Santa Monica doctor creates line of homeopathic remedies
DOWNTOWN Stuart Garber was caught in a pickle.
It was 2002 and Garber had received a call from a long-time patient, informing the practitioner of homeopathic medicine that she was no longer taking a treatment for a thyroid problem.
The Santa Monica doctor advised the patient to resume the medication, only to be told that she had no intention of doing so, bluntly asking Garber, “So what are you going to do about it?”
Garber was caught in a tricky situation, knowing it was his ethical duty as a doctor to ensure his patient’s well-being, but knowing equally well that there was no way she would go back on the medicine.
“She was on it for like 25 years,” Garber said in an interview last week.“Conventional medical wisdom is if you’re on a drug for that long it shuts down the gland and you pretty much have to be on it for life.”
He offered a deal — the patient would be the first to try a new homeopathic remedy the doctor had toyed with in his mind for some time, and in exchange, she would promise to stick to a strict regimen that included check-ups every few weeks.
The remedy — a concoction of biothera-py formulas — would eventually normalize the patient’s thyroid levels after six months of use and go on to cure the various ailments of countless successive patients, their problems ranging from insomnia to skin diseases.
That one concoction would spark a chain of events and chance meetings that would land the homeopathic remedy on the shelves of Whole Foods and Wild Oats markets in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.
Six years since Garber received that fateful call from his thyroid patient, the doctor is playing double duty, both as a homeopathic doctor and an entrepreneur, his line — “Dr. Garber’s Natural Solutions — released in Whole Foods stores nearly three weeks ago.
Natural Solutions, whose line includes 11 different remedies for diseases ranging from allergies to constipation, is based on three different biotherapies, which are natural substances used to fight illnesses.
The biotherapies include a gemmothera-py, which is the active growing agents in plants; the lithotherapy, which come from mineral rocks; and organotherapy, made from healthy tissue.
While Garber was surprised to see the results with his thyroid patient, he wasn’t convinced of the formula until receiving a call from another patient who had a sleeping problem.
Garber went back to the lab and tinkered with the formula. On the first night the insomniac patient tried the sleeping treatment, she dozed off.
“I thought wow, I think I hit on something important here,” Garber said.
Garber, who in 1997 became the first person in the country to receive his doctorate’s degree in homeopathy, began offering the treatment to other physicians soon after.
His colleagues reported similar results on their own patients and it wasn’t long before Garber began receiving suggestions to explore marketing opportunities.
In 2005, Garber sold his first batch to a medical distribution company. Dr. Garber’s Natural Solutions hit the shelves at the Santa Monica Homeopathic Pharmacy next.
Whole Foods entered the picture when Garber met an acquaintance of the head buyer for the company’s Northern California region. He sent off a batch to the buyer who enjoyed the product,but found it an inopportune time to introduce it to stores. Garber was told thank you, but try again six months later.
So he did. In a chance meeting, Garber ran into a friend who knew the buyer for the Southern California region for Whole Foods. The buyer coincidentally had heard of Dr. Garber’s Natural Solutions and had tagged it as a possible new product for the popular stores.
More than half a year later, Natural Solutions is now available.
“At Whole Foods Market, we have stringent quality standards for all the products that we carry,” Robin Rogosin, the Whole Body Buyer and associate coordinator for the Southern Pacific Region, said in a statement on Friday. “Dr. Garber’s Natural Solutions are uniquely formulated … and have been shown to be helpful among Dr. Garber’s patients in his clinical practice.”
While Garber is a practitioner of homeopathic medicine, his career started in 1981 as a holistic chiropractor.
Raised on Long Island, Garber moved out to the West Coast to attend the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic, receiving his master’s degree in 1981.
He started working as a protégé to one of the top cranial doctors in the world whose practice was located in Los Angeles. After a few years, Garber bought the practice.
It was during his travels in Europe that Garber began meeting homeopathic doctors. He began incorporating homeopathy into his practice slowly.
After taking a sabbatical for a few years from the profession, during which time Garber earned his PhD in homeopathic medicine, he opened his practice in Downtown Santa Monica in 1998.
Garber said he hopes to see his products expand within the Whole Foods company and eventually go global.
“This way a lot more people can have access to products that really work for them, that don’t have any side effects, that are easy for them to use, and that will really make an impact on the quality of their lives,” he said
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 5, 2008. Read the original PDF.