Taking back your health: The Home Medicine Cycle 1

After ten years as a home herbalist, I’m embarking on a new project. I would like to bring together all of the experience and information I have gathered about reliably growing and using herbs as home medicine in one place here on the part of my site devoted to herb lore.

Grumblers ridge, Mnichovice, the czech republic, where I grow my herb garden

Let me say right off the bat that I’m not a doctor. I’m a mother of small children. I’m also not against doctors. My children are registered with a pediatrician and go for regular check-ups. I’m not even against buying medicine from the pharmacy on a prescription, when there is no alternative.

My goal isn’t to return to the Middle Ages when people had to rely on the knowledge of a local herbalist who used a variety of remedies, some useful and some unreliable. My goal is to keep my family in as good of health as possible.

Simply put, my experience - while observing myself, my extended family and my friends - is that overuse of synthetic pharmaceuticals is harmful to health. I have found that almost every health challenge that comes our way can be handled with herbs and other simple remedies that we can grow or make ourselves. We know the source, we know what’s in them and we they are tried, true and safe.

This is why my pediatrician and family doctor love us. We show up on time for check-ups every year or two and rarely show up in between. They get a small cut from the insurance company because we’re on their books, even if we don’t show up. We’re all very happy with the arrangement and very healthy.

Doctors as allies, not dictators

I grew up in a time and a place without either insurance or any doctor within twenty miles. I can still remember when my towering six-and-a-half-foot father, who I thought was invincible, was too sick to get up because of a spider bite on his neck. When he finally made his way to a doctor, the doctor was appalled and frightened by the fact that he hadn’t come earlier, given the danger. I was also sick for a month when I was seven before I was taken to a doctor so weak that I couldn’t sit up in the back of the car.

We're a moderately normal family.

As a mother, I am immensely grateful to have a pediatrician less than a mile from my house. I don’t go to him often because he tends to be trigger happy with the antibiotics but, as long as I don’t forget that I have a reasonably good brain as soon as I walk into his office, he is an ally.

The crux of the issue is my attitude. I see a doctor as a skilled ally, not a genius or an expert on my body or someone with all the answers or a representative of the medical establishment. In turn, I view my body and my children’s bodies and complex biological systems, living in rhythm with the earth and with our consciousness. I know I don’t have all the answers and I know that the doctor doesn’t have all the answers.

The doctor has the advantage of years of experience, a lot of medical education and up-to-date professional medical news. I have the advantage knowing my body intimately and the advantage of intuition. But in the end, I take responsibility for my health.

I listen to doctors. When there is a complex problem, I do a lot of research both through doctors and on my own. But in the end I make conscious decisions and I use all of my resources - nutrition, exercise, ancient and modern herbal lore, doctors, other herbalists and my intuition.

Bodies are ecosystems, not battlefields

The pediatrician doesn’t always agree with me on everything. He was initially concerned about my herbal remedies, but he is coming to agree more and more, as year after year passes and he sees how healthy my children are compared to the general population. My children’s bodies are not a battlefields. They are balanced living beings. We are lucky to have avoided many serious health problems but we have also avoided many through ingenuity and responsibility rather than luck.

Kids will climb trees and they'll get bumps and bruises. What parent doesn't need basic first aid? Learning to use herbs as well is a natural extension. 

My children have never been to the emergency room. We are moderately careful but we aren’t the kind of family where kids are never allowed to learn about risk and the pain of falling off of a jungle gym. I’ve treated a case of croup that would have sent most parents scurrying to the emergency room immediately. I’ve dealt with an infant’s dangerously high fever on a ten-hour flight across the Atlantic. I’ve stopped profuse bleeding from a cut on my husband’s hand and bandaged it with a poultice so successfully that by the next day, when we could have reached an emergency room, the wound was closed and there was nothing left to stitch up.

If someone falls and breaks a bone, we’ll go to the emergency room, but we try to stay away by treating our bodies as whole and balanced systems, rather than battlefields.

My story of taking back my health

For three years, I underwent intensive and unsuccessful fertility treatments using the latest pharmaceutical and surgical technologies. (My children are adopted.) In those three years I learned a hard lesson about the medical industry. I did weeks and months of intensive research trying to determine the best and safest course of action.

Doctors, who had vested financial interests - rather than the attitudes of allies - gave me confusing and contradictory information. I tried to make sense of it. The brochures from clinics and pharmaceutical companies that I read claimed that the side effects of IVF hormone treatments are minimal and rare.

I desperately wanted children and I had no one to advise me. Everyone I trusted knew little more than me and those who were “experts” all had financial incentives to skew the truth. So, I let myself be ruled by doctors. I went where they said, I swallowed what they said to swallow and injected what they said to inject.

And over three years my body fell apart. When I started I was twenty eight and extraordinarily healthy. When I finished I was thirty two and sick in bed more days than I was well. I had no diagnosis from start to finish and the doctors refused to listen when I told them that I had once been able to resist most of the seasonal coughs and colds that went around and now if anyone coughed in my vicinity I was flat on my back for a week. Instead the doctors at the fertility clinic insisted that the next step in treatment should be to continue with all the hormone treatments that had been unsuccessful for three years and to add immune suppressants to them, further crippling my immune system.

And I finally said, “no.”

I took a step back and took responsibility. I knew that statistically less than 0.2 percent of those who undergo four unsuccessful rounds of IVF, as I had, will ever become pregnant. I knew that something in the treatment had severely impacted my ability to resist minor viral and yeast infections.

The potential benefit was no longer worth the cost. I had tried alternative infertility treatments as well and, in the end, my husband and I decided to adopt children instead of treat our bodies like battlefields for more unnumbered years.

our Bodies are ecosystems and not entirely separate from our environment.

I had begun to take a serious interest in home-based herbal medicine as well. So, I stopped taking all synthetic pharmaceuticals. I relied on herbs for everything for three years. I found that if I took so much as an ibuprofen for a headache, I would have severe rebound headaches and often flu-like symptoms two days later.

So, I stuck to the herbs and after three years, my immune system started to bounce back. I am as healthy as I was before, as far as anyone can tell. And with caution I can take antibiotics and other basic pharmaceuticals when needed.

This taught me that I have to listen to my body as well as to doctors. I have to pay attention and take responsibility for my health, first and foremost.

That is what my idea of home medicine is about. I can’t give medical advice because I’m not a doctor or even an expert herbalist. I’m a mother with experience in the trenches of home medicine. I read a lot and I experiment when I am sure of the basic safety of a remedy. I compare notes with doctors and herbalists all over the world. And then I try to do the best I can for my own family.

If your goal is good health for yourself and your family, you can take an active role. Listen to your doctor as an ally. Listen to your intuition as a key tool. Pay attention to your body. Learn first aid and other basic home medicine skills. Learn how to grow and use medicinal herbs. Think carefully to avoid dangerous pitfalls and learn what works for your particular family.

The home medicine cycle

This is what it means to take back your health. With the out-of-control use of antibiotics, pesticides and other harmful chemicals in modern society, we have to take a conscious role in guarding our health. With the huge medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex generating reams of advertising and countless scientifically suspect studies, you can’t trust everything a doctor tells you or everything you read. Develop relationships with doctors who think and read critically, who know that the industry isn’t always right. Do as much research as you can on your own and learn to use as many homemade remedies as you can, because there is one thing that separates homemade remedies from those you buy at the pharmacy - you know what’s in them.

A word of caution on using the herbal supplements you buy at the health food store: While there are surely some responsible companies making effective herbal supplements, you should be aware that this is an industrial complex as well, almost as big as the pharmaceutical complex. And it is much less regulated. Several studies have shown that many and possibly most herbal supplements sold in stores contain none of the medicinal ingredients they claim to. Some contain dangerous substances and some are simply sugar pills or water. Those that do actually contain a medicinal herb or other active substance have often been processed so much that their potency is minimal.

That is why my focus is on medicinal remedies you can grow and make yourself. You may sometimes need to buy dried herbs, if you can’t grow or collect everything you need, but if you buy locally and develop relationships with herbalists you can trust, you have a much better chance of getting what you need than if you simply browse the shelves at a store.

I have been taking responsibility for my health and making most of my family’s medicine for ten years now. As much as I can I use herbs that I can grow or collect myself, so I know what is in it and where it came from. I get other materials such as honey, wax and propolis and some dried herbs from local family businesses that I can visit and see their quality. I make careful decisions about using synthetic pharmaceuticals, if they are absolutely necessary.

The results? It isn’t that my family and I never get sick but it does seem like we get sick less than most people and that when we get sick, we don’t have terrible symptoms and they pass quickly. It didn’t always used to be that way. As I’ve said, I’ve been through some rugged illnesses and times when I couldn’t fight off the tiniest cold. So I’m not just coming from some extraordinarily tough genetic stock.

For what it is worth, I would like to share my experiences of what works in home medicine. So, I have set myself a project this year. I will write regularly about the steps it takes to build up a safe and reliable herbal medicine chest from things you can grow and gather near home. I am starting now, in February, because this is the time when you can order seeds and start an herb garden if you don’t already have one. Even if you don’t have room for an outdoor garden, a few pots with strategic herbs an a sunny window sill can go a long ways toward taking back your health.

I invite you to come with me on a journey this year through my Home Medicine Cycle of posts. If you are new to herbal medicine and simply want to find a way to better health, you can follow my posts and get tips throughout the year for how to grow the basic herbs you need, make medicines out of them and decide what to use them for. If you have experience with herbal medicine, we can compare notes and learn from each other.

In my next post, I will discuss the basics of how to start an herb garden, primarily which herbs to plant and where to find good seeds.

I’d love to hear from you. What are your experiences with taking your health into your own hands? If there are specific topics about herbs and home medicine that you’d like me to cover, let me know.