Transcript: How Can Homeopathic Remedies Help During Pregnancy and After Birth?

This is a text transcript from The First Time Mum’s Chat podcast. The episode is called How Can Homeopathic Remedies Help During Pregnancy and After Birth and you can click on the link to view the full episode page, listen to the episode and view the show notes.

Helen Thompson: If you’ve been listening to the First Time Mum’s Chat podcast for a while, you’ll know how passionate I am about complementary /alternative therapies, which are about treating the whole person and not just symptoms or diseases. Earlier this year, I interviewed midwife Beau Wilson, who happened to mention how she’s beginning to help mums through their whole birth process education, using homeopathy.

Homeopathy is a wonderful, safe, gentle, and effective healing art, which has been practiced for hundreds of years, and I’ve wanted to explore further how it can help both mums and babies. In this week’s episode, I’m delighted to be talking with Homeopath Eugénie Krüger, all about homeopathy and the many wonderful ways it can help you as you start your parenting journey.

Here’s a couple of highlights of what you’ll hear Eugénie talk about during our chat. How homeopathy has no contraindications, so can be used to help babies from the second they are born. How homeopathic remedies can help mums following a traumatic birth, such as a C-section. Details of homeopathic remedies that will help with issues including teething, sleep issues, colic and constipation.

And so, so much more.

Hi Eugénie and welcome to First Time Mum’s Chat. I’m delighted to be speaking with you today about the wonderful world of homeopathy and how you can help mums and their little ones. So can you please start by telling us about you and your background?

Eugénie Krüger: Yeah, sure thanks for having me on, Helen. It’s lovely to get to speak with you and share my passion with your audience. So I’m a homeopath based in Perth, although I do see clients all over the world. I was first introduced to homeopathy when I studied naturopathic medicine and my husband and I were thinking of starting a family and in my naturopathic training we got taught about homeopathy. I didn’t really know much about homeopathy at the time.

Then I learnt that you can use homeopathy while you’re pregnant and while you’re giving birth and on your newborn baby. After that, I changed my pathway to become a homeopath because it was such an aha moment for me that there’s something completely safe that I can use while I’m pregnant.

I now have an 11 year old son and an 8 year old daughter that have never needed pharmaceutical medication. They have only ever used homeopathics, and they’re the healthiest kids you’ll ever meet. So I am a homeopathic evangelist. I try to educate as many mums as possible about this beautiful safe medicine because I’ve definitely seen the results of my own life and in my thousands of clients over the past decade that I’ve been practicing.

Helen Thompson: And you have a podcast yourself that you talk a lot about homeopathy.

Eugénie Krüger: A lot. We actually just had our 200th episode on Friday. We had a huge party here in Perth. We had a hundred moms that came together that all use homeopathy. The Homeopathy Hangout podcast is where I share my passion for homeopathy. Sadly not many people in Australia know about homeopathy.

Helen Thompson: I work a lot with baby massage and in childcare and I wondered how homeopathy can help with things like teething and colic.

Eugénie Krüger: Yes. So homeopathy can literally help with anything. You can’t see this right now if you’re listening, but I’m wearing a T-shirt that says, yes, I have a remedy for that. Because it actually doesn’t matter what your complaint is, whether it’s physical, mental, emotional, we do have a remedy that can help.

So teething, it’s a tricky one because when our babies are little, you don’t really wanna pump them full of pharmaceuticals because even though pharmaceuticals have their place, they’re wonderful, but they are very hard on a little baby’s liver. So if your child’s teething, you don’t really wanna be pumping them full of Panadol, especially not when we have something as effective as homeopathic Chamomilla, which is amazing for teething and it works much faster than Panadol. You can literally have a screaming baby with swollen gums, red cheeks, drooling give them a dose and within five minutes they can calm down and have a sleep or have a feed. You really see that change so quickly. We have loads of teething remedies.

With homeopathy, we try to match the symptom of the patient to the remedy picture. So we have over 8,000 different remedies and each of them have a different remedy picture. So, for example, a baby who needs Chamomilla when they are teething, they’re gonna be very restless, very cranky, they can’t be pleased. One cheek will often be red, the other one will be, pale and they’ll often have green diarrhea. So then you know that is a Chamomilla child and that remedy will work really well for them.

Helen you’ve probably seen those babies that just drool and drool and drool and you have to change their bibs. So that’s more a baby that needs the remedy, Mercury. So obviously homeopathics are safe, they’ve got none of the physical substance in there, only the energetic signature.

So first time listeners when I tell them to give your baby the remedy Mercury, they probably were shocked. In my 30 minute intro video on YouTube, so if you just type in Eugénie Krüger Homeopathy, I have a 30 minute video there called Homeopathy at Home, and that explains how the remedies are made and how there’s none of the physical substance in there, only the energetic signature.

I know we don’t have time to go over all that on the podcast, so I’ll just direct people to my free 30 minute course. So then we have a remedy called Calc. Carb. Now these babies are the ones that tend to be a little bit, just very slow with their teething. You know those babies that it feels like it’s months and months where they just have these teething symptoms, but the teeth just never actually pop through. So they tend to respond better to the remedy Calc. carb, and then there’s the remedy Belladonna, which many of you might have heard of. These babies tend to have a fever when they are teething and the beautiful thing is, it might sound tricky to figure out which remedy your baby needs, but you’ll find that they tend to have the same symptom picture. So if they need Belladonna for their teething, and once you figure that out, you’re probably gonna end up giving that same remedy to your baby every time. So initially it might seem tricky, but you can actually get it figured out quite quickly.

Helen Thompson: Can you give your baby too much? How do you know how much to give them? I know you give them drops on the tongue, cuz I use it sometimes for helping with sleep. So how do you know whether you’re giving them too much and can you od (overdose) on it?

Eugénie Krüger: That’s such a great question. No, you can’t, because it doesn’t have any of the physical substance in it. So we’re not talking about pharmaceutical medication where you actually have physical amounts of the active ingredient, and that’s why you can OD (overdose) on something. The remedies only going to work if you’re giving the right remedy. If it’s the wrong remedy that doesn’t match the symptoms, it’s just not going to do anything. So what we recommend is to start off with what’s called a loading dose. So if you have very acute symptoms with a very irritable teething baby, you might think, okay, Chamomilla sounds like it fits.

I’m going to give 2 pillules or 2 drops every 15 minutes for 4 doses, and then I’m just gonna wait a little bit and see if there is an improvement. Now if there is no improvement after 4 doses, it’s probably the wrong remedy and then you would just try the next remedy. If there is a slight improvement, and that might be just that the cheeks are not quite as red, the baby is not quite dribbling so much, then you go, okay, I’m heading in the right direction and then what you wanna do is continue that remedy for a little bit longer, but just space the dosing out. So you would then continue after that initial 15 minutes or 4 doses, you’d then give a dose, say every half an hour for another 4 doses, or maybe every hour for another 4 doses and then you go, okay, my child’s great now.

Maybe later on the symptoms might return and then you might just need to give one single dose and then the symptoms are gone. So homeopathy is a bit of art and homeopathy requires us to tune into the person that’s in front of us. Actually, I think that’s something that’s really important as moms, as caregivers, that we really tune into our own intuition instead of just blanket prescribing, which is what I think a lot of the problems is with a mainstream medical model, is they blanket prescribe for people regardless of where you are at. With homeopathy, we call upon you to check into that individual in front of you, your child, or whoever it is that you’re caring for. How are they responding to the remedy, are they actually improving, are the symptoms changing, do they maybe need a different remedy, do they maybe need a higher potency, do I maybe need to give the remedy a little bit more often?

So initially it can seem a little bit overwhelming, but like anything in life, it is a skill and the more you work on it, the more you use it, the easier it becomes to the point where it’s just an absolute no-brainer. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for all the hours I spent, not just in studying homeopathy, but in reading just basic home prescriber books, when I first started out on this journey because all that information has really empowered me as a mother to be able to care for my kids. My 8 year old daughter has never been to a doctor in her life, and my son has only been because he’s had injuries. So he’s knocked a front tooth out, he’s had a gash in his eyebrow. So, you know, just boy stuff, that’s why he’s had to go to the doctor a couple of times and the other time he had a whitetail spider bite on his ear. Ooh. Ears swelled to about 10 times the size. So I took him to the doctor just to check what’s going on, and he said, yep, it’s probably a whitetail spider. So I took him home and I gave him the remedy that’s made from the whitetail spider, and within about 3 or 4 hours his ear was back to normal. So no antibiotics needed, no antihistamine, just homeopathics.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, that sounds amazing, cuz I know spider bites, especially as we know in Australia, can be pretty harmful.

Eugénie Krüger: Yeah, it really can, it can be lethal. There’s people that have huge scars and ulcers on their body from insect bites of all sorts that just never healed properly but homeopathics is amazing in situations like that.

Helen Thompson: So you can start homeopathy from a very early age. If your baby’s newborn can you give them homeopathy? Is there any particular age that you would say not to give them homeopathy?

Eugénie Krüger: Homeopathy is probably the only medicine on the planet that has no contraindications, which makes it so easy to use because a lot of supplements and herbs you can only give to your baby once they’re over 2 years old. Now, I’ll give you some examples. If your baby has had a very traumatic birth. They’ve come out and there might have been forceps and they have a huge hematoma on their head. You can give them some homeopathic arnica straight away, and in under a few hours it will get that hematoma down to nothing. I’ve seen so many eggs on heads from bumps disappear in a matter of under an hour just from giving regular arnica.

If the baby has had a very traumatic birth, maybe they didn’t breathe straight away, you can give them some homeopathic aconite, which is very good for shock. Or maybe it was just a very fast birth and the baby’s looking quite stunned. Homeopathic aconite is amazing to remove that fright and shock layer. So just to prevent issues later on down the track. So we have beautiful remedies that can be used literally from the second the baby’s born, and the homeopathic remedies are safe all throughout pregnancy.

So whether it’s morning sickness, Helen, if you’ve got a cough or a cold or any sort of illness when you’re pregnant, it is such a pain in the butt because there’s hardly any medicines that you can use safely. They often say this and that pharmaceutical is safe to use in pregnancy but then down the track mean Thimerosal was a classic example of that down the track they realized, oh, actually it has an effect on the unborn baby, on the fetus.

Homeopathics, we can say categorically is completely safe in pregnancy. So you can use these remedies safely throughout your pregnancy. If you’ve got a cough or a cold or you’re feeling unwell, you can use the remedies to safely help you get better and know that it’s not going to have a negative effect on your baby.

Something else that’s quite commonly used. I’m just thinking about now that ultrasounds, for example, if you’re going for an ultrasound you can actually use the homeopathic remedy made from ultrasound to give a dose before and after as well.

Helen Thompson: Mm. That’s an interesting one to know. Arnica I’m a great fan of. I use Arnica a lot, but I use the cream rather than the tablet.

Eugénie Krüger: I find the tablet works so much faster than the cream. I’ve never needed to use the cream in my life because the remedy works so fast and the beautiful thing about using the remedy is that Arnica is really great for the fright and the shock that is associated with the accident. So when you’re giving the Arnica, not only are you helping with the bruising or the bleeding, but you’re helping with that fright, which can sometimes be held in the vital force.

You know, when a child maybe they start learning how to ride a bike and then they fall over and have a big bump, and that shock that’s held in the vital force can make them hesitant to maybe try to ride their bike again. Or maybe in other areas of their life, maybe they subconsciously decided, okay, I’ve failed, I’ve had this big accident, I’m going to be more careful. You want them to be more careful, but you don’t want that to inhibit their development in life where they’re so fearful of things because they don’t wanna get hurt. So the Arnica not only helps with the bruising, the bleeding, the bumps, but it helps with the fright and the shock and the trauma of the accident itself as well.

Adults, for example, that have been in a car accident. I’ve had several clients who have crashed their car or somebody crashed into them, and since then they refused to drive because that fright and that shock has been held in their vital force, and you give them a high potency remedy like Aconite, and it removes that frightened shock, which gives them the confidence to get back behind the wheel and drive again.

Helen Thompson: Oh, I wish I’d known that when I had a car accident. I would’ve taken the tablet straight away.

Eugénie Krüger: Well the beautiful thing is you can actually take Aconite even decades later. So often I will prescribe for my clients, they might be in their sixties, seventies, and maybe they had a fright or a shock as a child and you can still use the remedy cuz that fright stays in the vital force. So it doesn’t matter how many decades later, you can still give a remedy to release that fright or shock from the vital force. What we can even do with homeopathics, and I’m going to try to not overwhelm your listeners, is we can use remedies for ancestral trauma as well. So for example, you might have heard of Ayahuasca, the plant which is often used in ceremonies in South America, but we have a homeopathic remedy that’s made from Ayahuasca and if I have a client in my clinic that I sense that she’s carrying some trauma that doesn’t feel like it’s her trauma. It’s something that’s been passed down. Maybe there’s been lots of abuse throughout the generations. I might give her a homeopathic remedy called Ayahuasca to help remove not just her trauma, but her ancestors’ trauma as well.

I’ve had really good success with that remedy, but I’ll, I’ll leave it there cuz I don’t wanna overwhelm your listeners. They can have a listen to the podcast cuz we go a bit more in depth into just the incredibly vast scope of homeopathy.

Helen Thompson: I use a lot of natural remedies cuz I don’t believe in going to the doctor at all unless I absolutely have to. I go to the doctor to get blood tests and that’s about the only reason and if there’s any problem, then I’ll go to my naturopath and she gives me all the natural stuff, and it really does help. So I know from my own experience how important natural therapies are. I’d like to check out myself more about homeopathy.

Eugénie Krüger: I have seen plenty of people in the past decade of clinical practice and we see miracles in our clinic every single day and we give hope to people who have been told there’s no hope. Homeopathy really is amazing and like I said, there’s literally nothing that homeopathy can’t help with. I don’t say cure because in some cases, for example, if you have had a limb amputated, homeopathy is clearly not going to help that limb grow back!

Helen Thompson: No of course not.

Eugénie Krüger: You can use homeopathics to support that person’s mental, emotional state. So say for example, they’re in terrible grief because of the amputation, they feel they can’t move on in their life. They might have lots of phantom sensations. All these things that are interrupting the flow of their life. So if you give them the correct homeopathic remedy to address that grief and to help support them in that way, then you’ll find that they just beautifully transition through that.

So because your audience is our first time mums, I’ll try to keep my examples to that. So say for example, you’ve had a traumatic birth, a c-section, maybe your milk hasn’t come in because of all the shock or the trauma, the medication. There are homeopathic remedies that you can use to stimulate your breast milk. There’s remedies that you can use to help with your bonding with your baby. So say for example, baby spend time in NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) and that bond was never properly established, there are homeopathic remedies that we can use to help you with that.

We actually have homeopathic remedies that’s made from human breast milk and often we can use that to help with that bond establishment. Whether it’s any issues that your baby might have with colic or reflux, constipation, we have remedies for all of that.

Also some other things that people might not think of homeopathy for. Say for example, it comes the time for you to wean your baby. We have a homeopathic remedy called Ignatia, not to be confused with Echinacea. So this one is I G N A T I A, it’s made from the Saint Ignatius bean, and it’s a beautiful remedy for grief, loss, and disappointment. So if you are starting to wean your baby, this is a great remedy that you can give to them to help with that transition of the bond kind of separating or just kind of becoming a bit more separate by stopping the breastfeeding. So you can give the ignatia to the mum and the baby because it’s just as big a grief and a loss for us as mothers to end that journey. Or say, for example, your child goes off to childcare for the first time, or you have to leave them with somebody for the first time. The homeopathic remedy, Ignatia is so, so beautiful to support them on a mental, emotional level as well.

Also, if there has been something like say a miscarriage or maybe there’s been a death in the family. Even if your family pet has passed away, homeopathic Ignatia is beautiful to support the whole family’s mental, emotional wellbeing.

And then my other favorite for first time moms, there’s the remedy, Sepia. It is our top remedy to balance the hormones after giving birth and to help prevent postnatal depression or even baby blues. It just really gets you back into that good mental emotional state. So that’s another one of my absolute favorites.

Helen Thompson: Yes, that would be a great one for first time mums, especially if they’re going through postnatal depression, because I know that can be really hard for mums. Would you recommend that they go to somebody like you? I know in Australia you can go to the chemist, I don’t know so much about America.

Would you recommend they do that or would you recommend to come and see somebody like you? Is it okay for somebody to go and get them without a consultation?

Eugénie Krüger: Yeah, it depends what it is that’s going on. So, like I said, that I’ve got that 30 minute video on YouTube which is great. It’s a great little introduction to homeopathy. And then I would suggest getting a book like Dana Ullman’s. It’s called ‘Everybody’s Guide to Homeopathic Medicine’. Definitely get yourself a book like that and you can safely prescribe homeopathic remedies.

Obviously if it is postnatal depression, it’s a really good idea to go and see a practitioner. If money is short you can to some extent say try a remedy like Sepia yourself for a few days. If you’ve had no improvement, definitely go and see a practitioner. I’m just saying that for those moms who might be financially strapped, That you can safely prescribe the remedies, but obviously it depends on the condition because we have to practice it safely. I have 5 homeopaths on my team, so I actually closed my books 2 years ago.

I’m not taking on new clients, only family of existing clients, but I have 5 homeopaths on my team all over Australia. For the international listeners there are homeopaths worldwide. What I would suggest is getting in touch with your local homeopathic registering body and then just getting some suggestions of homeopaths there.

I’ve had guests from all over the world on my show, and in most countries you can get homeopathic remedies quite easily. I have a dispensary myself, so if you go to EugenieKruger.com, you can order through there as well. We ship worldwide. If you’re in Australia and you select express post, often you can get the order the very next day.

So we do pride ourselves on extremely speedy turnarounds. We’ve got really great kits as well, like a birth kit and mother and child kit, if you wanna start with a kit, it comes with really great information as well. But in most countries you can get remedies pretty easily. You can very safely self prescribe, but obviously you need to learn a little bit about it. Go and get yourself a really good home prescribers book. There are loads of Facebook groups. I have my own Facebook support group for people just in Australia, but there are other international groups like Mary’s Homeopathy Study Group. There’s a Facebook group that has over 40,000 home prescribers on there.

There’s also Paola Brown, her group is Teach Me Health and Homeopathy, so you can go and join these Facebook groups and if you have a complaint, just post your complaint in the group and there’ll be thousands of people responding with suggestions on which remedies to use. But obviously we have to have to do it safely but homeopathy, because it’s such low risk and it is so safe, you can easily and safely self prescribe.

For the trickier things, build a relationship with a homeopath. I’ve got clients that I’ve been treating for 7 – 8 years and some of them, I helped the mom conceive the baby. So that one is now 11 years old. If you build that relationship with a homeopath, that’s definitely gonna help you a lot.

Helen Thompson: That’s good to know that they’re worldwide. While you were talking, I just thought about ADHD. Can homeopathy help with ADHD?

Eugénie Krüger: Yeah, I used to play this game when I did talks and at the end of the talk, I’d play a game and say, throw me any condition and I’ll tell you if homeopathy can help. But the game got really boring because it didn’t actually matter what the condition was, my answer was always yes.

So, yeah, ADHD you can definitely use homeopathy to support that. I actually have a ADHD combination remedy on my website called, ADHD support and I’ve had amazing feedback from that remedy. I always know a remedy’s helping when the teachers start commenting, the mums come back to me and they say, oh, my child’s teacher has asked me what I’m doing with him because his concentration is so much better.

Whether it’s autism or PANDAS or ADHD or Lyme or ticks, twitches, fears, phobias, night terrors. Anything you can think of homeopathy can help with.

Helen Thompson: I just thought I’d ask because a lot of people I work with in childcare, a lot of them have ADHD or autism and I wondered because if I knew what I could suggest then that might help the parents a lot more to help them calm down. I use a remedy to help me to sleep, it’s melatonin and it actually really does help. It calms your nerves and it really does help you to sleep.

Eugénie Krüger: Yeah, we do have homeopathic melatonin. Basically any herb or drug or anything you can get in homeopathic potency as well, which is just much safer to use because if you were to use actual melatonin, there’s now more studies that are coming out saying how it can actually disturb your endocrine system. But if you are using homeopathic melatonin then it doesn’t have that effect of disturbing the endocrine system because the remedies are so safe.

Helen Thompson: Is that safe to give to a baby?

Eugénie Krüger: That probably wouldn’t be my first one. So we have loads of remedies, so for example passion flour, but in homeopathic potency is really safe. Chamomilla, like I said, that teething remedy Chamomilla can actually be a really good remedy for sleep as well but it depends what the child’s symptoms are. One of our really good sleep remedies is the remedy Coffea, which is actually made from coffee.

Helen Thompson: Oh, that’s interesting cuz coffee I would’ve thought has the opposite effect cuz it’s got the caffeine in it!

Eugénie Krüger: Exactly, well, that’s the thing with homeopathy because it’s based on the principle of like cures like. Any physical substance that can cause a symptom in a person can cure that same symptom in the person in a homeopathic potency. So the remedy made from coffee is one of our best remedies for sleep. The remedy that’s made from the honeybee is one of our best remedies for sort of swelling and anaphylaxis. The remedy made from stinging nettle is really good for hives. The remedy made from onion it’s really good for streaming eyes, you know, with hay fever. So those things that can cause a symptom can cure that same symptom in homeopathic form.

The beautiful thing is that you literally need one or two honeybees to make homeopathic remedies for the whole world, forever and ever because it’s only the energetic sub signature of that substance. So homeopathy is the ultimate sustainable green, eco-friendly medicine on the planet.

I’ll leave your listeners one tiny little tease right at the end. Homeopathy is not only amazing for humans, but it’s incredible for animals and it’s amazing for your plants. So I’ll just leave that there.

Helen Thompson: That sounds interesting. Thank you for coming on, and if anybody wants to get in touch with you or listen to your podcast on homeopathy, how would they do that?

Eugénie Krüger: Yeah, just go to EugenieKruger.com, that’s the easiest place, everything is from there, and you’ll find me from there.

Helen Thompson: Okay. Thank you, Eugénie for being on the podcast. I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you and I’ve actually learnt a lot more about homeopathy. I’ve enjoyed the conversation.

Eugénie Krüger: It’s a pleasure.

Helen Thompson: Wow, Eugénie certainly shared a ton of great information about the wonderful world of homeopathy, and I highly suggest finding out more by checking out her 30 minute intro video. You can watch this video directly from this episode’s webpage, and I’ve also included a link to Eugénie’s website and Facebook group there. These can be found at MyBabyMassage.net/podcast/129.

I also share each episode on the First Time Mum’s Chat Instagram page, and you’ll hear me chatting live with folks I’ve interviewed from time to time. Please support me by following me and I look forward to meeting you during one of my lives.

Next week I’m chatting with yoga and flexibility teacher, Devin Garcia, who talks about ways to help mums holistically to manage expectations to get movement going again after giving birth. Be sure to listen to this episode when it comes out next week, and please subscribe to First Time Mum’s Chat via your favorite platform so that you get quick and easy access to all our episodes when they are live.