E32: Real Immunity with Cilla Whatcott

Cilla Whatcott is the executive producer of the Real Immunity Film Series. She's also a board-certified classical homeopath. Working with children with chronic illnesses, Cilla's homeopathic goal is to reregulate the immune system to able to mount an appropriate immune response, clear something, and improve itself. Tune in to learn about real immunity from Cilla Whatcott.

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Transcript

 Mimi MacLean:
Welcome to the Heal Podcast, for all things related to Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. I'm Mimi MacLean. Mom of five, founder of Lyme360, and a Lyme warrior. Tune in each week to hear from doctors, health practitioners, and experts to hear about their treatments, struggles, and triumphs, to help you on your healing journey. I'm here to heal with you. Hi, welcome back to the Heal Podcast. This is Mimi. And today we have Cilla Whatcott. She is the executive producer of the Real Immunity Film Series. She's also a board-certified classical homeopath. Cilla, thank you so much for coming on today. I would love for you to start out talking about your film series. I watched it and I thought it was amazing. So, I just would love to hear about your journey and what got you into doing that.

Cilla Whatcott:
Thanks, Mimi. I'm happy to be here. And yeah, I started the film series because so many people were coming into my office and they had a very fearful attitude about disease. And these young moms were running to the ER when their children had a fever of a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And I just recognized they had lost all touch with their intuition completely as mothers. And I felt like they need to understand health in a deeper way. I'd been writing books, teaching, lecturing, having conferences, and I felt like film was a vehicle to get it out farther and in a different way so people could visually and auditorily understand what I'm trying to teach.

Mimi MacLean:
Right. Now, what experience did you have because they were very well-made and I was impressed.

Cilla Whatcott:
Yeah. I stumbled through that. I took a course, first of all. It's been a five-month course on filmmaking, and took notes and then just launched on into it. I found a great editor and videographer who was extremely supportive and he had great skills. And together, we put things together and it came out well and I was pleased with it.

Mimi MacLean:
That's great. So, you're a board-certified classical homeopath. And can you just tell us what that means for people who might not know what that means?

Cilla Whatcott:
Right. So, homeopathy is something that's certified by a board of peers. Licensure, in most states in the US, it's separate in each state, and licensure is a license when you touch or treat or give material treatments to people, so there's a capacity to do harm. Whereas homeopathy is an energetic form of medicine. We take our cases by talking, we don't touch or examine or test or treat in the same way, so we don't need to be licensed. We're certified by a board of our peers. The certification is very stringent, requires a certain number of hours of education, so many cured cases, interviews, days of testing, yearly continuing education, credits. So it's very stringent, and those people with CCH after their name have acquired that certification. The interesting thing about homeopathy is, anybody can take a weekend course and say, "I'm a homeopath and I do homeopathy," but the most respectable homeopaths do have the certification of CCH after their name.

Mimi MacLean:
That's great. And so homeopathy is... Can you explain to people, also if they don't know what that is, why would someone come to you?

Cilla Whatcott:
Yeah. Homeopathy, it's a full system of medicine and it's about 200 years old. And it's based on the principle of like treating like. So our medicines are unique. They're not herbs or supplements or anything that you get at the co-op. Basically, they're prepared in certified homeopathic pharmacies and they're made from things in nature; animals, mineral, or vegetable. And the practice of homeopathy is based on like treating like, so I'll give you a brief example. If you got a bee sting and your arm was hot, red, swollen, painful, I might give you bee venom that's been homeopathically prepared, which means it's been diluted till there's no molecules of the original substance. And when I give you that, it's called Apis mellifica, your own vital force, your system, recognizes it and reverses the symptoms, so your body heals itself. And that's the principle of like treating like. It's very, very safe, there's never any harm, and we always follow the direction of the vital force. So we're not suppressing a symptom, we're supporting the natural immune system to do its own work.

Mimi MacLean:
That's amazing. Now, you know what I find so intriguing about this is you actually don't really need that much. So, I started doing it for my daughter and it's literally just a couple of little pellets. So it's amazing that just such a small amount can do so much.

Cilla Whatcott:
Right. I mean, less equals more. And they are available in low potencies in co-ops and they do have something written on them, like "This is for vomiting or this is for diarrhea," whatever. And laypeople can apply those low potencies pretty easily to their own families but professional homeopaths use very high potencies and take a very detailed case, prior to prescribing just one single remedy that covers everything about the case. So we look at mental, emotional, physical, historical, habits, likes, dislikes, tendencies. I mean, we thoroughly plumb the details of an individual's case. Because I might have 10 people with asthma, they're going to receive 10 different remedies based on their particular case. So, it's very, very individualized medicine and labor-intensive in terms of analysis as well.

Mimi MacLean:
And then how does homeopathy help with chronic illnesses and viruses?

Cilla Whatcott:
So, chronic illness is frequently a result of dysregulation of the immune system. And this is something that I've really focused on in the films, that are natural inborn, innate immune system is miraculous, and it knows how to mount an immune response and move us towards a greater degree of health. This is what we're born with and imbued with, this is natural. So, when you start suppressing symptoms... Conventional medicine has a clear directive that if you have a symptom, you're sick, if you stop the symptom, you're well, and it's black and white, it's that simple. So, most chronic disease is treated by finding a drug that can suppress that symptom, whatever it is. Well, homeopathy is a vitalistic form of medicine that sees things completely differently. So, when we see chronic disease, what we see is a dysregulated immune system. And by introducing appropriate remedies that address what the vital forces bringing up right now, immediately is the most important thing, helps the vital force to actually create health and reregulate the immune system.

Cilla Whatcott:
So I'll give you an example. Sometimes I get children who have chronic sinusitis, chronic ear infections, some chronic upper respiratory illness, this is the most common, and they've been suppressed. Every time they get an ear infection, they get an antibiotic, it just builds and repeats. Parents have been on five or six different antibiotics, nothing's happening. So they come to me, and what we do is we first assess the whole case and look at what one remedy matches this child's constitution. And given that remedy, the child might initially throw up another ear infection as a response to taking the remedy. And then we look at those symptoms and we give a remedy that addresses those particular specific symptoms, to help the body move through it on its own. So, we're simply engaging the immune system to do it on its own.

Cilla Whatcott:
The next ear infection might be farther apart from this one, it might be less painful, it might last less time. So what we're seeing is a reduction in frequency, intensity, and duration in the original pathology. And we simply support that and keep moving forward with appropriately prescribed remedies, so that pretty soon the child's immune system knows how to overcome these things on its own and you don't need the support of a remedy. So, this is what we call curative, but the remedy is not doing anything. It's simply a frequency, a form of energy. The child's own vital force and own body is executing the cure, which is amazing. So now, their immune system is reregulated and we're seeing it in its natural state of being able to mount an appropriate immune response, clear something, and improve itself.

Mimi MacLean:
And how long does that typically take that process?

Cilla Whatcott:
It varies, depending on the individual and how long they've been suffering from the particular pathology. It can be very brief. I usually tell people, "If you can give homeopathy six months with an initial intake, two, three, four follow-ups tops, you'll see changes." Frequently, it happens much more quickly than that, but instead of instilling false-positive hopes in people, I would rather say six months because it's a learning process. We are so enculturated with conventional medicine and the notion that you take a pill and it changes something. We have to teach people out of that paradigm and help them to understand what real healing looks like and how the immune system really works. So, in that six-month period, with a few follow-ups, I take the opportunity to do a lot of teaching and supporting, and that's what I really enjoy about what I do.

Mimi MacLean:
That's great. Now, if someone came to you and had chronic Lyme, and most of the listeners on here have chronic Lyme, what would be different? Is it the same process or is there something different that you do for Lyme patients?

Cilla Whatcott:
It would be the same process in terms of taking a thorough case, understanding everything about the pathology. I mean, every Lyme patient has uniquely distinct symptoms. Some might have more of XYZ, some might have more of ABC. It depends on the individual. So I take a careful case and then I look at what remedy is going to address the most limiting symptoms. They might have four or five major symptoms, but one of them, if removed, would really make their lives better. So, we're looking for that, and then we start this process of just regulating the immune system in order to balance it.

Cilla Whatcott:
And we might even use some of the actual [inaudible 00:11:45] that are involved. If they've had testing done and they know what they are, we might choose some of those. And again, these are frequencies, so they are not material in any way, and all they're doing is engaging the system to do its own work. And that's always unpredictable. I don't know the path it's going to take, what's going to heal initially, but we watch together. And I think that that deeper understanding of what's going on is can be very helpful for people.

Mimi MacLean:
Have you found there to be a common link of why some people, their regular Lyme turns into chronic Lyme? 20 or 30% of the cases don't get better after your typical herbs or your typical antibiotics, and it turns into something more serious. Is there a correlation? Have you seen something that you could pinpoint why it's happening?

Cilla Whatcott:
Sure. What I would say is, look at the terrain. The terrain is your basic health, and the terrain and your susceptibility. So, susceptibility is something that's unique to each person. We could all be in the room with someone with, say a cold or the flu. Some of us will catch it and some won't. Why? Because of our level of susceptibility, and that is governed by not only what we eat, how much we sleep, our emotional relationships, our exposures to different toxicants, our history. If I have a long history of ancestors who have chronic upper respiratory conditions, tuberculosis, or asthma, I'm going to have a greater susceptibility to those kinds of respiratory illnesses. So, all of those things govern our susceptibility. And those Lyme patients who... Your original question is, how come some go into much deeper chronic states? Well, their susceptibility is such that they're just susceptible to that, and they will, whereas others have a status that can help their own immune system pull them out more quickly.

Mimi MacLean:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And you talk about the power of intuition in your movie. Can you talk a little bit about that now and how that's integral and part of the healing?

Cilla Whatcott:
Sure. Yeah. Our intuition, it's really essential. And I think that, as a homeopath, this is something that I can teach people to access more thoroughly because, as a homeopath, we're observing so many nuances of their emotional and physical health. People are not always accustomed to doing that. So, through my questioning, they become more aware and sensitive in observing these different qualities. You can't heal another person. You can't help another person. You can't teach another person. It requires that person to do the work, to be receptive, to be open, to be impressionable. And basically, how do we do that? Through our intuition. We study something out in online, so we do the research, then we feel how it feels in our body and in our heart. We put the two together and we make a choice. Is this practitioner right for me or not? Is this diet right for me or not?

Cilla Whatcott:
I mean, that's an area where there's so many, many options. In terms of diet. Nobody can tell you the best diet for you. They can give you instructions about different diets, and then you have to intuit what's right for you through your own research and these signals that your body is giving you. And I would also add, this is in one of the films, Andy Wakefield made a statement that we're alive because of mother's intuition. It's mothers, through the ages, who have looked out for their children, made decisions on their children's behalf, and we exist, we've survived as a result of intuition. And I think we've lost that between direct to consumer ads on TV, telling you, "If you have this symptoms, you need this drug," and just robbing people of their ability to sense their own health, it's enormous. So, one of my biggest rants is about accessing your own feelings and understanding what you need, which I not only teach but try to apply to myself during my cancer journey last year.

Mimi MacLean:
I'm sorry to hear about your cancer journey. How do you teach somebody to tap into that?

Cilla Whatcott:
Observation, mostly. Get still, get quiet, and observe. If I tell you to do this practice or take this supplement, what's the initial response in your body? What are you feeling? What are you thinking? What do you know about it? Go read a little bit about it, come back to me with questions, and see how it feels for you. So, as a practitioner, the most important thing is for me to go out of my own way. If I have an opinion that the best thing for you is such and such, that gets in the way. I can say, "This might work for you, this might work for you." Together, we figure it out based on your sense of intuition, my clinical experience. I mean, it's a process

Mimi MacLean:
Right. Now, I have an interesting question because I'm trying to figure out to tap into that intuition. So, I don't know if this happens to you, but sometimes I have a voice that's in my head, and then I have a voice that's more in my stomach or like... You know when you have the two different voices in your body talking to you. I don't know if you have that, but I do. Is there one that's the correct one? Is it your heart or is it your head?

Cilla Whatcott:
Right. I hear you. And this is a conundrum. This is a challenge. I don't know if this would apply to you or not, but for myself, I've started a meditation practice, about 45 minutes to an hour and a half a day, and I'll do it in different segments. And what that does for me is, helps me to just stop and feel. And then the application, when I'm not meditating is, somebody says something to me and I immediately get a feeling in my body, like "This just doesn't feel right," or I just feel good when I hear this, and I trust that. I've learned how to trust that.

Mimi MacLean:
You know what's hard now, I think you touched on it a little bit, is how we've lost it. I feel like, especially as a mom, I have these intuitions, these feelings, and I feel like our society right now, especially, we give a lot of faith to doctors. And a lot of times, what the doctor says is not what my intuition says, especially when it comes to vaccines or other things. So, you're just like, "Wait." And you feel like you're crazy, or you're going against the system or you need to be quiet. It's hard because then for me, that is a lot of my angst going on in my life right now, as like source of stress. It's like, what I'm feeling is very different than what the world is telling us we're supposed to be doing.

Cilla Whatcott:
Definitely. Well, okay. So go back a hundred years in time. Pre-internet, pre-information highway, and doctors were the repository of knowledge. They had been to school, they had done their training, we look towards them as authorities, and people traditionally followed whatever they said. Also, doctors looked at you when they took your case, they visited your home, they held your hand, they treated multiple family members, they were a bastion of optimism and hope and support, they played a unique role. Fast-forward to now, current times, and they're looking at a screen because everything is computerized. You see three different people, this one takes your case, this one writes everything out, the doctor comes in for five minutes, boom, boom, boom, you're done.

Cilla Whatcott:
Their risk management has become a huge concept in medicine. They are being wooed by pharma reps all day long in between appointments. The pharma reps are saying, "You have this symptom, you match it to this drug. You have this symptom, you match it to this drug." It's become a system that no longer is humane, no longer serves humanity. And also, with the advent of the internet, you as a mom can access information rapidly if it's not censored, which is another topic altogether. But parents, you can access information, and you are seeking information. And who has your child's best interest at heart more than you do?

Cilla Whatcott:
So, you're taking that information that's brewing around inside your mind and your heart, you step into a doctor's office who says, "Nope. This is the way. This is all there is. Case closed," of course, you're going to be confused because you've just spent hours and hours reading and researching and you were the one that sees the look in your child's eye and sees how they sleep and sees how they play and what they're eating. You're with your child 24/7. No one qualifies, anyone more than yourself, to care for that child and do everything in his or her best interest. So, considering all that information, of course, parents are losing their intuition because we're straddling this paradigm of, "You're supposed to trust doctors." But more and more doctors' education is moving in the direction of pharma-prescribed results.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. And you know it's interesting that we're talking about this because it relates to Lyme too. Chronic Lyme is a disease that regular conventional doctors don't acknowledge. So I think a big part of dealing with this disease is feeling that we're crazy because we go from doctor to doctor, and if you don't find a Lyme literate doctor, you don't even realize what you have at that point. I mean, I think most people will see on average of 10 doctors before they even figure out that they have Lyme. I can't pay three different doctors to tell me to go see a psychiatrist, there was nothing wrong with me. And so, that is a huge part, I think, for anybody who's listening, is just tap into your intuition. If you know something's wrong, something probably is wrong. And if they're telling you, "There's nothing wrong with you," and you feel like there's something wrong, then you need to keep pursuing that and not take no for an answer.

Cilla Whatcott:
Exactly. And the symptom picture can be so diverse. I mean, I have some Lyme people that pain is the main symptom, others, it's the brain fog, others, it's vacillating emotions. I mean, the symptoms can be so diverse, and there's this tendency, if you don't fit that diagnostic description, then it's in your head. Also, they apply this allopathic method of "Let's suppress the symptoms, so we're just going to give you antibiotics. We're just going to kill it." And this entire concept of killing something or at war with something, or we're going to annihilate something, it is absolutely infantile. This is not where we're going as a culture, as humanity. We need to move towards harmony and acceptance. It's just not where we're going philosophically. And the consciousness of the medical paradigm is still there. We're just going to suppress the symptom.

Mimi MacLean:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, if anybody wants to work with you, do you have to go in-person or do you do on the phone or video?

Cilla Whatcott:
Yeah. I work through Zoom. I have clients all over the world. So, that's easy enough to do. And basically, I take a thorough case about 90 minutes and I might want some records if they have some test results, but most of our training is about case taking. First of all, how to understand subconsciously where that person lives, what's their reality and also materia medica. So we have 4,500 remedies that we use, and I have to understand what those remedies would cause if taken in a material form, just like the bee venom, and then apply a remedy, one remedy, to the predominant symptom picture that's going to cover the features of that case. So, it's very precise, very time-intensive. After that 90-minute conversation, I spend a great deal of time with my nose in the books, researching the materia medica and understanding what I'm seeing in the case in order to prescribe one initial first remedy, and then we go from there.

Cilla Whatcott:
We watch what the body does, I give the remedy, and someone unaccustomed to homeopathy is apt to say, "Nope. Didn't work. I took it, five minutes later, no, I still have a headache," or whatever the symptom is. And that's not the trajectory of healing. We wait and see what the vital force does, what the body does, and about three weeks later, we take a look and see, and the person may say, "Oh, well, now the headache has reduced, but what I'm finding is that my sleep is the problem," or whatever the symptom may be. So it's the vital force expressing, "I'm over here. Take a look at this." And then step by step, we continue to introduce these energetic frequencies as a remedy, and the vital force moves a step farther and a step farther. And this process unravels and moves towards healing in a very slow but beautiful way.

Mimi MacLean:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, for most Lyme patients, have you had success where they've had complete back to normal feeling? I don't want to say heal because I don't really know if it's ever gone.

Cilla Whatcott:
It varies. The other variation is, some people like to straddle the fence, so they're also doing allopathic methods and it can make things a little more difficult. It depends on the case. And I always try to meet people where they're at. I don't dictate, "You can't do this. You can't do that." I explain to them how it's going to look if they continue to do other things. Just give them all the information I can and then they choose. So I've had different outcomes, some that are very good, some where people get discouraged and they jumped ship and go to another method immediately because they're not seeing instant results. It depends on their sense of urgency and their ability to be patient and move through it. And it also depends on what they've been through, prior to coming to me. Some people have been through the wringer, and they're ready to just take a breath, settle down, and go slow. Others are not. They're urgent, they're frantic, they want to see results right away, and if they don't, they move on.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah. I get all of that. I've been at all those stages.

Cilla Whatcott:
Yeah, of course, we all had with whatever we suffer from.

Mimi MacLean:
Yeah, exactly. Can you tell us a little bit about homeoprophylaxis?

Cilla Whatcott:
Sure. So, homeoprophylaxis is something we call HP, for ease of pronunciation. And HP is a subset of classical homeopathy. It's basically the introduction of a remedy, either a [inaudible 00:27:27] which is made from disease products or animal mineral or vegetable source. And it's the introduction of that at a diluted level, so it's just a frequency, prior to encountering disease. And in doing so, we have familiarized the individual vital force with the frequency of that disease. So that if met in nature, you can either repel the disease or mount an appropriate immune response and sail off through the disease. So, I have over 4,500 children and adults that are on homeoprophylaxis programs, HP programs, and they can be for childhood illnesses, they can be for specific tropical diseases. If traveling, there's a number of applications, either infectious contagious disease or travel applications, or pandemics and epidemics. So, it's been used for 200 years, highly effective, about 90%.

Cilla Whatcott:
Some countries endorse it. India actually distributes it to their citizens free of charge, and it's highly successful. Cuba has done many studies with homeoprophylaxis. Brazil has done some studies. Dr. Isaac Golden, Australia, did a 15-year study with children and childhood diseases. So, I used these different protocols, and I, most recently, did an observational casual study with 508 individuals who use something called influenzinum to boost their natural immunity during any circulating viruses. And those results came out very well. And I'm always careful to explain to people that we are boosting your natural immunity. So when we look at the terrain, the terrain versus the germ, those people who have a better chance of healing from anything chronic disease or acute disease, have a better terrain. So, homeoprophylaxis addresses that terrain and brings people to a higher level of immune function.

Mimi MacLean:
It sounds like that's what we need right now for everybody, so we can get back to school.

Cilla Whatcott:
Yeah, I agree. I agree completely. My kids, my clients that are using HP are raving about it.

Mimi MacLean:
What is your website again?

Cilla Whatcott:
realimmunity.org. O-R-G. And on the realimmunity.org site, there's lots of testimonials, the programs are there, there's lots to see, and frequently asked questions as well. So, also, maybe I want to offer your listeners... I do offer a free 15-minute consult and that's with myself or one of the people on the real immunity team, but you can schedule individually for one of us, and you simply go to realimmunity.org, click on scheduling, and you can choose a 15-minutes slot for questions. It's not for treatment. It's just for questions or to get to meet me and see if there's a fit between us.

Mimi MacLean:
Okay. Perfect. Well, this has been amazing. I really appreciate your time. We will talk to you soon.

Cilla Whatcott:
Thank you, Mimi, so much.

Mimi MacLean:
Each week, I will bring you different voices from the wellness community, so that they can share how they help their clients heal. You will come away with tips and strategies to help you get your life back. Thank you so much for coming on and I'm so happy you are here. Subscribe now and tune in next week. You can also join our community at Lyme360 warriors on Facebook and let's heal together. Thank you.