Taking requests

Winter - for most of us - the time of year we read and plan and read some more and plan some more.

I know there are several of my readers who've already branched into growing/wildcrafting and making their own remedies, and others who are considering doing so.

Mad as a wet hen

Mass production of remedies is antithetical to natural medicine just like mass production of food is antithetical to, well, food.

Do I even have to write the rest of this post? Have I not made my point?

Is it not the height of irony - or perhaps the term is lipservice, or even hypocrisy - that those in the throes of all natural this or organic that or "Paleo" (hahaha) still take nutritional supplements in capsules? While I agree wholeheartedly that it is, in fact, difficult to attain all the nutrients one needs from today's depleted foodstuffs, it's not impossible. Maybe these people could just fucking try harder.

And what of their medicines?

A ranty piece on subtlety in herbal medicine

(Okay, it's not that ranty. But this is a passionately written piece about concepts I consider essential to the understanding of what's behind herbal medicine. Good herbal medicine.)

I call myself a slow learner. I'm not being derogatory, I choose to learn slowly.

I learn best intimately. I don't do well with facts & figures and nomenclatures, they just sit there on the surface of my brain. I need sensory experience of what I'm learning, that's what gets new ideas down into the interior regions where they can hook onto similars and stand facing opposites and sometimes sing harmony with whatever tune's been popular in the play list of my mind that day.

Mixing metaphors may be grammatically verboten, but, well, fuck the grammarians. If they can't follow a thought through all the twists and turns it might take that's their problem. Tidy, linear, quantitative thinking is well and good if you're looking to corral a concept, and tame it. So you can bob its tail and braid its mane and show it off. Me, I like my thoughts free to get into trouble, raid the neighbour's cornfield.

And I wonder, what are students of herbal medicine learning when they're taught along the lines of "berberine is the active ingredient in goldenseal"? Does molecular weight teach us anything we can use on the ground?

Really?

Tea vs decoction (and everything in between)

Some of us been talking about burdock root in the comments section at Tim's veggiepharm blog and in background emails, too.

But we're getting a little mixed up in our terminology about how we're using it, so here's a quick rundown of the 'official' terms for the various kinds of hot water methods used in herbal medicine.

These guidelines apply to most herbs, not just burdock. And yeah, there are exceptions of course.

A crockpot decoction experiment

This post isn't strictly about mullein, but it begins there.

I've got my slow cooker on the counter and it's on a good simmer. After a few hours cooking last evening and sitting to cool overnight it's been humming along all day. It holds my latest experiment, a couple of days' long deep decoction of 4 or 5 quite small first year mullein plants, roots and leaves together. One doesn't usually decoct (as in simmer for a long time) the leaves of plants because they're too delicate; decoctions are for the tough stuff like barks and roots. But as I said, this is an experiment. Besides, mullein leaves are made of stronger stuff than most leaves, and I want to find out just what they'll offer up this way.

I dug the plants out of the snow yesterday as we were having a bit of a thaw - oh man, that was fun - because, well, I have lots of mullein out there and I could. It's been calling me, mullein has.

Chaga is quieting

Chaga - ah, chaga. Just for the moment, forget anything you're ever read about it boosting immunity or fighting free radicals. Picture, if you will, a forested hillside. Birch. It's winter, the sun slants on an angle through the trees. The air is crisp and all is quiet. Very, very quiet.

It's been my experience - and that of one other person that I know of - that when I take chaga on a regular basis, quiet comes over me. I just don't want to speak. I also really want to be outside, in the sun, and when winter comes I especially want to just stand still in the winter sun and the cold wind feels good to me. Odd, eh?

The lesson of aspen

Windfall!