The wise women tradition of herbal medicine is cost-affective medicine. You maybe as surprised as I was to find out that in 2008 Americans spent 27 billion dollars on supplements, vitamins supplements, mineral supplements, fish oil supplements, all kinds of supplements. Nourishing herbal infusions give us more vitamins and more minerals for a lot less money.
Your average American in 2008 spent about a $100 a month on supplements. I am going to take care of myself. Newer age, healthier age person spent about $300 a month on supplements in 2008. A quart of nourishing herbal infusion drunk everyday will give us more vitamins, more minerals, more protein, more of the stuff, that we need to stay healthy for a cost of less than a dollar a day. Sure it does cost something to go out and buy those herbs, but when you consider you are not going to be buying those supplements, well, usually the only question that people ask to me, is what am I going to do with all of that extra money Susun.
In 2008, one of the largest studies ever done, looking at the effect of supplements on peoples' health and longevity was completed. It wasn't a direct study, but a meta study, which means it was a study of studies and they actually included hundreds of other studies that they looked at. Half of the studies that they looked at, were done by the supplement industry.
They wanted to be ascertain that they weren't accused of ignoring the information that came from the industry. What they found after looking at the supplementation habits of 8 million people, aged from a few weeks to well into their 90s, was there was no diminishment of disease, no diminishment of cancer, heart disease, or any other chronic problem among people who took supplements. Worse news yet what they found was that in many instances taking supplements actually decreased longevity.
There is a very large ongoing study called the nurses health study that is being done in the United States, and we are simply collecting data from a large group of women. Every year we go into that data and we mine it to see what we can find.
In 2008, we looked at the data from this very large study to see what connection there was between the calcium that women were getting through supplements or through their diet and their bone health. The news was quite startling, you may have heard. The women in the study who got 1500 milligrams of calcium from supplements and food were twice as likely to break a bone as women who got only 800 milligrams of calcium from their food alone.
Remember that each quart of nourishing herbal infusion has between 750 and 1000 milligrams of calcium. So even if you eat nothing else that contains calcium, during your day if you drink a quart of nourishing herbal infusion such as stinging nettle, or oatstraw, or red clover, or comfrey leaf, you'll have just the amount of calcium from your food that you need to keep your bones, and your blood vessels, and your heart healthy.
The wise women tradition of herbal medicine is very cost-affective. What organization recommends that we go for a yearly checkup? The surprise answer is nobody recommends that, not even the American Medical Association. If we are taking care of our health by drinking nourishing herbal infusions on a daily basis then we can safely say I don't necessarily need an annual checkup.
That's once again lowering the cost of our overall health. We'll spend under $30 a month to maintain optimum nutrition without changing anything in our diet, or having any more expensive items in our diet. We will have less cost involved in checking up on our health with our doctor's visits and we'll have a much less cost involved in going to the doctor when something is wrong.
Now when something is wrong, instead of using just the nourishing herbal infusions, we're probably going to use some herbal tinctures. The Wise Women Tradition of Herbal Medicine encourages us to learn how simple and easy it is to make our own tinctures, our own ointments, our own vinegars, our own herbal medicines.
As a matter of fact it is amazingly simple to make our own vinegars, tinctures, oils, and honeys. It's exactly this simple. Identify the plant you want to use, harvest the plant that you want to use at the time it needs to be harvested. Chop it up, put it in a jar, filling the jar with that plant material, and then pour whatever you are going to make over it.
Going to make a tincture, pour 100 proof vodka over it right to the top, put a lid on it, label it, wait for six weeks, you'll have a tincture. You want to make vinegar for even more mineral richness in your life, pour apple cider vinegar, make sure it's pasteurized, right over your plant, put a non-metal lid on it, wait for six weeks and you have a bone-building wonderful tasting vinegar.
You want to make instant tea for the winter, take your aromatic herbs like camomile or peppermint. Chop them up, put them in a jar and pour some honey over them just let them sit until it's winter time then take a big spoon full, put it in your tea cup, and hot water instant sweetened tea, and that honey is so demulcent and soothing. It helps to get rid of coughs and it's decongestant too. It helps to break up any congestion in the lungs, and helps that leave the body.
You can also make your own ointments if you want to, the same way by identifying the plant such as comfrey here, right behind me, chopping that up, putting it in a jar and pouring good quality oil over it.
Most oils like to sit for between four and six weeks before they are ready to decant and used. The comfrey leaf oil, and this comfrey is just about to flower here, wonderful time for making the oil, because the comfrey has a lot of allantoin in this stock. That comfrey oil usually only needs to sit for three to four weeks. As matter of fact if you let it sit longer, you might find that the moisture in the comfrey interacts with the oil and makes it kind of smelliness.
Tinctures, vinegars, honeys, and oils, cost-effective ways of getting our medicine. We can make them ourselves, but even if we don't make them ourselves they are far less expensive than the drugs that we would take. A local farmer tell me that he needed to take something to get his blood pressure inline and he didn't want to take any drug. We talked about hawthorn tree in his field, but he said he spent his life trying to kill it, and he didn't think it would help him.
I looked right there by his door and there was a beautiful Motherwort plant growing there and I suggested that he try some Motherwort. He bought some Motherwort tincture from a tincture maker, and the next time I saw him he was revived in smiles. He said the doctors can't figure out what I've done. They say my blood pressure is just perfect and they have never seen anybody get their blood pressure down from where mine was, with as they put it silly herbs.
Well the herbs aren't silly, whether you make them to yourself or buy them, you are going to find The Wise Women Tradition of Herbal Medicine is cost-affective. Right now for these hard economic times, think green.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services