Inside the Leader's Mind
The Engineer Who Became a Homeopath | Dr. Jo Polich, ActivMend
Summary On this episode of Inside the Leader's Mind, David Suson sits down with Dr. Jo Polich , a former director of engineering turned homeopath, inventor, and founder of ActivMend . Dr. Jo held senior technology roles at IBM and Alcatel, worked on satellite chipsets and fiber optic manufacturing, and holds three engineering degrees, two of them in materials engineering. Then her two-year-old daughter spent a year with stomach problems no specialist could diagnose, and a homeopathic remedy she grabbed almost at random from a Whole Foods shelf resolved it in a day. That sent her back to school for a medical license and into a second career. Years later she ruptured her own ACL, treated it with a topical she had improvised for patients, and walked into the head of orthopedics at Northwestern with an unswollen knee. He told her she had discovered something remarkable. Dr. Jo and David talk about walking away from a respected engineering title, why she tells customers not to buy her product, the difference between irrational optimism and denial, and what it took to win the first modern homeopathic patent. Takeaways Homeopathy drew her in precisely because it was not supposed to work. She saw it resolve her daughter's year-long illness, then researched it and could not explain the result. Engineering turned out to be ideal training for homeopathy, which she says demands more analytical rigor than anything else she has done. Her career was spent troubleshooting manufacturing problems, where following false data is fatal. Leaving engineering cost her professional respect. Say you are an engineer and people assume you are smart; say you are a homeopath and, in her words, they look at you like you have grown a new ear out of your head. After rupturing her ACL she had near-complete flexion at one month without anti-inflammatories, and the head of orthopedics at Northwestern told her she was doing better than 90 percent of his patients who used them. A conservative orthopedist told her he could not get a homeopathic study approved even if he sponsored it, so she took the work to plastic surgeons and dermatologists instead. In a controlled study they dropped a three pound bar twenty inches onto a hip to produce consistent bruises, and prevented them entirely rather than just resolving them. Allergan licensed the technology, the first time a major pharmaceutical company embraced an arnica-based product. The patent office initially refused any homeopathic product outright. Clinical data reversed that position and produced the first truly homeopathic patent in modern times. ActivMend's website states plainly what the product does not work on, including shin splints, high ankle sprains, and long-degraded tendon injuries. If a customer emails about a condition it will not help, staff tell them not to buy it. Irrational optimism is fine as long as the data supports it. The moment the data says no, you have to follow the data, and she says the same to the startups she advises. Her empathy runs high enough that her challenge is dialing it down, and she credits listening as the route to it. If you really listen to someone, it is hard not to reach their humanity. Soundbites "It was the fact that it's not supposed to work that intrigued me." "I have been the head of orthopedics for thirty years and have never seen a fully ruptured ACL that's not swollen." "Irrational optimism is fine based on the data that you have." "If you ever speak to any physician and they say I can fix anything, you should leave the office." "I have given to the world so much more by making that change than I ever could have as an engineer." Contact links for the guest Website: www.activmend.com Email: dr.jo@activmend.com Keyword tags Dr. Jo Polich, ActivMend, homeopathy, career change, engineer to entrepreneur, arnica, sprains and strains, OcuMend, Allergan, medical patents, radical honesty, startup advising, women inventors, empathy in leadership
