Nutrition and Herbs Notes-11/15-20/2010

All I need is a black bag and her lovely blouse.

I love what I'm learning about natural healing from study and experience. But I never knew how sad and frustrated it would make me to see people I love refuse to listen that tradition and continue to partake of the burning, cutting, poisoning that traditional "doctors" dish out. Herbs and diet are so easy, inexpensive, and side-effect free it is hard to believe they work, but they do. Changing the diet and taking herbs to correct a situation can cure, yes, cure any disease with two exceptions. Some people thrive on being sick and don't want to get well. God has a time appointed for each of us to die. That's it.

Anyway I've gotten very little studying done this week with traveling and caring for loved ones. Don't get the wrong impression, I love to serve my family. I just have some new things to work out. After this rant I'll post my study notes from this week.

Green Pharmacy: The History and Evolution of Western Herbal Medicine-Purging with copious amounts of senna and bloodletting were the practice of Gui Patin. Frogs, vipers, ants, worms, skull bones of dead humans, human blood, human toe nails, manures of various types, and pearls are some of the strange ingredients that were used in seventeenth-century prescriptions. Mother’s milk was not always recommended for children.  A mixture of cereal and cow’s milk was used instead. Hmmmm….not so different than the junk fed to babies in bottles today. Antimony is a powerful irritant poison. It questioned as an effective treatment because of the terrible side effects including death.  

The desire of the average physician to administer powerful and active drugs is only equaled by the desire of the average patient to have powerful and active drugs administered to him. Renaudot’s ‘L’Antimoine Justifie et l’Antimoine Triomphant’ illustrated a curious fact about the use of powerful and potentially dangerous drugs in  medical treatment.  This article stated that antimony was a sovereign cure for anything from asthma, catarrh, colic, fistulas, and ulcers to weaknesses of the stomach, and women’s complaints…Renaudot endorsed antimony for a surprising amount of ailments, including asthma, catarrh, colic, fistulas, and ulcers to weaknesses of the stomach, and women’s complaints. King Louis XIV’s  physicians hesitant in using antimony when he fell dangerously ill in 1658, because too much was at stake in the person of France’s most important patient.

The Seventeenth Century woman played many roles in the household.  Family doctor was her most important job, because professional physicians were few and far between and even the nearest apothecary might be a day’s ride distant.

Nicholas Culpeper’s practice was unique, because he was more interested in teaching people to use local herbs than exotic drugs. The physicians of Culpeper’s time despise him, because he was highly educated before stooping to the lowly profession of apothecary and he translated the London Pharmicopoeia from Latin to English for the benefit of others not so highly educated in the profession. Throughout the translation, he included his own explanations, descriptions, uses, and common names of herbs, opinions, and cautions. His translation made the established medical community furious. Two years later he published a second book, Physical Directory, “a complete method of practice of physic, whereby a man may preserve his body I health or cure himself when sic, with such things only as grow in England, they being most fir for English bodies”

In North American in the early 1600's the native’s state of health was nearly perfect. The Indians had their own health care system.  Describe their diet included fresh meats, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and pristine water.  They cared for the sick by cleaning the digestive tract, hot/cold hydrotherapy, and a large pharmacopeia of native herbs. The Native American philosophy on mind, body and spirit is that they are inseparable.

The settlers faced weakness, fever, and scurvy from the long ocean voyage plus exposure and starvation from lack of shelter and waiting for harvest upon coming to the new world.The English housewives brought many medicinal plant seeds with them to start their gardens in the New World, including mullein, plantain, and pennyroyal. Although the settlers were surrounded by Native American medicinal plants, they still relied upon their European medicines. They could not identify the plants and their uses.

If you were sick in the seventeenth century almost everyone you met would give you health advice.  Health was such a universal concern to the people of the time, because doctoring then had an appallingly bad reputation. Physicians gave many reasons for medical bloodletting, namely reducing vascular pressure, evacuated peccant humors, diminished the violence of the arterial action, and eased distempered bodily organs. 

 “Profit has nearly always been a more decisive factor than human misery in medical issues.According to Barbara Griggs, the business of modern pharmacognosy is to determine and isolate chemically a plant’s active principles, examine its structure, and determine its mode of action. During an outbreak of the black plague, the general population’s confidence in chemical medicine began to falter.  Over 26,000 people died whether they used chemical remedies or not.  

The Native American treatment for Malaria was Peruvian bark from which quinine is derived.

During the eighteenth century, more than 70 percent of the herbs stocked by apothecaries were exotic foreign imports. European people preferred these expensive imports instead of using local herbs for medicine, because the exotic origin of these drugs gave them the respectability of distance as well as the appeal of novelty. According to Robert Boyle, the Art of Physic might be improved if physicians were a little more curious, to take notice of the observations and experiments of midwives, barbers, old women, empirics, and other illiterate persons.

The cause of scurvy is a lack of vitamin C, resulting from a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. It first appeared among sailors on long voyages and city dwellers, both of whom had little access to produce. The eventual cure came from a  weed nicknamed scurvy grass that contains as much vitamin C as oranges. It took the British Royal Navy nearly 300 years to accept this evidence?

The North American Indians ward off scurvy even in the long winter months by drinking the vitamin C rich decoction of pine or spruce twigs.Three medicinal herbs that early botanists discovered from the New World include pink root (Spigelia marilandica), poke root (Phytolacca americana), and wild geranium (Geranium maculatum).The medical practice of the American colonies was called an “English practice” , because they used violent remedies-bleeding, vomiting, blistering, purging, anodyne, repetendi, and murderandi. American Ginseng (Panax ginseng) was given to a  Jesuit missionary in Tartary in the mid-eighteenth century fro exhaustion. He learned that it was used by the Chinese similarly. It was then dicidedly desirable in Europe. Later, a French Jesuit was given  (Panax quinquefolim) Asiatic ginseng with similar properties. The French made a fortune shipping it to China. The natives did likewise collecting it.

Two effects of foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), as found by William Withering, are diuretic and emetic. Druggists did not sell simple, British herbs that could be found nor did they serve an apprenticeship in the preparation and identification of drugs. The hospitals of Wesley’s time were hesitant, when asked if they would participate in a clinical trial of his tar water against their medicines. No doctor or hospital was prepared to run the formidable risk of their treatment actually probing inferior. Two major factors finally drove the colonies into accepting native herbs into their pharmacopeia. The American Revolution lit the flame of American nationalism and made doctors aware of the inconvenience of relying on imported medicines. The Napoleonic Wars including the war of 1812 made the import of drugs nearly impossible and quite expensive.

Because George Washington was delivered of 4.5 pints of his blood and given massive amounts of mercury drugs during a bad cold or pneumonia, he died. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, trained 75% of the physicians in America. He believed that all sickness was caused by irregular arterial action, which was always relieved by bloodletting and a dose of calomel (mercury).

Because Samuel Thomson was healed by the local herbalist after doctors had failed him, his curiosity about herbs and natural therapies began. Samuel Thompson discovered the medicinal usage of Lobelia by tasting the leaves. Samuel Thompson’s mistrust of the medical community was cemented when the doctor attended and butchered his wife during child birth and nearly caused the death of his two year old daughter a few years later. Lobelia, cayenne, bayberry, myrrh, sumach, sweat baths, showers, and cold rubdowns were treatments Samuel Thompson used in his medical practice.  He believe about the human body?

Over 3 million practitioners were faithful to the Thompsonian method at its peak in 1839? Like cures like is the premise of homeopathic medicine. The idea behind the practice of Eclectic medicine was to study patients not books. The downfall of Thompson’s popularity in America, because distant ills seem to be worth risking for the sake of present comforts.