Sage: More Than Just Poultry Stuffing

The wise gardener who planted salvia officinalis has an abundance of sage for valuable medicinal use. Prepared as an infusion (1 tsp herb steeped 15-30 minutes in a covered cup of boiled water), sage is helpful in relieving tension headaches, stomach cramps, flatulence and dyspepsia. Known as a diaphoretic herb, hot sage tea will increase the flow of bodily fluids (e.g. perspiration and delayed periods) and decrease the flow when taken cold. Colds, flu, and bronchial afflictions benefit from hot sage’s ability to expectorate and increase sweating and elimination of toxins. Cold sage tea arrests diarrhea and night sweats and can be used to assist in the weaning process when it is time to stem the flow of milk in a nursing mother. Sage is to be avoided during pregnancy as it can stimulate uterine contractions.

As a rinse, sage’s antiseptic properties help heal sore throat, inflamed tongue and mouth ulcers. Those sporting braces can benefit from sage’s ability to astringe and heal irritated tissue.

Aromatically, sage helps to clear the sinuses and lungs: the inhaled infusion (a towel tented to direct the vapors is helpful); strained sage tea in the vaporizer; sage tea added to the bath.

A sage compress speeds the healing of cuts, wounds, herpes sores, and varicose veins. Poured over the hair after shampooing, sage tea is helpful in reducing dandruff.

Sage was commonly used by Native Americans to clear the energy field. The dried leaves were rolled into cylinders and tied with string. The smoke from the ignited smudge sticks was credited with clearing negative vibrations.

Considering the varied medicinal uses of common sage, it is easy to understand the ancient proverb: “Why should a man die if he has sage flourishing in his garden?”

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Summer Woes

Most people anticipate the arrival of summer with great pleasure. I consider it my least favorite season: a time of sunburn, heat prostration, mosquitoes, and bug bites!

BUGS! Do I respect them…yes. Do I like them…not really. Despite my daily intake of supplements reputed to be bug repellents (garlic, B vitamins, etc), I am still sweet meat for the little critters. Oil of pennyroyal, a more pleasant scent than the more familiar citronella, is an effective repellent. A chemical-free pennyroyal “cologne” can be made by adding 6 drops pennyroyal to 1oz almond oil. This can be carried with you at all times, ready to be rubbed on exposed areas such as arms, neck, legs and feet.

HOW TO STOP THE ITCH! If you ventured out without protection and the bugs got you, the juicy cut surface of an onion rubbed on the bite will bring immediate relief. If you are outdoors and onion is not available, look for plantain in the grass, chew it up (be certain that what you’ve found is, indeed, plantain and not chemically treated) and apply to the bite as a poultice. If chewing the weed does not appeal (although it’s quite sweet and delicious), break down its capillaries by bruising the ribs in the leaf with a rock.

THE NOT SO FRIENDLY SUN! Peppermint tea warms the body in the winter and cools it down in the summer. For the electromagnetic drain of a hot summer sun, try a peppermint bath. Steep a cup of peppermint leaves in a covered pot of boiled water 30 minutes. Strain and add to bath. Collect the leaves in a washcloth with a rubber band and rub all over your body. Oil of peppermint, if blended with a carrier oil, can be rubbed on the body to restore energy.

The health food store carries many wonderful sunscreens so there’s no good excuse for a sunburn. If you are negligent and wind up with one anyway, aloe is the universal treatment. Split a spear and gently apply the gelatinous juice or buy pure aloe gel in the tube. Why do you think aloe plants proliferate in the hot tropics? To soothe the skin of foolish sun revelers!

Make it an enjoyable summer with your botanical preparations and be sure to share them with others!

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The Ginger Bath: A Relaxing Stimulant

Spring weather beckons us outdoors to exercise, garden, play tennis. Improperly exercised, overworked muscles experience soreness due to aggravated tissue and lactic acid buildup. The ginger bath is a wonderful way to assist release of such impurities from the body by increasing circulation.

A powerful detoxifier

Relaxing and soothing to sore, achy muscles, the ginger bath is a welcome respite from a hard day’s work or the aches and pains associated with flu. Its powerful detoxifying and diaphoretic actions cause profuse sweating, beneficial in breaking a fever. (Diaphoretic means that the herb, when had hot, will stimulate excretion of fluids, and when taken cold, will inhibit their flow.) Its stimulating properties increase circulation, dispelling chills and warming the body. Those with tachycardia or other heart stress should approach ginger with respect as an overdose will produce increased palpitations.

If you’ve been standing on your feet all day, a ginger foot bath will soothe and relax the entire body through the reflexes in the feet. Prepare to go to bed after a ginger bath. If you’re planning to go out dancing, skip the ginger and add a cup or two of wood-aged apple cider vinegar to your bath instead!

How to prepare a ginger bath

The easiest way to prepare a ginger bath is to add a palmful of powdered ginger to the bath. The powdered ginger should be purchased from a health food store that guarantees they are supplying you with non-irradiated herbs. The powdered ginger found on supermarket shelves has been irradiated. If you prefer to use the fresh root, simmer several tablespoons fresh, unpeeled ginger root in 6-8 cups water for 30 minutes. Strain, and add to bath water.

Herbal hydrotherapy should be taken a minimum of 20 minutes. This usually necessitates frequent adjustment of water temperature. When ginger is added, however, its warming properties add herbal heat, keeping the water hot for the duration of the bath. Sipping a cool glass of water enables one to better withstand ginger’s diaphoretic effects.

Every bath experience is enhanced by soft music. A scented candle and spiritual reading material. Make your ginger bath the most healing and deeply relaxing conclusion to a stressful day.

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Kitchen First Aid: Foods To
Heal & Soothe Your Little Ones

THE MASHED BANANA TRICK: the ouchless way to remove splinters! Instead of going after something embedded (splinter, glass, thorn) with tweezers (ouch!), try some ripe, mashed banana on the area, covered with tape, overnight. The enzymes in the banana draw it to the surface for easy removal the next morning. Mashed banana also works for drawing out a pimple!

THE SMELLY ONION: for the sting of a bee, the bite of a bug. Been bitten or stung? Take away the hurt or the itch by rubbing with a freshly cut onion!

THE VINEGAR BATH: to soothe the pain of a sunburn put one cup apple cider vinegar in the bath (buy wood aged from the health food store, not chemically aged from the supermarket). Soothes and cools!

MRS. RABBIT’S SECRET: for tummy aches, sleeplessness and nervous upset. Peter Rabbit’s heart went pit-a-pat as he ran from Farmer MacGregor. His mother knew how to calm him: a nice warm cup of Chamomile tea. When he couldn’t sleep or had a tummy ache, good old Chamomile came to the rescue.

THE SMELLY ONION – AGAIN!: for bumps, strains and sprains. When my athletic boys have minor injuries, we tape on a sliced, yellow onion overnight. It reduces pain and swelling.

KISSED A FROG – GOT A WART?: the Castor Oil trick.

We don’t really think that frogs give us warts but whatever does we can banish them this way: every night for 3 weeks, make a paste from baking soda and Castor Oil. Place on the wart and cover with tape. Remove in the morning. Stop after 3 weeks and then the wart will most likely turn black, dry up and fall off, never to return!

PETER PIPER PICKED A PECK OF PICKLED PEPPERS: If Peter Piper had picked Cayenne pepper he could have used it to stop bleeding! Putting powdered Cayenne on a bleeding cut not only doesn’t hurt but stops the bleeding in 10 seconds! Apply and cover with bandage. It even stops the heavy bleeding that can occur with head wounds.

THE BROWN PAPER BAG TRICK: to stop a bloody nose put a small piece of a brown paper bag between the upper lip and gum as high up as it can go. The top lip will hold it in place. Bleeding will stop in a few minutes!

WINNIE-THE-POOH’S BURN REMEDY: Honey, the sweet and sticky solution to minor burns. Gently apply to take the hurt from a burn. Use only raw, natural honey from the health food store, full of enzymes. Winnie-the-Pooh wouldn’t have gotten his honey from a supermarket!

OIL OF EUCALYPTUS: Man/Woman and Dog’s best friend!

If you’ve got a cold and can’t breathe, put a few drops of oil of Eucalyptus (found in health food stores) on a wad of cotton stuffed inside a small container. Every time you need to clear your head, open the container and breathe deeply. It’s really a safe and natural inhaler!

THE FASHIONABLE PET REPELS TICKS: Dip a rope in oil of Eucalyptus, wrap in a bandana and tie around your pet’s neck. The Eucalyptus repels fleas and ticks. Pets look cute, too! Refresh the rope twice a week. You can also put one part Eucalyptus in 16 parts water into a spray bottle and spray on your pet and on yourself before gardening, hiking, playing in the grass.

THE SMELLY ONION – YES, AGAIN!

To put a stop to non-stop coughing, thinly slice a yellow onion, wrap in cheese cloth and warm in the oven at 200 degrees for just a few minutes, Place on your sweet child’s chest and cover with a T-shirt. By the time I got from my son’s bed to the door, the coughing stopped! Onion is a well known European remedy.

PEPPERMINT TEA: the nicest way to help a headache and stomachache. Steep a Peppermint tea bag (it shouldn’t contain anything but Peppermint) in a cup of boiled water, covered, for 10 minutes. Add honey, if you like, and watch those sad lips turn into a smile when they soon feel better.

ECHINACEA: Bless you! What sounds like a sneeze is actually something to make you well. A final note for parents: if you are interested in natural healing for your family then you must find out about Echinacea (eck-i-nay-sha). It is almost like an herbal antibiotic and anti-viral and stimulates the immune system. When a child has come home with some kind of bug, you give it to that child to help make them well and you give it to the rest of the family to help keep them well! This way illness need not travel through the entire family.

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Banana For A Splinter -
A Parent’s Dream Solution!

Most adults have painful childhood memories about having splinters removed and, as parents, dread the day they have to remove one from their own child. Sterilized needles and holding the screaming child down is a thing of the past…grab a banana instead! School will soon be out for the summer but that doesn’t mean illness and injuries are on hiatus. Sunburn, poison ivy, colds, diarrhea, rashes, insect bites, splinters, cuts and bruises can all put a damper on precious family moments.

When your children are sick or injured, you want them to feel better – fast! Although in some cases there is no substitute for traditional medical care, prescription drugs are not always the best answer. In a new book by Master Herbalist Andrea Candee, Gentle Healing for Baby and Child (Simon & Schuster), Candee, also a mother of two, shares more than 30 years’ experience using natural remedies for wellness. Dubbed the “natural Dr. Spock”, and written as a parent’s guide to child-friendly herbs and other natural remedies, gentle and easy holistic therapies are given for common childhood ailments and injuries.

“The home pantry, as well as the health food market, can store a wealth of healing and nurturing,” says Candee. She wrote the book because "there is little available information to help parents implement a natural approach for their children. It’s a great guide for babysitters, too,” says Candee, “it should be given to the babysitter along with the usual emergency numbers. While there's no alternative to medical help in an emergency like a broken bone, there are many first-aid remedies in the book that may help resolve a situation without the need for the trauma of a visit to the emergency room.”

Although marketed to parents and grandparents, "these remedies can be used by adults as well," says Candee. "What’s safe for children is also safe for adults…but what’s safe for adults is not always safe or appropriate for children."

Many pediatricians are now incorporating herbal recommendations for their patients. Ginger tea for nausea or a queasy stomach, eucalyptus oil for a stuffy nose, chamomile for colic or teething. Lawrence Baskind, MD., a pediatrician in Croton-on-Hudson, NY, who wrote the forward to Gentle Healing for Baby and Child, believes Candee’s remedies are safe and effective: “The herbs and remedies that Andrea suggests are gentle with a wide margin of safety. There are a hundred years of clinical experience behind them. Our conventional medicines are based on herbal prescriptions.”

"It’s important to learn proper dosing for a child," says Candee, who maintains a consultation practice in South Salem, NY where she is frequently consulted by doctors on how to treat children with natural medicines. Candee says the most reliable method for determining how much of an herb to give a child is to use weight, not age, as a guide. “Using an adult weight of 150 pounds as a baseline, divide 150 by the child’s weight to determine how much to give. If your child weighs 50 pounds, divide 50 into 150, therefore the dose is one-third that of the adult dose.” Candee advises keeping the frequency the same, just reducing the quantity. A cup of tea given three times a day to an adult would be 1/3 cup given three times a day to the 50 pound child.

What is Candee’s favorite herb for children? “Chamomile is the most versatile herb,” she says. “It can be used as an anti-inflammatory compress for irritated skin, a warm bottle of tea for colicky stomachs, a relaxing cup of tea before bedtime or for emotional upset. A gauze pad can be immersed in the tea, frozen, and kept on hand for teething pain; a chamomile teabag can be moistened and placed on closed eyelids for irritated eyes. All that relief from just a teabag of herbs!” exclaims Candee.

Recommending a parent first get a medical diagnosis, Candee suggests that an educated parent can often substitute natural medicine for the pharmaceuticals, and to be sure to let the pediatrician know what is being used just in case there are contraindications.

Wondering how to use that banana for a splinter? Simply cut a piece of the ripened peel, tape it on, pulp side to the splinter, leaving it in place overnight. In the morning, the enzymes in the ripe banana will have pulled the splinter to the surface. Deeply embedded splinters may require another night or two of fresh peel. Just think of the memories your child will have when they’re adults!

Even the parent accustomed to the familiar route of mainstream medicine will find effective, user-friendly, soothing solutions in this invaluable guide through childhood ailments.

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Bugs: The Natural Way to Keep Them at Bay

Bugs! Do I respect them as part of Nature’s miraculous design…yes. Do I like them…not really. Despite daily intake of supplements reputed to be bug deterrents (i.e. garlic, B vitamins), many of us are still sweet meat for the little critters. Acknowledging the skin’s ability to absorb substances into the bloodstream (modern medicine’s example of this biological fact is the invention of skin patches for delivering pharmaceutical drugs into the body) encourages us to seek out natural alternatives to chemical insect repellants.

Ticks and Lyme Disease

Dogs and cats are often the carriers of Lyme infected ticks. To fully protect one’s self and family from being bitten, the family pet must also be protected. A successful program for preventing any tick from attaching itself to your pet includes garlic powder and brewers yeast sprinkled liberally on their food every day (found in a convenient powdered combination in health food stores) and oil of eucalyptus. The essential oil of eucalyptus, derived from the leaf of the tree, contains naturally occurring chemicals repellent to ticks and fleas. A most effective method is to dip a thin rope into the undiluted oil, wrap it in a bandanna and tie it around your pet’s neck (fashionable, as well). The rope can be refreshed twice a week or more often, if necessary. The oil is quite potent and should not be applied directly to the skin as it may cause irritation. Mixing 1oz oil of eucalyptus into one pint of water in a spray bottle also enables you to spray your pet’s coat on a daily basis. But why save all the good protection for your pets? Before gardening or hiking, scent yourself with “eau de eucalyptus.” The oil/water combination can be sprayed on skin and/or clothing before an outdoor excursion, gardening, or romp in the grass. Eucalyptus diluted in a vegetable oil (e.g. almond, sesame, sunflower) can safely be applied to the skin for longer lasting protection.

Mosquitoes and black fly take wing!

Dilute 1oz essential oil of pennyroyal in 16oz vegetable oil to effectively repel mosquitoes. Keep a vial of this dilution with you when headed for a picnic, swing in the hammock or anywhere mosquitoes hang out. Oil of Pennyroyal has protected campers in the swampiest of areas by directly applying it to exposed areas of skin.

Black flies ruining a relaxing day in the park? Check out the surrounding area for aromatic evergreen trees, break off a branch, mash it with a rock and apply to arms and legs. The released essential oils will repel those bothersome bugs.

Don’t be the local attraction for stinging insects.

Bees, wasps, and yellow jackets are attracted by sweet smells and bright colors. If you don’t want them to think you are a delectable flower to explore, avoid wearing perfumes and scented hair and body care products, as well as brightly colored clothing. Neutral colors such as tan and white are least likely to attract unwelcome visitors. Cover sugary food and drink at picnic sites.

The easiest, most non-invasive way to remove embedded stingers or body parts of insects (splinters and thorns, too!) is to apply ripened, mashed banana covered with gauze, or tape on a piece of overripe banana skin overnight (pulp side to skin). The enzymes in the banana will painlessly draw to the surface any foreign object.

Stopping the itch and swelling.

If you ventured out into the great outdoors without protection and got bitten or stung, safe, non-chemical solutions can prevail. The oil of a vitamin E capsule punctured with a pin and applied to a bee sting can relieve pain and swelling. A juicy slice of onion rubbed on or taped into place will relieve the itch and swelling of an insect bite.

The common weed, plaintain, when mashed with a rock or chewed to break down its capillary walls (only chew if you are certain it has not been chemically treated) and poulticed directly on the affected area, pulls out the toxins of an insect sting or bite and relieves swelling. A paste of baking soda and water or mud and water will calm the area. It all depends upon where you are and what’s available. Usually, what you need is right at hand. You just need to be able to recognize its healing benefits. Keep in mind that more than one application may be necessary so use what is convenient for the moment and follow up a few more times that day with what seems to provide the most comfort.

House moths, the unwelcome guests.

Those bothersome moths moved right into your clothes closets and food pantry without invitation - or did you unwittingly invite them? Residues of odors and stains on clothing attract moths to your closets. Open bags of cereals, grains and flours are comparable to putting out the welcome mat. The easiest way to deal with the food items is to refrigerate them during summer months. Clean clothing before storing. Additional protection can be provided by placing muslin bags in your closets filled with combinations of dried, aromatic herbs and essential oils such as tansy, peppermint, rosemary, eucalyptus, cedar, sage, thyme, cinnamon and clove.

Keeping houseplants bug-free.

Infected houseplants often respond well to a strained spray of water blended with a few fresh cloves of garlic. The eucalyptus/water spray described above can also be applied to houseplants.

In centuries past, aromatic herbs were strewn on the floors of homes to repel insects. Instead, branches of herbs can be hung in doorways, arranged creatively in containers or crumbled into potpourris creating pleasant pest-repellent aromas. Essential oils can waft throughout the home in electric or candle diffusers. Cotton balls infused with essential oils can be strategically placed.

Let us peacefully co-exist with the insect world without polluting ourselves and our fragile environment by using Nature’s bountiful gifts.

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