Acupuncture in a bottle? Prickly ash (Xanthoxylum americanum) tincture

Twice a year, I make an appointment with Sheena, my beloved physiotherapist, for a "tune up". And by tune-up, I mean a round of all-over acupuncture.

Needles everywhere!

After an acupuncture session my senses are heightened; especially touch. Interestingly, my feet become especially sensitive - I can FEEL the floor or ground under them in a way I find quite delightful. That sensation only lasts for a day or so, but the general feeling of well being stays with me for quite some time.



Recently - too long a story for today - I've faced a couple of significant injuries and had to see Sheena quite a bit. This time around she's been doing the more usual physiotherapist things to me, ie torturing me with exercises that are the sort of thing that

A) make many people swear off physiotherapy

yet

B) do a world of good for injured joints and soft tissues.

It wasn't until the last session that she gave me acupuncture, bless her, with the purpose of calming the truly impressive level of pain that comes when a nerve is trapped .. holy moly that hurts .. After she managed to free the nerve by turning me into a pretzel and shifting the joint in question (the sacroiliac) back into place, the nerve was bound to jangle for quite some time. Acupuncture settled it down .. mostly .. for a while ..

Knowing the acupuncture's effects would wear off before the nerve settled down completely, I decided to finally try the northern prickly ash bark tincture (Xanthoxylum americanum, sometimes spelled Zanthoxylum) that I made last year. Normally, for nerve pain, I reach for St John'swort (Hypericum perfolatum) tincture internally and the oil externally, but this time St J wasn't doing a damn thing for me.  

I had barely heard of prickly ash before reading Matthew Wood. He describes it (in his excellent website piece on the Doctrine of Signatures) as:

the remedy for the most extreme, unbearable pain, the pain of torture, where people writhe in agony from lack of relief.  It has barbs on it that are sharp and nasty, making blackberry bramble look like Disneyland.  It is impossible to pick without pricking oneself.   source - highly recommended reading!

After reading that a few years ago and his other writing on it in this book and and this one I kept my eyes peeled, and quite soon I found prickly ash growing in an area I could have sworn I had never seen it before. That's nearly always the way with the medicine plants, though. You only have to look with fresh eyes to see what was there all along.

I'm pretty cautious when it comes to working with a new medicine plant. Well perhaps not cautious, I don't approach them with fear so much as deep respect. (Remind me to re-tell the story of the elecampane experience some day). It's become my habit to hang out with a new plant in the wild for a couple of years before harvesting any, just getting to know how and where it grows, what it's like through the different seasons .. here's a nice quick look at northern prickly ash and its place within its habitat.

While I'm getting to know the plant 'in the field', I'll also read every scrap of the literature I can find about it - both how it has been used traditionally and current 'best practices'.

(Yes, I do read a LOT. You gotta!)

So after hanging out with the plant and getting to know it, I made some tincture last year, not because I was experiencing such pain, but because you never know when you or someone you love might, right?

Now here's the thing - this is not a pain-killer, per se, it's a 'remedy for pain' - there's a subtle but important difference there. It's known to (quoting Wood again) "equalise the charge on the nerves". It's not sedative in action; it's actually quite stimulating. That sounds like the last thing you'd want when you're in pain, right? But this isn't a stimulant, like caffeine, but stimulating, like the taste of citrus - prickly ash is, in fact, in the citrus family.

If ever there was an example of the difference in approach between pharma-based medicine and herbal medicine, this is it. Bearing in mind, of course, that sometimes one just has to mask the symptom, which pharma tends to do and I'm not knocking that as part of a larger picture; nevertheless, actual healing can't take place until we get down to the nitty-gritty of root causes.

I'd class physiotherapy as a kissing cousin of herbalism here, because movement is definitely good medicine that heals root causes. Combined with herbs that support movement (and circulation), we can go a long way towards cure.

I didn't know what to expect my home made prickly ash tincture to do, really. I obviously hoped for relief, but the way it came was a surprise. Instead of killing that pain, 3 drops - yes, just 3 - of the tincture literally did feel like it "equalized the charge on the nerves" throughout the rest of my body. Within moments I could feel the soles of my feet, just like after a round of acupuncture.

I could still feel the pain but it wasn't nearly so acute, because the prickly ash tincture managed to bring me back into the rest of my body. By golly that felt better.

When we have acute pain and that one part of the body is overstimulated, all other sensation seems to shut down, putting the rest of the body into what herbalists call a 'depressed' state. As Wood puts it, prickly ash helps to resolve that because it "improves capillary circulation, bringing the blood to the skin and mucosa".

Stimulating, not stimulated; prickly ash is refreshing, enlivening.

While rest is essential to healing an injury, over the long term enforced inactivity can also lead to poor circulation, atrophy of musculature, loss of appetite, and all manner of "what fresh hell is this??" experiences. Or at least that's what happened to me. For a few weeks I was allowed a 15 minute daily walk - that's NOT enough for my tastes but any more than that and the injuries flared. I was assigned specific stretches to do, and that was something, but my usual zipping around doing my bits and pieces of housework/bread-baking/general puttering was still mostly out of the question for longer than I would have liked. Inactivity makes me ache just as much as overactivity and there's the further (and just as important) issue that it can be psychologically deadening, too. I found the prickly ash tincture really helped to keep that difficult to describe life-force thing we call chi/qi moving while I sat around waiting to heal.

And that's no small matter.

Prickly ash is also what's known as a "diffusive", which means that a tiny amount added to other herbal remedies gets them further into the body, quicker. So as I healed, I decided to take advantage of that, and experimented with combining it with other herbs. I used it sparingly (as little as 1 drop at a time), either with burdock root tincture (3 drops) for deeper strengthening or with Solomon's Seal root to directly work on healing the damaged muscles & tendons. It worked great!

(A post on Solomon's Seal is forthcoming. It, too, is new to me and wow, that's some good stuff.)

Xanthoxylum (love that word) is a remedy that has fallen out of fashion, probably because those prickles - thorns, really - make it downright dangerous to collect and prepare, but it was very much part of the repertoire of the "Eclectic" physicians in the early part of the 20th century. If historical usage interests you, here is  an account from John King of the use of the berries for cholera!

There is far more for me to learn about how to use this plant, but I have to say I'm extremely pleased by how well it's helped me these last few weeks. It's difficult to describe but it seems to be both enlivening and grounding in effect. It seemed to help keep me from spinning off into despair when the pain was at its worst.

One of the reasons I embraced herbal medicine early on in life is that I've never responded to pharmaceuticals the way 'normal' people do. That means pain meds do nothing for me - except make me muddled headed (ugh) and nauseous (yuck!) and I can still feel the pain - so what's the point? The stronger the pain killer, the more paradoxical my reaction, which is .. inconvenient, to say the least, when you have something like this rotator cuff injury going on. With the Xanthoxylum at least I was able to stay clear headed throughout.

There are several members of the Xanthoxylum/prickly ash family throughout the world; bear in mind please that I'm describing my experiences with our native, northern prickly ash, and a home made tincture, deliberately made not-too-strong. I have no idea how a commercial version made from dried bark might differ from mine made from fresh bark.

As always, please do your own (careful and thorough) research before deciding whether this remedy might be right for your situation.

There's a nice article here for further reading, and another here.

Across the water and a little to the right, off camera,
is where I found my little grove of young
prickly ash trees. Context is everything.