Medicine chest 3 - Slippery Elm - the safe and the not so safe.

Here's a surprise for you all, I do some of my foraging in the retail environment! Ha!

Slippery Elm Bark - While we do have slippery elm trees in our neck of the woods (and I'm pretty sure I have a couple of weedy youngsters coming up in the wilder edges of our yard) I have yet to experiment with making my own slippery elm bark powder.



Instead, whenever we take the ever so pleasant day trip up to the village of Killaloe where stands one of the last remaining old fashioned healthfood stores, I stock up on slippery elm there. In the (alas, now rarely seen in retail) 'bulk' herbs section there's a bin, and inside the bin there's a great big bag of finely powdered, fragrant, slippery elm bark. The friendly older hippie lady weighs out the amount I ask for while we chat. I could buy my slippery elm on the internet, I suppose, but I like to be able to see and smell before I buy. I like to know I'm getting the real thing. I'm looking for a pale, tawny coloured powder. Anything too reddish or dark or too white is adulterated or poor quality.

I learned about slippery elm long, long ago, from the classic book "Back to Eden" by Jethro Kloss. Now old Jethro, the last of the American Eclectic physicians, was a bit fixated on enemas and was really big on soy beans. Ugh on both counts. But we forgive him; that book is invaluable for his descriptions of the herbs; he actually used them in practice, unlike the armchair herbalists who came after him. Even the brilliant (and very particular about his sources) Matthew Wood often refers back to old Jethro. If you ever run across a copy of Back To Eden, snap it up.

Anyway, there are lots of uses for slippery elm bark, both external and internal, but I mostly make it into lozenges. I should say 'sorta lozenges', because they don't even come close to resembling the commercial hard-candy type. In fact they always stick to the plate and/or each other. But I forgive them because they're invaluable, ha! To make them is simply a matter of mixing the powder with honey, (a sticky, messy business that involves much licking of fingers) rolling the goo into little balls which are then placed on a saucer to 'dry' (they never do, entirely). Sometimes I keep dusting them with more powder in the hopes that they won't stick together and to the saucer, but more often than not I just place them far enough apart that they won't glom together, put a small inverted glass bowl over the top as a lid and put up with having to scrape them off the saucer.

It's one of the great mysteries of life how a dry powder can be so moistening, but it is. If you want to know how slippery elm behaves on your insides, do the following - mix a little of the powder with cold water and watch it turn into, essentially, slime! That 'slime', or mucilage to be more delicate, is almost identical to the kind of thing our bodies produce on their own - or should - to lubricate our insides and keep everything moving along as it ought to. If you next add hot water (a pint to a teaspoon of powder) you'll make something magical, something that soothes every tissue it touches. If you're dealing with any kind of intestinal distress, even quite severe, slippery elm 'gruel' as they call it, is just the ticket. It's both healing and nourishing, and tastes quite sweet so it's appealing to someone with no appetite. It's especially useful for the dreadful stages of chemotherapy when the mouth is full of sores and the person can barely swallow. Just a little at a time can do wonders. It can be used thicker or runnier, the powder can be mixed in with oatmeal or sprinkled onto yoghurt; it's really quite versatile.

You don't have to be ailing to use slippery elm. I made a batch of lozenges recently, it sits on the windowsill over the kitchen sink and every couple of days I reach for one just because I like them. It's good for innards, a nice insurance policy when winter means there's no fresh wild foods to nibble on,  and moistening to the dry mouth and throat that those of us who heat with wood are prone to.

Now, a word (okay, several) on the use of slippery elm in capsules. To some extent, I don't entirely disapprove as much as I normally would to using an herb in capsule form.  Better, I think, to open the capsules and use them either in the liquid prep I describe above or make some of those melt-in-your-mouth lozenges, so that the moistening effect gets everywhere. People tend to think that bowel problems are a problem of the bowels, alone, but that's not the case, the inflammation is system-wide. So while capsules that take the slippery elm to the targeted area won't hurt, allowing slippery elm to coat, soothe and moisten the entirety of the digestive tract will do more good.

The 'recommended dosage' of the capsules, 3 or 4 capsules, 3 times a day is absolutely a bit much. By comparison, I'd estimate my lozenges contain maybe 1/2 a tsp, that's about 3 capsules worth (?) and I take no more than one every couple of days - and always with lots of water. Occasionally I'll use them more often, if I need to, but I wouldn't make a habit of it, my gut has always told me to be moderate about slippery elm. I just recently found out that my instinct on this is correct, it turns out transit time is 30 hours, so it's easy to see how large amounts could back up in the system, especially taken in capsules. This ends up doing the opposite of what slippery elm is supposed to do; as Matt Wood puts it "Excessive dosing can cause it to absorb too much of the intestinal secretion, resulting in a dried out condition". He also quotes Eva Graf's recommendation that it be used as a 21 day course at most. Slippery elm works so well that if you're not better within far less time I'd be surprised.

While writing this, I perused the interwebz for a minute or two looking into commercial preparations of slippery elm and I came across slippery elm tincture. What? Yeah .. No! Fer goodness sakes, no. Gawd those snake oil salesmen come up with some silly notions. The "Healthy Home Economist" (one of the most wrongheaded people on the internet) has an article here that's just utter nonsense. First she describes slippery elm bark as a bitter, which it isn't, then as a demulcent, which it is. I'll try not to let this turn into a rant dissecting all the ways her article is poorly researched and typical of so much on the internet these days but .. suffice it to say, the lady does a lot of paid endorsements, so let's assume she's doing one there. Her warning that the tincture is not safe for pregnant women is another clue that something's not right; the powder, which is entirely safe, is in fact recommended for the constipation of pregnancy (used correctly, of course). My educated guess is the tincture she's shilling talking about is made from the outer bark, which is not a traditional, time tested use, and my spidey senses tell me it was 'invented' to use up the bitter outer bark left over after the sweet, demulcent, healing inner bark was removed for commerce. Buyer freaking beware, jeeze. That our friend Sarah may be unaware of any of this attests even more to how unqualified she is to give herbal advice.

And of course as I've said before and I'll say again, don't take my word as gospel either. Find your own sources, 3 at least, who aren't trying to sell you anything.

So, in summation, slippery elm bark is wonderful stuff if used in moderation but you have to know you have the real thing and it works best if you use it the old fashioned ways. If you have capsules in your cupboard, go and open one up and check the colour - and maybe someone could let us know in comments how their capsules look on the inside? I'm so suspicious, especially after having read what I've read today about the adulteration that goes on out there, I feel the need to be reassured (and maybe others do, too).