Making Medicine At Home

(not a recipe yet)

It is getting increasingly difficult to find recipes and instructions for making your own medicines at home due to our litigious society and people's expectations for 100% cures and our willingness to believe that only laboratories can make effective medicines safely.

I am never shy about telling people that I take psyche meds and I will probably need them to live comfortably for the rest of my life. I am not necessarily a big mouthpiece for western medicine, but I can tell you that I tried every herbal and spiritual remedy before using my laboratory made chemical brain adjusting pills. For some things, modern medicine really kicks butt.

So when I tell you that it's a shame for the average human to lose the knowledge of how to make simples in their own kitchen, you should at least know that I am not on a mission to obliterate modern medicine's place in the world.

There are a number of urgent medical situations for which I would not turn to herbal remedies for help unless I had no other choice. Bladder infections are one of those things. It is so acutely uncomfortable (as in "I want to rip the plaster off the walls" kind of fun) and can quickly turn into a much more serious situation (kidney infection can kill you), so I tend to deal with UTIs as quickly as possible. Herbal medicine doesn't fix things fast. It does, however, fix them gently and with a lot less damage to the rest of your system than your average laboratory made medicine does. Modern western medicine often fixes one thing at the expense of something else in your body.

For herbal medicine to be effective you have to use it often in your life. Take the natural approach as often as possible. The more you treat your body with respect, and take care of it all along the way, the better it will respond to simpler more natural remedies. The first step is to try to live healthily. Sounds so much like a useless platitude, doesn't it. Yet, how many of us are taking as good a care of ourselves as our bodies deserve?

Are you getting as much exercise as you need to keep your vascular system in shape? If you are getting enough exercise then everything will run more smoothly in your system, because every part of our system is connected to the rest. I know this from breaking a hip. All your bones are connected and when one is broken and you try to move it you can feel the excruciating pain reverberate throughout every other bone in your body in an outward ripple of discomfort.

I know I'm not getting enough exercise. I'm just starting to get back on my bicycle by riding it to the store for my groceries and to my Master Gardening class. I have never been in poorer shape in my life than I am right now and I'd like to change that.

Are you eating food that is close to it's original source? Meaning: are you eating food without artificial colorants, preservatives, and flavors? Are you eating simple sugars or high fructose corn syrup? Your body cares a lot even if you don't. Are you eating a balanced diet? Meaning: are you eating enough vegetables with your meats and grains? Are you eating lots of steak and other red meat or are you eating a good portion of your meat in lean varieties? Are you drinking lots of alcohol? (I know I am and I am about to address this too). All the stuff you put in your body has to be processed by your liver and kidneys. Where do you suppose all those chemically produced food additives are going? What do you think your body does with an extraordinary surplus of sugars, especially the super processed complex kinds that your body can't even really use?

I'm not trying to shame anyone or bust any one's balls. I'm just asking that you think about these things a little. I haven't been treating my body very well in the last couple of years and it's beginning to tell on me. Because I am going to be taking psyche meds for most or all of my remaining life, which puts more stress and work on other parts of my body even while it's helping my brain, I want to start treating my body much better so that I can get results from natural medicine whenever possible.

Natural medicine works, but it takes more time, and it won't fix a trashed liver fast enough to save your life if you've been busy shoving crap into yourself nonstop. A well cared for body will respond to natural medicine faster than one that has a thousand compound problems from poor all around health.

Learning to make your own medicine should be required life knowledge. Instead it is becoming more and more obscured beneath people's fear of herbs, fear of doing themselves harm, and because people are being told that they are not qualified to know these things unless they have a doctorate degree in medicine.

Like all things in life, the things we now look to professionals to advise us on are things that the professionals learned from regular people. Food preserving was learned first by housewives and sailors and farmers, people like you and I. For centuries people preserved food without the USDA to tell them what was safe and what wasn't. The USDA knows a lot of what it knows because people already experimented and discovered (to some personal cost, of course) what is safe and what isn't. All the USDA has really done is to confirm WHY some things are safer than others.

Medicine is the same way. No, don't just go outside and eat whatever you find. The knowledge about what herbs are safe, or what quantities of an herb are safe and how to use them well is already out there. Read about them first. This is not crazy "New Age" shit. People have been making salves and tonics and teas and remedies for thousands of years. That's a lot of time to cultivate a reputable store of knowledge.

My mom is teaching me to make salves. This one is an anti-fungal salve to help me clear up my athlete's foot which I'm prone to when I wear the same shoes all the time. Which I'm doing now because I have only two pairs of shoes that fit and only one of those pairs is fit to be seen in public. It may not be as effective for me right now as could be hoped because my body is fairly trashed. It's out of balance. But while I start to eat better, exercise more, drink less alcohol, and work on my emotional health, I am also going to be learning to treat my body with more respect. With more care.

I am not going to learn to make a million herbal remedies, but a select essential few. Our next project is a burn/wound salve. If you peruse the isles at the drug store you can still find ointments and formulas that list ingredients such as "arnica" and "calendula" and "camphor". These are all natural ingredients. Just because something comes in a package with a warning label a mile long doesn't mean it's better than what you can safely make yourself.

As I learn to make these simple medicines I will streamline the process and the recipes and I will share them here. I will tell you how to apply them safely and I will trust you not to eat things that I've labeled "for topical use" because I trust most people out there to approach projects like this with common sense and intelligence.

The thing is, we need to remember how to do this ourselves. We need, as a whole people, not to let knowledge like this slip from our collective memories. We need to redevelop these skills. Besides, it's really fun to make salves!!

If you are like me and a long way from being healthy, don't be too hard on yourself. Figure out where a couple of your least healthy habits are and start strategizing how to make change. Start with small but steady steps. Read the labels of everything you consume, it will be a fascinating and eye opening education.

I can't emphasize that enough: READ ALL LABELS.

It isn't an all or nothing proposal. If drinking soda is one of your main pleasures in your comestible life, then drink soda. Just don't drink a liter of it a day. Maybe ditch all high fructose corn syrup items from your diet besides soda. You don't have to spend every day at the gym or run a marathon to be in better shape. Just move more. Ride your bike. Walk more often. Walk your kids to school if you're only ten blocks away from it. Yeah, you have to wake up earlier, but you'll all feel better too.

You don't have to be skinny to be healthy, but not being obese is a huge health benefit. I myself will always be plump. I don't desire a really skinny body anyway, which can be as unhealthy as a really fat one. But I know that I am heavy enough right now that my body is putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on my joints. So no joint relieving medicine is going to help my joints if I continue to put so much weight on them.

Making change takes time and the commitment to living deliberately and consciously which is so much more fun than it sounds.

Now that I have stirred myself up, I am going to go walk the dog to get some fresh air and get this flesh of mine in flight. Right after I apply some salve to my foot.

Got Blood?

I went to the doctor for the first time in a year today. Don't be thinking I must be really healthy or something. I mean, it's not like there haven't been good reasons to go to the doctor, there have been good reasons. but the last time I went to the doctor was for my yearly exam which turned into a biopsy for cervical cancer. Ever had your cervix scraped with a wire brush? The doctor assured me it wouldn't hurt (much). I think she's never had it done to her. Why not just use a broken bottle down there? I know, it's possible that I am more sensitive to pain than some. I will only say to that possibility that it took me two weeks to take myself to the doctor when I broke my hip. When I finally came in my doctor sent me off to get x-rays and called me later to say that I must be a "very stoic" person because I had fractured my acetabulum in five places and had not been taking pain medication. Ha! So there.

Oh alright, I'll admit that every time I had to lower myself down to the toilet to pee it hurt so bad I kind of thought I might die.

That wire brush scraping morphed into a little slice of my cervix then being removed with a knife. Even though the biopsy came out negative, I'm a little reluctant to go to the doctor because I'm convinced that they're going to find something I can't afford to have.

Here's a list of my current ailments:

• Sharp pains randomly shooting through the ball of my left foot. (The good shoes have really helped with this)

• Right ankle is slightly swollen and hurts to walk on.

• Hip hurts after exercising.

• Back hurts after hip starts to hurt.

• My right hand ring finger is often stiff these days.

• Never got my bone density test after my hip healed.

• Head might explode at any minute.

• Can't sleep without having beers first.

• afraid I am a thirty seven year old living in an eighty five year old's body.

The Verdict: The back and hip problems are most likely musculature in nature and caused by having weakened muscles from the hip breaking incident. Strengthening them will most likely ease this problem. Lots of stretching and low-impact exercising. And time. There's nothing to be done about the foot. The ankle can be healed by balancing on that foot to help strengthen it up again.

So if you don't get the subtext, here it is: I AM WEAK.

However, just in case there is some systemic inflammation responsible for all my aches and pains, the doctor thought it wise to get some blood work done. I love that phrase: BLOOD WORK. It sounds like some kind of kooky procedure in which you cosmetically enhance your blood or something. The next rich person's fad: GET YOURSELF SOME BETTER BLOOD WITH A LITTLE BLOOD WORK. I can tell you that I am not fond of having needles shoved in my veins to extract the stuff that keeps me alive. Blood itself doesn't usually make me woozy. Needles don't really make me that woozy either. It's the combination that creeps me out.

Here are some highlights of my blood work adventure:

• Max and Rex came to witness the gore for the first attempt. They amused themselves with ghoulish noises and pretend passing out on the floor. This did not amuse the nurse who was trying to locate my veins.

• Apparently, my vein "rolled" away from the offending needle in a willful act of avoidance.

• After about six nurses asked me if I was OK as I waited for a new nurse to give my veins a try, I decided I must look much worse than I felt and should lie down.

• They all kept asking me if I "usually" have trouble having my blood taken, as though I do it all the time.

• I went through a total of three nurses. The one that finally got the blood told me why they had to keep trying to get the blood from the same spot, it turns out that when you have to take "a lot" of blood you don't want to take it from the smaller veins or they could collapse. She also explained that the reason the younger nurses were having so much trouble is that they were wearing surgical gloves which makes it more difficult to feel where the veins are.

So next week I get to get an x-ray to test my bone density to find out if I am, in fact, an eighty five year old.