When I sat down with Dr. Paul Theriault for his third visit to the Homeopathy Hangout, I honestly had no idea just how far the conversation would take us. We covered everything from an extraordinary desert plant with near-mythical longevity, to the physiology of dying, to the deeper purpose of human life, to a candid and compassionate discussion about transgender identity. It was one of those episodes where the topics just kept unfolding naturally, which is exactly what I love about long-form conversations.
Paul is a naturopathic doctor based in Calgary, Alberta, with a deep commitment to vitalist medicine and a remarkable gift for synthesising homeopathic, esoteric, and anthropological knowledge into something genuinely clinically useful. If you haven’t heard his previous two episodes (122 and 190), I’d encourage you to go back and listen. His work is unlike anything else in the homeopathic world right now.
Welwitschia mirabilis is a plant that grows in the Namibian desert in southwest Africa, and it is, in a word, extraordinary. It belongs to a group called the gymnosperms, meaning it produces seeds but no flowers, and it is the sole member of its entire order, genus, and species. There is nothing else quite like it on Earth. In one of the African languages, it is known as the plant that can never die, which tells you a great deal about its nature.
The plant has only two leaves, which grow continuously throughout its life, fragmenting and spreading but never truly dying at the root. Some specimens are estimated to be thousands of years old. Paul also noted something botanically fascinating: Welwitschia produces small cone-like structures with what look almost like proto-flowers, complete with nectar, bridging the gap between flowering and non-flowering plants in a way that makes you pause and rethink your categories.
Paul and his colleague Michal began triturating the seeds of this plant together in 2022, working up to C8, but Paul felt the process was not yet complete. Following a significant celestial alignment in November 2023, he resumed the trituration and eventually carried it all the way through to C36. The resulting remedy and the book he wrote about it exceeded even his own expectations.
Paul describes the core picture of Welwitschia as living death. These are patients who may have serious, even advanced pathology, such as cancer, ALS, or severe chronic infections, yet they experience surprisingly little pain or suffering. Their bodies are not mounting much of an immune response. They may have pneumonia with no signs, kidney infections with no signs, or extensive mould colonisation, and yet they are often quite lucid and, interestingly, not particularly distressed by their condition.
Paul contrasted this with the Arsenicum picture, where a patient with a serious infection would be acutely anxious and overwhelmed. The Welwitschia patient, by contrast, just carries on. I immediately thought of a client of my own, and I suspect many of you reading this will too.
Paul introduced a term I had not encountered before: bardo. He describes bardo not simply as death, but as a physiological process of dying, one in which the vitality shuts down and the self begins to exit the body. In the Welwitschia patient, this process can be initiated by a flood of higher spiritual energies, and yet because the vitality is so exhausted, the person cannot complete the process. They linger in a state of slow decomposition without great suffering, unable to move forward.
This makes Welwitschia, in Paul’s clinical experience, an excellent remedy for palliative care. He is clear that it will likely speed the dying process, and so informed consent is essential, but it makes that process more graceful, more comfortable, and more complete. He also noted that it is not an either/or with medical assistance in dying, which is legal in Canada: if someone is going through that process, a dose of Welwitschia beforehand may support the vital force in completing its own bardo as smoothly as possible. He shared that he used it for each of his four dogs who passed away in 2023, and he described watching their higher auras gently release from the body in a way that was profound and peaceful.
One of the most reassuring things Paul said, and I was glad he addressed it directly because I had been wondering this myself, is that Welwitschia will not inadvertently cause death in someone who is not in a bardo process. If a person is dying prematurely and should not be, the remedy can actually interrupt that process and help bring them back. It is, in a sense, intelligent in its action: supporting the physiological process of death when that is what is needed, and supporting life when that is what is needed instead.
Beyond its role in dying and palliative care, Paul has found Welwitschia genuinely useful for stubborn chronic infections, including mould toxicity, chronic Lyme disease, and chronic Epstein-Barr virus. He also uses it as a kind of constitutional clarifier: when he cannot quite see the patient’s constitutional picture, a dose of Welwitschia often clears the energetic noise and allows the right remedy to become visible.
Paul’s framework for understanding the remedy extends well beyond the clinical picture, and I want to share at least the broad outlines of it here, because even if the esoteric dimensions are not everyone’s cup of tea, the underlying ideas are genuinely thought-provoking.
Drawing on his own research and the work of teachers including Michal Jakir and Gerard Guignol, Paul describes human life as ideally involving a series of maturations, developmental shifts that correspond to the layers and series we already recognise in homeopathy through the work of Jan Scholten, Michal Jakir, and Paul’s own animals table. Each maturation should, in a healthy state, open a new chakra system into the vital force, bringing in a distinct quality of energy. Paul believes there are approximately sixteen such chakra systems in total, not just the familiar seven-chakra system most of us know.
The reason this rarely unfolds as it should, he argues, is miasms. Paul describes miasms as crystalline structures on the shell of the etheric body that block maturation, prevent the full incarnation of the emotional, mental, and causal bodies, and keep us tethered to a system of control that operates on an energetic level as much as a social one. He made a point that stopped me in my tracks: those outer energy bodies we sometimes speak of, the astral body, the mental body, should actually be fully integrated into the etheric body. The parts we can perceive outside the physical boundary are the parts being blocked from incarnating by miasms.
The goal of this maturation process, and here Paul draws on Qabbalic terminology via Michal Jakir, is something called tikkun olam, the rectification. In his framework, this is not a metaphor but a physiological reality: the gradual transformation and transfiguration of the human body toward a state that traditions across the world have called sainthood, liberation, or the rainbow body.
Paul drew a fascinating parallel between the Tibetan Buddhist phenomenon of the Rainbow Body, where advanced practitioners of Dzogchen meditation sometimes physically dissolve at death, leaving only hair and nails, and the Transfiguration described in Christian tradition. He argues these are descriptions of the same physiological process, one that should be available to all humans, not just rare adepts.
In Tibet, he noted, this phenomenon has become frequent enough in the local population that it seems to have reached a kind of critical mass. Cases are documented every year or two, including a case as recently as 2017. Paul’s contention, and he is clear this is a speculative claim, is that Welwitschia, used widely enough, could begin to reinitialise this natural transfigurative process across the human population. He is not suggesting a single dose produces instantaneous transformation. Rather, he believes a gradual physiological process can be restarted, one that every other vitalist medicine, including constitutional homeopathy, nutrition, and bodywork, can then support and accelerate.
If you are a trained homeopath and feel drawn to exploring this, Paul suggests following the protocol used in CEASE-style therapies: a dose twice a week at a given potency, moving up only once you have stopped reacting for two weeks. He was very clear that this is not appropriate for lay people to do unsupervised, and that reactions can be significant if you move up too quickly. He learned this himself, aggravating when he moved from C6 to C30 too quickly and needing to step back to C12.
The specific preparation Paul uses is his C36 trituration of Welwitschia, which is currently available through Helios Pharmacy. If you search Welwitschia on their website, look for the one labelled C36: that is Paul’s preparation. He is also hoping to work with Australian pharmacies in due course, and I am personally hoping to stock his remedies on my website so that he can receive royalties for the remedies he has created, which brings me to something I feel strongly about.
I used part of our conversation to raise something that has been on my mind for a while: the question of paying royalties to the homeopaths who create new remedies. The work involved in a trituration like this is enormous. Thirty-six hours of grinding alone, not counting the preparation, the recovery time it takes from your body, and the months of writing and documentation that follow. And yet, once a remedy is handed to a pharmacy, the creator typically receives nothing.
I have started doing this myself: I stock Kim Kalina’s Golden Spiral Master Gum and Petrified Sequoia remedy on my website and pay her a 10% royalty on every sale. It is simple to administer through our online portal, and the warmth I felt receiving her response made the whole thing feel exactly right. I would love to see this become standard practice across the homeopathic world, and I want to gently challenge pharmacies to consider building a small royalty into the price of newly created remedies. Even an annual report and a modest payment would make an enormous difference to the people doing this work.
Toward the end of our conversation, we found ourselves in territory neither of us had planned to enter: a discussion about transgender identity. It arose naturally from a broader reflection on alternative health communities and the cultural tensions running through them right now, and I am glad we went there, because Paul brought a perspective I found both clinically grounded and deeply humane.
Paul shared that he is gay, and that in his clinical experience treating trans patients constitutionally, the gender identity itself did not resolve with homeopathy. What resolved was the shame, the trauma from parental abuse, the layers of pain around the identity. The identity itself became clearer, not less present. He has found remedies like Staphysagria and butterfly remedies genuinely helpful in supporting trans patients to feel at home in themselves and to make their own informed choices about their lives.
He drew on his anthropological background to note that gender diversity has been documented across human cultures and languages since recorded history began. Several Indigenous North American traditions recognised five genders, and the Navajo language, for instance, contains terms that distinguish between the inner essence of a person and the body they inhabit, acknowledging that these do not always align. Paul noted that none of these cultures had access to hormonal therapies, and the people in those categories simply lived as who they were.
On the question of medical interventions, Paul was nuanced. He expressed genuine concern about the global hormonal disruption he sees in patients across the board, which he believes is linked to xenoestrogens, plastics, pesticides, and other environmental factors. He does not think the hormonal challenges many trans people experience are unique to trans people: they are a small part of a much wider picture of hormonal dysregulation affecting almost everyone. He also noted that puberty blockers and surgeries are actually quite rare in practice and come at the end of a long protocol of less invasive steps, though he acknowledged that some clinics have not followed that protocol responsibly.
My own contribution to this part of the conversation was to say what I genuinely believe: I hope that homeopathy can be a path that helps people feel at home in their bodies, whatever that looks like for them, and that reduces dependence on pharmaceutical interventions with serious and irreversible side effects. That is not a political statement. It is simply what I want for every patient who comes through my door.
As Paul put it so well: our goal as homeopaths is to support anybody, regardless of their beliefs, their gender, or anything else, on a mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual level. That is it. That is the whole job.
Paul’s book on Welwitschia is available now at lulu.com, and his other books can be found there as well. Please do not purchase his books through Amazon, where he receives essentially nothing. His website is drpaultheriault.com, where you can also find his journal articles and some free triturations. He is currently licensed to practice in Alberta, Canada, but he encourages people outside that area to explore the Naturopathic Medicine Institute’s network of vitalist naturopathic practitioners. And of course, you are welcome to join the conversation in our Facebook group, Homeopathy Hangout Podcast, where Paul is an active presence and happy to answer questions.
I always come away from conversations with Paul with my head buzzing and my notebook full. This one was no different. If the Welwitschia remedy calls to you, I hope you will explore his book, support his work, and approach it, as with all powerful remedies, with care, proper training, and respect for what it is doing.
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