Interviews

Elaine Lewis

Written by Kelly Young

Kelly Young, frequent contributer to the hpathy Quiz, interviews “H4E” assistant editor, Elaine Lewis.

Kelly Young of the Hpathy Ezine Team interviews assistant editor Elaine Lewis.

elaine and shana at NHS

Shana and Elaine Lewis

I cajoled Elaine into being the June Homeopath In The Hot Seat; afterall, June 20th is her birthday and, remember, I have those piano strings still…

Wires, they’re piano wires!  Oh my God, somebody call my agent!  Kelly, at this point, nobody remembers the piano wire bit!

Neither do I; but, I think everyone here would like to know more about you.

I seriously doubt it.

Could you please, just for once, not be difficult?  How does a musician become interested in homeopathy?  

If I find a musician, I’ll ask him.

          

 What inspired you or made you look at alternatives to standard medicine?

Ahem!  Well.  That’s a very interesting question.

Could you possibly answer it?

I don’t think so. 

Elaine!!!

Alright, if everyone is going to become hysterical!   First of all, I never thought of myself as a “musician”.  And as for your question…Ahem!  Well, for one thing, there are a lot of doctors in my family, maybe that had something to do with it.  I even have a cousin in Australia who’s a homeopath!  I didn’t even know that until my cousin Flora told me roughly 10 years ago.  And, speaking of my cousin Flora (one of the many doctors in my family) it was through her that I found out about what was to become a very important place in my life: The Health Food Store!

I was at Cousin Flora’s house one day and said, “Hey!  Where did you get this vitamin C in capsule form?”  “Au Naturel at 18th near Walnut,” she said. 

I went there.  It was like a Vitamin C Paradise!  Capsules, powders, crystals….!              

At Au Naturel, I was always given a free magazine at the check-out counter.

This magazine changed my life!!!!  I found out that what we eat, what’s considered “normal”, can actually ruin your health!  What an incredible culture this is, where the diet is lethal!  Do you realize that the staple food in the United States is White Flour, which isn’t even a food at all?  

It turns into a paste in your intestines and causes constipation, IBS, yeast overgrowth…well, you get the idea!

I couldn’t believe what I was reading–I was learning so much!  I started buying books from there too; I bought all of Adele Davis’ books–Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, etc.–and especially those by the witty and debonair Carlton Fredericks!  Does anybody remember who he is?

 

 

I don’t know who he is!

Good grief!  Really?  He’s one of the holistic health pioneers, one of the best spokespeople for the natural food movement.  He had a radio show in New York on WOR, which I could barely get in Philadelphia without a lot of static, but it was worth it!

What was he like?

I would say he’s a cross between David Niven and Tony Randall:  Sophisticated, educated, aristocratic, scholarly, urbane, wry, with an unabashed aversion to stupidity!

Sounds like my kinda guy!

Same here!  He would say things like, “You know what bacteria is, right?  It’s the rear door to the cafeteria.”  His audience loved him so much that he used to say, “I can’t die, my audience won’t let me!”  Here’s what happened when he offered a showing of a short film to the public, as he describes it in his book Eat Well, Get Well, Stay Well:

Dr. Francis Pottenger sent me his cat movies, showing in three generations of the animals the progress of degenerative changes we see (but count as normal because they’re average) in the faces of human beings when they are products of pregnancies in which all the [food eaten is] cooked.  I decided to show the film after my evening broadcast in New York.  It seemed unlikely that many listeners would attend at the dinner hour, and I didn’t require tickets for admission.  This was palpably a mistake, for we had but 500 seats and some 4,000 people jammed the street and the lobby, with the police barring them from the elevators.  Mrs. Fredericks, who had planned a quiet restaurant dinner for two after the event, fought her way through the crowd, telling the police, who were blocking her way, “I am Mrs. Fredericks!”  A policeman shook his head.  “You’re the fourth ‘Mrs. Fredericks’ tonight, and you’re not getting in either!”

Ha!  I love it!

By the way, the movie he was showing?  I simply went to Youtube, typed in “Dr. Francis Pottenger”, and there it was!

Please watch it, especially if you have animals! 

I’m definitely going to watch!  So, what did you learn from Dr. Fredericks?

What I learned from him:  The average American’s diet is overwhelmed with sugar (over 104 pounds of sugar a year) and white flour, which is essentially the same thing, due to the fact that white flour turns to sugar in your stomach.  These two “foods” not only have no actual food in them, and exist only to benefit the processed food industry as their shelf-life is infinite, but, they also are anti-nutrients as they leach vitamins and minerals out of the body!  

Yeesh!

If you know someone who is depressed, anxiety-ridden, phobic, feels faint, complains of headaches, insomnia, blurred vision, lack of energy, shakiness, muscle aches, dizziness, sweating, getting sick often, over-weight or underweight or looks pasty and unhealthy; tell them their whole problem is processed food!  Unfortunately, these unhealthy people are inevitably on drugs as well, which only compounds their problem.

There’s hidden sugar in every packaged food in the supermarket–even food where you wouldn’t expect to find sugar at all, like peanut butter, ketchup and bread.  You have to read labels from now on!

Even “wheat” bread is not whole wheat bread unless it says so!  It is simply a fancier way of saying white bread!

Oh, I’ve seen that plenty of times!  “Wheat” Bread!  I’ve always wondered just what that was!

You have to see the actual words “whole wheat” or it’s not whole wheat.  There is often not only sugar in the products you buy, but usually more than one kind of sugar–high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, honey, brown sugar, and so on and here’s why:  If you spread the sugar out by different names, it doesn’t turn up as the main ingredient in the food–which it really is!  The first ingredient listed is the main ingredient.  By all rights, sugar should be the main ingredient in almost every processed food; but, if you add it in by different names, then it comes in as maybe the third, fifth and seventh ingredient instead of #1!  Very clever!  

And some of these names for sugar aren’t even recognizable; so, you can add all this sugar to food and no one will know it!  Why are they doing this?  Because corporate food companies tend to use the cheapest ingredients to maximize their profits, meaning the food doesn’t really taste that good–unless you add sugar (and P.S., they need to add salt too for the same reason!); secondly, they’re trying to addict you to the food so you’ll become a regular customer and sugar is very addictive!  The only foods that won’t hurt you are actual whole foods that come out of the ground or grow on trees and are available in the produce aisle of your supermarket.  A good dinner, for example, would be a salad and a sweet potato or a stew you actually make yourself with real vegetables.

Here is one of my stews.  It’s basically kale, turnips yams and zucchini.  It looks like I have mushrooms in there too:

This is the food our bodies were genetically programmed to accept, unlike junk food, processed food, white flour products like “macaroni and cheese” (you can make REAL macaroni and cheese with whole grain pasta!), and if we would do this, we’d have our health back.

Whole Wheat pasta product

As for meat, this is another problem!  We’re not really meat-eaters as a species, we’re fruitarians, really; but, if you must eat meat, buy meat from pastured animals and free-range chickens.  Factory farms don’t let their animals graze and don’t let chickens pick up their seeds and bugs and other things that are good for them!  Too expensive, too much land required.  Imagine the real estate tax bill on a real farm!  OMG!  So the food these animals are eating is unnatural, inappropriate, plus they’re getting hormones and antibiotics in their “feed”; so, shop at the health food store, the farmer’s market, or Whole Foods if you have to eat meat.  Support what real farmers we still have left!!!!

How about you, have you been reasonably healthy all your life?

Oh my goodness, no!  Absolutely not!  I used to be in very bad health!  I used to eat this stuff too, you know!  I used to suffer with dizziness, frequent headaches–terrible headaches, really–anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, irregular heart beat, sciatica, constipation, couldn’t gain weight, very thin…. Did I mention insomnia?

It doesn’t sound good!  What did you do?

Reading these articles and books was my salvation.  It was a very simple matter of switching over to real food, like replacing white flour products with that bag of whole grain pasta shown above, putting processed food and fast food out of my life, stopping the junk food, switching to brown rice and whole wheat bread, raw sugar, raw honey, raw milk, etc.; and when I changed my diet, even my dog’s health improved because she was eating what I was eating!  She lost 10 pounds!

What about other family members, besides the dog?

My mother was diagnosed with emphysema in the mid 1980’s. She had to come stay with me; she had to come home from London because of her health.  She was trying to find an apartment, she wanted to live there.  She spent the whole first week after she arrived here in bed without ever getting out of her nightgown, that’s how exhausted she was.

Based on the knowledge I had gained over the years, I gave my mother a decent diet of whole foods, like that stew you saw above; plus, I gave her raw milk with a tablespoon of mint flavored cod liver oil stirred in it twice a day

a protein milkshake with a banana, a raw organic egg, and lecithin granules and vitamin C blended in raw milk in the morning; carrot juice in the afternoon, B-complex and vitamin E supplements, an herbal combination for the lungs, calcium and magnesium supplements; I didn’t know homeopathy then, but in three months, my mother moved out and moved into her own apartment!  You see, Kelly, homeopathy is not really the answer when there’s a maintaining cause (poor nutrition, “dead” food, “convenience” food, medical drugs, etc.).  You have to get people off of this stuff and increase their nutrition!  The body can heal itself if you feed it right.  A year later, my mother moved to Arizona; (this is an “incurable” disease, right?) two years after that she moved to England–yes, she finally made it to England!  I rememeber when Shana was born, she flew all the way from England to see her; so, that was 7 years later!

Emphysema sounds really serious!  I’m surprised your mother didn’t go right to the hospital from the plane!

It’s a good thing she didn’t, Kelly!  What would they have done for her besides debilitate her even further with their “hospital food”?  Besides, there’s no “drug” for this disease, or any disease, for that matter!  It’s shocking, really.  In the absence of a drug their hands are tied, how ridiculous is that?  You mean if there’s no drug, there’s nothing you can do?  They say, “There’s no cure for this!”  What they really mean is, “there’s no drug for this.”  That’s all they mean!  When did “drug” become synonymous with “cure”?   How did we get to this place?  

Just look at their so-called “hospital food”, it’s proof of their disdain for nutrition.  Dr. Robert Mendelsohn (do you know him? Because I’m perfectly willing to start another fan club for him!) says the following about malnutrition in hospital patients:

“Many studies have since discovered malnutrition in anywhere from twenty-five to fifty percent of patients in American and British hospitals. … Malnutrition is one of the most common causes of death among old people in hospitals. … Malnutrition obviously puts a person in the worst possible state to fight off whatever disease brought him to the hospital in the first place.” (Confessions of a Medical Heretic, p. 74)   You see the degree to which their indifference to food goes?

I would add to this the sheer number of tests and proceedures before which the patient is actually asked to fast!  Even emaciated patients are expected to fast in order that tests can be run.  The patient’s vitality is ignored because test numbers are all-important.  Plus which, vitality is not something they can do anything about or care anything about as long as the test results are “normal”!  People are famously discharged from the hospital in a devitalized state! 

Do they really expect a drug to restore vitality?

I guess so.  Who knows?  Why would anyone think it was a good idea to put some synthetic, inorganic substance into his or her body that can’t be digested nor metabolized?  How is your body supposed to digest something that’s unnatural and foreign?  No wonder all these side-effects occur, this stuff cannot be metabolized!

I never thought of that, but, of course, only food can be digested!

The reason we have these drugs is not because it’s the best way of healing there is, but because of the ability to patent them and make a profit from them!  You can patent an invention and that’s what drugs are– inventions; they’re formulas!

Carrot juice, vitamin C, vitamin E, cod liver oil, herbal combinations, raw milk, orange juice (made from actual oranges) are part of nature, they’re not going to make anyone a whole lot of money and, in fact, quite the opposite; they’re actually costly because raw juices can’t be stored, they go bad. Real food starts to go bad as soon as it’s cut open.  Raw juicing may be good for you but it’s labor-intensive!  You’d have to hire people to do this, to make juice fresh constantly, so forget about it! You’re stuck with packaged, denatured “food” and drink that saps the energy out of a patient’s body and is quite useless to someone who’s sick and trying to get better!

So, here’s what we’ve got, a “health” system that can’t cure a single chronic disease and relies entirely on synthetic substances that are toxic to the organs of elimination in order to restore a person’s “health”, who most likely lost it due to poor nutrition and drugging in the first place!  Good luck! 

Are you still there, Kelly?  Because I sense that I’ve been talking for a long time….

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…….Oh!  I’m sorry, were you talking?  Where were we?  Oh! So, after gaining what seems like a huge amount of information on nutrition and natural healing, you went a step further and became a homeopath?

Well, Kelly, as I said, I kept reading because what I was learning was definitely paying off with my own health!  I also took a course in herbology with Dr. Christopher–John R. Christopher, a famous herbalist.

Herbs solved a lot of my problems!  Did you know that garlic oil will cure cysts? You can order it from http://www.herbsfirst.com/.  Rub the oil on twice a day, give it two weeks or so.  You can also try just cutting open a garlic clove and rubbing it on.

Any more herbal helpful hints?

Did you know about Hawthorn Berry syrup for heart disease?

It’s such a specific; a food for the heart, as Dr. Christopher used to say. When your friends or family members have damaged organs, you have to rely on nutrition and herbs and possibly low-potency homeopathic prescribing–remedies known to have an affinity for a particular organ, the way Nat-sulph is known as the cell salt for the liver.

You may need a high potency remedy in an acute attack of some sort, but in a chronic case, such as heart failure, you’d want a wholesome diet as described above, herbs like Hawthorn Berry, supportive supplements like vitamins E, C, and Co-Q10, and a heart remedy that matches the case in low potency, because it’s not a one shot deal, it will have to be repeated daily for some time; remember the organ is damaged and shouldn’t have to deal with an aggravation from a high potency remedy.

As Rajan Sankaran says about treating organ pathology in his book, The Sensation In Homeopathy:

“…there are cases where there is no peculiar local sensation even where one should be found. In such cases there is usually severe local or organic pathology. … Such cases need to be given the remedy in very low potencies….” (p.328)

I learned about homeopathy slowly over time. It started with the cell salts. The health food store only sold cell salts as remedies and that was it! I probably read about them in one of those free magazines.  My first use of them was Ferrum Phosphoricum 6X every 15 minutes at the start of a cold.

 

I got such good results from this that Ferrum phos 30C now has a permenant place in the drawer beside my bed!

My dog, Larry, was cured of cirrhosis of the liver with Arsenicum 30X given once a day by our homeopathic veterinarian in Yardley, PA, Dr. Khalsa. Larry had stopped eating when we started treatment and he totally bounced back from what was surely certain death!

Larry and Snoopy  Larry, Snoopy

It generally takes a long time to become a convert to homeopathy–it’s so unlike what we’re used to; but, once you get into it, it’s like being drawn into another dimension!  All of a sudden, all you want to do is learn more!

I know what you mean, there’s no coming out, there’s no going back!

The fascination just never ends!  The quest for a better understanding, it just goes on and on; and the odd thing is that the more you study homeopathy, the more you realize you have so much to learn!  Every homeopath will tell you this!  So, I actually know nothing!  Is there anything else you want to know?

So the more you learn the less you know?  Well, as a newcomer to homeopathy, I can attest to that!  This is a lot of information to digest.  While I attempt to do so, can you tell me about your first “official” case as a homeopath?  What about your favorite case or maybe least favorite?

Before I do that Kelly, I just want to say, for the record, that I’ve done a lot of drug-bashing here today and I’m sure a lot of people may be wondering, “Well, what are we supposed to do if we get sick?”  But the fact is, there is nothing better than homeopathy in acute disease or even injury, it runs circles around orthodox medicine, and I speak as someone who has used both and there is, frankly, no comparison!  Plus, homeopathic remedies when used correctly are non-toxic and safe; whereas, Pharma drugs are often toxic and unsafe even when used as directed; plus, you’re lucky if they work at all.

Ok, my first official case:

I took this case online in 2000 on a homeopathy bulletin board.  We call them discussion forums now.  Anyway, his name was … oh, I should probably make up a name … Tom.  He had a serious prostate problem due to stress at work–a promotion he didn’t feel he was ready for, he was only thirty-something.  Tom’s grandfather had prostate cancer; so, he inherited a weak prostate from him.  It was giving him trouble, frequent trips to the bathroom with pain; it was affecting his work; there were problems at work anyway, he was in high finance/banking; he wasn’t sure that he knew what he was doing, was afraid of making a fool out of himself in front of clients.  He was anxiety-ridden about the whole thing.  The MD’s were getting nowhere with his prostate issue.  Did I mention antibiotics weren’t working?  This guy’s life was on the verge of ruin as it didn’t look like he’d be able to handle the stress of work and his poor health much longer.  He came to the discussion forum asking for help.  I recommended Lycopodium 6C three times a day, in water, with 10 succussions before each dose.

The improvement was almost immediate.  He said, “I still have it but I don’t care.”  (I hear this a lot from people right after a remedy–the first thing to change is their fear about being sick.So, the first thing the remedy resulted in was relaxation; so, this was a good start!  Soon the local symptoms began to go away too.  He wound up eventually at the 30C potency, with 12C and 15C in between.  He not only recovered, but he quit his stressful job! 

How did I know it was Lycopodium?  Lycopodium is a prostate remedy, plus it’s a remedy for “fear of undertaking anything new, any new enterprise”.  Tom had just been promoted at work and lived in fear that his clients would see that he didn’t know what he was doing–and that’s another Lycopodium symptom: fear of humiliation, of embarrassment.  And yes, our remedies have both physical and mental indications.  It’s much more interesting than orthodox medicine which is rather “cook-book” in its approach: everyone gets the same thing–an antibiotic, an antidepressant…not very challenging intellectually.

Nice job, Elaine!  Thank you for being in the Hot Seat this month!  How can people get in touch with you?

I take online cases (and animal cases too) and can be reached at [email protected].  Thanks, Kelly!

About the author

Kelly Young

Kelly Young