Queen Ann's Lace, that weedy plant that grows in abandoned meadows was once used to stop bleeding. These flowers, along with common spider-webs contain substances that encourage blood to clot. It grows so abundantly, that as recently as WWI it was used in the field to ease blood loss from wounds. It could be made into a tea to be used as a wash and ground up to be made into a poultice to be applied directly to the wound.
Descriptions such as these, while charming, send chills down my back. They are part of a class of medical care reminiscent of the prescription a doctor made for my grandmother back in 1917 when, at the age of twelve, she was found to be anemic. He told her mother to give her a quart of red wine to drink every day.
That prescription must have worked, she lived to be quite old, and did not really begin to have problems with her health until she was in her late seventies, when the doctor prescribed such a cocktail of medication for her, including pills for high blood pressure, pills for low blood pressure, pills to ease the side-effects from the combination of the first two groups and pills to ease the side-effects from the pills that were intended to ease side-effects. Towards the end, she was consuming so many pills she had no appetite left for food.
A battle has nearly always existed between established medicine and other forms of health care--at least since the seventeen hundreds, when medical science was in its infancy, and would hardly be recognized as a science by most of us today, so much have we learned since then of how the body works.
So, as the acceptable medical health care, which we have been told all our lives is the best in the world, becomes less available to us, where do we turn? And, not only is it less available to us, it is seemingly less trustworthy, with so many stories in the news that show us how much Big Pharma will do to insure their profits.
We search for an approach to health care that is saner, and for many of us herbal medicine appears to offer that, showing us plants, many of which are readily available, that have elements we know aid the body to heal. May the wisdom of the earth guide our search.
by Genevieve Fosa
About the Author
Genevieve Fosa is a freelance ghostwriter and editor, with a background in nursing. Because of all the things she has seen in hospitals, she has been interested in herbal medicine. She writes both fiction and nonfiction books and articles to your specifications. for more information please go to www.thebestword.net
