Homeopathy, Cystitis, Bladder Infection, Cantharis, Prague seminar, Sensation method

Healing with Homeopathy

Teaching Homeopathy in Prague: Acute, Flight-Induced Bladder Infection

By Judyth Reichenberg-Ullman, ND, MSW, and Robert Ullman, ND

An Intercultural Experience

Our first visit to Central Europe was in September 2017 as tourists, along with exploring Slovenia and Austria. We say “Central Europe” because of a faux pas, undoubtedly one of many, that I, Judyth, made during the seminar by referring to the Czech Republic as part of Eastern Europe. So much for being “savvy travelers”! The other time we had taught with the aid of interpreters was in Zurich, some years ago, and we had simultaneous translation. Our Swiss seminar had gone smoothly except for two memorable exceptions: Judyth presented a homeopathic Chocolate case and showed a video of a highfalutin British chocolatier who referred to the delicious substance as the Grande Dame. The students, German-speaking Swiss, erupted into laughter. Turned out they misunderstood her to say “condom.” The other glitch was when Bob cracked a Yogi Berra baseball joke that went right over everyone’s heads (so to speak) and fell totally flat.

We both prefer an interactive teaching style. Especially after having taught homeopathy for over 25 years, we love to hear the students’ reactions and to learn from them, as they are from us. Prior to the Prague seminar, we were informed that the translation would not be simultaneous and that the format would include little to no interaction with our audience of 100 to 150 students. When we inquired about the prior level of homeopathic training and experience of the participants, we discovered that a dozen or so would be seasoned, even practicing for decades, homeopaths, and that many of the other attendees would be students, some beginners. Maybe, we were told, we could entertain a very occasional question, but, by and large, we would speak a few sentences at a time, which would be translated. We conferred with a couple of our colleagues who had offered seminars there, and they warned us that it would be a rather slow-moving interaction. Since we live in Chile half the year and Judyth speaks Spanish and French, we are often able to decipher the local language fairly well, even Portuguese and Italian. But that was not the case in Slovenia, nor in the Czech Republic. How could we gauge our audience response?

A Raging Red-Eye Bladder Infection

It is a long, long flight from Santiago, Chile (after flying from Temuco, nine hours south of Santiago) to Madrid to Prague! We are certainly not newcomers to long, grueling flights (at least we weren’t traveling with our two golden retrievers, which always adds many more layers of stress to the ordeal). We geared ourselves up for the 12-to-14-hour flight to Madrid (flight time is wind-dependent) and choked down an awful Iberia Airlines dinner and breakfast. A couple of movies, a little reading, and some sporadic sleep. And several pee breaks on the plane. We were both careful to drink water en route. We had about seven hours to kill in the (enormous) Madrid airport—not enough time to actually find a locker for our luggage and head to the Prado, we were informed by the flight attendants, because it was International Women’s Day and we could expect transportation chaos and a huge march in Madrid.

Any such plan was nixed, in any case, after Judyth, went to the bathroom and, to her horror, found a toilet bowl filled with bright red urine! And it hurt a lot to pee. Having treated countless women with cystitis, she knew she wasn’t suddenly dying of kidney cancer, but just had a severe bladder infection. What a way to start a homeopathic teaching journey! We normally travel with a black leather kit containing 300+ tiny vials of high-potency remedies. But, knowing we were headed to a seminar with lots of homeopaths, we just took our 50-remedy (“Don’t leave home without it,” we always say) 30C-potency kit. Which remedy was obvious given the voluminous amount of blood, rapid onset, and intensity: Cantharis (Spanish fly). It is the first remedy to consider. We would recommend one dose of a 1M potency, but 30C was what we had. Judyth drank as much water as possible. There was no cranberry juice available. In our practice, in addition to homeopathy, we would recommend that or cranberry capsules, along with Thorne Research Uristatin. But it was a good test for homeopathy!

She pushed Cantharis 30C every couple of hours. We found (with difficulty) a bed in the airport hotel for four hours and made the best of our layover. Since we are no longer vegetarians, we enjoyed the iconic baguette with Serrano and brie. Things were going as well as could be expected up to the awful moment, when Judyth bent over to pick up a receipt for the refreshments and her (no kidding) 48-year old REI zip-off hiking pants, by now paper-thin, ripped right up the back! It was bad enough to have to drape her sweater around her waist. But, worst of all was tossing those irreplaceable pants!

She felt somewhat better by the time we arrived in Prague the next morning and continued faithfully with the Cantharis. An inveterate believer in homeopathy, she wanted very much to avoid antibiotics. By the next morning, her symptoms were about 80% better, and we were able to walk comfortably about five miles around Prague prior to teaching the following day. We visited, unexpectedly, the most remarkable exhibit at the National Museum: Light and Life. It was a perfect way to spend a few pre-seminar hours before teaching the Sensation Method. We were introduced to many bizarre life forms that we had no idea existed and could serve as fascinating homeopathic remedies! Judyth did inquire at the seminar if someone could give her a dose of Cantharis 200C just in case, which did happen. But by that time, she was pretty much fine, except for a brief relapse after drinking a couple of cappuccinos. That was proof that coffee can sometimes interfere with remedies.

Chalk up another homeopathic cystitis success story! We have helped many patients over the years, but often with Staphysagria or Sarsaparilla, depending on the specific symptoms. Judyth was about 90% cured by the time the seminar organizer, Jiri Cekovsky, treated us for dinner at Maitreya, an absolutely wonderful Buddhist vegetarian restaurant. Cured enough to enjoy the fabulous meal 100%!

What to Expect at a Czech Seminar

Judyth was scheduled to present the first day on long-term case management with an emphasis on Rajan Sankaran’s Sensation Method. She chose four of my favorite cases, including a woman with autoimmune hepatitis successfully treated for 12 years (her blood values are now normal), a woman with vaginitis, and another with migraines, all needing unusual remedies as well as a case of dermatomyositis, which appeared in one of our recent Townsend Letter columns. Bob was scheduled for Day 2 to present his work with children on the autism spectrum, his specialty. Our two women professional interpreters, as well as homeopaths, (they alternated) were excellent. We found it quite easy to get into a rhythm of speaking a few sentences, then having them skillfully translated. For the direct quotes of the patients, it was quite fluid to just let the translation occur without commentary.

It is fascinating that in Prague the organizers don’t know who will attend the seminars until they arrive! Quite unlike the US where registration occurs way in advance with the notion that a seminar may be canceled for sparse enrollment. As Jiri predicted, the large room nearly filled—we would guess about 125-140 attendees.

We both noticed, Judyth the first day and Bob the second, that the students were quite self-contained, compared especially to the US. Attentive, avid note-takers, good eye contact, but no spontaneous questions. And, if we did ask them what they thought about the patients, only one or two hands went up. We conversed at length about this with both interpreters as well as with Jiri, homeopath, author, and the seminar organizer, and this is what we discovered:

• Czechs, until 1989, grew up under a Communist regime. They learned to accept, acquiesce, not to question. And not to show that they were smarter than their comrades. They learned not to stand out.

• These deeply ingrained traits remain embedded, despite the fact that the Czech Republic is now a democracy and that Prague, one of the few European cities to escape bombing in WWII, is now bustling with tourists. As an aside, we talked the other night with close Chilean friends whose families emigrated originally from Czechoslovakia. They likened the reticence we experienced among our Czech students to that of older Chileans who endured a regime of fascist dictatorship from 1973-1990 and may continue to demonstrate a similar reticence.

• The handful of students at the seminar who were Bulgarian or Hungarian assured us that their compatriots are much more outgoing, outspoken, and lively than Czechs.

• If the body language of our seminar attendees indicated interest and animation (students stayed and did not leave, engaged in eye contact with us, took notes avidly, appeared to be interested), that should be our confirmation that all was going well. And so it was.

• Our nation, the US, is very young—not even 300 years old. We are, by and large, more naïve, outspoken, opinionated, less traveled, speak fewer languages, and are far less worldly wise than Europeans. Americans tend to be more boisterous, self-aggrandizing, and, on the positive side, friendly and outgoing. But we have a lot to learn!

From Prague to Lively Southern Spain

We took advantage of our March Prague invitation to seek out some warm weather in southern Europe (which was having a cold snap, including a few hours of snow in mountainous Úbeda. Andalucía seemed like the natural choice, since we speak Spanish in Chile, the weather would hopefully be warm and temperate, and we had fallen in love with Spain while hiking the Camino de Santiago a couple of years ago. We had visited Córdoba for the colorful Fiesta de los Patios in 2007, but somehow had never made it to Granada or Sevilla.

We knew that Spaniards really know how to eat and have a good time. The timing just happened to be Palm Sunday and the first part of Semana Santa in Sevilla. The processions all over Spain, highlighted in Sevilla, are truly amazing. The brotherhoods (hermandades) parade their enormous floats, which reside the rest of the year in the cathedrals and churches, through the streets. Each transported by 50 or so hefty, stalwart men wearing abdominal girdles to avoid hernias, accompanied by hundreds or a thousand adults and children dressed in robes and conical hats re-enacting the crucifixion. It is a remarkable experience on all levels, and the spiritual, social, and tourist highlight of the year for Sevilla. Though we found a couple of the processions to be enough to satisfy our fascination, we felt that we plunged deeply into Spanish Catholicism and culture. Rather than just being tourists, we took the local buses, conversed with lots of Spaniards without the use of a GPS, and loved the experience.

Some of the highlights of our trip:

• Sitting up front and center on Palm Sunday in the remarkable Catedral de Sevilla. It was second only to the three masses we attended at the Catedral de Santiago de Compostela after having completed our 500-mile trek a couple of years ago. The pomp and glory were at least as great, the procession with the palm leaves impressive, and the sermon very moving. The emphasis was on the silence of Jesus just before the crucifixion, how at least as much can be communicated without words as with, and even the contemporary plight of immigrants worldwide was incorporated into the sermon. Plus, the remarkable synchronicity of close friends from Bothell, Washington, sitting in the row just behind us! We’d known we’d be in Sevilla at the same time but decided it was fruitless to try to connect amid the throngs. So, the universe handled it for us! We all joined in a post-mass tapas lunch.

• We also touched base in a very meaningful way with our Jewish roots through visiting the Old Jewish sector in Sevilla and the remarkable Sinagoga del Agua (an orthodox synagogue discovered in the past decade as Andalucian architects were excavating to build a three-story apartment building) in Úbeda.

• Being a Spanish literature major, Judyth cannot help herself but to shop at Spanish-language bookstores. It turned out that the owner of a delightful, small Sevillan bookstore was the director of the Feria de los Libros (annual book fair) in Sevilla. She is an outspoken proponent of buying books in neighborhood bookstores rather than through Amazon. (She really made us think twice about our book-buying habits)! And we were happy to discover that our book, Mystics, Masters, Saints and Sages: Stories of Enlightenment, our only book translated into Spanish, is still available in Spain!

• We did not meet any Spanish homeopaths. It is to our enormous disappointment that there is a dedicated anti-homeopathy movement in Spain at this time. The effort is to eliminate homeopathic and herbal medicine from the Spanish university medical school curricula. What more can we say?

• What trip to Spain would be complete without attending a flamenco performance? We happen to love flamenco—the movements, the costumes, the music, the remarkable visual expressions, the heart-wrenching wailing, the staccato beat, the gypsy influence. So, we took full advantage of the opportunity and enjoyed six, yes six, dance performances. From an intimate cave experience in the Sacramonte hills of Granada to a titillating evening in the “smallest theater in the world” at Triana Market. How exciting it would be to full-out dance tango or flamenco! Next lifetime, perhaps?

• By the way, we cannot help but mention a few culinary delicacies, because, regardless of your dietary preferences, Spain is a foodie’s paradise. If you are not a teetotaler, we heartily recommend tinto de verano, a red wine with sparkling lemon water. Or, if you can find it, vino naranja (local white wine with macerated orange peel). By far the most heavenly delight that we ingested was a Manchego cheese ice cream at Eslava. If you’ve eaten Spanish food, you know about white sheep cheese with membrillo (quince paste). Well, this was truly the best ice cream in the world (even better than Molly Moon’s in Seattle and Berthillon in Paris)! We’re now back to Zumba to take off a few of those happily-earned pounds.

We’ll save some of the homeopathic gems that we shared in Prague for a future article! This one we’re sending to Julia Childs with a cc to the Townsend Letter!

Judyth Reichenberg -Ullman and Robert Ullman are licensed naturopathic physicians, board certified in homeopathy. We have written eight books on homeopathy as well as Mystics, Masters, Saints and Sages—Stories of Enlightenment. We also have an app: Natural Travel Doctor. Apple version: https://tinyurl.com/l7song8 and Android: https://tinyurl.com/m7cnexh

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We are more passionate than ever about homeopathy and we never seem to tire of traveling.

We practice in Edmonds, Washington, and by Skype. The Edmonds office address has changed, as you will see on our website. We live on Whidbey Island, Washington, and in Pucón, Chile. Visit our website www.healthyhomeopathy.com. Please friend us on Facebook at Healthy Homeopathy. Call us at (425) 774-5599 or email us at drreichenberg@gmail.com or drbobullman@gmail.com.