is alternativedrmcare.com. In fact, on that website I actually have a blog. If you go to the website and hit the header that says blog, there is a video there that summarizes all of the most current, scientific research, very solid scientific research supporting the foundations of homeopathic science. It’s extremely well done. It was put together by doctors from India who have been homeopathy unobstructed for over a 100 years, and they did a really excellent job summarizing all the most current research, and where to look it up yourself if you want to. It’s really quite remarkable.

Trevor:  I just think it’s so important for people to be informed about homeopathy and to try it out. Since a lot of my audience are concerned about skin issues, can we talk about some of, maybe if you could share some cases about how homeopathy can help with skin issues?

Dr. Mitch:  I’ve had cases of psoriasis of adults. Psoriasis is not only an allergic phenomena, it’s actually an autoimmune phenomena. That is, you’re allergic to yourself. You’re allergic to, there’s five layers of skin in your body. As an allergy to the cells in the stratum spinosum, and they become hyper-inflamed and create thickened plaques of skin that when it peels off it bleeds. It’s very, very uncomfortable. I treat that with a combination of homeopathic treatment to stimulate the vital force, the body’s ability to heal itself, along with nutritional therapy.

I find that virtually almost every patient I’ve ever treated with psoriasis are all gluten sensitive. I don’t even have to do the blood test, but I do them anyway to confirm it to convince them, but I haven’t had a single case of psoriasis that hasn’t had some degree of Celiac positivity, even if it’s not blatant. To have true Celiac disease, you have to be IGA, immunoglobulin A positive, but there’s a lot of patients who are IGE and IGG, different antibodies positive and they will all have the whole range of Celiac like symptoms but it tends not to so much affect the gut. Those people tend to get it of the skin and the lungs, and the brain. I take them off of all glutens and sometimes all grains and get them on vegetables and fruits, and other foods that they’re not allergic to. Then I give them homeopathic treatment. That combination together will cure the psoriasis, or make it tremendously better.

I just recently had a case and she had developed guttate psoriasis, which is patches of psoriasis all over the body with weeping, itchy, horribly burning lesions that were much worse when she felt cold, which is counter intuitive. Usually a hot, burning lesion feels better with cold. Hers were worse from cold, they were more itchy, worse at night to the point where she was incredibly restless and had to get up out of bed and just pace around, and better from a hot bath. What was really interesting is said she would feel much better from a scalding hot bath, that you or I would get burned and she loved it. It would make the psoriasis feel better.

I took that pattern of symptoms together. Someone who has itching, burning rashes all over their body, which were weepy, some were weepy some were dry, who is extremely restless, who was worse from cold and better from scalding heat, and got up in the middle of the night restless and was irritable. One other thing, she craved milk, which is a symptom of this remedy. The remedy was Rhus toxicodendron, poison ivy, which makes a really nasty rash that we know is usually worse with cold, better from hot bathing. Even when you get a poison ivy rash out in the woods, it’s that same pattern of symptoms. I just used the homeopathicity or similarity between the poison ivy eruption and the psoriasis eruption to find the right remedy. After giving her a dose, I gave her 200 C potency for three days in a row, because it was all over her body and she was completely miserable. She called me four days later to say it’s not burning or itching as much. The next time I saw her at the eight to nine week followup, it was virtually completely gone and she was totally thrilled, totally thrilled.

This is the kind of thing we see. Also, I got her off of all gluten and the blood test came back that she was Celiac positive. She was Celiac variant positive. She was not IGA, she was IGG off the charts, so I took her off of all the grains. I made her stop the milk, which she was also allergic. What’s very interesting, I find this a lot is that we tend to be allergic to the very things we crave. Rhus tox tends to crave milk, cold milk and here she was allergic to it, eating the very things that would make her psoriasis worse. I got her to stop that, take the remedy and it all went away. Now she can have some of those foods without the same reactivity that she had before.

Homeopathy doesn’t only treat acute situations that we mentioned initially, but deep chronic, autoimmune conditions. I’ve treated multiple sclerosis homeopathically with nutrition too that’s successfully. I’ve treated systemic Lupus erythematosus, where people are nearly on their deathbed. I’ve treated patients who have malignancies with homeopathy nutritional therapy successfully. It’s not only acute conditions, it’s very complex, deep complicated diseases processes can be treated effectively with homeopathy, but those are the kings of things that require somebody with tertiary care training and someone like myself. There’s been a lot of work and require a lot of expertise, but it’s so gratifying to see someone like that improve, rather than just suffer and die. It’s quite gratifying. A lot of work but worth it.

Trevor:  Yeah, absolutely. I want to reiterate that people are hearing symptoms that they have that if it’s a chronic, more complicated case it’s better to work with a homeopath, not just try experimenting with the remedies that you’ve mentioned. Unless it’s an acute case like with the arnica or the hypericum, those are simple but keeping in mind that it’s a combination. It’s not just the physical symptom but also a lot of these mental states, emotional states, the amelioration of hot or cold, warm drinks or temperature, these are the kinds of things that help people pick the homeopathic remedy that’s going to help them the most.

I think it’s great for our audience to start becoming aware of especially acute homeopathy is a great place to start, with like the arnica and the hypericum. I want to talk to us now about the access to homeopathy, because right now you can go into a health food store and you can pickup a homeopathic remedy. They come in little tubes, they’re little white pellets is usually how they’re administered, and like you mentioned something like the 30C, 12C, SC, those are the kinds of potency you see in health food stores, and even some pharmacies have them. It’s great that we have that access for acute conditions, but as you and I have talked about, and why I wanted to have you on, is there has been a threat to homeopathy and our access to it.

Dr. Mitch:  That’s very true. One of the biggest issues over the years, a lot of people don’t realize it but the very first national medical organization in the United States was founded in 1844. That was the American Institute of Homeopathy. They opened the doors to all doctors, whether they were the homeopathic doctors, or Thomasonians or biologists, or electrical doctors. There weren’t chiropractors back then, or osteopaths just then, but also to the allopathic doctors, to everybody but three years later in 1847, the second national medical organization was formed, the AMA, the American Medical Association. In the founding charter of the AMA is they said we allopaths are coming together to crush the scourge of homeopathy.

The reason was this, in small town or wherever there were doctors or paid people, there would be a couple of allopaths working in town. In those days, back in the 1800’s, they didn’t have very many tools. They were bloodletting, they were leaching, they were scoring people and burning them, and they were using horrible tools that were poisoning people. They were using [inaudible 00:26:55], which is a form of organic mercury to what they called puke and purge somebody, to drive the evil humors out of the body. It was just primitive, barbaric medicine.

When a homeopath came into town with these incredibly safe, incredibly effective remedies, within a very short period of time everybody in town was going to the homeopath, and the allopaths were going out of business. We have to realize the AMA, the American Medical Association is not an organization that’s come together to protect the American people, the public healthcare access. They are a trade organization that are meant to protect their business interests. They didn’t like the fact they were losing business, but at the time in the 1840’s and 50’s, there wasn’t much they could do about it because the public demand was very high for homeopathy. The way that homeopathy was spread across the United States is there was several epidemics and pandemics of cholera, of scarlet fever, of all kinds of infectious illnesses, which was the number one cause of death back in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. Where allopathic medicine was completely useless for a lot of those conditions, homeopathic medicine was extremely effective.

In the medical literature, the homeopathic hospitals and the patients who went to homeopathic physicians, those communities all survived. They did fine. The cholera went away, whereas the communities that only had allopathic doctors, they lost most of their population. That’s an established fact, that’s an established fact. That actually exists today because there were some epidemics in South America of cholera and other illnesses like that where the patients were dying from just taking antibiotics. When Homeopaths Without Borders went down there and treated them for free, the people were all getting better. The same thing happened in Haiti and in Cuba. We have both ancient and modern examples of homeopathy was very effective in the treatment of the public health, and it was because that was the reason that it spread like wildfire across the United States, simply because homeopathy works, that’s all. Inexpensive, cost effective, safe medicine.

Around the end of the Civil War, the beginning of the advent of the Industrial era, these large chemical companies started growing up. These chemical companies realized that they could make a lot of money selling patent drugs. That’s where Merck Sharp & Dohme and a lot of these different large pharmaceutical companies were born. They realized that the only way they’re going to make any money is to sell large material doses of these drugs. The only ones that were doing that were the allopaths, because in homeopathy what we do is we use a process of potentization where we know that if give a large material dose of a substance that’s very, very similar to disease process, it’ll cause a really big aggravation.

There was a process created for making a smaller and smaller dose of the medicine, so that you’re getting a very small material dose, but a more purified bio-energetic dose. The process of potentization of serial solution, and serial succussion, what it does it sort of extracts the electromagnetic principle of the original material substance and purifies it. The higher the potency, the going for SC to 12C, 30C to 100 and above, you have less and less material substance but stronger and stronger, more purified and concentrated bio-energetic substance. It’s that because the remedies are based on a bio-energetic principle, not a biochemical principle, the more clear the symptom pattern.

If you know it’s got to be this remedy and nothing else, because the symptom pattern fits that, you can give a higher potency remedy and it acts on a bio-energetic level to go deeply into the organism to stimulate the defense mechanism to heal itself. That’s exactly what it does. That idea of bio-energetics is not well understood or accepted by traditional medicine, by traditionally trained people even though there are quite a few research studies for the last several decades that have shown that there is a biophysical principle underlying homeopathy that was previously not understood.

There’s a whole new field of medicine developing called nano-medicine, where they’re recognizing from the research, if you go to my website and go to the blog, that really well done video summarizes a lot of the nano-medicine that’s been discovered, where they’ve done all kinds of nuclear magnetic residence studies and [inaudible 00:31:42] studies. All the more sophisticated biophysical, biochemical experimentation you could possibly do as good, if not better than more traditional medicine and research does. They’ve proved that there is something there in homeopathic remedies beyond the material dose. There is biogenetic principle there and it can be measured.

This is one of the bones of contention between what’s going on with the federal government’s regulation of homeopathy medicine and the worldwide homeopathic movement that I want to address. Just over the past year the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC had different meetings with different kinds of doctors, mostly allopathic and conventional doctors, and a few homeopathic doctors and researchers about OTC homeopathic medicine. Whether there was any scientific validity to them and whether they really worked or not, based on the homeopathic principles. The sad thing about it, even though there is a large literature of homeopathic research that’s been vetted, even by regular straight doctors and researchers, and said yeah this is good research compared to any other research. The FTC commissioners chose to ignore it, chose to not accept any of the research that was presented to them and made the claim there is no research behind homeopathy that supports it. In fact, let me go, I actually have the website up. I can read to you what the FTC said.

First of all, they made the claim that on the FTC website they say that homeopathy dates back to the 1700’s. When in fact, homeopathic medicine really came to be in 1810 when Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy published the first book of homeopathy, The Organon of the Healing Arts. Really it’s not in the 1700’s, it was 1810. He was just doing preliminary research up until then. The publicist’s statement notes that the FTC has long recognized that marketing claims may include additional explanatory information to prevent the claims from being misleading. Accordingly, it recognizes that OT [inaudible 00:33:51] drug claim that it’s not substantiated by competent and reliable scientific evidence might not be deceptive if the advertisement or label where it appears effectively communicates that 1, there is no scientific evidence that the product works, which is wrong. It’s a deceit because they presented the research, they were presented a mountain of research by homeopathic doctors and researchers. The FTC just chose to ignore it, which is unconscionable.

Then they make a statement and 2, the product claims are based only on theories of homeopathy from the 1700’s, that are not accepted by most modern medical experts. 1, that’s wrong. It’s not from the 1700’s, it was from the 1800’s and also, who are these modern medical experts? What about all the thousands and thousands of homeopaths with years of experience? I’m fully trained in allopathic medicine. I was an assistant professor of family medicine at the Medical College of Virginia and UVA. I’ve trained students for years. I was assistant professor of family medicine at a residency program and trained doctors in both traditional medicine and homeopathic medicine, and a lot of those doctors saw that there was something to it, even though they didn’t understand it, they at least were open minded to it.

This is just such bias and prejudice, it’s really shameful that our government can do this. When I explored who these commissioners are that the FTC as well as the FDA are cahoots, the AMA and big pharma. The multinational pharmaceutical complex does not, the big drug industry, they don’t want homeopathy around. Why, because it cuts into maybe 1% of the pie and profit of drugs. More and more people are becoming aware of the effectiveness and the safety of homeopathy, and big pharma does not like not having ownership of it. They don’t want to give up even a tenth of a percent of profit.

Homeopathy is still small, there’s only maybe 10, 20, 30 million people in the United States that use it regularly, but unfortunately the powers that be in true public health and welfare, they’re interested in bottom line profit. That’s what this is all about. It has nothing to do with the safety or the therapy effectiveness of homeopathy. It has to do with protecting the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and dis-informing the public, and that’s what’s so shameful about this because there is research that supports homeopathy, worldwide. There is research that shows that it works clinically.

In fact, there was a very powerful study that was done by the Swiss government. It’s well known that the Swiss government has a long and widely respected history of neutrality. They’ve looked at very seriously all systems of medicine and they want the best for their people. They published in late 2011 a report on homeopathic medicine that represented the most comprehensive evaluation of homeopathic medicine ever written by a government. Based on that report over several years, they decided that homeopathy was valid, was therapeutically effective and they decided to cover homeopathic medicine in their healthcare system. Any Swiss citizen, child or adult can go to their doctor and get homeopathic medicine covered by their health insurance.

If Switzerland could do that kind of research and show that homeopathy works, and do a really good job of it and publish this large study showing how it works, very, very fairly and equitably, why can’t the United States do that? Why, because the United States government unfortunately is too much in bed with big pharma, too much in bed with corporations, and doesn’t have the interest of public health and welfare as much in mind as they do in protecting the corporate interest of big pharma. That’s the bottom line and it’s really a shame. That needs to change and I hope you and I can be part of making a change and educating people.

Trevor:  Yeah, well that’s a lot of information for us to digest and it’s a sad thought that, you know this possibility that our government wouldn’t be looking out for our best interests or that the FTC or any of these organizations would deny us an access to a form of healthcare that has this long history of working, and that doesn’t have side effects, that is safe, that’s easy for people to use, that creates results. It’s a shame that our access to it would be determined by others who don’t have the experience that someone like you has.

I’m not sure exactly what people can do at his point except to be aware of this. Are there any efforts being made to block this? Are there any organizations, homeopathic organizations that people can support or any ways that people can be involved in protecting their access?

Dr. Mitch:  Yes, absolutely Trevor. There is a National Center for Homeopathy, the NCH in Washington, DC is spearheading a movement to educate people and to argue against the FTC regulations, because they’re ridiculous. They’re based on false premises. 1, the false premise is there is no homeopathic research when there’s a burgeoning amount of high quality research and 2, claiming that it’s based on unscientific theories from the 1700’s, neither of which are true. Homeopathic medicine is essentially more scientific than is allopathic medicine. Allopathic medicine is based on reductionistic theories, armchair theorizing about what might happen, whereas homeopathy is based on empirical medicine, watching what exactly happens. Observing what happens in nature, not making stuff up, not making up highfalutin theories about the way things work, but observing the way things really work and going according to nature, and what god intended for us to do.

Our symptoms physically, emotionally, mentally are our expression of the inner imbalance. If you read the physical, mental, emotional symptoms and see the whole pattern of the whole person, and treat the whole person with an energetic medicine, that stimulates their own healing mechanism, and you respect the fact that we do have a life force, a vital force, a god given defense mechanism in us, then there’s true healing. It’s when we ignore that and just treat the brain like with psychotropic psychiatric drug and suppress that, or just treat the body and ignore the rest of the emotions, that’s when trouble happens. That’s why there’s so many adverse side effects through medications, because they don’t take that into consideration. I think that’s one of the most important things that we can do is to educate people.

There’s the National Center of Homeopathy and their website is www.NCH.org, that’s easy enough to remember. I recommend people join that organization, get their newsletter, contribute to it and support their effort to educate the public and educate the government and our congressmen about this. Also, there’s the American Institute of Homeopathy, AIH.org. That’s a national medical organization for healthcare practitioners. They take MD’s, DO’s, ND’s all kinds of licensed healthcare practitioners. Supporting them would be very helpful, and there’s several other organizations that are affiliated together trying to educate the public and tell them the truth about homeopathic medicine, not all this nonsense that’s out there because the other thing I found, you know I’ve been involved in helping to support homeopathy for many, many years as you can well imagine.

Back in the late 1990’s there was another threat to homeopathy by the FDA, and they were trying to change the regulations for homeopathy that had been voted in by congress many years ago. They had a big meeting at Boiron, which is the largest homeopathic manufacturer in the United States, at least it was then in Philadelphia. Boiron asked me to come give a presentation on homosexuality, just like I’m giving to you. In those days they didn’t have PowerPoint and computers, I just had my slides. I gave a slide presentation on the history and the science, and the philosophy and the clinical presentation of homeopathy before all nine factions of the FDA.

There was a certain group after I gave the presentation, it was interesting that there were certain groups, part of the groups that were very interested. I want to say the monographs, the researchers in the FDA, they were all fascinated. They had no idea homeopathy was so effective, but then there was a small group of the FDA people that were the enforcers. These guys who look like gorillas with plaid jackets and torn knuckles who were actually, one of them was picking his teeth with a toothpick, looking at me up and down. I think he was sizing me up for a coffin. They weren’t real interested in my presentation, they weren’t so now they can kill me.

The problem is that within the government itself, there’s a lot of confusion and descension. You have some that are really interested in the truth, and you have some interested in backing up what big pharma wants. That’s what we have to change. One of the things I hope this new administration will do, if they will. I beg them to, is take out all the conflicts of interest. I mean there should be no FDA commissioners, no one working in the FDA who’s ever worked in big pharma. Nor should any FDA agent ever be allowed to then quit their job and go to work for big pharma. Too much of that has led to conflicts of interest, not in the public’s interest.

The same thing has happened to the CDC. The same thing is happening at FTC. The very people who are trying to regulate us are working with the industry that would hoodwink us if they could get away with it. We shouldn’t allow that. We should have a peoples commission. I would replace the FDA with people who have no links at all to big pharma, or in medicine. Just educated citizens working with doctors, healthcare practitioners, just completely independent so there’s not conflicts of interest and there’s no nonsense and shenanigans going on. That’s what we really need so we can get the truth out about healthcare. We need an integrated medical system, I’m not going to throw allopathic medicine out, I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater because I’m trained in that field and I realize there indications where sometimes you need antibiotics, or you might need an antiinflammatory, or you might need surgery.

My office is at the base of Wintergreen Ski Resort. If someone comes down off the mountain with a broken leg and the bone’s sticking out, I’m not just going to give them a remedy and send them home. You’re going to clean the wound up, you’re going to fix the fracture, you’re going to sew it up and then I would give them remedies that will work, if they need an antibiotic with the antibiotic. Remedies that help make the bone heal faster, that prevent infection, that reduce pain so we can use an integrated approach. We don’t have to use one or the other, we could use the best of all worlds. That’s what I’d like to promote.

Trevor:  Ah yeah, absolutely. I mean wouldn’t it be great if we have that, to have that integrative approach and for our government to support that, and for health insurance to cover these things so that people can get the kind of care that they need, and we can all work together. Certainly, I completely agree with you, there’s a place for all of us. I think a lot of this comes from what you were talking about is being informed. I think that the people who are making the decisions opposing homeopathy or opposing an integrative approach don’t have the facts. They don’t have the information that they need. That’s why I think those sites that you recommended, the National Center for Homeopathy for example, I think these are great places for people. I’m a member of that organization and I think that the more we can become informed, and the more we can share that information with others so that they can be informed, I think we’re going to get to a better place.

Dr. Mitch I want to thank you so much for your information today. We’ve covered so much and I really appreciate all that you do for your patients, what you’ve done for myself and my family. What you do for homeopathy, for the profession, for medicine in general I want to thank you so much for that, and for your interview today.

Dr. Mitch:  Thank you so much Trevor, God bless.

Trevor:  I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Mitch Fleisher, and learned lots about homeopathy. To learn more about Dr. Fleisher and the resources he mentioned during this interview, just go to the Spadoctor.com, go the podcast page with this interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there. While you’re there, I invite you to join the Spa Doctor community so you stay up-to-date on everything that’s going on with the Spa Doctor. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your own customized skin profile. Find out your skin type by going to theskinquiz.com. It’s free, just ten questions and you find out what might be holding you back from having clear, glowing skin. The skinquiz.com is where you’ll go.

Also, my new book is out. You can now get Clean Skin From Within, the book at your favorite online retailer and you can get four bonus gifts when you go to the Spadoctor.com/bookbonus. You’ll get four bonus gifts that complement your book purchase. You can also join us on social media and join the conversation there. Thanks for joining me today and I’ll see you next time on the Spa Doctor podcast.