Betony for tinnitus

(Please note - Here I am referring to Wood Betony - Stachys officinalis, formerly known as Betonica officinalis, a plant that comes to us from Europe. It is not the same plant as Pedicularis canadensis, also known as American Wood Betony. If you are looking at commercial sources, it is essential to ensure you know which you are getting, as they do not have the same uses.)

Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of the Doctrine of Signatures (see top bar), and also that I do crazy things like let plants instruct me on how to prepare and use them .. so the following is an example of how those sorts of things play out in my world.

I'd been drinking betony leaf tea off and on throughout the summer, "keying it out" over a period of some weeks. ("Keying it out" is herbalist-speak for getting to know a plant's personality.) I made a very mild brew, just 2 or 3 leaves fresh from the garden to about a litre of freshly boiled water, steeped for about 10-15 minutes. I added a couple of tablespoons of that tea to each glass of water I drank throughout the day, so each batch lasted me a few days. See? Not very much betony in my system at any one time, but enough, and for long enough, that I could get a sense of what its more subtle effects might be.

I dunno if that's what other herbalists and plant folk do, it's just the way I like to do things.



I had some really interesting mental effects from it. Most of what you'll read out there about betony will call it "calming" or "grounding" but that's not quite the word I'd use. It gave me a sense of space around me, like I just had more room to think (do you get what I might mean here?). The "signature" for that in a betony plant is fairly obvious if you've ever seen one growing - they grow in a neatly defined circle, close to the ground. Other plants grow quite happily nearby, but they never seem to impinge on the betony's space.

Within this space that I found with betony, came more interesting dreams and a better ability to allow my creativity to flow. That, in turn, was part of the impetus to quit the internet for a while as well, and take a step back from the people and situations that, while not necessarily directly detrimental, were still distracting me from what I needed and most wanted to do.

One of the other - and very welcome  - effects of a little betony in each glass of water I drank in the day was that it really helped the (fucking crazy-making) ringing in my ears that's been plaguing me off and on since last winter. I hadn't expected that. Helping me with the craziness that tinnitus can induce is something I expected (Matt Wood recommends it for delusional thinking!) but not the actual physical manifestation. Not the ringing itself. I had been taking sweetleaf (aka monarda fistulosa or bergamot mint) for that, as recommended by several sources, and it had been somewhat helpful, but the betony knocked it right out. Not, sad to say, permanently. I still get (maddening!!) rounds of it from time to time. But when these strike, taking betony regularly goes a long way to hushing it down most of the day, so that I really only notice it when I get up in the morning, then it fades as the day goes on.

(Of course, if you have tinnitus you know that even thinking about it can bring it on louder, as is happening right now as I write this. Argh!!)

My dozen betony plants did well in the garden this summer, especially those nestled next to a low rock wall in the shade of one of our pear trees. Being in their first year, they didn't flower (to be expected) nor did they get very big. That meant I had just enough to make my teas, but didn't feel comfortable harvesting enough to dry for winter use. So I did two things - I made a few batches of the tea into ice cubes, so I now have a supply of betony cubes in a ziplock bag in the freezer. I also made a smallish jar of tincture.

Betony is quite a communicative little plant, and at one point during the summer some of the plants let me know that they wanted to be near rocks, just like the ones under the pear tree were. So (feeling, as I always do, just a little like I might be crazy thinking plants are talking to me .. you'd think I'd be used to it by now but I am not) I brought them some rocks - each about the size of a loaf of bread - and placed them around the plants as they directed. The little plants went from doing perfectly well to looking much more lush. The difference was really something to see.

So when it came time to make some tincture, I wasn't surprised they had something to say about the process. First, they let me know that it would take very little plant material to make a decent tincture (which made sense, since so little was needed for the tea). So I only picked a few leaves, maybe a dozen, when it would have taken at least thrice that to fill a jar the way I normally would. Then, when I got out the scissors to snip off the stems and snip the leaves into pieces, this .. how can I describe it .. it was like a shout came up "noooo!!". I laughed, but obeyed; the leaves, on their wiry little stems, went in whole.

The change in the weather and air pressure has my ears whistling like a kettle on the boil these days, so I'm now trying out the betony tincture (along with a few drops of the afore-mentioned sweetleaf) and it's working quite well. I haven't strained the plant material out of the tincture; I'm out of tincture bottles, and I'm lazy, so just taking it from the jar, and this morning as I did so I noticed something interesting. One of the stems keeps sticking up, breaking the surface of the tincture, and it is covered in stiff little hairs. And there it is, the signature for betony's use for tinnitus, as the hairs on the stems surely resemble the stereocilia in our ears.

Or so I take it anyway, ha!

In my getting-to-know-you time with betony, I admit to have been remiss when it came to the research. I got so wrapped up in Matt Wood's references to its relationship to the solar plexus, which in turn can revitalise the whole person, that I really hadn't looked any further into how others use it. (You can read his long, excellent take on betony here.) But there are references aplenty elsewhere (I see now) to using betony for tinnitus.

Mind you, there is nothing like direct experience to learn by. Really, there is nothing like it. As long as we're using gentle plants that have a long history of safe use, we can, and should, fool around with them, try them out in different ways, see what they can do. That's the way herbal medicine has always advanced, with the hands-on experience of one person being passed on to the next who tries it, maybe tweaks it a little here and there, and passes it on again. I love this direct learning approach, I love the tactile, sensory aspect of it, the smells, the companionship of curious birds in the trees nearby and dragonflies that are likely to land on me as I kneel close to some flower or leaf .. I can't imagine how anyone could not want to get this close and personal with the creatures who have the ability to make us well and whole and enhance our lives or even just our meals. To understand them in this way is .. well, it's a blast of meaning that you won't get just seeking information in the form of someone else's words, that's for darn sure!