Natural Remedies For Teething, Tummies and Sniffles

I have invited Jay Borneman, from Brenmar Pennsylvania, the Chairman and CEO of Standard Homeopathic Company and Hyland’s, Inc., a trusted name in homeopathy, to talk to me about some of the products that Hyland’s offers and basically to talk to me too about homeopathy in general. I have gotten some questions about how this all works. All I know is that it has been working, but I’m not quite sure how. So he will be here to explain that.

 

You will not want to miss this episode, especially if you are holistically-oriented mom. Standard Homeopathic Company and Hyland’s are companies committed to providing safe, natural, homeopathic remedies for the entire family.

 

RM: Hi Jay! Welcome.

 

JB: Hi, how are you?

 

RM: Doing just fantastic! When I became a mom, one of the first challenges I faced as a holistic-oriented first-time mom was finding products that I could feel comfortable about giving to my daughter. But a few parenting websites, a couple of play groups, and it was not long before I had a medicine cabinet stocked full of Hyland’s Children’s Products. Jay, what is it about Hyland’s that makes even the finickiest of first-time mothers feel comfortable about giving them to their children?

 

JB: I think you answered the question. I think smart moms talk to each other and I think that what moms talk about for their children are effective solutions for their healthcare problems, approaches that make their children feel better while doing so with a very clear idea of what the side effects of medications are.

 

Recently, you will recall, that there has been some controversy about cough/cold products for children under the age of two. That is because the appropriate use of medications is really an important factor throughout the country right now. That is because people are really cognizant about it; they are talking about it quite a bit.

 

Homeopathic medicine has a distinct advantage for healthcare, particularly for children, because the side-effect profile of homeopathic medicines is very benign. They are not completely without side-effects—no medications are—but generally speaking, the side effect profiles for homeopathic medicines are quite good. Consequently, moms choose them for their children because of the safety profile.

 

So if your child has a cough, cold, sleeping issues, or teething particularly, earaches, and that sort of thing, homeopathic remedies might offer an opportunity to take care of the child, to relieve the symptoms, to make the child feel better without worrying about some common symptoms—such as nausea with antibiotics or contraindications of ibuprofen and those sorts of things.

 

Our advantage in the health care system is that we provide some alternatives or some complements to existing therapies so that the kids feel better, mom and dad feel better, and everyone does better in the long run.

 

RM: Absolutely. I would imagine that a lot of moms listening to the show right now are familiar with Hyland’s Teething Tablets and Teething Gel, but you offer a whole range of homeopathic remedies for children. Would you mind sharing a little bit about the other products in the children’s range?

 

JB: Sure. You know, Hyland’s has been around for a long time in Los Angeles. The company was founded in 1903 and over the years we have developed quite a line of homeopathic medicines for all kinds of problems, symptoms and conditions and all kinds of age ranges. Our company makes over 4000 homeopathic medicines, many of them single remedies that are used by physicians or by healthcare professionals for their patient population.

 

In the broader market, Hyland’s Baby Products have been around for well over 50 years. You mentioned our teething tablets. That was our first product in the baby range. The product developed because we had a tableting technology that created soft tablets, tablets that dissolved very quickly, without any sort of problem of choking. We put them up against a baby’s cheek, which is very moist, and the tablets dissolve right away. The teething tablets were a major hit for us and have grown over the years to actually be a very important product in the whole analgesic category for children nationally.

 

They spawned a large range of baby products including medicines for colic, for bedwetting, for coughs and colds, for bumps and bruises, for earaches. We have a diaper ointment in that line. We have a sublingual vitamin C in that line as well, a non-homeopathic product.

 

So [we have] lots of different approaches for healthcare in kids. I would say that second to our teething tablet in popularity is our earache drops because of the watchful waiting period physicians like to use. This is a medicine you can use to relieve the inflammation in the ear in the first 48 hour period when best practices now say that nothing should be done by the physician. We have lots of different approaches we can use to help kids feel better.

 

RM: My family’s experience with homeopathy has certainly been favorable: sniffles, sneezing, tummy ache—Hyland’s remedies have worked very well for us. But understanding how they worked is another story. Jay, can you tell me a little about homeopathy in general? What exactly is it and how does it work?

 

JB: Homeopathy has been around for quite a long time. The physician that is given credit with establishing first principles of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, was active in the 18^th century. The principles have been around for a while.

 

The best way to understand how homeopathic treatments work is to give an example: If you are familiar with cooking, as we all are, and you an onion up, you will find that you were generally healthy before you cut that onion up. As you slice into the onion, all of a sudden you will develop some symptoms because of the chemical constituents in the onion itself. Those constituents make your eyes run, the tearing is usually burning in nature and subsequent to that, your nose will run. That discharge will also be clear and will be burning, “excoriating” is the word that is used.

 

If you have those symptoms—runny eyes, runny nose particularly—from another cause, another “etiology” is the technical term, say a spring allergy, it is possible that a very small dose of Allium cepa —the red onion in the example—may actually relieve those symptoms. It goes like this: You’re well. Introduced into your body is some sort of agent that causes symptoms. If those same symptoms are caused by another etiology in another person, it is possible that the agent that causes the symptoms in the healthy individual will relieve the symptoms in the afflicted individual. It might be healthy to use Allium cepa for seasonal allergies or allergic rhinitis.

 

Teething tablets give a great example of this. Kemi, you are a pretty healthy person, do you drink coffee at all?

 

RM: I usually drink tea.

 

JB: So suppose you change your morning routine and start drinking coffee and you drink a pot of coffee before you leave the house in the morning. What kind of symptoms do you think you will develop?

 

RM: I would be kind of jittery.

 

JB: Yes, jittery. You are going to be adverse to noise and light, you are going to be irritable. It may raise your body temperature a little bit. It may cause diuresis—you will need to use the restroom. So tell me about your daughter Abi’s first teething bout. What symptoms did she have?

 

RM: She was kind of fussy…

 

JB: Irritable.

 

RM: Yeah, and she wanted to chew on everything.

 

JB: You can see that there is a parallel between the symptoms caused by coffee in an overdose situation—you drinking that pot of coffee in the morning—and your daughter’s teething symptoms on her first bout of teething. In fact, probably the most effective homeopathic medication in our teething tablet for the symptoms is a very, very dilute—a very small does—of crude coffee, of roasted coffee.

 

That is a great example of how homeopathy works. You would never conceive of giving a crude coffee kind of thing to a teething child, yet the symptom match is spot-on. A very, very effective approach.

 

Now the dose we are using is quite small, in that particular case 1/1000 of a milligram, very, very small. That is one of the reasons that the margin of safety in our Teething Tablets is so high. I think you would have to take six or seven full bottles of the Teething Tablets before you would see the first adverse effect. It is a very safe product, but the coffee in there is a great way to see how homeopathy works?

 

Basically there are two principles. The principle of similars, which says that the symptoms in a healthy individual are caused by a substance another individual has those same symptoms from another cause or etiology, then that which would have caused the symptoms in the healthy individual would relieve them in the afflicted person. That is the principle of similars. The second is the idea of a minimum dose, a very, very small dose. What we are trying to do is stimulate the body; we are just trying to get the body to get through the illness using its own curative powers so that the afflicted can move onto the next thing.

 

RM: It seems like so many of the products available over-the-counter tend to mask the symptoms of unwellness. If a mom is unfamiliar with homeopathy and uses a homeopathic cold remedy for her child, should she expect the symptoms—like a cough—to be suppressed instantly?

 

JB: The thought about how quickly the medicine should work relates on how the body is already reacting prior to administration of the medicine. If you are having a lot of symptoms, if there is a very acute situation going on, typically the medicine will work quickly or it is not the right medicine.

 

One of the things that we hear all the time from our customers who use our Teething Tablets—you will notice an 800 number and we encourage people to call us if they have questions and that number is attached to a pharmacy information service and there are pharmacists there 24/7. One of the things that we do is support our moms and if you have a question, use the 800 number and call us.

 

One of the things we hear all the time is “My daughter or my son had a horrible time teething. We used a couple of the Teething Tablets and the baby fell asleep. What did you do to my baby?” What we did for the baby is relieve the teething symptoms. The child was so tried out from all the fussiness, crying, and the rest of it, and the pain was gone, it let the child sleep. Basically the way you should conceive of this is if you have a fever that is very high or a cough that is fairly aggressive, if you use the appropriate homeopathic remedy, it should work fairly quickly—15 minutes or so.

 

Chronic disease is a different story. The physicians deal with that and basically it can take a long time for the medicine to work; it is a completely different situation. But in the acute situation, it will work fairly quickly.

 

RM: One of the things that I certainly wanted to have in my home was a natural first-aid kit. It was a pleasant surprise when I was introduced to the Hyland’s Kids Kit. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of Ferrum Phos or Belladonna before this, but let me tell you they are household words now.

 

JB: Great!

 

RM: Jay, can you tell the moms listening today about some of the things in the Kids Kit, like Belladonna, and the types of ailments they can be used to treat?

 

JB: Great. Kemi, one of the things that we find out about our moms, our customers, is that they are very educated. It occurred to us about 15 years ago that one of the things we can do to help moms is partner them with relevant, successful medical information.

 

The information in Hyland’s Kids Kit is what drives that particular item for us. The brochure was written by a very famous homeopath who passed away several years ago, her name was Maesimund Panos, she was from Tip City, Ohio and was a mentor of mine 25 years ago. She wrote a fairly important book in the late ‘70s called “Homeopathic Medicine at Home”. It was probably the most-accessible household manual for homeopathy that had been written in the past 50 years. It was written with Jane Heimlich, whose husband was the fellow who did the Heimlich Maneuver. She was a reporter in Cincinnati.

 

At any rate, I asked Dr. Panos to take her book and break it down into an understandable brochure that was accessible, that moms or dads could understand and easily take care of their kids. So what she did was create this kit for us on homeopathic medicines that are the most common ones for the ailments that mom and dad would not only see, but should treat—and I think the “should treat” part is important. There are a lot of ailments that should not be treated by parents, that they should see a doctor for, but there are lots of things that you see day in and day out that homeopathic medicine can work for.

 

For example, we have talked about belladonna. Belladonna is an interesting plant. It is in the nightshade family, along with tomatoes, actually. The name Belladonna comes from the translation of “Beautiful Woman” and the plant was named because it has an alkaloid in it called atropine which women would put into their eyes to dilate their pupils because it was a sign of beauty. Unfortunately, it was fairly toxic stuff, so beauty had a price. But you know atropine, because it is what the eye doctor uses to dilate your pupils and examine your eyes.

 

So here is a great example of homeopathy: If Belladonna contains atropine, and atropine causes dilation—it opens up your blood vessels—what kind of symptoms will you develop? Besides glassy eyes with large pupils, you will get shiny, red, hot cheeks; elevated body temperature; fevers, and that sort of thing. Belladonna is an anti-inflammatory from a homeopathic perspective. It is used to reduce fevers; it is used to knock down inflation, that sort of thing. Belladonna is really a mom’s friend because if a baby has a fever, belladonna might be a useful homeopathic medicine for that.

 

Now Ferrum Phos is also used for fevers as well, but there are different kinds of fevers, and this is a great way to start thinking about homeopathy. Not all fevers are the same. Some fevers are very hot and aggressive and some are very lower and languishing. The lower, languishing fever is the Ferrum Phos kind of fever and the hot very intense fever is a Belladonna fever.

 

One of the things you are exposed to along the way with the Kids Kit is just because a particular group of symptoms has a name, it may have a different homeopathic remedy from person to person depending on how that organism reacts to it. There is more than one homeopathic medicine used for coughs. More than one used for colds, more than one used for flu and the beauty of the Kids Kit is that the brochure is written clearly and it is a great communication tool for the mom or dad to be able to understand which homeopathic medicine would work best.

 

RM: We certainly found it very easy to use and my daughter has responded quite well.

 

JB: We are glad to hear that.