Q&A: Preparing for cold and flu season with homeopathy

Photo Cred: Andrea Piacquadio

By Avery St. Onge

Using a homeopathic medicine approach to strengthen the immune system is among the most safe, inexpensive, natural, and most importantly, effective ways to prevent season illness, said Lisa Samet, ND.

According to Samet, a naturopathic doctor in Montreal, Canada, who specializes in homeopathic medicine, homeopathy is a treatment modality under the umbrella of natural medicine that uses holistic remedies to treat and prevent disease. To Samet, the natural and gentle treatments in homeopathic medicine are ideal for strengthening the immune system and are well tolerated by people of every age group.

As autumn takes ahold and cold and flu season commences, we spoke with Samet about how to help prepare patients and their immune systems to fight off seasonal illnesses.

Integrative Practitioner: Why is it that more people seem to develop cold and flu symptoms during the fall rather than the summer?

Lisa Samet: It’s not the cold weather that makes you sick. I have been asked that question numerous times. It’s not anything to do with the temperature. What’s more likely to make you sick, is when you get a chill. Good health, I think we can all agree, largely has to do with the functioning of the immune system. So cold air in and of itself, it’s not a problem, but if we get a chill, that is a stress on the immune system. When the immune system gets stressed, it’s more likely to succumb to a virus or bacteria.

There are always bacteria and viruses around and in us, and a healthy immune system keeps everything in check. When your immune system is stressed, it’s less able to do that. Now stress can come from a variety of things. It can come from what we typically think of as stress, like an emotional stress. But stress can come in different forms as well, like not having good nutrition, getting a chill, getting heatstroke, or missing sleep. All these things end up being stressors on the immune system. In the winter, if we were to not dress properly, be exposed to a cold draft or cold wind and take a chill, that would affect our immune function. That would then make us more susceptible to being sick or not being able to keep those viruses and bacteria that we have all around us and in ourselves, in place.

Integrative Practitioner: When should a patient begin building their immune system for fall, or is it a year-round process?

One of the most critical aspects of healthy immune system function is having adequate, and even better than adequate, levels of vitamin D. In the winter, most of us, depending on where we’re living, don’t get much sun exposure, and therefore we are low in vitamin D. That’s another reason why people tend to get sick in the winter. So, if vitamin D is a key component, in the summer we have to make efforts to get the sun. Not to the point of burning, but the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction with everyone being so paranoid about skin cancer, that nobody even goes in the sun, or if they do, they’re so slathered with sunscreen that they don’t even get any of the benefits.

Sun has not only vitamin D, but a lot of cofactors, and other hormones that build the immune system. When we don’t have the option to get the sun in the winter then we need to take vitamin D. So right away that puts a seasonal spin on things. But apart from vitamin D, for me, good health and a healthy immune function is a lifelong process. Not something that we make sporadic efforts at.

Integrative Practitioner: What are some specific lifestyle changes that patients can make to better support their immune system?

Lisa Samet: I like to talk about the four pillars of good health, which are enough sleep, adequate nutrition, managing emotional stress, and exercise. It’s almost like getting back to basics. People think, “oh, taking care of the immune system is a complicated and obscure process.” That’s not true. Taking care of the immune system is basically taking care of your health. Which is common sense.

We need to be attentive to sleep because sleep is when the immune system repairs and detoxifies the body. If we don’t get enough sleep, and we cut that process short. So, without enough sleep, the immune system is compromised.

Another lifestyle factor to consider is stress management. We’re all under a lot of stress, sometimes in peak periods, sometimes on a chronic basis. We need to manage our stress. It wears our immune system and causes people to be sick not only acutely, but chronically.

We know that life can be stressful and difficult, and there’s a lot of moving parts, and things don’t always happen the way we want them to. So how do we manage stress? I do a lot of work on this with patients. I’ve written a book called Emotional Repatterning, and that is one of the deepest ways to manage stress. When practicing emotional repatterning, we identify and change deep subconscious beliefs that we have and that helps us show up a lot better in the world and have more realistic expectations.

Other things that are good and easy to help with stress are meditation and tapping, which is also called the emotional freedom technique. Tapping is essentially a method of releasing stress. Unlike meditation, which is something you invest in every day, tapping is used more on an as needed, acute basis. So, if you’re acutely stressed, it’s easy to use tapping and learn tapping to help relieve stress.

Exercise is also a great relief or even just connecting with friends and family and talking about your stresses. Whatever the way you choose, you need to figure out a way to offload stress because if you accumulate stress, and don’t know how to work with emotional difficulties, that absolutely has an effect on the immune system.

Integrative Practitioner: When building up a patient’s immune system, what kinds of foods should they be eating?

Lisa Samet: Diet is key and often overlooked by people. I work with patients all the time about this. It’s not like people don’t know that fruits and vegetables aren’t good for you. They all know, we all know, but why don’t we eat them? That’s the question, and we really need to take it seriously.

Fruits and vegetables are where the bulk of the vitamins and minerals and nutrients we need come from. It’s where the fiber is. I like to say, food items that do not look like how they looked when their ingredients were grown, are probably something that we should think twice about. The further away we get from how a food looked when it was growing, the worst off the diet is.

For me, a good diet is a diet that’s high in fiber, high in fruits and vegetables, low in processed foods, low in sugars, and high in whole grains, like whole wheat, quinoa, and brown rice. The white stuff has no nutrition in it. It’s just calories, then it goes to sugar very quickly in the body.

I think a plant-based diet is healthier because animal products cause more inflammation and acidity in the body and disease is usually very happy in an inflamed acidic state. That’s where disease take hold and growth. The less inflammatory our diet, which is usually more of a plant-based diet, that’s where the health usually lies.

Integrative Practitioner: Do you suggest that your patients take any supplements?

Lisa Samet: I’m not like a huge fan of supplements. I’m a homeopath and by nature we don’t usually use many supplements. I would say vitamin D is the only one that’s really essential. Second to vitamin D is vitamin C, which can help fight viral infections. With the COVID-19 pandemic over the last couple of years, my patients were all taking high levels of vitamins D and C and zinc. Another supplement that I really like for preventing and treating upper respiratory infections is NAC, or acetyl cysteine, which is an amino acid that’s a precursor to glutathione, a very powerful antioxidant.

For kids, elderberry lozenges and elderberry syrup are great and tastes good as well. They’re helpful for keeping healthy and treating and preventing coughs. The other thing that’s nice is echinacea. It’s a great plant to help fight viral and bacterial infection. It’s an anti-microbial plant that can be taken in liquid glycerin for kids and in tincture, which has alcohol, for adults. I like herbal products in liquid form, not in pill form. They work better. Echinacea is not necessarily a preventative, but it can be something that’s an effective treatment when you’re sick.

Those are the supplements I’d point out, but if you eat right, you don’t need to take 15 pills a day to keep yourself healthy. Eating right is the key to a lot of things. People want to keep eating the unhealthy food that they love and that tastes good, so they resort to “magic pills”, whether that’s supplements or prescriptions. I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it. Getting back to basics is the only real way to stay healthy.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed.