Helpful herbs and problem pharmaceuticals
To begin this section on the difference between herbs and pharmaceutical drugs, I need to start with my story of how I became interested in herbs and herbal medicine.
When I was young, I (like many people) was off to the doctor whenever I was sick. I was brought up to believe that’s what you do when you’re sick. Doctors give out medicine that helps to make you healthy – right? Every sniffle or pain I went, spent my five minutes telling the good ol’ doc what was ailing me, he or she would write out a prescription which I’d get filled on the way home and then I would take whatever the doctor had prescribed without asking any questions. I had ‘faith’ in the doctor and his medicine!
When I had my children, I started off doing the same with them – every sniffle, cough, rash or whatever – off to the doctor for a prescription for antibiotics or whatever they thought best which I then fed into my babies – no questions asked.
Shortly after I had my daughter (my first child), I started to have regular problems with abdominal pain. I would get attacks with pain, sometimes fever, vomiting and much discomfort. I had many trips to the A and E at the hospital where I was examined and checked out. I was sent for scans for gallstones, and checked for appendicitis and who knows what else, but with no results. I was told at various times I had everything from infections in my tubes to gastroenteritis.
This problem stayed with me for about 6 years, until I was diagnosed with dispepsia and put on medication for it, which seemed to do a fair job of relieving my symptoms for the most part. I had been on these pills for about 12 months before our move to Australia at age 25. Before we left we went for a trip to Tauranga to visit my relatives including my lovely wise old Nana. When I told her of my health issues, she told me I should be taking ‘Slippery Elm Bark’. I had never heard of this and she explained that she used to put it in my fathers bottle when he was a baby as it helped with stomach problems. She had a box of this powder in the cupboard and promptly made me a drink with warm milk (I think) and this brown powder stuff! I tasted it and tipped it down the sink. Yuck!
During my final visit to my doctor in NZ, I asked him what I should do about my medication and he told me I should be able to do without it after I had finished my next script. Ok! Off to Australia I went, finished my medication and assumed that things would be fine. Wrong! Within a month, I was having attacks again. That’s not what my doctor said would happen! What to do – find a doctor? No (this I think was where the ‘faith’ started to diminish!) – I remembered what my Nana had said, and so off to a health shop to find slippery elm bark. I bought some, started taking it and got results! I’ve taken slippery elm off and on over the years with great results. I have since realised that a big part of my problem back then was my disgusting (but fairly ‘normal’ ) diet at the time and my smoking habit.
This was the beginning of a life long interest in herbs (and gradually, all aspects of ‘real’ health – Thank you Nana!) – it set me on a path of learning about herbs and how to use them to stay healthy or to regain health when problems arise and discovering what they can do for our health. From that time, I gradually stopped going to doctors and also stopped taking my children. I could probably count the number of doctors visits I have made over the past 20 years on my two hands and I haven’t been to a doctor for any advice or health issue for over 15 years at this point (2009). The few times I have been to a doctor in the past 15 years have been only to get blood tests done, just to check things like my hormone levels etc when I have been trying to resolve health issues myself, and I went a couple of times for prescriptions for progesterone cream when I tried that for a while in NZ (you can only get it on script in NZ and here in Australia unlike other countries where you can buy it in the health shop!). My son now aged 23, hasn’t been to a doctor since he was about 12 years old and in the time since our move to Australia when he was aged 3, he has probably been to a doctor less than 10 times! He is healthy, sensible, and calm of mind and manner. He has no fillings in his teeth (even tho he drank rain water and didn’t drink milk for most of his childhood – there goes the fluoride and the milk for calcium theories!). He never completed his vaccination program as I stopped once I realised there were questions to be asked and he has had no medication since he was a young child apart from about 24 hours worth of pain killers when he managed to cut the end of his finger off at work a couple of years ago!
Another early experience that concreted my passion for herbs was when my daughter was a child she used to get a terrible cough on a regular basis that would last for weeks or months. It would be so bad she would be gagging. She was diagnosed with asthma by the doctors and prescribed inhalers etc which did absolutely nothing! I found some information that said thyme tea (an infusion of fresh thyme) helps with coughs. It did! It was the ONLY thing that we found helped. I used to send her to school with a drink bottle full of thyme tea. She hated the stuff, but realised eventually that it worked and so would gladly take it. We have used this tea many times over the years for ourselves and visitors alike when a cough is a problem. It’s amazing! Prior to this discovery we wasted lots of money on cough mixtures from the chemist which did absolutely nothing as I’m sure many of you would agree from your own experiences with these expensive bottles of sweet artificially coloured syrup!
I have discovered that many herbs have incredible properties – anti viral, anti bacterial, anti fungal, immune supporting, endocrine supporting, expectorant, strengthening and much much more. Used every day in cooking they help us to stay healthy. Used at the first signs of a cold some can ward it off within hours. Herbs help to give us control over our health and the health of our family. Used wisely and used regularly you can change your health forever.
I have used herbs to rebuild my husband from the scrawny 52kg skeletan that he had become with the help of his doctors and their addictive painkillers, after a motorbike accident left him with complicated health issues, back to a healthy 70kg plus and no painkillers. Herbal medicine and nutritional medicine allow us to manage his condition and allow him to live a normal life and remain healthy without the downward spiral that the drugs he was on were causing. I am certain that if he had stayed on them, his condition would have continued to deteriorate and affect his life much more than it now does.
I have also discovered during this time, that pharmaceutical drugs while effective in emergency medicine to keep someone alive, are damaging in chronic health issues causing side effects that require more medication and gradually undermine health and destroy lives. These drugs only remove the symptoms, doing nothing to correct the underlying problem. Just as if you were to patch up a hole in a rusty pipe with some silicone, the problem will appear somewhere else because all you have done is to patch up the leak (the symptom) and have done nothing to correct the problem which is the rusting pipe and in the mean time the pipe continues to rust and get worse eventually causing a much bigger problem.
For more information on boths sides of this story, see my pages on
Helpful Herbs and Problem Pharmaceuticals.
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