Alastair Hay I Ep #31 | Discussing Skin Sensitivities in Children with a Homeopath

based out of portsmouth in the uk did i get that right you did yes well done welcome back thank you i i’m honestly you had me back yeah we were excited to have you back because as you can tell we’re like in high spirits from all the jokes you’ve been cracking okay so so we have you know as always a lot to cover and uh not enough time to do it so let’s try to cover a little bit more today um so alison we wanted to talk to you today about i guess uh our skin you know skin conditions so i mean okay not to make it a a jokey topic but uh so you know a lot of people suffer from eczema and you know skin conditions and we read on the national library medicine that in the uk there’s a high prevalence of ectopic dermatitis which is also known as a topic eczema and approximately 11 to 20 of children get affected by it and 5 to 10 adults um is this something that you see often with your clients and or you know your your clients i’m just writing that down actually just it’s sort of i’m quite a visual person so if i see it written down i go does is that representative of my clients yeah i’d say absolutely you know there are many more children i see with expert than i do adults and in your in your current practice like we were we were discussing before about you know specialties etc and you were saying that it’s not something you go by but you’ve you’ve noticed that people usually come to you with a specific or someone refers you uh when there’s a pathology is that is that correct and i have got a degree in physiology and pharmacology which is what i did before retraining as a homeopath so my understanding of how conventional medicines modify physiological systems is is pretty good also i’m not scared of that you know so making sure that how many medicines work with that and and and it’s not negatively challenging so yeah i i revel in those sort of cases i’m not very much you know aware or um knowledgeable on the topic but when we were doing this research where we know quite a lot of people have been developing eczema sometimes around around uh my family or friends it’s it’s really because they’re stressed and and they would develop this redness either around joints etc and so i usually see this but is all type of skin issues like redness is eczema called eczema not in not not particularly it has to fulfill particular tiki box criteria to then be labelled as eczema i mean it is a form of dermatitis anything that enzinitis just means inflammation of so the dermis is the skin and when it’s inflamed that would be a dermatitis there are different forms of eczema that fulfill other criteria that means it’s not just dermatitis but it has more and more criteria to say we will call it that but it is it’s notoriously difficult from from a conventional medicine perspective to diagnose particular skin complaints i mean luckily you know it’s not for me to diagnose someone says i’ve got this complaint it might well already have been diagnosed but i’d be looking at the sort of minutiae of what makes it better makes it worse and so on and so forth to then prescribe on the symptoms that how someone is expressing it you mentioned about the distribution of x typically will be on the on the sort of inside folds and psoriasis these are called the flexor service surfaces because that’s where it flexes and those the extensor surfaces but it doesn’t mean their body has read the rule book you can find xml will be but but that would be quite typical um what’s actually more fascinating someone like myself is when someone’s symptoms are atypical they’re not as you would expect them to be so you know there are people for whom i’ve seen that have been diagnosed as having x-men said you know what feels really good if i put really hot water on my skin if i want to put you know it feels burning and i want to put something really hot on it that’s quite unusual and then in homeopathic literature you can find there’s very few homeopathic remedies that would fulfill that particular or have that resonance with that kind of symptom whereas if someone’s got experts in their usual places it’s worse at night it’s hot it’s itchy it’s red there’s loads of homeopathic remedies that cover that so we have to say you know what what makes it unusual but just as much as you said with with respect to emotional state stresses strains that sort of stuff then yeah these things we break our weakest link and that for a lot of people certainly when you’re young is your skin so so i i heard you say earlier uh some people miss uh i guess misunderstand between eczema and psoriasis so what is the difference between the two they typically they can look quite different although they can look quite quite similar i mean typically psoriasis is on is on these the outside surfaces you know and and um excellent inside surfaces i’ve seen a psoriasis case recently where it’s pretty much all over their body it’s you know they’re covered in it how how how it’s been diagnosed as psoriasis with this particular person is what it looks like the skin is thickened it’s the way in which the cells are being laid down in the skin is is sort of the the cells are are produced being produced from the base layer of your skin more quickly so immature cells get to the surface more quickly those are um harder i think that it’s described as more keratinized so so that that’s how how that expresses itself sometimes the treatments for for those both those skin complaints can actually be quite similar sometimes they’re different sometimes they’re they’re they’re similar so i could have a someone who’s comprehending with psoriasis but the person is quite similar to someone else who’s got eczema in terms of you know how it’s come about the stresses and strains in their life they’ll have a similar remedy but it could it could be quite quite different you know in in terms of its expression in the person so they would have different remedies but you know in terms of its origins from a a medical or physiological perspective they’re quite different in terms of how the origins of them so that they are they’re certainly not not the same in in in in that sense but they’re both expressed on the skin nearly always so is it just stress caught that causes um or triggers it to to flare up uh the inflammation um or what what are the factors that we generally trigger um eczema or these skin inflammation i’d put it down to probably one if one or all three factors that that could be sort of deciding factors to whether your skin is going to break out first of all is family history if you’ve got a family history of where your skin breaks out then you are probably more likely for that to happen expert has this reputation of having a genetic familiarity to it next thing is environment we can be we can be putting things on our skin that is going to irritate it and if you already have that susceptibility then it’s more likely to break out than the next person who doesn’t have that susceptibility and finally the person the personality you know what is you know if if you’re finding you know we were talking about road rage before before we had the before we had this part into you and actually if you go around furious the whole time there is going to be inflammation going on somewhere isn’t that you’re going to feel inflamed now for some people that inflammation will come out in the skin for some people that come out in their guts for some people that’ll come out in their in their language or as well you know you’ll be hey you’ll be behaving in an inflamed fashion what i find interesting with the statistic you first gave me was actually the sort of percentage of children that have skin issues expert in particular compared to adults i think what i find interesting about that is actually the skin the skin as a as an organ is actually further away from from our major organs than our heart our liver our kidneys um our brain what what you know it’s it’s usually the first place in which we will express a disorder on our skin as we as we get older we would have we would have suppressed those symptoms we’d have pushed them deeper and we’ll have deeper and deeper things go go wrong with us so if an ad if if an adult’s presenting complaint is eczema and nothing else about them has gone wrong in terms of these more major organs they’re probably quite healthy on a sort of more holistic level sometimes the skin can express itself with issues if the liver is not doing very well you know and so on and so forth but once you’re going through that if that’s where your body breaks if we’re like a chain and you pull that and it breaks that weakest link if that weakest link for you is your skin that’s not bad it’s not like you have any stress and suddenly you have a heart attack failure or you get stroke those are much more major things that’s not to say extra isn’t particularly bad the skin can get infected and all hell can break loose that’s a very interesting way to see that i my interpretation or one way to think as like a mom like you know a young mother if you see your your child uh developing xml developing some redness on your skin sometimes the kid doesn’t know how to you know how to tell you how to communicate what’s going on and sometimes i feel it’s a it’s a sign for you to potentially look in another way or it’s their way to say like something’s going on in this particular example where um i have i have this mother that is taking her her son that is acting up as well a little bit and is not really able to express himself because he’s in this in this age where he can express but he wouldn’t be able to express his emotions and started having you know patches on his back on his hands um on his arms and um and as a mom she knows that something’s going on she know that because she’s a very conscious mother she know that some events might have affected him and so that’s why she decided to go to a homeopath but say you have a presenting you know a presenting case that presenting symptoms um that is just those patches how do you go about you know analyzing this so that you give them the right the right remedies the the conclusion about whether something is the right remedy and art is based on someone’s response to it and on paper it might look like the right remedy but in practice if it doesn’t work it wasn’t the right remedy i’m thinking of an example where this lad was a was a baby in arms and well i’m jumping the gun a bit he’d actually um seen lots of other practitioners and you look at the skin on face value and it was a sulphur case the distribution of the skin what made it better we made it worse it was hot it was red it was worse at night if you go if you’ve washed it or got water on it that made it worse this takes every single box for sulfur he’d had sulphur till it was coming out with it made no difference so if you’re just looking at the skin you know why isn’t he responding to homeopathy i it was only until we delved a little bit deeper into the into the consultation i said you know when did it first start and this this kid was probably about 15 when i saw him so he’d had it for the you know all of his life he was 15 and and he had it very soon after he was born and i said to his mum in the conversation can you think of anything that sort of happened that you know might have brought this on and she went well you know there is this one thing i don’t know whether it’s related but she said well i i was involved in an armed robbery and my baby was and you know the child was it was in my arms someone’s putting a gun at your head when she says empty the safe the gun isn’t pointed at the child but the gun is pointed at their mother you’re in that energy sphere you’re in that in that space and you must be i can’t even begin to what that must feel like but you’d be absolutely petrified yeah with that information i then prescribed a hypothetic remedy that was for terror it’s not even known as a remedy for eczema that i prescribed and his eczema got better very very quickly after that um you know within within weeks it was fifty percent better but a couple of weeks ago fifty percent better prescribing on elements from terror so what was a terrifying situation so you can see the fact you can see the symptoms on the surface and go that’s a sulphur case didn’t do anything but actually knowing a bit more about why on earth someone would have that and sulfur doesn’t work you need to know what what is why would this happen and there wasn’t really much family history of eczema either you know some allergies that sort of stuff so it was very intriguing but with that without that information i would never have thought of prescribing that remedy right so with respect to your friends for horror well that particular case i think i prescribe aconite for terror it’s it’s um it would be you know it’s it’s used for things like earthquake situations you know people being involved in those sort of things um there are other remedies that can be used for that but the aconites seemed to fit the bill because basically i was almost prescribing through the mother how she felt in that situation was was him being with within that um you know that’s that’s what i i chose to prescribe and and echo night where’d you find that type of raw materials like is the pharmacy providing this well i i like within the uk the remedies are made by a hemopathic pharmacy um there’s six homeopathic pharmacies in the uk the people making hemopadding medicines are pharmacists who’ve retrained as homeopaths and to make homeopathic medicines aconite in its material form is poisonous when it’s made into a homeopathic medicine it’s been shaken and diluted a lot to make it into that medicine and then you know it’s been tested on a bunch of healthy people producing symptoms blah blah blah you know that that sort of stuff you know it’s i wouldn’t uh you know i think we’ve got some growing in our garden but i’m never going to pick it up and eat it because it’ll kill me you know i’m just trying to compare the principle of saying the raw material in um in a homeopathic remedy is toxic but processed and put in a certain format is is then can be consumed right uh given in a specific setting um well you know not not not every hemopathic medicine in its raw state is going to be toxic the other remedy is natural that’s sodium chloride that’s salt as a homeopathic remedy um you know to consider salt as toxic might sound ridiculous but we could have too much salt you know there is a you know you know pretty much every substance has the equivalent of a lethal amount of it that that would wipe out 50 percent of people who take it you know when you’re when you’re researching drugs poisons you know you you have what’s called an ed50 and an ld50 effective dose and lethal dose of something and you want to get the window right to have a therapeutic value this is from a sort of toxicological medicinal perspective as i was learning as a physiologist and a pharmacologist i’m just thinking of a case in particular where a child had excellent they’re a little bit older than this case i think from what you’re talking about this car was about five and i i sort of posed this question i said so why do you think you’ve got x-men then and there’s this this girl said it’s because my parents keep arguing all the time i looked at the pair i looked at the parents and they were like well you know it’s like they this child was actually expressing their parents anger because they couldn’t say well i’m gonna bang your heads together you know that sort of stuff there was none that kind of they couldn’t you know the the angst in the family was being expressed through that that child that’s a bit more tricky to deal with from my perspective because there is a dynamic that needs to be shifted and you know i did prescribe before the child and only that child said we’ll look at if it doesn’t get better then we need to look at how perhaps as a as a couple they could see someone else that could then help with their own sort of relationship situation that is you know not homeopathy and not my area of expertise and i felt like they needed some kind of relationship counselling that sort of stuff but the child did get better they were able to express why it was annoying their parents you know they were passionate people that just you know if you’re going to do that just make sure it’s not within a shot of your child because the child was misinterpreting how you know a discussion with passion was not actually arguing they’re just debating so that the homeopathic remedy just helped them not feel that they were going to be you know their parents were going to split up or that they would go well they just re just understand it so the child was able to expect you know are you arguing no we just go oh thank you just that sort of reassurance just happened and then because their skin got better yeah it’s that is very um interesting for children to kind of like express this this dynamic in the environment and yeah and it’s also kind of tricky because i guess as a hobby part then for you um if you if you just say you are unable to even with the prescription um of you know seeing couples therapists for the parents and then giving what you need to give to the child like how would you navigate it if the child still persisted um you know with the with the symptoms well it has happened in consultations where you have to tread carefully you know you can’t say i think it’s you um you know it’s actually you can pose a question how do you think it would be if this happened do you think that would be what what difference do you think that would make to the environment in which this person is or or you can put someone in the child’s shoes imagine you’re you’re sitting at the dinner table with your family and and this occurs you’re being a parent but actually they’re talking about stuff you don’t understand that perhaps being quite loud about it how do you how would you feel in that situation and you might even find that that they they were in that situation and they’d forgotten or they might go you know what actually that might need sorting out um sometimes they might say well actually they’ll have a consultation with me or actually there’s some someone else that they they would like to to see and that has occurred i’ve got people who i see for which i see the the mother and the and the and the daughter in this particular instance where both are having help child has ex mother has other symptoms um but initially it was the child that was the one who was having the the consultations but the mother was able to recognize that their influence and input in what’s in the environment which the child is growing up is they sort of claim out the idea that actually if i am more well i am more well for my daughter definitely in in that particular scenario but if i felt that someone else was better as this other couple i was mentioning that i said look you know this great relationship counselor i think you should have a word with them they actually asked if i would do i’m like well actually that’s no i’m not the expert in that whereas i know someone someone who is um so that’s what we did and and everyone’s getting better you know that’s lovely to see where where that the both the child and the parents it’s like you’ve that the healing has been turbocharged it’s wonderful to see that awesome because everyone’s working on their own health and well-being definitely and and as a family you um because you are sharing the same space and because um you know whatever you’re saying or could affect you could affect every members differently um even your healing process such a holistic process and i think that what we’ve seen with in this in this episode is really that um there is a presenting you know aspect which is eczema or um skin skin redness but there are different um elements that come in in why it’s triggered you know with respect to the this this child who who was who had eczema from from a baby the situation was what have you got well you know it’s been diagnosed as x-men um who’s got it well it’s someone who’s 15 have had it in such-and-such but the why was the clincher in this particular case right if we until we knew the why because we knew who he was until we knew the why we weren’t getting anywhere no one else was getting anywhere and if i didn’t if i hadn’t have known the the the why then it would then i don’t think would have got anywhere um in fact my sort of my my tag lines for my brand have gone the same sort of way with it starting off with being um the the the what the who and the why in terms of what the tagline has been um i just realized that actually so so what’s your tagline the tagline well so with the who was um helping people get well and stay well it was just how the gal help you get well and stay well that’s what i do um how was was um as is the slightly older tagline here which is uh it’s it says bringing homeopathy to you that’s how home visiting homeopath how we’re going to have a consultation in your home or quite often these days online but um the latest tagline which is over the last couple of years or so is actually you are nature that’s why i do it i believe in nature i believe in that nature always wins things might get in the way of that stuff like that but actually we’re just coming into autumn in the uk and actually seeing what the plants are doing seeing what what is happening in terms of the seasons and we try and defy that we try and steal your livers if it’s the height of summer that’s not going to went very well which might need to go to bed earlier um yeah yeah we’ll get up later um yeah so yeah nature is amazing and we don’t we we take ourselves further and further away that from that with what we eat with what we watch with what we do with how we travel and and so on and so forth and what i love to do is is embrace that and encourage people to acknowledge that with with this you are nature thing and homeopathy is wonderful at tapping into that stimulating body to heal itself that is a natural instinct for your body to do that i mean i guess what you’re saying basically is um to for people like patients and uh practitioners to to remain open and curious and at the same time um i guess agile enough to to pivot when when the situation calls for it the curiosity without judgement is something that i i encourage people to do when i’m teaching other practitioners is actually to be curious but without judgment it’s actually you that the level of inquiry is actually just because i’d like to know to help you rather than going you did what you know that’s not wrong you know people will will make decisions that they felt was right at the time it’s not for us to judge that you know if something if they if they regret doing that you might as well you know would you do it again what did you learn from that experience you know we’ve all done crazy stuff but we might not decide to do it again by speaking first curious without judgment let’s ignite to end our conversation yeah well thank you so much for joining us today um aleister we were really excited and happy to have you back thank you so much it’s been it’s been been lovely cheers