In small doses

Any COVID-19 story with a happy ending is a success story. But for Denise Straiges, President of the Academy of Homeopathy Education and a homeopathic practitioner in New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, one story in the recent spring outbreak stands out as particularly satisfying.

A friend had referred to her an ER doctor and pulmonologist at a major Maryland hospital. He had been working on the frontlines treating the first round of COVID-19 patients and became symptomatic. The hospital quickly sent him home with orders to“ride it out.”

When Straiges was contacted, the doctor had been symptomatic for only 12 hours, but as all too many physicians and nurses have discovered working with COVID-19 patients, the novel coronavirus seems to hit healthcare workers harder than most other people who contract the disease.

By the time the mutual friend had dropped off the homeopathic remedy Straiges suggested (Phosphorous) outside his door, the doctor couldn’t even get out of bed. “He told me that he felt so bad he couldn’t even get up to walk across the room to get the remedy,”Staiges says. “It took him about three hours to work up the strength to walk across the room.”

Completely out of breath and in bad shape, he took the remedy at about two o’clock in the morning and then repeated it again four hours later. “By 10 a.m. when I spoke to