Medicinal Herbs #2

We came from here http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/876152/

Interesting thread. A couple comments, while perhaps not timely still on subject. Note I'm not a doctor and am not giving medical advice, just information and my thinking on the subject. Hope you all find this useful.

On anti-depressants:
The set of SSRIs (Selective Saratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors) and related drugs on the market are the latest in a string drugs prescribed by the psychiatric industry. The SSRIs work by inhibiting the uptake of brain chemicals associated with feeling good and being mentally alert. The brain chemicals commonly targeted include seratonin, adrenaline, and dopamine - adrenaline less so now because it is associated with anger. What I find ironic is that most of the drugs prescribed since the late 1800's have done the same thing. Cocaine was prescribed as an anti-depressant. It works by inhibiting the re-uptake of seratonin, dopamine, and adrenaline. It was prescribed until it was proved addictive and made illegal. The industry fought taking it off the market at the time. Another example is amphetamines. They follow the same pattern. Same re-uptake inhibition (just more adrenaline), same addictive qualities, same fight over having it removed from the market. Same thing with barbituates. What concerns me with the current set is that frequently when people stop using the the SSRIs, they experience a recurrence of the depression. Longer periods of SSRI use correspond to greater levels of depression. The industry says that this is proof that people's brains have an imbalance and need the drugs. To me the symptomology has the same flavor as addiction to cocaine or amphetamines or barbituates or ...

A nutrative approach:
I don't really have enough information on this, but I am keeping aware of it. Two products on the market that deal with depressive symptoms from a nutrient perspective are Sam-e and 5-htp. 5-htp is a substance that your body uses to make seratonin and melatonin (waking/sleeping brain chemicals). Sam-e I don't know much about. People take both with benefit to their "happiness" level. I am not aware of any addictive qualities of these items. I do know that 5-htp is also used in conjunction with drugs such as cocaine to producs an amplified high. Apparently being able to make more saritonin in addition to inhibiting its re-uptake produces an even better high. Sigh. My thining is that it is better to support your body with required nutrients rather than mess with trying to control the way it works. This applys to most people. I do think it likely that there are people who require something different.

On sleep herbs:
I tried Valerian once. I did not feel more rested. I did feel quite drugged. I won't use it again.

I will occasionally use melatonin. Mostly when I travel back East for work, have to sleep in a hotel, and have to wake up much earlier than normal and be mentally sharp, I will take one to help me go to sleep early. Melatonin is the brain chemical your body produces naturally to make you feel sleepy. Thus the effect of a pill feels quite natural and is effective. I don't know if taking it regularly will mess with your body's natural production or not.

Every body is different and reacts differently. I use valerian occasionally and love what it does for me. I have tried sleeping pills and feel grugged for a couple of days after using them. Valerian does not do that to me. I feel very refreshed after a nights sleep that is gotten from drinking a cup of valerian root tea. Hate the taste but love the sleep.
I think that it is true that there is a nutritive answer to many of the problems that doctors prescribe drugs to fix. In other countries doctors do prescribe herbs instead of pharmeceuticals. I wish the practice was more widely available in USA.

Me too. You can't patent an herb though.

Money drives industry, and if you can't get a patent and make a fortune on an herb, but you can on a chemical, the chemical is what will be produced and marketed. It's the marketing that gets to me. I found out last night that Honey Nut Cheerios are health food, and I can eat all the Three Musketeers I want because they have no fat! Amazing!!! And if I'm on antidepressants and they're not working, all I have to do is add another antidepressant! Lethal side effects, but I wouldn't care!!! Hooray!

Shiny Happy people.

Remeber George Orwell's Brave New World? I think it is the scariest book I have ever read. I see way too many things today that remind me of it. Someday we will all go to the local center and get our required daily allowance of anitdepressents. Life will suck but we won't care.

There will always be a "reservation" with people who want different.

Three cheers for the reservation people! Count me in.

Actually Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World. The parallels continue to be frightening. George Orwell brought us Animal Farm and 1984.

oops you are so right. Two of my favorite authors in junior high Darn I think my age is showing again. LOL

So, I just finished reading a book that made me very nervous. It is regarding the overuse of antibiotics and their effect on man, animal and our foods. They suggested a variety of herbal antibiotics and I found it very interesting. So, some of the recommended stronger herbal antibiotics are garlic, aloe, ginger,echinacea, goldenseal and honey to name a few of the common ones.

We have a friend that is a nurse. He talks about staph and MSRAs running rampant thru the hospitals. He says that you will not find a Dr that will put one of their family members in a hospital as that is the best place to get sick. And yet, the Doctors are loathe to give up on prescribing antibiotics that no longer work. The medical field is progressive in much technology and archaic in this field. It is obviously money driven but at the expense of our well being. Learn from it and take responsibility for our own health!

I can't remember where I read it (of course) but they analyzed water from a river in India and said it had enough antibiotics to treat an entire city. Very, very scary.

not to mention the amounts of antidepressants in our own city/county water supplies the days. Very scary indeed Brigid.

I'm with you on the meat supply Pod--I had to quit eating chicken several years ago because I am deathly allergic to penicillan (its a genetic thing in our family). Every time I ate chicken I would start itching so bad I thought I would never be able to handle it. It's one of the main reasons I don't eat meat anymore--although I do eat and use organic eggs and sometimes some fish/seafood. Although I often wonder about myself with the later--and its definitely a seasonal thing.

I was in a pretty bad car wreck in 2004--and that resulted in a total left hip replacement as well as lots of plates and pins in the lower part of the same leg. I have a really good sport's orthopedic surgeon (44 is considered rather young for a total hip replacement) and he pulled me out of that hospital where I was taken and he performed the 14 hour surgery; and he had me transferred to a rehab convalescent center (everyone else was there for heart related surgery) by ambulance the minute I awoke from the anesthtesia (sp?!). He refuses to allow any of his people to remain in regular hospitals. Then he kept me on vancomycin for the entire 10 days I was in rehab because he was so worried--as well as coming to see me twice every day (including Christmas and New Years). Thanks to him you can't even tell I had all this surgery on this leg--except when I get on an airline or have to have some sort of invasive medical work done.

Amazingly the antibiotics are fed in the poultry/beef industry to make the animals larger more quickly. But the comment that got my attention was eggs. The author mentioned that four common strains of salmonella have become commonplace in eggs. Apparently the industry and govt are proposing all eggs be pasturized before consumption. If this is the case, eggs will no longer be sold in the shell but marketed in liquid form in milk carton type containers. I now feel like I am playing Russian roulette when I cook eggs.

The sad truth on India. And some of our U.S. company medications here are made there because it's cheaper than here. So we're partly to blame.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/265911
Overuse of antibiotics is the main cause of resistant superbugs. My DH's body developed an outright allergy to Penicillin as a child. He was living with relatives and they had bad water in a rural area. So the parents dosed the whole family with penecillin routinely rather than bother to get good water from somewhere else. Later on in life he became allergic to another antibiotic. And his body eventually became resistant to some other antibiotics...a more rare reaction. So there isn't many antibiotics that work on him. After an operation at a VA hospital left him with serious problems, he eventually went into septic shock months later, which very nearly killed him. They tried everything they could and couldn't cure the infection completely. It took a long time before they were able to operate and remove the source of infection. Meantime he ended up with superbugs he picked up in MICU. Oh, and I don't agree that doctors won't admit family members to a hospital. If their family member's condition is serious enough, there would be no choice. My daughter is a doctor and I believe she would avoid it if at all possible, but if it was necessary, she would admit. Might be more choosy about what hospital is chosen and what doctors, but that's about it. BTW, does anyone use antibacterial soap? Very bad thing to do!

I don't use any here but when DH has had extended stays in a large hospital, we used antibacterial hand cremes when going in to see patients and antibacterial soaps when we came out from the visit.

So what do y'all do to build up our natural immunity so it can resist these bad bacterias?

Eat a well balanced diet of nutritious food (another subject on the nutritional quality of a given food item), exercise, get enough sleep, and find some time to enjoy life. That's the basics. Certain herbs (echinaecia) and some mushrooms are supposed to help build immunity.

Vitamin C, bioflavonoids and Astragalus root also.

Podster, would that book you're referring to be by Stephen Buhner? Just wondering, he wrote some pretty interesting stuff along those same lines....

For excellent audio recordings of some of the preeminent herbalists in the country (heck, the world) giving lectures on topics such as MRSA and immunity, go to Tree Farm Tapes. They go to various herbal symposia and record the teachers. You can order by lecture or get the entire session. Especially good is David Winston's lecture on MRSA and herbs.

Hi Cyra! I hadn't seen you around in a while. Yes, it was Buhner. Amazing information. I can see so many correlations in herbals that are added to foods to control the bacterias in food and yet, today, we consider them seasonings to flavor only. Sad that I have to get older before I am smart enough to learn these things... 8 )

Herbalbetty ~Thanks for the info on the Tree Farm Tapes. That will be worth checking out.

Reading this thread, I'm so happy that I gave up eating dead animals of any kind years ago (although difficult).
You read pollution coming from feedlots and slaughterhouses. Antibiotics are used to control diseases in overcrowded conditions. Overall it's a hellish thought.
Live love and peace.

Last year, I started making beer; and, while looking around the Internet for background literature, I found references to gruit beer, an ancient herbal brew. Further searching led me to Stephen Buhner's book, _Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers_. I started out by adding lemon balm and yarrow, to good effect. This year, I've gone considerably further, with one batch containing the following: yarrow, nettle, borage, burdock, hyssop, wormwood, prairie sagebrush, dandelion, sage, and spruce. It all tastes great, a little bit like root beer. It seems to be having a very good effect on my health as well. The herb beer also seems to have a slight psychotropic effect.

I have also used herbs to treat some minor skin and gum problems, with good results. All this has made me quite passionate about the subject.

This message was edited Jul 7, 2009 2:03 PM

I wonder if the "slight psychotropic effect" is due to the wormwood, similar to absinthe?

Actually, I haven't tried the one with wormwood yet: it's still in the fermenter. I noticed the psychotropic effect with a batch that had not much more than yarrow, dandelion and burdock. Rather than making me drowsy, like regular beer, it made me a little bit giddy, and maybe even a bit spacey. All rather agreeable.

This message was edited Jul 7, 2009 2:52 PM

I read not long ago. some gov agency has discovered that rivers that pharmaceuticals company are at have high concentrations of whatever meds they are making turning up in the rivers. Even tho the companys insist it is impossible.

Cando, not only rivers where pharmaceutical companies dump their waste (although the waste is supposed to be treated before it leaves the facility), but regular municipal water systems as well. Think about all the drugs that people take. Birth control, antibiotics, antidepressants, stomach acid blockers, etc. Much of it is excreted from the body into the septic system. Some people also flush left over prescriptions down the toilet or into the sink. It goes into waste water. The waste water is treated. But, treated for bacteria and such, not to filter out pharmaceuticals. Where does that waste water end up? Not pretty.

herbalbetty, I read about the other stuff ending up in our water too. Years ago i was guilty of flushing meds too. Than learned better. Now i take it to our local hospital and they get rid of it safely.

Very interesting thread.

I am quite skeptical of the pharmaceutical industry myself, and although I am dependent on the industry to supply me with insulin, I try to grow most of the medicinals that I need.

The industry is not interested in making people healthy, but rather in treating people for a profit. That is why they tend to ruin everything they touch.
Even the natraceutical industry has made a mess out of a good thing; standardized herbs generally are untrustworthy.
Best to grow your own medicine!

I was looking for a source for Greek Mountain Tea seeds and then I also noticed Horizon Herbs had Lomatium dissectium or Desert Parsley on the same site. Seems to be antiviral, a possibility for preventing/treating flu. Found this:
http://www.lomatium.com/history.htm

Also Baical Skullcap, Scutellaria baicalensis, which shows great promise as far as flu and other antiviral needs:
Okay, here's the correct link:
http://www.horizonherbs.com/product.asp?specific=724

This message was edited Nov 14, 2009 3:44 PM

Thanks Linda, Looks worth looking into. The Medical industry has'nt come up with a cure for the cold or flu. If it just prevents secondary infections. it'll be worth it.