Ep. 105- The Interview: Dr. Doug Brown

Doug is a homeopath. Well-known in the Pacific Northwest, he cures ills, at times, that people aren't even aware of. His practice is full of miracles, every day and it is his understanding of what plants and the natural world have to offer us, that is the real miracle.

Transcript

Happy Sunday everyone and welcome to another episode of Bite-sized Blessings. I don't do this very often but every once in a while I'd like to ask my listeners please consider leaving a rating or writing a review wherever you find the podcast. Those ratings and reviews help others find us. And in other exciting news the podcast has started a Patreon. For those of you who are not familiar with what Patreon is, It's a fundraising platform for creators. I have three main levels at which you can support me and each level comes with its own rewards. It's not expensive. I have everything from $3 to $10 a month but please do consider supporting the podcast. As the podcast becomes more successful I found that I have greater expenses so any little bit will help. Please go to patreon. Com or go to my website and on the front page of my website you'll find a link where you can get more information. So now to this week's podcast episode 105. This week I interviewed Dr. Douglas Brown and one of the things I wanted to do on this podcast was introduce people to each other. To introduce people that you the listener might not otherwise have the privilege of meeting. And this week my guest is a doctor of homeopathy. Dr. Brown has such an interesting life trajectory. On his website which I will provide a link for under the episode show notes he says, If anybody had suggested 25 years ago that I would become a full-time practicing homeopath I would have been mystified and astonished. He was a graduate of Yale University's family nurse practitioner program in 1987 and at that time was fully committed to the medical model of health and disease upon which his training was based. And so as many of you listeners are familiar with by listening to this podcast life has surprises for us and sometimes we end up in these really strange places. These really unique places that we just could never imagine. And that is exactly what happened to Dr. Brown. So now episode 105 of Bite-sized Blessings. I recently had a case where someone was deeply deeply distressed about the loss of their cat. But what was interesting about this particular case is that the as the cat was getting sicker and sicker with a kidney infection the patient herself developed a kidney infection. Her identification with the cat was so strong and you know her grief was overwhelming. It was like losing a child and she identified with the cat in so many ways. Well I'm a work in progress. The thing that most engages me right now is is the work of healing with homeopathy as my main modality. It's a way in which I feel I am best used by the cosmos by the universe as a way of helping others heal and helping myself grow. I started out as a family nurse practitioner. I was always I always wanted to be a healer in some some respect. And I actually before before becoming a family nurse practitioner worked as a sociologist with American Indian communities. I taught taught some and did some outreach work and based at Cornell University. Was associated with the American Indian Studies program there but but really developed a desire to have more direct contact with communities and not be so much confined to academia. And that's what led me to become a nurse practitioner and after 10 12 years of doing working in them in the contemporary medical paradigm just had a sense that something was missing there. Something wasn't the dots weren't being connected between what was going on in people's mental and emotional lives and what was happening in their bodies. And that really intrigued me and I just felt like there's got to be something deeper here. And I'm going beyond your question but but I guess who I am relates to to that journey right to that journey to figure out why is this so unsatisfying especially with chronic illness. I mean I was very happy when I could prescribe antibiotics and people would get better from an acute illness that was great. But the vast majority of times of visits with patients I felt like I was dealing with something deeper than that what the the tools I had been given or that I had learned were capable of really handling of managing. So that led me on a search and I studied many different modalities. I read about Chinese medicine. I read about hypnotherapy. Took courses in thought-field therapy. Went to a lot of integrative medicine seminars. Trying to find my way and in this in this process of trying to find my way it wasn't anything that I intentionally or consciously chose but what happened was my son who was at the time two years old he's now 29 so we're talking a long time ago when he was two years old he developed an ear infection which didn't respond to the antibiotics I gave and it was really quite a serious infection. He was crying much of the time at night had a fever was getting dehydrated and this was going on and on and after two rounds of antibiotics which didn't help I figured well I just have to bring him to an ear nose and throat doctor who is going to do one of those hypnostomy things where you puncture the eardrum and place a tube and I wasn't happy about that because some research had just been coming out about how some long-term sequelae of hearing loss could result from the scarring from that but I figured I didn't have a choice until as I was about to do that an acquaintance said why don't you just try a homeopath and I had never considered homeopathy as anything serious but I was desperate so I brought him to this homeopath. He was a doctor who had come to the United States from India. He had dealt in retrospect I found out with all kinds of tropical illnesses serious diseases dengue malaria many serious illnesses that he had treated well and but I still didn't really trust him and when he asked these strange questions about my my son's disposition and his earwax and things that seemed to have no no connection at all to his current ear infection my my distrust grew even more and you can imagine my reaction when he said well we're gonna just give him this remedy which is belladonna I said belladonna you don't mean deadly nightshade do you he said yes that's right deadly nightshade but he said no don't worry you know it's so diluted well well doesn't have any toxicity so I thought to myself this is crazy but since I had paid my $40 or whatever I went and gave him gave my son the concoction as I called it and I was blown away by how quickly is ear infection resolved it seemed to cut you know seem to get better way faster than the vast majority of infections that I treated clinically with antibiotics but my son just bounced back so quickly and I was so amazed that I thought it must have just been a fluke it couldn't have been from the remedy so the universe decided to that I needed another kick in the butt and a few months later for my poor son developed another ear infection and I was traveling with him at the time but I called him and he asked similar questions and after a short series of questions said oh he needs the same remedy can you get it I was with him in San Francisco it wasn't a problem to get it and once again he immediately got better so that made me really that created a lot of cognitive dissonance right okay how could this possibly be that something which has no material element in it of supposedly curative plant belladonna there's no material element in it how could this have worked so I began reading trying to understand it better and what I read didn't necessarily convince me but it gave me enough to decide I want to learn this and and try it on my own and so I began self-study and I began surreptitiously bringing remedies into my clinic jobs where I work and occasionally when people would agree I would prescribe a remedy and you know I had some beginners a lot sometimes people got better with it which gave me enough confidence to want to pursue it more and a turning point turning point for me came when I met a psychiatrist who's now retired but he told me that confidentially I couldn't tell anybody because he might lose his license but he told me that he sometimes treats his chronically mentally ill patients with homeopathy and that sometimes that he gets really good results and I I've always had a very strong interest in mental health and that persuaded me to go to Hahnemann College which at the time was the the best college for homeopathy in the United States the best homeopathic medical school so I retrained it was a four-year process where I really just retrained and became a homeopath what a journey honestly I was you know I was thinking as you were beginning to explain who you were I'm gonna ask him how he became interested in homeopathy but you completely answered my my thought question I didn't even get a chance to utter it and you were on top of it but what a fascinating journey and I'm sure you know when you were a child I don't know when you were a child what did you envision for yourself did you want to be a fireman did you just want to be a healer astronaut well I think you know as a very young child I was very dreamy and I don't have actually a lot of great memories of early childhood I read a lot I read a lot of science fiction I wanted to be a sailor at one point a sail around the world adventure but I think by the time you know I grew up in the late 60s I got very involved with the anti-war movement and became a bit of a social activist you know what by the time I was in high school and it was at this time that I had inklings that I wanted to be a healer of some kind and the thought of medicine of becoming a doctor was very strong in my mind in high school but when I got to college I was very lucky to get a scholarship to go to Colgate University in central New York State and I became very intrigued by some of the faculty in the philosophy and religion departments and also in sociology and political science and issues around world hunger and development issues and and so that derailed my pre-med ambitions so because I there were just too many courses about the world and what was going on in the world and in philosophy and religion for me to take to take the organic chemistry and so I indulged myself in in those interests and that is what then led me to pursue Native American studies in graduate school and rural sociology so it was a bit of a roundabout way before I finally got back to my my desire to be a healer you know I grew up in a very chaotic actually household my dad was perhaps the more religious of my parents and he grew up in a Jewish family and occasionally took me to temple but but he became mentally ill and really was not an active part of my life after I turned five or so he really struggled a lot my mom was a refugee from the Holocaust she she fled Vienna after the Nazis took power in Austria went to England but you know she although she was persecuted because of her Jewish ancestry she herself was not religious at all not Jewish at all really and her father actually had converted to Christianity but she she took me occasionally to the Society for Ethical Culture I remember in New York City very interesting and I remember enjoying that but we didn't go very often so no it was not a not a religious household how would you explain homeopathy to someone who's never heard of it before a newbie how would you explain it to a newbie you know Kirsten it depends a lot on how much time we would have you know because there's there's the 15-second elevator talk there is more the three-minute very casual conversation talk and then there is the more the more detailed talk you know I so I can kind of go through those if you'd like you know so the 15-second elevator talk is well it's it's a system of medicine that is very individualized and aims to heal people from the inside out by stimulating people's own capacities for healing period yeah that's that's what it is right if I had a little bit more time say I had five to ten minutes talk I would say I would you know start with that but I would go on to say that one of the great insights of homeopathy and which which everything around it is built is that everyone is everyone is an individual and people's symptoms originate from something that is traumatized or or distorted within that needs to become into alignment that needs to come into balance and every symptom that we have whether it's mind or body actually is a result a consequence of that disturbance in our own ability to self-regulate we call that the vital force that's a kind of an old-fashioned term but it's from my point of view it's an aspect of the soul it's something that's non-material it's energetic it's it's connected to our energy field and the most important thing to consider about it is that it recognizes that the symptoms we have in our mind and in our body are connected that everything comes from one single disturbance that is we are one whole unit one unitary whole and that's you know as it's been pointed out so often the word health comes from an old English word meaning whole and so homeopathy is great gift is that it recognized the holistic nature of our our being so that's you know that's the five minute or ten minute version you know around homeopathy I've heard it said multiple times by like many different people that one of the ideas or concepts is that like cures like do you find that to be true yes that is that's a very important principle like cures like and it seems so counterintuitive to us right because from our earliest ages we've been inculcated with the idea that if you have a fever you take an antipyretic right to bring the fever down right if you have pain you take an analgesic to take away the pain if you have an infection you take an antibiotic right or an antiviral so we have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the idea that if you are sick the important thing is to oppose it with something that will do the opposite of what the sickness does right so to hear that like cures like even though we're told it comes from Hippocrates it doesn't seem it seems very counterintuitive right and it took me and that was very hard for me to swallow before I just can continually exposed to the fact that it works the experience that it works I find by the way that I never try to persuade people that homeopathy works because I know it never would have persuaded me until I witnessed it until I experienced it but it is based on this principle that like here's like it turns out that if we expose if we introduce to a person the substance that has an informational map and energy that is similar to what the patient is experiencing that exposure will help release it from the patient and bring that person back into a state of equilibrium it's not it's not a static equilibrium it's a dynamic equilibrium all of life really is movement and change but it's a kind of energy that is resonating with the with the energy of the of the remedy just as an aside but like can you give an example of of where that would work yeah sure I mean what came to mind just now again is Belladonna since I happen to mention it as an acute remedy for my son 27 years ago so Belladonna deadly nightshade is it is in the family of nightshade plants or what we call the Solanaceae plants it turns out that if you were to eat the raw eat the plant eat the alkaloid or get poisoned by deadly nightshade you would develop a kind of delirium you would get a lot of blood rushing to the head that'd be a lot of cerebral congestion and to the organs of the head like the ear there'd be a lot of redness or red face there could be hallucinations that could be a lot of pain could be a lot of headache could be a fever so these are the the symptoms of intoxication well if you give someone with those symptoms that are arising not from Belladonna intoxication but they have those symptoms if you give that person the remedy Belladonna the potentize Belladonna the spirit of Belladonna then the vital force in that patient will recognize the disturbance and be able to counteract it by and you know will navigate its way through it and come into a place of healing where those symptoms resolve I recently had a case where someone was deeply deeply distressed about the loss of their cat and you know many people are deeply grieved by the loss of a pet a cat you can have a great attachment to a cat but but what was interesting about about this particular case is that the pay as the cat was was getting sicker and sicker with a kidney infection the patient herself developed a kidney infection her ID her identification with the cat was so strong and you know her grief was overwhelming it was like losing a child and she identified with the cat in so many ways so the remedy that I gave her was it's called lac feline um it's made from a drop of cat's milk potent eyes and it cured her kidney infection and cured her back pain and it allowed her to go through the grief process of losing her cat in a much more painless much much less painful way I think before I go into examples I'd just like to share a related aspect of this which is that as a homeopath many of us come to expect miracles daily yeah I expect these remedies which have no material substance in them at all to bring people to a place of growth and health and patients often react as if it was a miracle and I am a little bit nonchalant at this point because I've been doing this now for you know more than 20 years so I kind of expect a miracle when the miracles don't happen that's kind of when I start taking notes because it means I haven't gotten the remedy right and I have plenty of patients like that where it takes many many sessions to zero in on exactly what the remedy is so I'm in my consciousness I have more the non miracles because that's what I don't expect I expect a miracle but since you asked for a miracle I'll share one. This maybe isn't that dramatic but it's in my mind since the patient just just came to me a few days ago she's a relatively young woman she's she's 37 or 38 and she has just been feeling so stuck she actually has a pretty decent job she works for her mom in a spa here in Portland but she she has a lot of grief from a relationship that didn't work out after like eight years and she ultimately would like to be a parent and you know her biological clock she feels is taking to some degree and and she just doesn't feel fulfilled and yet she just does not know how to move on did not know how to move on in her life she just all the doors just seemed closed and she she just didn't know how to get out of this stuck feeling and it had been going on for years and I've given her a few different remedies and some helped some but basically this stuck sense of not moving forward in her life just persisted until one session it would maybe our fourth or fifth session I gave her the remedy made from argon which is a noble gas you know it's an element in the periodic table and one aspect of these remedies the noble gases is this feeling of you know doors are closed you're all alone you're isolated you know the noble gases since their elements in the 18th column of the periodic table their outer shell is filled right every electron place is filled with electrons so it cannot bond easily it doesn't bond with other elements these noble gases and so I gave her argon and the next visit she was like completely transformed she was so excited she was planning this trip to Costa Rica and a festival she was just excited about life you know it just seemed like all the doors of life were just open to her and stuck was the last thing she was feeling and it was just a very dramatic change in her inner experience of life you know it's very beautiful to see you know I often tell right away within the first even even before somebody starts speaking you know if they've had the right remedy or not because their energy pattern changes their expression changes they might look younger you know it's a lovely thing to see to see that happen that's wonderful I think you know a lot of people consider physical sickness you know having a kidney infection or having a cold that won't go away or to be when you would need a remedy but in fact homeopathic remedies can be used for lots of different reasons right right so for this woman she was feeling stuck for someone else you know of course it could be grief or sorrow I mean or a kidney infection or it could be fear anxiety I have a lot of patients with you know especially since the pandemic there's so much fear so much anxiety and and so much sense of social isolation that that imposed on many of us absolutely and I mean that's kind of why I started this podcast because I wanted to remind people that there was a lot of goodness and beauty in the world and magic and miracles are happening every day as you said as you said so it's good to have these reminders I think and have these conversations with people who have experienced miracles in so many different forms because everyone has their own idea of what a miracle looks like mine of course is some epic thing it's like some sort of amazing show tune or musical on a stage where you know there's stars sparkling and glitters everywhere that's my idea but other people their idea is healing or friendships or their parent so there's room everywhere for every kind of miracle I've learned and I've certainly figured out that I'm very ignorant when it comes to miracles because I didn't know that all these other miracles existed well aren't we all because really miracles are basically phenomena that our current paradigm does not have explanatory power for right and and for me one of the things that keeps me glued to my homeopathic seat as it were is a front front row view into phenomena of the new paradigm that's emerging and it seems to me that the central idea of the new paradigm that is struggling to emerge that is in the process of being birthed right now is about the primacy of consciousness right the primacy of awareness of consciousness that we can just even think think of a remedy you know that that somebody could actually write the name of a remedy and a potency and put a glass of water over it with the intention of drinking that water and then that intention in that act of drinking that water will actually heal the person right that's crazy right crazy by our materialist paradigm but I see it work often right and I call these I call these remedies noetic remedies right noetic meaning having to do with consciousness right because that's really what we're doing with and it has to do with quantum entanglement right it has to do with the fact of paying attention to something will affect it right so these are things that were just at the dawn of coming to understand right and I feel as a homeopath I get to participate in in making that kind of paradigm shift active in myself and hopefully in my patients too when they really consider what is this that just happened how did I suddenly become unstuck by taking this pellet that had nothing actually in it except sugar right that's so fascinating because just last week in my interview with Tiago episode 104 we talked about consciousness and quantum entanglement and I always think about I always go back to this idea of the Big Bang and everything emerging or exploding out of this this is very it's theoretical because how can we we are testing for it there is some evidence for the Big Bang but everything was connected at one time it was all in this tiny little singularity of possibility and so because of that you know we were all connected at one time so why wouldn't we be connected to that remedy belladonna and have it work for us why why wouldn't we speak to argon gas and put it under our water or capture some argon gas which is impossible but you know what I'm saying put it next to our water glass and utilize it that way I think the new paradigm and this idea of figuring things out it touches everything it's going to touch everything and there's something you very uniquely and beautifully mystical about it because it you can't just go out and grab it it's not something you it that's tangible but I like to equate it kind of with Star Wars and you know the midichlorians and the force that surrounds everything it's kind of like that we're discovering our own our own force which makes it magical and miraculous and absolutely beautiful and filled with potential I think it's super exciting yeah and another exciting aspect of it Kirsten is that it it brings home that everything that we share our planet with that we share our cosmos with really has has some kind of a soul some kind of a mind some kind of an awareness some kind of a consciousness right that you know when we do as homeopaths we do what are called provings proving is where we take a substance that we do not yet know of its healing potential of its medicinal value we turn it into a remedy through this process of what we call triteration it basically a successive dilution of the substance we then take take it in into ourselves and we observe the effects it has both on our level of our body at the level of emotions at the level of thought and in our dreams we journal these then we come together as a group and we see what what common themes come up what common symptoms come up and then that becomes the basis for its prescription to for people who spontaneously come to us with those issues and themes and then we know oh this reminds me of when I proved such and such a plant or such and such a mineral or such and such an animal and we then prescribe it but in this process you know we learn to really use all of our senses to understand the experience of the substance itself you know and I'm still not quite sure what that means I recognize there's a risk of projecting human thoughts and feelings onto things that aren't human but there's also in it there's also a humility in that right that humans are not the only species that have thoughts feelings experiences sensations right and and I trust that I trust that we are not necessarily we're not not keep out the necessarily we are not at the pinnacle of spiritual evolution you know we are actually newbies in this universe we have a lot to learn from many other voices in our natural world and when we participate in this process of deep listening you know listening with our hearts even more than our minds we stand to gain a lot of growth that's so beautiful thank you I just interviewed and produced a podcast with this gentleman called four arrows who has worked with indigenous and it was adopted by the Lakota and I told him during the course of her interview that I pick up rocks every once in a while and I always ask the rock I say do you want to come with me and 95% of the time the rock says no so I put it back 5% say yes so I have them they're in storage now core rocks but I said I keep waiting for them to trust me enough to talk to me and he said oh just give it time though they'll know when the times right and they'll start talking to you and I was like yeah yeah just be wait and be patient that's beautiful that's beautiful funny that does bring to mind another case if another interesting case if I could share because it was a case of granite and this is a very lovely man but going through a lot of pain because he's his marriage is in the process of breaking up and they have a child together but one thing I noticed in our in in my meeting with him is how painfully difficult it was for him to express himself it was I would ask him a question and I would just wait wait and wait and finally a very short answer would come and then but he would also have a episodes of I would hear from him and from his wife how he would have these episodes of anger that would then erupt right but much of the time he was just holding everything in and and his remedy was made from granite and with the remedy I was almost I was astounded at the last visit with him he's doing great he said he's he's he's got involved with an acting group a theater group and he's playing multiple roles in this play I was just I was blown away because I just couldn't imagine that you know who had so much trouble speaking so much trouble and now he's involved in acting multiple roles and also doing dance it's like is this the same person that we started with he's very happy yeah it was just just amazing it's a granite yeah so yeah stones stones have in their lives right which are so far removed from our human lives think of the time scale of a boulder or piece of granite right you know we are living our lives at this usually fast pace which you know for us it's like the life of a flea or a mayfly from a granite perspective right so they can take all the time in the world to answer a question if you're if you're a stone you don't have to answer a question right away you can wait I think what's really interesting about you know all this is the stuff I really do have a deep feeling that the stones the trees the waterways the rivers even puddles animals they're all waiting for us to get with the program and understand the greater picture which is yes we can be in community and conversation we're just waiting for you to figure it out yeah they're waiting very patiently and hopefully we'll learn before our planet is decimated completely destroyed they're very patient thank God thank you for listening to episode 105 of bite-sized blessings and my conversation with dr. Douglas Brown intrepid adventurer as he is following his path no matter where it led I need to thank the creators of the music used for this episode music L files Otis Galloway Alexander Nakarada Frank Schroeder and Ed Vardis Sen for complete attribution please see the bite-sized blessings website at bite-sized blessings calm on the website you'll find links to groovy artists musicians creators and of course links to dr. Brown's website as well as to articles that he's written that I think you'll find interesting thank you for listening and here's my one request please share this podcast with every single human being you know no that's not my request but yes yes please share this podcast get the word out tell everyone about it be shameless okay back to our regularly scheduled programming thank you for listening and here's my one request be like dr. Doug be open to the mystery and the path be open to new ideas be open to the universe and what it wants to show you what path it wants you to follow and then then you just sit back and enjoy the ride