Interview with Dr. Lauri Grossman
Dr. Grossman is a homeopath and the chair of the Department of Medicine and Humanistic Studies at the American Medical College of Homeopathy in Arizona. Dr. Grossman believes that there is nothing like helping a woman who can’t speak out. She is 53 years old, lives in Manhattan, New York, and her website is homeopathycafe.com. You can reach her by telephone at 212-787-4445 or by e-mail at laurigrossman@gmail.com.
Andrea: I am interested in why you didn’t dare to speak to out when you were young.
Dr. Grossman: I was just a very shy gentle child and I grew up with a very overpowering big brother. I responded to that by being quieter and shyer. So I grew up always keeping my opinions to myself. For me it was a lifelong thing. It was not that there was an event that brought it on. I was most comfortable walking alone in the forest. I was a very quiet child that was very sensitive to disorder and to disruption.
Andrea: You made the transition to becoming a person who is able to speak up when you had to fight for your children in court?
Dr. Grossman: Yes. I wound up getting divorced at a very young age. My gentle nature had always served me well because I worked in the therapeutic setting. I did a lot of research and I was an excellent student. So my being quiet actually served me very well in my lifetime. Then suddenly, I was propelled into a very new position and that was to have to speak up for myself in a courtroom, which was an incredible challenge. The judge kept reprimanding me that he could not hear me. Of course part of that is a ploy that lawyers might use to get me aggravated, but I kept pinching myself to say, “Speak up! Speak up! Speak up!”
Andrea: You didn’t speak loud enough?
Dr. Grossman: It was difficult enough for me to just speak my piece. It was difficult when I spoke my piece to speak it out with confidence and assertiveness. What seemed like a scream to me seemed like a whisper to the judge. He didn’t realize how difficult the whole setting was for me. Certainly I am not alone. Women who need to speak up in a boardroom who work in executive offices and who are more introverted can have a hard time speaking up. Certainly any conflictual setting can aggravate the problem.
Andrea: How old were you when you were divorced?
Dr. Grossman: I was only 25 or 26. I was very young. I was a very naïve and innocent 26-year-old.
Andrea: So finally you convinced the judge?
Dr. Grossman: Well that didn’t even matter; I eventually did speak up, but my court case in my divorce lingered for years and years and years. It gave me plenty of time to work on speaking up! But certainly the voice you are hearing today was not the voice that came out of me when I was 26-years old. It was a process that took many years. I will say that homeopathic medicine was the thing that helped me the most, and that is why, obviously, I am so passionate about my career because I really do see how it makes such a huge change.
Andrea: How did you get to know homeopathic medicine for the first time?
Dr. Grossman: It’s funny because I know you are from Europe, and in Europe homeopathic medicines are everywhere and certainly 30 years ago in the US homeopathic medicine was unheard of. The first time I really had exposure to homeopathic medicine was when my infant son came down with 105.5 degree fever and none of the American physicians really knew what to do about it. There was a German physician that treated my son who looked at his fever like it was nothing and he gave him one dose of the homeopathic medicine Belladonna and my son’s fever was absolutely normal within a half hour and it shocked me and it shocked everybody else. I immediately wanted to know more about homeopathy, but I could not learn it at all in the states. So I wound up having to go to Europe. Now there are plenty of homeopaths in the states, but back then there were none. Once I studied homeopathy, I became the Johnny Appleseed of homeopathy wherever I went. I tried to teach it in medical schools and in teaching hospitals and workshops across America. I tried to introduce the American public to the effectiveness of homeopathic medicine.
Andrea: You need to know that the doctors in Germany are not convinced about homeopathic medicine in general. There are some healthcare professionals that are using alternative medicine. Usually the doctors you go to if you have a cold or flu, they know about it, but they don’t believe that it works.
Dr. Grossman: It’s very funny because in this country homeopathic medicine is the last form of natural therapies for the medical professional to accept. When acupuncture came along, the medical professionals said, “Ah hogwash!” Then that was accepted. Then when Yoga came along, the same thing happened. For each of these things, there has always been a group of traditional and conventional practitioners who haven’t accepted it, and homeopathy seems to be the last one that is going through that same process. Although I do say that when I first started teaching homeopathy in the states, my classes were filled with hippies eating granola, and nowadays my classes are filled with medical doctors and nurses, so things have changed a lot.
Andrea: Definitely. Could you please tell me about other cases when you applied homeopathic medicine and it had a tremendous effect on someone’s health?
Dr. Grossman: I have been in practice for 30 years now. So I treat everything from pediatric illnesses like ear infections and skin disorders to all sort of chronic complaints, like chronic headaches and digestive troubles. I do a lot of work with women who have chronic headaches and women who have female disorders; anything from painful periods to irregular periods or problems with menopause and hot flashes. Actually, my passion in homeopathy is to work with people who have emotional challenges. People with anxiety, depression and of course low self-esteem fit in there, too.
Andrea: So you consider low self-esteem as a sickness?
Dr. Grossman: No, no, no. I don’t consider it a sickness, I just use it as a description. It does me no good and it doesn’t serve any benefit to label anything a sickness or not. It doesn’t matter to me whether people come with a diagnosis or not. The diagnosis certainly helps me figure out what the problem is, but to have a label for it doesn’t matter to me at all. If someone has low self-esteem, it doesn’t matter if it is because they were born introverted and that was just their personality at birth, or if they had an event that triggered a response where they stopped speaking out, or if there is some sort of negative consequences that they will have to deal with if they speak out; that doesn’t matter to me. I don’t consider it an illness, I just consider it a situation that needs to be remedied or a situation for a person that needs their vitality strengthened.
Andrea: And does homeopathy also work in serious cases? For example, if someone has cancer or Parkinson’s disease?
Dr. Grossman: Homeopathy works beautifully for patients with cancer, but I do recommend that patients have an integrative approach. There is nothing like the benefit of the cancer patient who has surgery. The surgery removes the major core of the cancerous cells obviously, and it also allows the patient to have more time to respond to homeopathy, if they integrate homeopathy with their cancer procedure. The nice thing is that you can use homeopathic remedies to boost the body’s ability to fight the cancer cells and to strengthen specific organs. It can also be used to reduce the amount of pain, either from the cancer itself, or from treatment, and also to deal with side effects of chemotherapy or radiation treatment.
Homeopathy works beautifully hand-in-hand with conventional medicine for cancer. It works very well hand-in-hand with many different illnesses, chronic diseases and also some serious diseases. In terms of Parkinson’s in my practice, I have not had terrific results with that. I have been able to slow down the progression of the Parkinson’s, but in the area with degenerative nervous disorders, I have not had terrific results with homeopathy. I tend to encourage my patients to seek other forms of integrated medicine.
Andrea: That sounds great at least for the cancer patients.
Dr. Grossman: Let’s not forget to mention that the homeopathy is very effective for many of the cancers that conventional medicine is least effective with. That offers a ray of hope for some patients who otherwise don’t have much hope.
Andrea: What about some other chronic diseases, for example if someone has a chronic virus?
Dr. Grossman: Homeopathy works beautifully to strengthen the immune system for someone who has a disorder that has been lingering in the body for a long time, and certainly the longer it has been in the body, the bigger is the challenge. If the person has been on many different suppressive medications, that makes it more difficult for homeopathy to heal it. But the severity of the illness doesn’t preclude being able to use homeopathy. Homeopathy is used for many, many very serious disorders.
Andrea: You mentioned that you helped women speak up by recommending homeopathic medicines to enhance their self-esteem?:
Dr. Grossman: Yes. I worked with women to boost their self-esteem when they were too timid to voice their opinion. In other specific incidences, I helped women who were abused when they spoke up, who learned to protect themselves by not speaking up. I know that there is a huge number of women who are married today who find out in their midlife or later in life that they may be more comfortable in a homosexual relationship or in a lesbian relationship. These women are afraid of speaking out because they are afraid of the consequences of what will happen to them in terms of their financial security and in terms of their standing in the community. So there are many, many, many different reasons why women don’t speak out, and for each of these different reasons, it would call for a very different homeopathic remedy.
Andrea: Can you give me an example of a homeopathic remedy?
Dr. Grossman: Sure. There is a homeopathic remedy that is called “Staphysagria”. It is a very, very effective remedy for people with a very mild personality and a very sweet disposition. It is a remedy that I used very frequently when I did work in battered women’s shelters. It is a wonderful remedy for women who are married to abusive men or in abusive relationships. What happens with these people; they are very sweet and they tend to suppress their anger, so in situations where somebody else might be angry, they might feel guilty or ashamed and so they tend to suppress their anger and they turn it on themselves. If you give this homeopathic remedy to someone like them, what happens is that you start to see their own personality emerge and they feel much stronger being who they are and standing up for themselves and expressing themselves. When you give the homeopathic remedy and suggest that the patient also see a therapist, it eases this transition and it helps the person emerge in a more comfortable way.
Andrea: That sounds really interesting.
Dr. Grossman: You would be surprised. Seeing the change and the transformation that can happen with one woman with this remedy will make all of the hours of studying to be a homeopath pay off. It is one of the most gratifying experiences that there is.
Andrea: I can imagine how you feel. You mentioned that you worked on the Board of Shelters for Abused Women? These abused women mostly have really strong feelings and they are very afraid. Could you really help them with homeopathic medicine?
Dr. Grossman: Most definitely. As I said, it is one of my most gratifying experiences when I can help women like that. Certainly they need a lot of support services. You can’t just say to a woman that has been in an abusive marriage, “Here is a remedy; go leave tomorrow.” They need a lot of support to deal with the logistics of the situation to make sure that they and their children are safe, to make sure that they can handle their financial situation as well so they are not just living out on the street. But it is certainly a homeopathic remedy that will ease this transition and make that process much less complicated and much less challenging.
Andrea: Is this medicine expensive?
Dr. Grossman: No. It is one of the most low-cost medicines in the world. One little tube of a homeopathic remedy; a vial of the homeopathic remedy that will last for many, many years costs about $4 in a natural food store. It is one of the most inexpensive, safe, and effective forms of medicine that is available today. That is why it’s really a crime that many people don’t know about it. It is safe, effective, low cost and has no side effects.
Andrea: Yes; especially that it has no side effects.
Dr. Grossman: When you think of what the alternatives are, it is amazing that it has taken so long for this information to get out. That is why whenever I have a patient that has been happy with my treatment and they say, “Boy; this is just amazing!” the one thing that I will say to them is, “If you can get a group of people together that have a common complaint or a common concern, I am happy to teach a workshop to anybody about anything from menopausal problems to children’s ailments. This is the work that I feel like I was put on the earth to do. It is very rewarding.
Andrea: You also mentioned that you counseled smart business women in regard to conveying their creative ideas when they were afraid to outshine others?
Dr. Grossman: Certainly I get hired by different businesses and corporations to work with CEOs or top executives for when they have to make a presentation or when they have to travel internationally to present a project abroad. They are not necessarily timid about speaking up, but they are anxious about the presentation or anxious about how they are coming across. Homeopathic remedies are great for performance anxiety. It works beautifully for people who are nervous before an exam or an interview or a performance. Many homeopaths work with many musicians across the globe before they go on stage so that they can perform to the level that they want to. Similarly with a corporation that wants their top executives to be able to speak up creatively when they are speaking to a committee.
Andrea: In which health center do you teach?
Dr. Grossman: I am chair of the Department of Medicine and Humanistic Studies at the American Medical College of Homeopathy and that is in Arizona. For nearly 20 years, I have taught at NYU in the holistic nursing division. I have taught workshops at other hospitals and teaching facilities. It is in my resume that is posted on the internet.
Andrea: You mentioned that you have little children who don’t speak up because they want to be able to fit in. How do you help them? Is it also through homeopathic medicine?
Dr. Grossman: Yes. My practice is limited to homeopathy, so when I do work with children, it is also with homeopathic medicines.
Andrea: Do you also encourage them with words?
Dr. Grossman: If the parent decides to take the child to therapy or to speak to a counselor or a social worker, then that is the parent’s decision. For children, I find that, unless they are in a bullying situation where they really need to work through some of the social skills with a social worker or a therapist, the homeopathic remedy is often times all that is needed.
Andrea: It sounds really awesome.
Dr. Grossman: There are some great studies that came out of Duke University. There were some physicians that did a study on depression and anxiety and emotional disorders and homeopathy and it was a very positive report that came out. So we are getting more and more scientific studies that speak of the validity and the effectiveness of homeopathy for emotional disorders.
Andrea: What advice would you give people who are shy and who afraid to speak out if you don’t know if they are just born like this or if they need some homeopathic medicine?
Dr. Grossman: Anyone can use homeopathy. In addition, surround yourself in your life with people who believe in you and run, run, away from people who do not believe in you.
Andrea: What can you do if it is your parent?
Dr. Grossman: I would say the same thing to them. I think that the most important thing is to surround yourself in your life with people who will help you to become all you can be rather than people who will keep you from that. Of course, I would recommend homeopathy, but not everyone is open to that, so I would recommend it as an option, but I would also recommend for the person to explore whatever avenues they want to that might be able to help them. Some people like therapy and some people find great relief in going for a long walk in the woods and other people find great benefit from taking Yoga classes or an exercise class or a fitness class where they are greatly invigorated. There are so many different options out there today. We live in a very varied and colorful world and I recommend to people to explore the world and to find what works for each person. We are all very, very different. Going jogging might work for one person where sitting and reading poetry might work for another person. Spending more time alone might be valuable for one woman and spending more time visiting friends and relatives is more valuable for someone else. So we have to acknowledge that we are all different and the answer for each one of us is going to be very different.
Andrea: I understand. Do you speak out when you witness abusive situations? For example on the street, if you see parents abusing their children?
Dr. Grossman: I think I lead a very balanced life. I think I speak out when the situation calls for it, and I will be safe if I speak out. I will not put my life in danger. I think I am pretty wise about that, but I will speak out.
I once chased a robber down the street who I saw steal someone’s pocketbook. I chased him down the street screaming to every big man along the way, “You stop him! You stop him!” And we actually did stop him! So I do speak out and every time I speak out and I tell this story to my mother, my mother giggles because she cannot believe this is the daughter that grew up in her home. She knows what I used to be like. It is very funny. To anyone who meets me now, I say, “You would never believe who I was as a child.”
Andrea: I bet she is very proud of you now.
Dr. Grossman: Definitely she is.
Andrea: Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t get to?
Dr. Grossman: The only thing is that if anyone reads this and has any concerns, they can always call me. I love sharing the knowledge that I have with others and it is my pleasure to help encourage anyone who was in a situation like mine where they didn’t feel like they had a voice. We all need to help each other. I think that we are all put on this earth to help each other and it is my pleasure to help other people either through a phone call or to share information or to offer workshops. I think there is a lot of suffering in humanity that we could put an end to if we helped each other.
Andrea: That is why I am writing this book.
Dr. Grossman: Thank you very much. It is an honor to be a part of it. Good luck with it. I wish you all the best. Please keep in touch with me because it will be a pleasure, especially since you are writing about the issue that I am so passionate about. This means more to me than anything else that I work with in my practice. I work with children that are sick and I work with women with menopause, but there is nothing to me like helping a woman who can’t speak out. It is one of my greatest, gratifying experiences.
Andrea: I appreciate that you shared your stories because I am very passionate about my book and you are doing in your daily life what I am writing about. Thank you so much, Lauri!