Understanding the Science and Philosophy of Homeopathy
In today's episode, Haylie Pomroy is joined by Dr. Payam Hakimi, D.O., Medical Director of Body of Harmony, for a conversation she has wanted to have for years. Haylie has used homeopathy since she was two, raised her kids on it, and now has two physicians at the Institute for Neuro Immune Medicine enrolled in Dr. Hakimi's training course.
Dr. Hakimi covers how homeopathy works through the immune system to inspire the body to act rather than acting on its behalf, how dilution levels and potency affect speed and depth of response, and why the concept of constitution, the full physical, physiological, and emotional makeup of a person, is central to selecting the right medicine. He also explains what blocked elimination pathways look like clinically and how homeopathic medicines target specific detox organs to release what the body has been holding.
If homeopathy has ever felt mysterious or inaccessible, this episode of Fast Metabolism Matters makes it clinical, clear, and actionable.
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Payam Hakimi is the Medical Director of Body of Harmony in Beverly Hills, CA, and Miami, FL, offering a range of services including Functional Medicine, Anti-aging Medicine, Hormone Replacement Therapy, Clinical Homeopathy, and IV Nutrition Therapy. A board-certified Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, Dr. Hakimi blends conventional and complementary medicine with a personalized approach to care. He earned his DO from Western University of Health Sciences, completed his residency at LAC+USC, and served as Chief Resident and Assistant Clinical Professor at USC Keck School of Medicine. A national leader in homeopathic education, Dr. Hakimi is a senior faculty member at the CEDH and the only U.S. physician to consistently lecture on homeopathy at medical conferences, sharing his expertise with diverse healthcare audiences.
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Learn more about the Body of Harmony through their website: https://bodyofharmony.com/
Haylie Pomroy, Founder and CEO of The Haylie Pomroy Group, is a leading health strategist specializing in metabolism, weight loss, and integrative wellness. With over 25 years of experience, she has worked with top medical institutions and high-profile clients, developing targeted programs and supplements rooted in the "Food is Medicine" philosophy. Inspired by her own autoimmune journey, she combines expertise in nutrition, biochemistry, and patient advocacy to help others reclaim their health. She is a New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet.
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Edited Transcript
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Homeopathy is a substance that will create an effect in the body that will make the body accomplish something. And we think it works through the immune system. And it sort of is about encouraging the body to get something done. And if we can think about sort of vaccines to go back in time where homeopathy started, it was the time that vaccines were sort of becoming one of the leading systems of medicine at the time.
Haylie Pomroy: Welcome to the Hope and Help podcast, where we talk about science and science-based tools for fatigue and chronic illness. I'm your host, Haylie Pomroy, a #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet, leading health and wellness expert, and that's right, guys, I'm back in school. I'm a PhD student right now in neuroimmunology, and as always, a fierce advocate for those in need of a little bit of help and hope.
Today, we're going to be talking about a subject very near and dear to my heart. We are going to tackle the topic of homeopathy. Personally, I have taken homeopathics since I was two years old. I raised my kids on homeopathy, and I think it is a very powerful form of medicine. As you know, for our community, whenever we have a subject that we're going to tackle, I try to seek out an expert in the field, someone that is revered by many, and so today, I'm very excited to have Dr. Hakimi with me.
Dr. Hakimi, thank you so much for being here today.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Thank you very much.
Haylie Pomroy: It is wonderful. You used to be in my neck of the woods in Beverly Hills. We had offices there together, and now you're here in Miami, Florida.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yes, we moved to Miami, and we're happy about it.
Haylie Pomroy: That's great, and when you say “we,” you told me your wife is from here, so I'm sure she's extra happy. Happy wife, happy life. I'm a firm believer in that.
Dr. Hakimi, there's so much about homeopathy that I want to ask you. Kind of first, let's start from the basics. What in basic terms is homeopathy?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: In basic terms, homeopathy is a substance that will create an effect in the body that will make the body accomplish something, and we think it works through the immune system, and it sort of is about encouraging the body to get something done.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. I always say it inspires action in the body, as opposed to kind of doing something for the body. It inspires action. Is that a good kind of — it's the way I grew up thinking about homeopathy.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly, exactly. That's exactly how it is, and if we can think about sort of vaccines to go back in time where homeopathy started, it was the time that vaccines were sort of becoming one of the leading sort of systems of medicine at the time. What happened is we started giving small amounts of viruses to people to sort of get their body to create an action to it. And homeopathy, I think of it exactly the same way. That's what it does as well.
Haylie Pomroy: And so it's funny, because we just had a pharmacologist on, and we were talking about the difference between what used to really be an inoculation with the vaccines and what is now. It's a totally different aspect of medicine. And with homeopathy, is there actual substance in there, or is it more like the electrical signature of the product? Like, how does that work? Like, are you going to chemistry be able to isolate the substance, or?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: It depends how diluted the homeopathic medication is. We use some of the homeopathic medications as mother tinctures. That means they're the actual substance. And then there are others that get diluted and diluted, and that's the number that you actually see on the homeopathic medication, on the tubes, that says 6C or 15C or 30C. That relates to how diluted it is. The more diluted it gets, the less of the actual substance is in the medication.
Haylie Pomroy: Dr. Hakimi, your practice is very robust. You do all aspects of integrative and functional medicine.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yeah, we do. We start from, I think I started when it was called holistic
Haylie Pomroy: Alternative medicine. You've got to do this 30 years, like, pick a name.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And then it was called integrative medicine. What we do, what I do in the office is functional medicine, hormone replacement therapy, clinical homeopathy, osteopathy and cranial osteopathy, anti-aging medicine, IV nutrition. And so we cover everything under one roof, actually.
Haylie Pomroy: What was the motivation for you to get into this kind of medicine?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: I think this was a love that was there from day one, maybe from the time I went to osteopathic school. A great deal of my time was reading other books because I had heard the first week of osteopathic school, medical school, they teach you how to study properly. And one of the techniques was to change the way your brain is functioning. And that means not working, not sort of concentrating on medicine, but actually doing something else. And I was very much involved in alternative medicine. And so I loved it. I started reading books from day one of medical school. Sort of this alternative path started from day one of medical school with me. And it's sort of grown since then.
Haylie Pomroy: And was homeopathy something that was introduced early on? In our practice, I always say it wasn't by choice; it was by need. There were different modalities that were working, but in the complex cases that we were seeing, we needed that aspect in. I was exposed to it young. I needed it, though. How did it come into your practice?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, it's interesting. I was the chief resident for the family medicine department at the University of Southern California, LA County. And one of my sort of tasks was to bring an educational piece to the residency program. And so I was tired of bringing in the old sales reps who will bring food and we will talk about the medication, which we had done many years. What I asked my resident was, are you open to bringing your own food from the cafeteria? And then we're going to talk about other things. And I gave them a lecture on osteopathy. They loved it. And then I started with acupuncture. We had people who did raw and vegan food and name it; we started doing. And homeopathy was one of the other aspects that I brought in as an educational piece to the residency program. And right away, it was love at first sight. As soon as I heard it, I knew that this is what's going to help my patients. Because if I wanted to continue on this path of more natural therapies with osteopathy, homeopathy would be a really nice sort of engagement with osteopathy. And that worked really well for me. I started early on with homeopathy as well. And I've loved it. It's fantastic.
Haylie Pomroy: We're going to call it a natural therapy. Would we consider that it's in the natural therapy space? Although it's interesting because I was just in Vienna and Austria this year.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: My favorite city.
Haylie Pomroy: Oh, God, I loved it. But my favorite pharmacy almost in the world. And I try to hit them all. But it's so cool to see their pharmacy in Austria, in Germany, in Switzerland. And homeopathy is right up there with any other pharmacological option. It's such a standard of care.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, even in this country, homeopathic medications, we don't call them remedies because they're medications, actually, because FDA has been regulating them since the 1900s, and they are treated as medications.
And at the time, and we sort of have probably forgotten this, but we had early 1900s, late 1800s, we had around 22 homeopathic medical schools in this country. And we had around 100 homeopathic hospitals where the staff was homeopathic doctors treating patients. We've had homeopathic sort of psychiatrists.
In this country, homeopathy was one of the biggest things at the time. And we can see from the monument of Hahnemann in Washington, D.C., because it's one of the only monuments of a physician. And it was put up because of all the amazing things that he added to the medical knowledge of the time. We sort of forget that homeopathy is a medicine because we've heard remedies so much. And we think it's a, yes, we can say it's natural in the sense that it is the basic components of it are natural substances. But in essence, it's considered a medication and a medicine. That's what we call it, homeopathic medications.
Haylie Pomroy: Recently, there's been some regulation issues coming up around homeopathics. There's been some that I've had a hard time accessing now in the United States that I used to be able to access really readily in the U.S. And now we're having a difficult time getting them. What's going on with it?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: What happened with the FDA was actually very positive for homeopathy, because if you remember, you would go to Whole Foods and all these places and you would see many different supplements marked as homeopathic medications, although they did not have anything to do with homeopathy.
Haylie Pomroy: Really?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yes. They were not using homeopathic dilutions. They were just putting homeopathy on the box because homeopathy has become sort of the term to sell things. FDA had an issue with that. And what happened through, and FTC as well, what happened, the resolution was, which was again, very positive for homeopathy, is these companies cannot put homeopathic medication or cannot put homeopathy on their supplements unless they can show that it was manufactured in a homeopathic pharmacy with homeopathic restraints and principles and everything that goes with it. It was actually fantastic for homeopathy, and we're very happy about it.
Haylie Pomroy: Okay. And that's great to know, because we found that there were certain things that were difficult to get and suddenly had changed. And I really didn't understand what was going on.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: I think some of the injectables were taken away from—
Haylie Pomroy: The Traumeel.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly. That was taken away, but based on certain sort of regulation changes. But we still think that that part of it was not positive because those injectables were doing a lot of good for a lot of our patients. I can bring an example. My father had an issue, and I took him to Cedars-Sinai, he had a sciatica back pain and nothing really. He was on morphine and everything else. And he called me from the ER and said, can you come get me, please? These people don't know what they're doing. I go and get him out of the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, and I bring him home, and I run to my office, grab Traumeel, bring it back. And he was basically writhing in pain on the floor. And I inject him, and we're talking with the family, with my mom and my brothers. And then half an hour later, my dad is sitting up eating. What happened?
Haylie Pomroy: Yeah. We used a lot of the injectable Traumeel for, I had a car accident and it was just life-changing for me. It was wonderful. I hated to see that go. But good news is it's still available out of the country. I guess good news if you're going out of the country. I want to ask about, you brought up Hahnemann. And in my practices and in my space I really like the German model of homotoxicology, how the body toxifies or how it detoxifies. That there is actually a system of the body depositing toxins or trying or attempting to secrete toxins. How does homeopathy play into that model of medicine? It's not like we just get poisoned and you have this outcome. They actually talk through the phases of the body, innate immune response, the excretion reaction. And then the degenerative response, the deposition, depositing of toxins or viruses or some sort of provocative agent. How does homeopathy work on those areas of what systems are being impacted?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: One of the most important things in homeopathy is elimination. Elimination is, it either happens, or it happens slowly, or it's retarded. The tissues that eliminate are obviously the digestive system, the genitourinary system, the skin, the lungs, the mucous membranes. Homeopathy, we think whenever anything comes to the body, even water, it has to be used, and then the rest of it has to be eliminated somewhere. Calcium, magnesium, anything else that we use.
Haylie Pomroy: Food.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Food has to be eliminated as well. When the process of elimination gets retarded, what happens is things back up, and it's the backup that's the problem. The backup causes abnormalities with the skin. We see it as psoriasis. We see it as acne. We see it as other things. It causes abnormalities with the lungs. We see people who are prone to asthma, bronchitis, and everything else, or anywhere else in the body. We see people who have genitourinary problems continuously and chronically. And so we know an elimination system has been blocked. To change things, we use homeopathic medication specifically for those elimination pathways to help our patients to eliminate better. And that releases the body and gets rid of a lot of the toxins.
Haylie Pomroy: And that includes things that promote lymphatic drainage. And liver detoxification and not just movement of the bowel, sweating, things like that.
Hi, it's Haylie Pomroy, your host. I’ve written six New York Times Best-selling books on metabolic pathways, and my latest book, Toxic Overload, tells you exactly what to do when your body’s overburdened. If you go to hayliepomroy.com/book for a limited time you can download a digital copy of this book completely free. That’s hayliepomroy.com/book. Grab your free copy while supplies last. Now, back to our show.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly. Because we have to use all of those. And I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of constitution. We use the constitution as a way of knowing the patient that's in front of us, which elimination system is not necessarily working the way it's supposed to, and then encouraging that specific elimination system.
Haylie Pomroy: For our community, let's talk a minute about constitutions, because it's a term that's used in homeopathy. And will you tell us all, like, what do we mean by a person's constitution? Is it akin to their genetic predisposition? Is it their disc profile, their psychological profile? Or what does a constitution encompass? All of the above.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: All of the above. Constitution is the physical, physiological, and behavioral, and emotional makeup of a person.
Haylie Pomroy: Can you say that again?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: The physical, physiological, and the behavioral, emotional.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: We put the behavioral, emotional are part of the homeopathic medications and constitutions. We do have certain constitution, like a phosphorus, which is sensitive to light and sensitive to sound and sensitive to spaces. And so we know that as an emotional behavioral aspect, we know what a person who is a phosphorus constitution is going to do. But we also know that a person who has phosphorus will have some abnormalities in the physiology, which makes them do certain things. And then we also know that they get some, because of the way their body is, they will get some joint issues and neck pains and back pains and knee pains that becomes part of it. When we look at somebody, with a person, we try to figure out and see if we can match all of these things. And these things, as you said, are partly genetic. We actually, just like a medical doctor, we ask the family history, because the family history gives us everything that a patient might be, and that can direct us to what their constitution can be.
Haylie Pomroy: That's great. That's great. And is a person's constitution always their constitution, or does it change depending upon what they're dealing with from a health perspective?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly. The constitution changes. And one of these changes is a constitution that is an eliminator, again, like phosphorus, with a constitution that does, again, does not eliminate properly, which becomes another homeopathic medication. Once phosphorus goes through its degradation, they can become another homeopathic medication. Or we see some of the homeopathic constitutions that are close to one another, like sulfur, like sodium, pulsatilla. These can also, at times, sort of switch back and forth based on the emotional and physiological effects that they're going through.
Haylie Pomroy: Clinically, are there some, like, I think in my mind, like, oh homeopathy works really well for this, or a patient presenting, I wish I could get some homeopathy in them. Like, is there certain things that are just ripe for a homeopathic intervention?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yes. Well, number one, there are certain people that respond better to homeopathic medications. Number two, there's certain homeopathic medications that work really good.
Haylie Pomroy: Give me the people.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: The people.
Haylie Pomroy: Is it a moment in time, or is it just, they're just those people? Because I have two kids, and one is, like, so good with homeopathy, and, I mean, profound effects. Big raspberries gone. The other one is just more of an herbal kid. Like, they're 20s; I still have kids. But one just we do homeopathy, but they're just we're so different, and they're both mine.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Bodies that have not been under a lot of stress, bodies that are new to medication, bodies that actually, like, we have patients that come in, and they say, if you give me this much of a B12 shot, I won't sleep for two days. We know those people are sensitive to everything. We know homeopathic medication is going to work really good with them. The other criteria, well, it's not a criteria, but the other thing that tells us that homeopathic medications are going to work good is, if a patient has been on a medication, how many medication, and what type of medications. We know medications like beta blockers. We know medications like steroids. Basically, what they're doing is beta blockers are working on the nervous system to sort of calm, bring down the reaction of the body.
Haylie Pomroy: Like a sedative.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Steroids are doing exactly the same thing. If we have a patient who is on these medications, or they have been on multiple medications, we don't expect the homeopathic medication to work right away. We know that we have to give it some time for the homeopathic medications to start working. And that's what we use a lot of times with it's promising the patient and telling the patient, how long is it going to take for things to get better is another question with homeopathy. And that sort of comes into place. Like, well, what is your physiology? What has your physiology been through so far? And how responsive are you to different things?
Haylie Pomroy: I always go back to what you said earlier, which is homeopathy evokes the body to do something. The body has to have the energy and the capacity to do what you're enticing it to do. I love nutrition, but I always, whenever we're coupling homeopathy, we always try to make the most nutrient-available protocol. Easy to absorb, easy to bring in, not hard to digest, because we want to—everything you do in your body is nutrient dependent. If we're going to provoke a change with homeopathy, that change is a nutrient-dependent activity. And so we try to kind of couple that. With homeopathics, there are different potentizations. Are some potencies, like I've heard sometimes some potencies are quick acting and some don't even take effect until it's been in the body for three to four weeks. Is that the case with potentization, or how does that work?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: It's the case with the substance itself. Like we have a substance that is made from a honeybee, which is called Apis mellifica. And so we know in nature, well, and the reason that medication works really good and Apis mellifica has research that shows it works the best at around 15C. Number one, try to use it at 15C, the potency of the dilution of the homeopathic medication.
The other thing is when it works fast in nature, it's also going to work fast in homeopathy. Let's say a honeybee sting. It's right away. It's going to be painful. It's going to swell. That allergic reaction, the dopamine, the histamine release is going to happen very fast, and the person is going to have a major reaction. Now, the acuteness of that is very important because it also constitutes how homeopathic medication works. Apis mellifica also works that quickly.
Apis mellifica sometimes works in 10 to 15 minutes. You see it in front of your eyes, maybe with some of the welts that you were talking about earlier, it works that fast. And then we have other homeopathic medications that are heavier metals, let's say, or homeopathic dilution of sand or other homeopathic dilutions.
Haylie Pomroy: What about like tissue salts or cell salts? Are those quicker or slower?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Those depend on the physiology of the patient and which are we more carbonic, more fluoric, more phosphoric, and where we're going, because some of them eliminate faster. Then we have the homeopathic medications that are homeopathic dilutions of metals like aurum metallicum or muriaticum, which is a homeopathic dilution of gold. These are medications that are a little bit heavier. It's going to take them a little bit longer to work. They're still going to work, but we don't give it 10 minutes to work as we did with Apis. It's a different, it's a completely different class.
Haylie Pomroy: What are some homeopathics that you, like top three things that you have all the time available in your, I'm going to call it your personal first aid kit. I've got my purse out here. I can tell you what's in mine.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Definitely Arnica. Arnica is an amazing research that shows how it works, and it helps with angiogenesis, and it helps with inflammation and everything else.
Apis mellifica is another one that's there all the time. And then one of the homeopathic medications like Gelsimium, I like a lot because it's a homeopathic medication that helps you with a lot of different things, starting from the anxieties and everything else, sleep issues. It helps with flu-like symptoms in the body. And it's one of the major medications that we use actually with a chronic fatigue syndrome because Gelsimium is a homeopathic medication for muscle aches and sort of this feeling of, we call it obtundate. That means I feel heavy and I feel tired physically and mentally.
Haylie Pomroy: Kind of a wet blanket.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Wet blanket.
Haylie Pomroy: That's interesting with that, the last one you were talking about, Gelsimium, I've always thought of it also helping with when you talk about with ME-CFS is helping modulate that immune response, if a person's immune response is out of harmony.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Gelsimium actually has a really good research that shows that it works in the allopregnanolone pathways. We know actually, Gelsimium is the homeopathic dilution of St. John's wort. We know actually how it works in the nervous system, and we know how it sort of stimulates or dampens the stimulation of the nervous system. And that's how you take away some of these pain activities, anxiety issues, and sort of feeling tired, feeling I can't think straight, which comes with CFS. It's ME/CFS, which is I'm in a brain fog. I know it, but I can't recall it. It can't come back to me. Gelsimium.
Haylie Pomroy: Do you have like website resources? One of the biggest things about building our community is it's so hard for people across the United States and globally, because we're globally syndicated too, to get access to people. And I know that you obviously have a wealth of knowledge, not just in the homeopathic, but from a functional medicine perspective. Do you post blog posts? Do you post things? Yes. Okay. And what's the website?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Our website is bodyofharmony.com. Body of Harmony. The philosophy was to harmonize the body. It was never to push or pull or anti or it was more about how do we harmonize the body so it works better. Body of Harmony has a blog. I post a lot of different things. There is an ME/CFS blog, actually, that's really good. It covers everything from the supplements, all the homeopathic medications that we use, like Mercurius Sol and Gelsimium that we talked about, Arsenicum Album and Nux Vomica and Pulsatilla, everything else that we use in homeopathy. Then it goes through low-dose naltrexone. There's a video on low-dose naltrexone there, which is used as an anti-inflammatory and immune boosting. And it's been fantastic with ME/CFS patients. Then there is the IV nutrients like NAD and Glutathione and everything else that's used to help patients with ME/CFS.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. And the other piece that I love is kind of the information helps people even go back and talk to their doctors. There's a massive, I mean, I really think the pandemic has made it worse. There's a massive deficiency in having access to adequate care, period. I mean, I don't know, I haven't had anybody disagree with me on that. And I usually say things that can sometimes be disagreeable. But someone was talking, and I was in a pharmacology group the other day, and they were talking about, well, we shouldn't release genetic information unless it's been signed off by a doctor. I said, well, good luck getting to see your doctor. And that genie's already left the bottle.
I mean, it's direct-to-consumer available. And I know you do a lot of functional medicine testing. Like you said, I'm a massive IV therapy advocate. I would love to ask you, because I have access, those individuals that are struggling right now to talk to their doctors about getting I used the word alternative many moons ago, getting adequate care, because it's really just adequate care at this point. This whole alternative versus integrative versus functional, personalized, however you want to call it. It's medicine, and it's the way medicine should be, period. Because we've gotten so far away on the other end of 3-minute to 7-minute visits with a script pad attached at the middle, beginning, and end. How can someone talk to their doctor if they're going in and they're not feeling well? They're dealing with we have a lot of chronic. We were getting so many long COVID. I don't know what we're going to do. How do they talk to their doctor about I want to do broader care? What are some tips that you can give them?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: One of the things they can do, and this is, I'll go back to one of my experiences. When I first came across low-dose naltrexone (LDN), I think it was 2006, and I literally looked at the research, dropped to the trash can, put it in the trash can. I said, this is trash. It doesn't work. And then it came across my table one more time. And then a patient brought it to me and said, look, it works. And so then I started sort of researching about it and I figured that it actually works. And then I started putting my patients on LDN. In medicine, there is, I hate to call it narcissism, but I will. It's a narcissism that as medical doctors, we know everything. And the only thing that can cure things is a medication. That's not true.
Haylie Pomroy: It's absolutely not true.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And, but unfortunately, doctors don't have time. As you said, they have the 7-minutes visit, and then they have 10 minutes to sort of type in their notes after you leave the office. So they're working usually till 7, 8, 9, 10 PM just to keep up with their day. But if you were to take even the stuff on my website and, and send them the links, send them the link that is on LDN, send them the link that's on NAD IV, send them the link of all, all of these things.
Haylie Pomroy: I always tell them to print it out and make copies. We do this thing that's called a request for care. We have that online community. We all sit down and help prep people before they go to their doctor's office. I heard you give all of us permission to bring white papers, to bring documents to our physician, to help encourage them to participate in our wellness journey. And so I always tell them with the request for care, I say, make a copy for the doc, for the nurse, the front desk, and have one put in your church. And I agree with you, and so many of our community are talking about being just so medically gaslit when they go into the doctor's office, and they're told you're fine, you're aging, lose weight, stop eating burgers whatever it is that they're dismissed about. But that's why I love the resources that you give on your website. Is because it's, it's not just for their own personal knowledge, but it's also backed in science so they can take it and communicate with the healthcare provider that they're destined to see for right now. Exactly.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And a lot of what's on my website is, has research behind it so they can actually see what works and what doesn't work. And then make your doctors be a little bit more receptive to these things by talking about mold and yeast and, and viruses and, and environmental toxins. These are the things that are bothering and sort of putting pressure and stress on our body and our immune system and are revving up our inflammatory system. We need to know what these are, and doctors need to start getting to sort of look at these things as a possible part of the medical, the sort of chronic medical conditions.
Haylie Pomroy: Hi, it's Haylie Pomroy, your host. When I was going through my health crisis, the worst part of it was feeling lost and alone. And I decided that I didn't want anybody else to feel as desperate as I did. That's why we set up a private membership group where you can come in, ask questions, get support, be connected with people that can actually help you on your health journey. If you go to hayliepomroy.com/member, you can join me for 30 days for free. I'll see you there. We can jump in and we can start to organize the path for your wellness. That's hayliepomroy.com/member. I will see you there. Now back to our show.
We were talking at the Institute about trying to look at some of the positives that came out of the pandemic. One was that everybody started having nomenclature around science. People were talking about cytokine storms and spike proteins and really forcing to get to understand and know their body. But I think with long COVID, we even have the we need to re-educate the medical schools period. We have to get in and I'm taking it as personal responsibility from a nutrition perspective to get in and make inroads into the medical education because they're the ones that are the front lines seeing these patients, giving the patients permission to be fierce advocates for themselves. And collaborative in the education piece.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: I agree. I think our medical schooling is long overdue for an overhaul because we've been doing it for the past hundred years. There's nothing new to it. My nutrition course in class in medical school was 50 minutes, and where it was the doctor talked about all the vitamins and then at the end said, don't use vitamins, the vitamins don't work. But you have a test on it the next day. What does vitamin A do? And so it was very confusing when you see in pharmacology that these things actually work, and then somebody else we're reading in pharmacology medical school, these things work and then nutrition, these things don't work. I think our medical school definitely needs a change for sure. It's been there for a long period of time, and it's sort of teaching the old things over and over again, but we haven't added anything to it. And we need to open our medical schools to everything else that's working, everything that's experiential, that's working. We have acupuncture that's been there for a long time. And we say acupuncture doesn't work. And then the homeopathy has been there for a very long time. Homeopathy is where some of the medicine like glonoinum, nitroglycerin, and all this other stuff came from, these came from homeopathic research. It's time for us to start creating doctors that can actually help because we're, we're changing. The soil is changing. The air is changing. Toxins are changing. Everything has changed since 50 years ago.
Haylie Pomroy: And food is not food. Food is not food.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: We need someone who, we need doctors to know what's happening now. Not what, not what was happening a hundred years ago.
Haylie Pomroy: Exactly.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: We're done with that.
Haylie Pomroy: Exactly. And it's like, we're, we have patients that are in a completely different environment. Air, food, water. I always say, if you plan on eating, breathing, drinking, or sleeping in this today, you are in a completely different environment than you were when the medical books were written. And even in a lot of the research that's been cited it's not even replicable anymore. They were saying somewhere in the 80th percentile of all the research that's been published is not replicable in today's patient.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, we can talk about research at another time. No, I'll leave it with this. We have five migraine medications. And then you have week one, a rep comes in and says, our migraine medication is the best. Look comparing to these five medications, it did the best. Next week, the next rep comes and says, our medication is the best. Comparing to these five. And then every single one of them says exactly the same thing. How can we call that research? Because research means it has to be able to be replicated. How can we call this research when only with five medications, everyone comes and says “Ours is the best.” And now you have sort of blood pressure medications that's not five, it's like more than 25. And they're all saying their medication is the best. How does this happen?
Haylie Pomroy: And none of us are deficient in migraine medication or blood pressure medication. There is no deficiency. We weren't born with a deficiency in that medication. So functional medicine, we're working with what's gotten out of balance. And with homeopathy, we're working with turning back on the systems. And evoking the system. Positive change. Awesome. I know we're almost out of time. I want to go down some very specific subjects. Will you come back?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Of course.
Haylie Pomroy: That would be wonderful.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Of course.
Haylie Pomroy: So do you see homeopathy being important in kind of the health crisis that we're in, coming back to some of the Hahnemann teaching, coming back to using that in hospital situations? It was shocking to me to see IV nutrition given in Kaiser hospitals during COVID. The administration of vitamin D. Maybe it was low quality, but the administration of zinc in the hospitals, I was in a medical microbiology class at George Washington in the public health department. And the gentleman that was teaching this particular class said again, supplements don't do anything. And I said, well, if you look at the top 10 medical breakthroughs in public health, let's talk about vitamin A, let's talk about vitamin D, let's talk about scurvy, let's talk about night blindness. Are you sure? You sure? Are you sure?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yeah. I mean, with the amount, it's so funny. I was working out the other day and, and my friend grabs me and says, look at this doctor on TV. He says, probiotics don't work. You say they work. I said, there's so much research on probiotic and how can a doctor — you have to do your research before you go on national TV and you say probiotics don't work.
Haylie Pomroy: I know.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And they're not doing that.
Haylie Pomroy: I know. And in every other species, I've had my first degrees in agriculture and soil sciences before I did biochem, then a master's in nutrition, and now PhD in neuroimmunology.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And our soil is changing, so everything is changing.
Haylie Pomroy: But we're the only species that does not supplement from a mandatory perspective. There is not a horse, a dog, a cat. You cannot sell dog food without it having supplementation and black rhinos, every extinct species. but somehow our soil, but somehow we're, we're good. Although we have this massive progression of disease. Dr. Hakimi, thank you so much for talking with us today. Our community is going to have tons of questions about homeopathy. That's the goal is that we evoke questions and ideas and to have someone like you to be able to lean on for answers. We all appreciate it very, very much.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: For a lot of the doctors or physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants who are watching this right now, we do have a course where we teach doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, homeopathy. And we believe that homeopathy should be taught in, with medical knowledge, because that was one of the tenets of Hahnemann, which was, you need to know the disease. You need to know your patient. You need to understand the medication, the mechanism, and then be able to make the right decision.
I just want to say how I got to have you on the show was at the Institute for Haylie Pomroy: Neuro-Immune Medicine (INIM). And Dr. Klimas always says this. She says I didn't want to learn all these different modalities of medicine. I was forced to. I had to because what was available was not getting patients well. Two of our docs are taking your training course. Yeah. And when they came and said, oh, we're taking this training course, I said, I love homeopathy. I want to have them on the show. It was great. We're incorporating it with our patients in the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine (INIM) and to start with two of our physicians. And then what we do in our clinical, we have rounds every Friday. It was one of our favorite things to do. All the docs come together. We all talk about cases and everybody that's gone and learned and advanced their education brings it back to the whole team. I'm really, because, again, I've been taking homeopathy since I was two. I'm very excited.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, you have my full support and any of the doctors who want to sign up for our course or at least know about it is called CEDH or Center for Education and Development of Homeopathy. We are in many different, we're in more than 30 countries and we have more than 400 teachers teaching homeopathy to doctors. That's wonderful. Our plan is to grow homeopathy and bring it back to what Hahnemann was talking about and the basic knowledge and the basic concepts so that we can decrease the amount of toxins that are being given to patients and actually use natural substances, which we know have worked over the past 200, 300 years. We're going to use those and sort of help out our community and your community.
Haylie Pomroy: I appreciate it so much. You guys, there's lots of hope if you're struggling right now. We're bringing solutions every day, and I'll make sure that all of the contact information is available for the community. We will connect more, and I look forward to having you on. There are a lot of subjects we didn't get to cover, but I think this is really going to help everybody out there.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Thank you very much.
Haylie Pomroy: Thank you.
In today's episode, Haylie Pomroy is joined by Dr. Payam Hakimi, D.O., Medical Director of Body of Harmony, for a conversation she has wanted to have for years. Haylie has used homeopathy since she was two, raised her kids on it, and now has two physicians at the Institute for Neuro Immune Medicine enrolled in Dr. Hakimi's training course.
Dr. Hakimi covers how homeopathy works through the immune system to inspire the body to act rather than acting on its behalf, how dilution levels and potency affect speed and depth of response, and why the concept of constitution, the full physical, physiological, and emotional makeup of a person, is central to selecting the right medicine. He also explains what blocked elimination pathways look like clinically and how homeopathic medicines target specific detox organs to release what the body has been holding.
If homeopathy has ever felt mysterious or inaccessible, this episode of Fast Metabolism Matters makes it clinical, clear, and actionable.
If your body feels like it's running on empty, overburdened, or just not responding the way it used to, Haylie's latest book, Toxic Overload, tells you exactly what to do. Download your free digital copy today and start understanding what your body is trying to tell you.
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Payam Hakimi is the Medical Director of Body of Harmony in Beverly Hills, CA, and Miami, FL, offering a range of services including Functional Medicine, Anti-aging Medicine, Hormone Replacement Therapy, Clinical Homeopathy, and IV Nutrition Therapy. A board-certified Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, Dr. Hakimi blends conventional and complementary medicine with a personalized approach to care. He earned his DO from Western University of Health Sciences, completed his residency at LAC+USC, and served as Chief Resident and Assistant Clinical Professor at USC Keck School of Medicine. A national leader in homeopathic education, Dr. Hakimi is a senior faculty member at the CEDH and the only U.S. physician to consistently lecture on homeopathy at medical conferences, sharing his expertise with diverse healthcare audiences.
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Learn more about the Body of Harmony through their website: https://bodyofharmony.com/
Haylie Pomroy, Founder and CEO of The Haylie Pomroy Group, is a leading health strategist specializing in metabolism, weight loss, and integrative wellness. With over 25 years of experience, she has worked with top medical institutions and high-profile clients, developing targeted programs and supplements rooted in the "Food is Medicine" philosophy. Inspired by her own autoimmune journey, she combines expertise in nutrition, biochemistry, and patient advocacy to help others reclaim their health. She is a New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet.
Learn more about Haylie Pomroy's approach to wellness through her website: https://hayliepomroy.com
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Edited Transcript
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Homeopathy is a substance that will create an effect in the body that will make the body accomplish something. And we think it works through the immune system. And it sort of is about encouraging the body to get something done. And if we can think about sort of vaccines to go back in time where homeopathy started, it was the time that vaccines were sort of becoming one of the leading systems of medicine at the time.
Haylie Pomroy: Welcome to the Hope and Help podcast, where we talk about science and science-based tools for fatigue and chronic illness. I'm your host, Haylie Pomroy, a #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet, leading health and wellness expert, and that's right, guys, I'm back in school. I'm a PhD student right now in neuroimmunology, and as always, a fierce advocate for those in need of a little bit of help and hope.
Today, we're going to be talking about a subject very near and dear to my heart. We are going to tackle the topic of homeopathy. Personally, I have taken homeopathics since I was two years old. I raised my kids on homeopathy, and I think it is a very powerful form of medicine. As you know, for our community, whenever we have a subject that we're going to tackle, I try to seek out an expert in the field, someone that is revered by many, and so today, I'm very excited to have Dr. Hakimi with me.
Dr. Hakimi, thank you so much for being here today.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Thank you very much.
Haylie Pomroy: It is wonderful. You used to be in my neck of the woods in Beverly Hills. We had offices there together, and now you're here in Miami, Florida.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yes, we moved to Miami, and we're happy about it.
Haylie Pomroy: That's great, and when you say “we,” you told me your wife is from here, so I'm sure she's extra happy. Happy wife, happy life. I'm a firm believer in that.
Dr. Hakimi, there's so much about homeopathy that I want to ask you. Kind of first, let's start from the basics. What in basic terms is homeopathy?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: In basic terms, homeopathy is a substance that will create an effect in the body that will make the body accomplish something, and we think it works through the immune system, and it sort of is about encouraging the body to get something done.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. I always say it inspires action in the body, as opposed to kind of doing something for the body. It inspires action. Is that a good kind of — it's the way I grew up thinking about homeopathy.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly, exactly. That's exactly how it is, and if we can think about sort of vaccines to go back in time where homeopathy started, it was the time that vaccines were sort of becoming one of the leading sort of systems of medicine at the time. What happened is we started giving small amounts of viruses to people to sort of get their body to create an action to it. And homeopathy, I think of it exactly the same way. That's what it does as well.
Haylie Pomroy: And so it's funny, because we just had a pharmacologist on, and we were talking about the difference between what used to really be an inoculation with the vaccines and what is now. It's a totally different aspect of medicine. And with homeopathy, is there actual substance in there, or is it more like the electrical signature of the product? Like, how does that work? Like, are you going to chemistry be able to isolate the substance, or?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: It depends how diluted the homeopathic medication is. We use some of the homeopathic medications as mother tinctures. That means they're the actual substance. And then there are others that get diluted and diluted, and that's the number that you actually see on the homeopathic medication, on the tubes, that says 6C or 15C or 30C. That relates to how diluted it is. The more diluted it gets, the less of the actual substance is in the medication.
Haylie Pomroy: Dr. Hakimi, your practice is very robust. You do all aspects of integrative and functional medicine.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yeah, we do. We start from, I think I started when it was called holistic
Haylie Pomroy: Alternative medicine. You've got to do this 30 years, like, pick a name.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And then it was called integrative medicine. What we do, what I do in the office is functional medicine, hormone replacement therapy, clinical homeopathy, osteopathy and cranial osteopathy, anti-aging medicine, IV nutrition. And so we cover everything under one roof, actually.
Haylie Pomroy: What was the motivation for you to get into this kind of medicine?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: I think this was a love that was there from day one, maybe from the time I went to osteopathic school. A great deal of my time was reading other books because I had heard the first week of osteopathic school, medical school, they teach you how to study properly. And one of the techniques was to change the way your brain is functioning. And that means not working, not sort of concentrating on medicine, but actually doing something else. And I was very much involved in alternative medicine. And so I loved it. I started reading books from day one of medical school. Sort of this alternative path started from day one of medical school with me. And it's sort of grown since then.
Haylie Pomroy: And was homeopathy something that was introduced early on? In our practice, I always say it wasn't by choice; it was by need. There were different modalities that were working, but in the complex cases that we were seeing, we needed that aspect in. I was exposed to it young. I needed it, though. How did it come into your practice?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, it's interesting. I was the chief resident for the family medicine department at the University of Southern California, LA County. And one of my sort of tasks was to bring an educational piece to the residency program. And so I was tired of bringing in the old sales reps who will bring food and we will talk about the medication, which we had done many years. What I asked my resident was, are you open to bringing your own food from the cafeteria? And then we're going to talk about other things. And I gave them a lecture on osteopathy. They loved it. And then I started with acupuncture. We had people who did raw and vegan food and name it; we started doing. And homeopathy was one of the other aspects that I brought in as an educational piece to the residency program. And right away, it was love at first sight. As soon as I heard it, I knew that this is what's going to help my patients. Because if I wanted to continue on this path of more natural therapies with osteopathy, homeopathy would be a really nice sort of engagement with osteopathy. And that worked really well for me. I started early on with homeopathy as well. And I've loved it. It's fantastic.
Haylie Pomroy: We're going to call it a natural therapy. Would we consider that it's in the natural therapy space? Although it's interesting because I was just in Vienna and Austria this year.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: My favorite city.
Haylie Pomroy: Oh, God, I loved it. But my favorite pharmacy almost in the world. And I try to hit them all. But it's so cool to see their pharmacy in Austria, in Germany, in Switzerland. And homeopathy is right up there with any other pharmacological option. It's such a standard of care.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, even in this country, homeopathic medications, we don't call them remedies because they're medications, actually, because FDA has been regulating them since the 1900s, and they are treated as medications.
And at the time, and we sort of have probably forgotten this, but we had early 1900s, late 1800s, we had around 22 homeopathic medical schools in this country. And we had around 100 homeopathic hospitals where the staff was homeopathic doctors treating patients. We've had homeopathic sort of psychiatrists.
In this country, homeopathy was one of the biggest things at the time. And we can see from the monument of Hahnemann in Washington, D.C., because it's one of the only monuments of a physician. And it was put up because of all the amazing things that he added to the medical knowledge of the time. We sort of forget that homeopathy is a medicine because we've heard remedies so much. And we think it's a, yes, we can say it's natural in the sense that it is the basic components of it are natural substances. But in essence, it's considered a medication and a medicine. That's what we call it, homeopathic medications.
Haylie Pomroy: Recently, there's been some regulation issues coming up around homeopathics. There's been some that I've had a hard time accessing now in the United States that I used to be able to access really readily in the U.S. And now we're having a difficult time getting them. What's going on with it?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: What happened with the FDA was actually very positive for homeopathy, because if you remember, you would go to Whole Foods and all these places and you would see many different supplements marked as homeopathic medications, although they did not have anything to do with homeopathy.
Haylie Pomroy: Really?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yes. They were not using homeopathic dilutions. They were just putting homeopathy on the box because homeopathy has become sort of the term to sell things. FDA had an issue with that. And what happened through, and FTC as well, what happened, the resolution was, which was again, very positive for homeopathy, is these companies cannot put homeopathic medication or cannot put homeopathy on their supplements unless they can show that it was manufactured in a homeopathic pharmacy with homeopathic restraints and principles and everything that goes with it. It was actually fantastic for homeopathy, and we're very happy about it.
Haylie Pomroy: Okay. And that's great to know, because we found that there were certain things that were difficult to get and suddenly had changed. And I really didn't understand what was going on.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: I think some of the injectables were taken away from—
Haylie Pomroy: The Traumeel.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly. That was taken away, but based on certain sort of regulation changes. But we still think that that part of it was not positive because those injectables were doing a lot of good for a lot of our patients. I can bring an example. My father had an issue, and I took him to Cedars-Sinai, he had a sciatica back pain and nothing really. He was on morphine and everything else. And he called me from the ER and said, can you come get me, please? These people don't know what they're doing. I go and get him out of the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, and I bring him home, and I run to my office, grab Traumeel, bring it back. And he was basically writhing in pain on the floor. And I inject him, and we're talking with the family, with my mom and my brothers. And then half an hour later, my dad is sitting up eating. What happened?
Haylie Pomroy: Yeah. We used a lot of the injectable Traumeel for, I had a car accident and it was just life-changing for me. It was wonderful. I hated to see that go. But good news is it's still available out of the country. I guess good news if you're going out of the country. I want to ask about, you brought up Hahnemann. And in my practices and in my space I really like the German model of homotoxicology, how the body toxifies or how it detoxifies. That there is actually a system of the body depositing toxins or trying or attempting to secrete toxins. How does homeopathy play into that model of medicine? It's not like we just get poisoned and you have this outcome. They actually talk through the phases of the body, innate immune response, the excretion reaction. And then the degenerative response, the deposition, depositing of toxins or viruses or some sort of provocative agent. How does homeopathy work on those areas of what systems are being impacted?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: One of the most important things in homeopathy is elimination. Elimination is, it either happens, or it happens slowly, or it's retarded. The tissues that eliminate are obviously the digestive system, the genitourinary system, the skin, the lungs, the mucous membranes. Homeopathy, we think whenever anything comes to the body, even water, it has to be used, and then the rest of it has to be eliminated somewhere. Calcium, magnesium, anything else that we use.
Haylie Pomroy: Food.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Food has to be eliminated as well. When the process of elimination gets retarded, what happens is things back up, and it's the backup that's the problem. The backup causes abnormalities with the skin. We see it as psoriasis. We see it as acne. We see it as other things. It causes abnormalities with the lungs. We see people who are prone to asthma, bronchitis, and everything else, or anywhere else in the body. We see people who have genitourinary problems continuously and chronically. And so we know an elimination system has been blocked. To change things, we use homeopathic medication specifically for those elimination pathways to help our patients to eliminate better. And that releases the body and gets rid of a lot of the toxins.
Haylie Pomroy: And that includes things that promote lymphatic drainage. And liver detoxification and not just movement of the bowel, sweating, things like that.
Hi, it's Haylie Pomroy, your host. I’ve written six New York Times Best-selling books on metabolic pathways, and my latest book, Toxic Overload, tells you exactly what to do when your body’s overburdened. If you go to hayliepomroy.com/book for a limited time you can download a digital copy of this book completely free. That’s hayliepomroy.com/book. Grab your free copy while supplies last. Now, back to our show.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly. Because we have to use all of those. And I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of constitution. We use the constitution as a way of knowing the patient that's in front of us, which elimination system is not necessarily working the way it's supposed to, and then encouraging that specific elimination system.
Haylie Pomroy: For our community, let's talk a minute about constitutions, because it's a term that's used in homeopathy. And will you tell us all, like, what do we mean by a person's constitution? Is it akin to their genetic predisposition? Is it their disc profile, their psychological profile? Or what does a constitution encompass? All of the above.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: All of the above. Constitution is the physical, physiological, and behavioral, and emotional makeup of a person.
Haylie Pomroy: Can you say that again?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: The physical, physiological, and the behavioral, emotional.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: We put the behavioral, emotional are part of the homeopathic medications and constitutions. We do have certain constitution, like a phosphorus, which is sensitive to light and sensitive to sound and sensitive to spaces. And so we know that as an emotional behavioral aspect, we know what a person who is a phosphorus constitution is going to do. But we also know that a person who has phosphorus will have some abnormalities in the physiology, which makes them do certain things. And then we also know that they get some, because of the way their body is, they will get some joint issues and neck pains and back pains and knee pains that becomes part of it. When we look at somebody, with a person, we try to figure out and see if we can match all of these things. And these things, as you said, are partly genetic. We actually, just like a medical doctor, we ask the family history, because the family history gives us everything that a patient might be, and that can direct us to what their constitution can be.
Haylie Pomroy: That's great. That's great. And is a person's constitution always their constitution, or does it change depending upon what they're dealing with from a health perspective?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Exactly. The constitution changes. And one of these changes is a constitution that is an eliminator, again, like phosphorus, with a constitution that does, again, does not eliminate properly, which becomes another homeopathic medication. Once phosphorus goes through its degradation, they can become another homeopathic medication. Or we see some of the homeopathic constitutions that are close to one another, like sulfur, like sodium, pulsatilla. These can also, at times, sort of switch back and forth based on the emotional and physiological effects that they're going through.
Haylie Pomroy: Clinically, are there some, like, I think in my mind, like, oh homeopathy works really well for this, or a patient presenting, I wish I could get some homeopathy in them. Like, is there certain things that are just ripe for a homeopathic intervention?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yes. Well, number one, there are certain people that respond better to homeopathic medications. Number two, there's certain homeopathic medications that work really good.
Haylie Pomroy: Give me the people.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: The people.
Haylie Pomroy: Is it a moment in time, or is it just, they're just those people? Because I have two kids, and one is, like, so good with homeopathy, and, I mean, profound effects. Big raspberries gone. The other one is just more of an herbal kid. Like, they're 20s; I still have kids. But one just we do homeopathy, but they're just we're so different, and they're both mine.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Bodies that have not been under a lot of stress, bodies that are new to medication, bodies that actually, like, we have patients that come in, and they say, if you give me this much of a B12 shot, I won't sleep for two days. We know those people are sensitive to everything. We know homeopathic medication is going to work really good with them. The other criteria, well, it's not a criteria, but the other thing that tells us that homeopathic medications are going to work good is, if a patient has been on a medication, how many medication, and what type of medications. We know medications like beta blockers. We know medications like steroids. Basically, what they're doing is beta blockers are working on the nervous system to sort of calm, bring down the reaction of the body.
Haylie Pomroy: Like a sedative.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Steroids are doing exactly the same thing. If we have a patient who is on these medications, or they have been on multiple medications, we don't expect the homeopathic medication to work right away. We know that we have to give it some time for the homeopathic medications to start working. And that's what we use a lot of times with it's promising the patient and telling the patient, how long is it going to take for things to get better is another question with homeopathy. And that sort of comes into place. Like, well, what is your physiology? What has your physiology been through so far? And how responsive are you to different things?
Haylie Pomroy: I always go back to what you said earlier, which is homeopathy evokes the body to do something. The body has to have the energy and the capacity to do what you're enticing it to do. I love nutrition, but I always, whenever we're coupling homeopathy, we always try to make the most nutrient-available protocol. Easy to absorb, easy to bring in, not hard to digest, because we want to—everything you do in your body is nutrient dependent. If we're going to provoke a change with homeopathy, that change is a nutrient-dependent activity. And so we try to kind of couple that. With homeopathics, there are different potentizations. Are some potencies, like I've heard sometimes some potencies are quick acting and some don't even take effect until it's been in the body for three to four weeks. Is that the case with potentization, or how does that work?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: It's the case with the substance itself. Like we have a substance that is made from a honeybee, which is called Apis mellifica. And so we know in nature, well, and the reason that medication works really good and Apis mellifica has research that shows it works the best at around 15C. Number one, try to use it at 15C, the potency of the dilution of the homeopathic medication.
The other thing is when it works fast in nature, it's also going to work fast in homeopathy. Let's say a honeybee sting. It's right away. It's going to be painful. It's going to swell. That allergic reaction, the dopamine, the histamine release is going to happen very fast, and the person is going to have a major reaction. Now, the acuteness of that is very important because it also constitutes how homeopathic medication works. Apis mellifica also works that quickly.
Apis mellifica sometimes works in 10 to 15 minutes. You see it in front of your eyes, maybe with some of the welts that you were talking about earlier, it works that fast. And then we have other homeopathic medications that are heavier metals, let's say, or homeopathic dilution of sand or other homeopathic dilutions.
Haylie Pomroy: What about like tissue salts or cell salts? Are those quicker or slower?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Those depend on the physiology of the patient and which are we more carbonic, more fluoric, more phosphoric, and where we're going, because some of them eliminate faster. Then we have the homeopathic medications that are homeopathic dilutions of metals like aurum metallicum or muriaticum, which is a homeopathic dilution of gold. These are medications that are a little bit heavier. It's going to take them a little bit longer to work. They're still going to work, but we don't give it 10 minutes to work as we did with Apis. It's a different, it's a completely different class.
Haylie Pomroy: What are some homeopathics that you, like top three things that you have all the time available in your, I'm going to call it your personal first aid kit. I've got my purse out here. I can tell you what's in mine.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Definitely Arnica. Arnica is an amazing research that shows how it works, and it helps with angiogenesis, and it helps with inflammation and everything else.
Apis mellifica is another one that's there all the time. And then one of the homeopathic medications like Gelsimium, I like a lot because it's a homeopathic medication that helps you with a lot of different things, starting from the anxieties and everything else, sleep issues. It helps with flu-like symptoms in the body. And it's one of the major medications that we use actually with a chronic fatigue syndrome because Gelsimium is a homeopathic medication for muscle aches and sort of this feeling of, we call it obtundate. That means I feel heavy and I feel tired physically and mentally.
Haylie Pomroy: Kind of a wet blanket.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Wet blanket.
Haylie Pomroy: That's interesting with that, the last one you were talking about, Gelsimium, I've always thought of it also helping with when you talk about with ME-CFS is helping modulate that immune response, if a person's immune response is out of harmony.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Gelsimium actually has a really good research that shows that it works in the allopregnanolone pathways. We know actually, Gelsimium is the homeopathic dilution of St. John's wort. We know actually how it works in the nervous system, and we know how it sort of stimulates or dampens the stimulation of the nervous system. And that's how you take away some of these pain activities, anxiety issues, and sort of feeling tired, feeling I can't think straight, which comes with CFS. It's ME/CFS, which is I'm in a brain fog. I know it, but I can't recall it. It can't come back to me. Gelsimium.
Haylie Pomroy: Do you have like website resources? One of the biggest things about building our community is it's so hard for people across the United States and globally, because we're globally syndicated too, to get access to people. And I know that you obviously have a wealth of knowledge, not just in the homeopathic, but from a functional medicine perspective. Do you post blog posts? Do you post things? Yes. Okay. And what's the website?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Our website is bodyofharmony.com. Body of Harmony. The philosophy was to harmonize the body. It was never to push or pull or anti or it was more about how do we harmonize the body so it works better. Body of Harmony has a blog. I post a lot of different things. There is an ME/CFS blog, actually, that's really good. It covers everything from the supplements, all the homeopathic medications that we use, like Mercurius Sol and Gelsimium that we talked about, Arsenicum Album and Nux Vomica and Pulsatilla, everything else that we use in homeopathy. Then it goes through low-dose naltrexone. There's a video on low-dose naltrexone there, which is used as an anti-inflammatory and immune boosting. And it's been fantastic with ME/CFS patients. Then there is the IV nutrients like NAD and Glutathione and everything else that's used to help patients with ME/CFS.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. And the other piece that I love is kind of the information helps people even go back and talk to their doctors. There's a massive, I mean, I really think the pandemic has made it worse. There's a massive deficiency in having access to adequate care, period. I mean, I don't know, I haven't had anybody disagree with me on that. And I usually say things that can sometimes be disagreeable. But someone was talking, and I was in a pharmacology group the other day, and they were talking about, well, we shouldn't release genetic information unless it's been signed off by a doctor. I said, well, good luck getting to see your doctor. And that genie's already left the bottle.
I mean, it's direct-to-consumer available. And I know you do a lot of functional medicine testing. Like you said, I'm a massive IV therapy advocate. I would love to ask you, because I have access, those individuals that are struggling right now to talk to their doctors about getting I used the word alternative many moons ago, getting adequate care, because it's really just adequate care at this point. This whole alternative versus integrative versus functional, personalized, however you want to call it. It's medicine, and it's the way medicine should be, period. Because we've gotten so far away on the other end of 3-minute to 7-minute visits with a script pad attached at the middle, beginning, and end. How can someone talk to their doctor if they're going in and they're not feeling well? They're dealing with we have a lot of chronic. We were getting so many long COVID. I don't know what we're going to do. How do they talk to their doctor about I want to do broader care? What are some tips that you can give them?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: One of the things they can do, and this is, I'll go back to one of my experiences. When I first came across low-dose naltrexone (LDN), I think it was 2006, and I literally looked at the research, dropped to the trash can, put it in the trash can. I said, this is trash. It doesn't work. And then it came across my table one more time. And then a patient brought it to me and said, look, it works. And so then I started sort of researching about it and I figured that it actually works. And then I started putting my patients on LDN. In medicine, there is, I hate to call it narcissism, but I will. It's a narcissism that as medical doctors, we know everything. And the only thing that can cure things is a medication. That's not true.
Haylie Pomroy: It's absolutely not true.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And, but unfortunately, doctors don't have time. As you said, they have the 7-minutes visit, and then they have 10 minutes to sort of type in their notes after you leave the office. So they're working usually till 7, 8, 9, 10 PM just to keep up with their day. But if you were to take even the stuff on my website and, and send them the links, send them the link that is on LDN, send them the link that's on NAD IV, send them the link of all, all of these things.
Haylie Pomroy: I always tell them to print it out and make copies. We do this thing that's called a request for care. We have that online community. We all sit down and help prep people before they go to their doctor's office. I heard you give all of us permission to bring white papers, to bring documents to our physician, to help encourage them to participate in our wellness journey. And so I always tell them with the request for care, I say, make a copy for the doc, for the nurse, the front desk, and have one put in your church. And I agree with you, and so many of our community are talking about being just so medically gaslit when they go into the doctor's office, and they're told you're fine, you're aging, lose weight, stop eating burgers whatever it is that they're dismissed about. But that's why I love the resources that you give on your website. Is because it's, it's not just for their own personal knowledge, but it's also backed in science so they can take it and communicate with the healthcare provider that they're destined to see for right now. Exactly.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And a lot of what's on my website is, has research behind it so they can actually see what works and what doesn't work. And then make your doctors be a little bit more receptive to these things by talking about mold and yeast and, and viruses and, and environmental toxins. These are the things that are bothering and sort of putting pressure and stress on our body and our immune system and are revving up our inflammatory system. We need to know what these are, and doctors need to start getting to sort of look at these things as a possible part of the medical, the sort of chronic medical conditions.
Haylie Pomroy: Hi, it's Haylie Pomroy, your host. When I was going through my health crisis, the worst part of it was feeling lost and alone. And I decided that I didn't want anybody else to feel as desperate as I did. That's why we set up a private membership group where you can come in, ask questions, get support, be connected with people that can actually help you on your health journey. If you go to hayliepomroy.com/member, you can join me for 30 days for free. I'll see you there. We can jump in and we can start to organize the path for your wellness. That's hayliepomroy.com/member. I will see you there. Now back to our show.
We were talking at the Institute about trying to look at some of the positives that came out of the pandemic. One was that everybody started having nomenclature around science. People were talking about cytokine storms and spike proteins and really forcing to get to understand and know their body. But I think with long COVID, we even have the we need to re-educate the medical schools period. We have to get in and I'm taking it as personal responsibility from a nutrition perspective to get in and make inroads into the medical education because they're the ones that are the front lines seeing these patients, giving the patients permission to be fierce advocates for themselves. And collaborative in the education piece.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: I agree. I think our medical schooling is long overdue for an overhaul because we've been doing it for the past hundred years. There's nothing new to it. My nutrition course in class in medical school was 50 minutes, and where it was the doctor talked about all the vitamins and then at the end said, don't use vitamins, the vitamins don't work. But you have a test on it the next day. What does vitamin A do? And so it was very confusing when you see in pharmacology that these things actually work, and then somebody else we're reading in pharmacology medical school, these things work and then nutrition, these things don't work. I think our medical school definitely needs a change for sure. It's been there for a long period of time, and it's sort of teaching the old things over and over again, but we haven't added anything to it. And we need to open our medical schools to everything else that's working, everything that's experiential, that's working. We have acupuncture that's been there for a long time. And we say acupuncture doesn't work. And then the homeopathy has been there for a very long time. Homeopathy is where some of the medicine like glonoinum, nitroglycerin, and all this other stuff came from, these came from homeopathic research. It's time for us to start creating doctors that can actually help because we're, we're changing. The soil is changing. The air is changing. Toxins are changing. Everything has changed since 50 years ago.
Haylie Pomroy: And food is not food. Food is not food.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: We need someone who, we need doctors to know what's happening now. Not what, not what was happening a hundred years ago.
Haylie Pomroy: Exactly.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: We're done with that.
Haylie Pomroy: Exactly. And it's like, we're, we have patients that are in a completely different environment. Air, food, water. I always say, if you plan on eating, breathing, drinking, or sleeping in this today, you are in a completely different environment than you were when the medical books were written. And even in a lot of the research that's been cited it's not even replicable anymore. They were saying somewhere in the 80th percentile of all the research that's been published is not replicable in today's patient.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, we can talk about research at another time. No, I'll leave it with this. We have five migraine medications. And then you have week one, a rep comes in and says, our migraine medication is the best. Look comparing to these five medications, it did the best. Next week, the next rep comes and says, our medication is the best. Comparing to these five. And then every single one of them says exactly the same thing. How can we call that research? Because research means it has to be able to be replicated. How can we call this research when only with five medications, everyone comes and says “Ours is the best.” And now you have sort of blood pressure medications that's not five, it's like more than 25. And they're all saying their medication is the best. How does this happen?
Haylie Pomroy: And none of us are deficient in migraine medication or blood pressure medication. There is no deficiency. We weren't born with a deficiency in that medication. So functional medicine, we're working with what's gotten out of balance. And with homeopathy, we're working with turning back on the systems. And evoking the system. Positive change. Awesome. I know we're almost out of time. I want to go down some very specific subjects. Will you come back?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Of course.
Haylie Pomroy: That would be wonderful.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Of course.
Haylie Pomroy: So do you see homeopathy being important in kind of the health crisis that we're in, coming back to some of the Hahnemann teaching, coming back to using that in hospital situations? It was shocking to me to see IV nutrition given in Kaiser hospitals during COVID. The administration of vitamin D. Maybe it was low quality, but the administration of zinc in the hospitals, I was in a medical microbiology class at George Washington in the public health department. And the gentleman that was teaching this particular class said again, supplements don't do anything. And I said, well, if you look at the top 10 medical breakthroughs in public health, let's talk about vitamin A, let's talk about vitamin D, let's talk about scurvy, let's talk about night blindness. Are you sure? You sure? Are you sure?
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Yeah. I mean, with the amount, it's so funny. I was working out the other day and, and my friend grabs me and says, look at this doctor on TV. He says, probiotics don't work. You say they work. I said, there's so much research on probiotic and how can a doctor — you have to do your research before you go on national TV and you say probiotics don't work.
Haylie Pomroy: I know.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And they're not doing that.
Haylie Pomroy: I know. And in every other species, I've had my first degrees in agriculture and soil sciences before I did biochem, then a master's in nutrition, and now PhD in neuroimmunology.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: And our soil is changing, so everything is changing.
Haylie Pomroy: But we're the only species that does not supplement from a mandatory perspective. There is not a horse, a dog, a cat. You cannot sell dog food without it having supplementation and black rhinos, every extinct species. but somehow our soil, but somehow we're, we're good. Although we have this massive progression of disease. Dr. Hakimi, thank you so much for talking with us today. Our community is going to have tons of questions about homeopathy. That's the goal is that we evoke questions and ideas and to have someone like you to be able to lean on for answers. We all appreciate it very, very much.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: For a lot of the doctors or physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants who are watching this right now, we do have a course where we teach doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, homeopathy. And we believe that homeopathy should be taught in, with medical knowledge, because that was one of the tenets of Hahnemann, which was, you need to know the disease. You need to know your patient. You need to understand the medication, the mechanism, and then be able to make the right decision.
I just want to say how I got to have you on the show was at the Institute for Haylie Pomroy: Neuro-Immune Medicine (INIM). And Dr. Klimas always says this. She says I didn't want to learn all these different modalities of medicine. I was forced to. I had to because what was available was not getting patients well. Two of our docs are taking your training course. Yeah. And when they came and said, oh, we're taking this training course, I said, I love homeopathy. I want to have them on the show. It was great. We're incorporating it with our patients in the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine (INIM) and to start with two of our physicians. And then what we do in our clinical, we have rounds every Friday. It was one of our favorite things to do. All the docs come together. We all talk about cases and everybody that's gone and learned and advanced their education brings it back to the whole team. I'm really, because, again, I've been taking homeopathy since I was two. I'm very excited.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Well, you have my full support and any of the doctors who want to sign up for our course or at least know about it is called CEDH or Center for Education and Development of Homeopathy. We are in many different, we're in more than 30 countries and we have more than 400 teachers teaching homeopathy to doctors. That's wonderful. Our plan is to grow homeopathy and bring it back to what Hahnemann was talking about and the basic knowledge and the basic concepts so that we can decrease the amount of toxins that are being given to patients and actually use natural substances, which we know have worked over the past 200, 300 years. We're going to use those and sort of help out our community and your community.
Haylie Pomroy: I appreciate it so much. You guys, there's lots of hope if you're struggling right now. We're bringing solutions every day, and I'll make sure that all of the contact information is available for the community. We will connect more, and I look forward to having you on. There are a lot of subjects we didn't get to cover, but I think this is really going to help everybody out there.
Dr. Payam Hakimi: Thank you very much.
Haylie Pomroy: Thank you.
