Are you a Herb-a-Phobic

How many pounds of herbal medicine do you have sitting in your pantry right now and how many types of Herbs do you use on a monthly basis?

If your answer does not exceed five pounds for amount on hand and .. one to three herbs used monthly .. perhaps the bricks you are carrying .. do not equal a full aerobic exercise.

What are .. or .. should be .. your top five medical Herbs? How many are in your garden right now?

How many people have you witnessed to about the healing qualities of herbs in the past month .. some of them you know are dying from their hospital care. Now the kicker, after you witnessed to them .. what did they say?

I tried to talk to an indigent in the park Saturday .. the left side of his neck was clean and stitched up for about four inches on his carotid artery. I told him to take capsicum and he said, "I wouldn't put that junk in my mouth." I said, "Why not, you've put everything else in there!"

I have to admit I have not been all that successful medicating with herbs.  I have high blood pressure and take medication for that, and I have bipolar depression and take an anti-depressant for that.    I have tried diet and herbs for both conditions with very little success.

Ginkgo for the other half and for the old man to keep the circulation up to speed.  I've had no luck getting any seeds to even germinate yet.  Just keep trying I guess...

Saw Palmetto for the other half.  Makes it easier for him to fill up the pee bucket.  Should grow here, but no luck yet getting the plants going.

Milk Thistle  for the liver - that *does* grow here easily, and it grows wild everywhere.

Devil's Claw for aches and pains - not even found a source for the seed yet.

Licorice for my blood pressure (needs raising, not lowering!) - seeds planted, nothing happening yet, but not given up.

They are my 'top five' that I use most, but I'd love to learn more of what the locals use.  If ever I ask them the name of a plant growing wild, they happily pick some and demonstrate how to use it and what to use it for, but they never have a name for the plant.  The answer is always 'That's for the chickens' or 'That's for soup' of 'You break this bit off and dab the yellow stuff on warts' or 'make tea from it when you have an infection'.

interesting that you said licorice seeds planted and nothing grew from them, my licorice seeds did not produce ..thought it was just my bad luck

My number one herb is red chili pepper inside a gel cap .. it is called capsicum. It has taken my wife through three heart attacks and she never turned purple. Something you don't want to see on your best friend in the whole world .. wife. The first one I didn't know how to read a pulse and she taught me .. she worked E.R. for 24 years. The second was an irregular heart beat and I could hear it with my finger tips .. lasted thirty minutes. The second was V - Tack .. extremely fast pulse with no pressure .. 90% fatal in E.R. with Doc's, RN's and Paddles. Started with her hitting the floor and waking me at 9:00 PM .. finished at 4:00 AM .. I rolled her up on a heavy blanket to get her off a cold floor and covered her. When she tried to go .. I smacked her chest the way RN's do .. her eyes would fly open. She asked to get up and I took her to bed. She was fine when I awoke .. no E.R. She was on capsicum because I bought the book .. "Left for Dead."

Capsicum has also stopped her sleep apnea .. enlarged her veins to where anyone can draw blood where they use to stick four times and go get a machine to insert the needle.

Last month she walked into E.R. on capsicum .. refused oxygen .. they could not find her full blockage .. their words .. to her right and left lungs for eight hours. Her blood oxygen level stayed between 92 and 97, which is normal. Usually you are dead. Capsicum took my neighbor's blood work to normal in six weeks .. he read our book and skipped a quad.

#2 Herb .. tie .. yarrow and echinacea for colds to swine flu; #3 Mullein for decongestant; #4 Icelandic or NW USA kelp for micro nutrients .. seas less polluted (mountainroseherbs dot); #5 garlic .. flushes heavy metals, anti biotic and viral, takes blood pressure to normal over six months of time.

i have about 30 different medicinal plants growing in my forest garden give or take a few. dozens of others that grow semi-wild or wild in the surrounding forest. i haven't taken any modern medicine in over 6 years. i got sort of sick once, but i beat it in less than 24 hours.

gotta love natures medicine.

Hard to pick a top five, especially since the best results I have thus far have been with combinations.  That said:

1. Garlic is part of almost every effective anti-infection formula I use, whether for colds and flu, sinus infections, or topical use for stuff like staph as well as general prevention and wound care.  I am extremely susceptible to sinus crud and colds, and I have figured out how to routinely beat colds and sinus infections in less than 48 hours.  Garlic containing combos are among the most important methods, so long as you take enough.  It's use in wound care and staph infections makes it worth it's weight in gold, too.  I would never be without my anti-infection formula.  It goes on every cut and wound I get and nothing has gotten past it yet.

2. Comfrey is such a wound-healing miracle.  You will never believe the stories told about comfrey use until you experience it for yourself.  Again, I use it mostly in combo.  But I have seen flesh wounds that would have required stitches close up in just 2 - 3 days with no scarring.  Also invaluable when I start having canker sore outbreaks in my mouth.  100% relief on all but the worst day or two, simply from swishing tea a few times a day!  Add to it that it is so good for the lungs, and nutritive to boot, and it's hard to beat.  Just be careful if you know you have liver problems.  Some parts of the plant and some phases of the life cycle contain questionable alkaloids with known liver toxicity.   Less dangerous statistically than an aspirin, as far as the number of people actually known to be harmed, but still worth keeping in mind.

3. Elder is another key remedy for colds and flus.  I find the flowers to be especially potent when taken in large doses of a quart of tea or more immediately before bed.  Often 100% effective overnight for me!

4. Red Raspberry leaf.  Primarily nutritive, especially high in iron, and with no toxicity but also another surefire remedy for colds - though the dose tends to be prohibitively large (6 or more quarts in a day).  Don't discount nutritive herbs!  Used over a long period they can greatly improve health!  There are several I choose from on a regular basis as a primary dietary supplement, also including nettles, alfalfa, oat straw, and comfrey.

5. Cayenne pepper.  A fantastic accelerator for any herbal formula and a stimulant for all organ systems, it's value in deadly cardiovascular emergencies such as heart attack and stroke, and in stopping hemorrhage makes it a must have for any herbal kit.  It contributes so much to the flavor of food too!  Too many uses to go in to in this forum, it really deserves a page of it's own (if only I had that kind of time right now!)

Lemon/lime Balm and Lemon verbena make an outstanding tea that is mild enough to drink everyday and it does a great job preventing heartburn and is quite calming.

We get lots of capsaicin in our diets from the chilis we grow and eat with just about everything.

I'm surprised mushrooms haven't come up yet.  Shitake and Oyster mushrooms are very easy to grow and are reported to have a number of pharmaceutical activities.  Reishi and Enoki mushrooms are also reported to have a number of medicinal properties and I am looking in to growing these in the near future.

I've always just enjoyed mushrooms from an edible standpoint, but the more I read, the more I am inclined to reach for them as medicine, too.  Something that is well-tolerated (I always hate to use the word "safe" for anything as too much of anything can be bad), and a broad anti-inflammatory and has anti-biotic properties would be a great addition to the home medical kit.

DustyTrails wrote:#5 garlic .. flushes heavy metals, anti biotic and viral, takes blood pressure to normal over six months of time.

How much garlic does one need to ingest to get the effect?  I eat a moderate amount of garlic, but have high blood pressure (since my mid-twenties).  Does it need to be raw garlic?

This last year I have mostly replaced sinus/allergy drugs (pseudoephidrine, claritin) with a lot of stinging nettle.  The drugs really mess with my sleep and make me anxious.  The stinging nettle just gives me the occasional weedy tasting burp.

Also, I eat a fair amount of bee pollen for the allergies.  It is a small help and it helps justify my ever increasing beekeeping habit...

Ardilla wrote:
This last year I have mostly replaced sinus/allergy drugs (pseudoephidrine, claritin) with a lot of stinging nettle.  The drugs really mess with my sleep and make me anxious.  The stinging nettle just gives me the occasional weedy tasting burp.

Also, I eat a fair amount of bee pollen for the allergies.  It is a small help and it helps justify my ever increasing beekeeping habit...

Local honey, 1 tablespoon a day... mmmmmm....  I quit smoking cigarettes and started eating a tablespoon of local honey every day.  No more allergies.

I'm going to try stinging nettle for midnight trips and see what happens.

Some times when I am not feeling right .. I just start taking one herb at a time for about three days until something cures it. Have you ever done that. The recorded effects are bull .. each person can react different. Bilberry cured what I had the last time.

I respect the medicinal qualities of herbs, including common culinary herbs like hot peppers and garlic. I don't believe that having fewer than five pounds of prepared remedies on hand makes me a helpless slave of the consumer economy.

I don't have a phobia of herbs, or of synthetic drugs. I don't buy Pfizer's ad programming or Hulda Clark's woo: I look at the evidence of effectiveness and of risk, and decide from there. If I do buy pills, I work very hard to find compounds that are in the public domain, such as ibuprofin or diphenhydramine, so that patent royalties aren't feeding this sick system, and so that there's a better chance for subtle harm to have already been revealed by scientific studies.

DustyTrails wrote:

Some times when I am not feeling right .. I just start taking one herb at a time for about three days until something cures it. Have you ever done that.

Generally when I'm not feeling right, I don't do anything but take it easy and a day or three later I feel fine.The body is able to fight off most illnesses if it's given a chance.  Even when my pharmaceutical brain drugs don't help me for a day, generally I recover and feel better in a day or two if I avoid stress.     

I have tins of herbs that I need to toss out, they are getting old.  But I am nostalgic, some of them I collected with my father.
What in blazes do you need five pounds of herbs for? You must be awfully sick. 
I drink an occasional peppermint tea, or lemon balm or the like.  For health reasons,  my advice would be, get a Vita Mix or something similar.  this time of year we 'ingest' things like turnip greens, parsley, carrots, etc.  Just juice the whole plant.  Add some apple juice for liquid, as it would be to dry otherwise.  whatever is growing. In spring I use a lot of dandelions and chicory, radish greens,  sometimes I use fruit for enjoyment.  You know, the ounce of prevention. At the next full moon I am digging comfrey and burdock root to make a salve and to make comfrey tincture.
Finally, after at least ten years,  the VA hospital discovered that , no, my husband does not have bronchial asthma after all. He had to point out to them that all Drs so far have wanted to do was prescribe some inhalers and pills that make a person sick but he is not satisfied that that is what he is afflicted with. ( he did not use the stuff) well, finally a Dr. saw his point, DH managed to cough up a tiny lump of phlegm and low and behold, it is a fungus that has been proliferating in his upper chest.  We made a spray out of 2% H2O2  and raw garlic and he has been inhaling this.  So far he is about 50% improved.  Last week we stacked 100 bales of spoiled hay, so that did not help, but all in all, much improved already. 

Anything you grow and eat is a med. A healthy diet is the number one med we try to use. Trying to find live food in a store is pretty hard... a good start is to stay out of the aisles. We do use a lot of ginger and garlic. Salt water does a lot of good things both to gargle and to bath in. Mustard burns, but seems to kill infections too... just takes a bit for the skin to heal. Oregano can be good for the throat. Chicken soup (with lots of joints and bone marrow boiled in) is a great med too. CLO (cod liver oil) is another one. Fermented foods of all sorts, home made sauerkraut, kieffer, (just to name a few) Raw foods.... Drs recommend raw milk for babies (you try telling a mother she should pasteurize her beast milk) maybe it is good that way for adults too. Raw veggies ... raw dirt anyone?

Listen to your body, if I feel feverish, I wrap up and sweat ( which is normally what I feel like doing). Then I go to sleep (how I feel after a long sweat). Normally the next morning I am fine.

Wash your body less often... stay away from any shampoo or deodorant that has stuff you can't pronounce. Need I go on?

while we are on the subject, if you do manage to get sick, here is a recipe  for a 'magic potion' that will give you a serious nudge in the right direction. About three garlic heads, chopped, leave the skins on, two pieces of ginger the size of my thumb.  cover with water and bring to an almost boil, let simmer for ten minutes or, do not boil, add the juice of a lemon,  make a cup of peppermint tea, you will need it.  You can add the peppermint to the potion, it will taste awful no matter what.  sip hot.  If you do not have peppermint with this, it will upset your stomach.  Go to bed and rest,  maybe sweat.

Burra maluca i have ginkgo seeds near me in madrid, I plant some ever year for fun. It used to be to see if i could grow trees from seed. I can send you some. I am very bad at sending thing buy post.  On the other hand if you live near a town it is possible that they have ginkos as decoration there to and you can find them yourself between now and Christmas even beyond is when they fall from the trees.
      They are all over the place in Madrid the park the  Retiro has a book that maps its plants so they are  easy to find. Ginkos grow in the middle of the street Principe Verguara leaving Velazquez in the northerly direction, in the Plaza de las Salesas and near the Ritz to mention a few central places.
     
      Their fruit is like that of a plum except the wood of the seed is thin and easily broken. The kernel can be roasted and eaten. The fruit smells bad something between sick and shit, which in town areas covered anyway with dog shit make collecting ginko fruit all of an experience. I step on them lightly to separate the flesh from the stone and pick up the stones with the bags provided for dog shit. Maybe they smell because the fruit stays on the tree till it rots

  I use garlic for cuts and for places that look as if they are going septic badly heals cuts and spots, cutting the garlic and applying the cut edge to the wound or area that looks as if its going septic.  A niece of mine got feed garlic and honey drink every time she had a sore throat, a recipe i invented and forgot about. I  don’t know if the garlic works or if i just get better anyway but i d always get better after this treatment. Putting a piece of cut garlic on a cut hurts like hell. At first i used the skin of  garlic dampened a bit, after all it resists all the germs in the soil.

In Spain they have  good breakfast recipe for anyone who wants to take garlic for blood pressure every morning  you rub a piece of toast with garlic and then with a tomato and pour on some olive oil. It is delicious it is from Catalonia but not much fun for those who don’t like garlic .
     Raw garlic goes into gazpacho which is raw soup, it  should be chilled in the fridge or ice added to it. Put dry bread in water in your liquidizer, with almonds  seasoned with olive oil vinegar and salt, this makes the sort of gazpacho they call ajo blanco eaten with red grapes.  Some people like a lot of garlic in their ajo blanco and others less.     
     Miss out the almonds a good source of iron for vegetarians and raw all of them, add tomatoes and a bit of green pepper and cucumber and onion and you have the normal gazpacho, raw soup full of minerals and vitamins the food of the poor in the south of Spain a complete meal without cooking.  Some people add cumin. How much bread and how much tomato you can decide for yourself. try with lots and then with a little, it is best to have very ripe tomatoes they make the soup a better color.  I have a recipe from a English cookery book writer Elizabeth David i use occasionally which is to rub garlic on dry bread and drop the pieces into the bottom of your salad bowl which and then put in the salad oil and vinegar.  it is better not to dry the lettuce much or the bread stays so dry that it does not let off the flavor of the garlic. Maybe eating a bit of dry garlic is the best way to get a bit of garlic everyday if the recipes are a bore to make every day.
Fruit contain asprin and people who eat three pieces of fruit a day live longer, how many more things will they find in fruit.   Agri rose macaskie.

burra maluca the seed o fginko germinate when it s hot again at the begining of the summer though i think i have germinated kernals soon after picking the fruit taking hte kernals out of the shells. agri rose macaskie. rose

Thanks for that Rose!  I've tried and failed several times with the ginkgo from seed, but I'm hoping that the new agri shop will have a live tree in sometime.  I haven't seen any around here grown for decoration, but it's good to know that they grow in your part of Spain as I'm sure the climate is very similar here. 

I won't give up them, but I have so many projects, and so little time... 

burra maluca the ginkos i have grown from seed grew very slowly so it would be better to buy them already grown a bit from a nursery than to grow them from seed.

  dusty trails, you story is a beautifull story. It seems bad to call such a terrible moment a beautifull story but  it is of such a good relationship that it is one. Thank for it. You do write beautifully. rose .

It is impossible to draw a firm line that divides food from drug. A few things are clearly one and not the other, but so many things are both.

Basil for inflammation, osteoarthritis, allergies, and boosting HDL. Columnar basil doesn't bolt or fade in the summer heat, a few pots on the patio provide pesto on demand (permaculture zone 1) . 

Ginger as a tonic, as a tea for colds and flu. Again, a few large pots on the porch provide a good supply of fresh herb for use when needed. 

Yarrow for cuts, scrapes and nosebleeds - have established several patches around the house, including right outside the back door

Ginseng as a tonic. Too hot to grow here, although I have grown ashwagandha before and it is similar in effect.

Lemon balm and occasionally passion flower tea for anxiety, both are in the yard. Clouds of butterflies now parachute in an army of caterpillars strip the passionflower plants before I harvest much, so I still end up buying some tea. But it is worth it just to see the Gulf Fritillary butterflies do well and hang out in my yard.

Turmeric for inflammation, tonic. Trying to get it started, have one plant that hasn't seemed to recover from transplant shock and the dry period when I was out of town and it got overlooked.

Just planted 3 willow trees I started as cuttings, will be able to use that for headaches, fever, muscle aches etc next year.

Olive leaf for tea - haven't used it yet, but reportedly good for colds, fevers, tonic, high blood pressure, malaria, reducing cholesterol oxidation.

Hibiscus for anthocyanins, blood vessel health, etc.

Prickly pear cactus and chaya in the diet for cholesterol and blood sugar control.

Green Tea - multiple benefits beyond the caffeine.

I saw a long documentary about chili peppers and what interested me was that they are begining to use a paste made of them to kill pain long term like for three mounths if i remember right. If you put the paste, cream  on someone it is so painfull that you need to use a local anasthetic whhen you apply it but afterwards they dont feel pain in that part of their bodies  for a long time. They say it works like a burn, it seems a burn kills your nerve endings and so you no longer feel pain untill they reestablish, well chilies do the same without burning you. They gave the example of an aids sufferer whose feet hurt, with a application of chile every three mounths i think it was maybe every mounth he could walk around happily.  agri rose macaskie.

[I deleted yucky stuff here - BM] 

I happen to have more than 5 pounds of herbs on hand because I sell herbs.  The herbs we use personally are gathered every year when in season and 5 pounds for many of these herbs would be an excessive amount to keep in storage till it's season rolls around.  However, the juniper trees are always outside and their needles are always available, so no need to keep a large amount of this favorite plant in storage. 

I do not believe in juicing or essential oils and seriously restrict the amount of capsules I take - they are in the rare category.  Sometimes I take an Omega capsule.  I do believe that chewing and smelling food is very important to digestion.  We use herbal vinegars, infused oils, tinctures and dried herbs for infusions or decoctions. 

My top 5 herbs may sound boring, but we use what is available and abundant.

Mullein
Self-Heal
Plantain
Goldenrod
Elderberry
Rose hip (yeah I know it's #6, but I can't cut any of these from the list)

We do eat Garlic, onion and peppers almost daily.  We are on no prescription medications and I haven't haven't had a cold or flu for maybe 5 or more years.  Just can't remember the last one.  Occasionally I"ll get the nose tingles warning me that something is being fought off, but that usually only lasts a couple of hours. 

Sparticle, it is a complicated diatribe the one you say is hard, there is the Tv addicti bit and the alternative medicine bit maybe the anti addiction to tv fits in with the alternative medicine bit as alternative medicines advise healthy behavior.
        I have just been whatching a documentary about the zen heroe assasine, fighter, teacher, Musachi, who advises heroic behavior, such as not thinking of your own body or pleasure.
  the arguement is difficult it is importante to advise a certain toughness so that people are in health, do, do exerciseM my protestant mother thought that loving people was not so much having a warm feeling about them as making sure they had exercise, company friends who sympathised with them. My mother took it for granted that people  would meet people who criticised them, so she made no special effort to make sure they had these.  Mental stimulus, exercise of the brain, work and play, enough food and sleep. It is a better philosophy than the love one, which starts and stops at the word love, i have met all sorts of abuse from those who talk of love, knocking you down in the name of hard loving, ignoring you but saying they love you because they can manage a warm feeling to wards you, to mention two forms of abuse. A certain toughness is part of the sort of loving my mother did, that considered that the importante things was to keep you healthy. But if you go to far on the tough side you start to get cruel. .
      If you take the heroic view of things as the asassine Musashi does, you must not think of your own pleasure or death too much, if you start counting out people thinking o ftheir won pleasure you get the clever abusing them they will take such a lot if you teach them not to go for their own pleasure. And those who advise not thinking of your own pleasure can become  very unfeeling people. I thught that the heroic way of going on was suitable for those with a certain character whse formation made them suitable for this road but obviously was not appropiate for everyone for whom lonlyness and hardship could be overwhelming. But i know thoes who think that this sort of consideration is condeseending and you ought to ask for hte same degree of coldness and toughness from all adults i htink tha tis cruel and unrealistic.  In the karate kid the corean strenghtens the kid in order to bring him to the point when he is able to deal with bullies. The film is, as is usua,l set in a time frame which is too short for the sort of result acheived. People often need special preparation to be able to take very tough things and if you believe that if a hermit can do it so can everyone else you are likely to become cruel.
  This is just an extended vresion of what sparticle says, when he says that he has known tough people and is weary of them and i write all this extended version because i too have known them and am weary f them and want to come down on them.  Agri rose macaskie.

Or maybe I am just really healthy!

  If people have crazy diets then you have to tell them they are crazy and if the government has people playing round with nuclear stuff that causes their children to get cancer, the only thing i can think of is that that fact needs to be given a lot of publicity, the journalists dont do their job.
  There was a episode of "Father is a family guy" when there is a lorry full of radiactive waste parked outside their house and his son asks what why th elorry is covered in warning signs or some such  and the father embarrased to talk about the danger, lies and so the son unafraid of hte contents of the lorry the son opens the cap on the lorry and the garden fills full of radioactive waste. If you don't tell people cruel truths, things can get worse.

  The reason i have for quarreling when people insist on their beliefs and alternative medicine could be such, is that they get scary when they are protecting their beliefs.  I have had it in the teeth for liking alternative medicines, people go in for long campaigns against you for having differences of opinion with them, campaigns in which they will menace you to pull you into line, and that can be ten years of menaces for example. Do we tell our children that fights go on for years so they are prepared for adult life? So there is a reason for questioning peoples  defense of their ways of thinking if it seems too emphatic, they carry that defense of their opinions into out and out war with others tha tis they start to try to reduce the other persons credit even in themes that have nothing to do with the differences of opinion they start to attack the person not just the ideas they hold tha tthey don't like.
    Also those who defend their ideas emphatically  can have totalitariana attitudes to life. THey dont allow a variety of ideologies though being emphatic can simply be away of letting everyone know it is a theme you care about.  Populations  need to  have variouse ways of thinking, it is what keeps things balanced, all groups ideas get silly with time, the most careful informed and square ones among them, not such good ideas creep in without them realising it, ideas that are not healthy and they need counter groups to keep things healthy. Another reason for having lots of ideologies is that having lots of different ideologies is what keeps enough ideas on the table for us to move on. However it is necessary to say that people are eating wrong. Maybe they had a trolley full of party food but certainly people are eating very wrong nowdays i suppose the new generation, as is true of the old one, is always doing something wrong.

  I have been done down when i talked of any alternative medicines. i have been told that i would use them for everything, and that when i have only used such simple remedies as peeled and grated apple for light vomiting and diarhea, and garlic for small cuts. I have hardly used any alternative medicines, so to pretend i would be stupid about them is mischeivouse.
    I go to the doctor, what has made it harder to go to the doctor is not liking alternative medicines it is a growing disconfidence with pèople, because they twist things so, which makes me less strong about all human contacts, the doctor is one of hardest of human contacts with his power to say you are about to die included in any contact you hav ewith him. ALso the lack of people, as they were attacking me, who I can ask for advice on doctors has reduced my capacity to use them. I think part of machism is to cut you off from others. My sisters who dont really talk to me wont help to fnd a english doctor who will help to advise me on whether it is necessary to do plastic surgey on my sons burn cured but with weaker skin were the burn was and i dont trust the social security doctor here a hundred percent and i certainly dont trust the dentists they have messed me up too often.
    People attack you to  make you follow their own ideologies in part and because part of human nature is generous but another part of it is, dead mean.
      I find it easier to go to the dcotor if i am doing yoga, which means i have more  healthy attitudes and am more relaxed. I am less afraid of facing the news i have some terrible illness when i reflect that as well as the power of the doctors i will be able to meditate or take herbal remedies, when i have plans of my wn abut how to face illness as well as using the knowledge of a dctor.

  In the program  House they say bicarbonate gets the body to clean out radiation or some such, and one program of House, was about a case i have read about, i dont usually read medical cases but i happened to read about the tape worm one, the man who was infected with the pre-tape worm stage of tape worms when the tape worms are tiny worms who lodge in your flesh or brain or bihind your eyes,which they took a long time to discover because he did not eat pork, he had caught the parasites because his cook did. 
 
  I have heard of the children of people working in atomic power stations getting cancer, which seems strange but that is what i have heard several times now. It is easy to undrstand that the sperm of the father should cause deformations in the fetus but  that the sperm of the father should carry cancer or the likelyhood of getting in childhood is difficult to understand, at least for me. I dont know what makes the children of those who work in atomic power stations get cancer. Maybe the body of the father carries more radiation than is good for his children. In the case of a child at my daughters school the father stopped working in, where ever it was, in contact with radiation, before the baby was concieved, if i remember right.
    Some bits of this world are more horror story than anything else. rose macaskie.

Oddly enough I'm re-reading "Breast Cancer, Breast health" right now and on the ride to town I was going over the garlic section.  Though it doesn't make claims such as the poster did, I"ll share the claims the author makes if anyone cares.  Otherwise, I'm not going to spend a lot of time typing. 

Burra Maluca wrote:

Devil's Claw for aches and pains - not even found a source for the seed yet.

My sister in Ocala Florida had Devils Claw growing wild in her yard.  She gave me a couple of the seeds for decorative value.  They look like some sort of wierd devilish insect.  Interesting to know this plant is medicinal and is good for aches and pains.  I am going to take one of teh seeds and try to grow it next spring.

Some of the traditional medicinal herbs have known toxins or carcinogens. I'm fully confident there are many great medical advancements to be made by investigating plants, particularly those considered to have medicinal qualities, but i tend to not trust my health to unproven chemical "cocktails". That's a big challenge to really investigating in a consistent and repeatable way herbal treatments: there is typically a whole arsenal of compounds in the herb, which may interact in ways unexpected and vary in composition depending on season, etc.

The only miracle i'm familiar with involving herbals was a friend of mine from high school. Nice girl. Her family was very into herbal medicine and homeopathy, but at some point, she came down with an extreme infection and ended up in the hospital. Unfortunately, the antibiotic she was administered caused a severe allergic reaction and high temperature that cooked her internal organs, and she lapsed into a coma and eventually died. There's no way of knowing if the herbs had sensitized her to the antibiotic (most of which are derived from compounds isolated from natural sources). A rather routine infection miraculously and tragically turned into a fatality.

The best case is that the herbals simply failed to keep her healthy. In the worst case, they set her up for a fatal reaction when she had to resort to antibiotics.

Public schools are funded according to average daily attendance. In cases where medication makes sitting in a classroom bearable for children who would otherwise find any available way to escape, then I can see a financial interest of vaguely the shape DustyTrails mentions.

I think there are more ethical ways to make a classroom bearable, and of the schoolteachers I know (public, charter, Waldorf, etc.), I cannot name one who would knowingly participate in the sort of Faustian bargain described. I think, instead, that mainstream society has an odd idea of what it means for a mind to be healthy.

Typical drugs kill far more people than herbs do.  In 2008 there were zero deaths related to herbs.  Pharmaceutical companies - hundreds of thousands.  Using herbal medicines the traditional way has been tested for thousands of years.  Now you have people coming up with diets that we didn't evolve with, claiming it to be healthy or for weight loss and can throw some statistics out there to prove they are correct.  Low fat diets to lower cancer risk - argh.  We've always had fat in our diets!  Maybe eat fats that aren't laden with organoclorides and eat a balanced diet and watch that cancer risk go right down. 

People ate and used herbs, bitter greens, high mineral vinegars, fermented foods and protein for thousands of years - until now.  They worked physically and ate with the seasons.  The closer we get to that, I believe, the healthier we are.  So if traditional Chinese or Native medicines have taught a remedy for thousands of years and modern herbalist who follow the traditional ways use it and have for years, then I trust that protocol over our current medical science based on isolating compounds.

We were not built to partake of isolated compounds.  Even the alcohol we drink now is far different than the herb infused healthier alcoholic drinks humans used to.   Our bodies work better with the variety of compounds available in the herbs and foods that work in conjunction with one another and our specific cases of disease for the lowest risk, healthiest remedy.

Here as elsewhere it appears a few people seem really set on forcing every position into one of two sides of an oppositional binary.

You have a 101F fever. Which of these solutions is correct?
a) go to Walgreens and open random boxes of chemicals, eating a few handfuls of whatever has a label with some numbers attributed to a scientific study on it, or you've seen on a commercial recently, then book an appointment with a surgeon for a foot amputation.
b) hang upside down by your knees, rub cayenne powder all over your body, and consume huge quantities of random weeds. After a few weeks of this treatment, if you have not yet recovered, blame "western medicine" for putting chemicals in your drinking water or radiation in your underwear. Do not go to a hospital even if you start bleeding from your eyeballs.
c) something else.

Personally, I would take some acetaminophen and an herbal remedy which has had a few studies done on it for safety and efficacy, and monitor my fever to make sure it goes down. And if it doesn't, I'd call a doctor. Let's not sacrifice our health on the altar of ideology; pretty much everyone is some variation of (c), really. It galls me when people disregard evidence-based medicine just as much as it galls me when people dismiss the use of any plant product as superstitious twaddle. Oppositional binaries are dangerous things to regularly fall into, because they blind you to such a huge range of possibility, within which the truth very often is to be found.

Here are two interesting (and longish) posts from Greg Laden at ScienceBlogs discussing skepticism towards herbal medicines and how it sometimes goes overboard.
Does Cranberry Juice Help Prevent UTIs?
There is a follow-up as part of the next article:
Fetishistic Thinking in Relation to Skepticism

I respectfully disagree with you.  It's hard to take the over 20 years of personal research and experience and distill it down to a single response and even if I did, people are just going to believe what they are going to believe and so am I.  I was very ill for most of my life and it wasn't until I got away from the drugs and the doctors that I got  well, yes this is just my own personal experience - but it makes me feel very strongly about my opinions.  Not so much that I will resort to name calling or forcing my opinion on others or look down on others. 

Those statistics on death I provided you came from the U.S. National Poison Data System.  http://www.naturalnews.com/027993_vitamins_nutritional_supplements.html

I stand firm in my opinion that herbs are the best course and the place to start.  That's just my opinion based on my own research and experience. 

I won't disagree with every point you made, because frankly I don't have time.  But yes for thousands of years these herbs have been tested.  Whether you believe it or not.  Taking herbs is not some random thing and their results aren't secret.  Egyptian papyrus dating to 1700 bce outlines herbal remedies and then documented again in 400 bce by hippocrates, again in 60 ce by Dioscorides.  And well beyond this are the oral traditions that have been documented by people such as Juliette de barclay levy and many others. 

I don't think ancient Aztecs would have had much of a need for chemotherapy since cancer in ancient man was extremely rare.   I also think that fevers, unless extremely high or long in duration, should just be left alone.  The fever is there for a reason. 

I think skepticism of tests on vitamin or herbal pills is warranted.  I again fall back on the way the plant is meant to be partaken of.  We were meant to smell, chew, taste and swallow a plant subsistence that still had much of it's medicinal values intact.   I have no intentions of ever buying herbs produced by a vitamin or pharmaceutical company. 

sparticle wrote: In 2008 there were zero deaths related to herbs.  Pharmaceutical companies - hundreds of thousands. 

That's not entirely correct. People died from herbs interacting with drugs. people died from herbs alone there are people who still take phen phen and ephedra. People died from taking herbs when they should have been taking drugs. People died from buying herbs that were laced with drugs.