From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Herb Mentor Radio. This is John Gallagher from learning herbs and HerbMentor.com. So, my guest today is Stephen Harrod Buhner.
Stephen is an earth poet and the award winning author of ten books on nature, indigenous culture, the environment, and herbal medicine. Some of these books include Sacred Plant Medicine, Herbal Antibiotics, Lost Language of Plants, and Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. Stephen's work has been written about or profiled in just about every herbal publication out there and also even in the New York Times, CNN, and Good Morning America. He has been invited to teach at many colleges and conferences and even the United Nations.
Currently, Stephen is a full time writer, lecturer, and teacher and senior researcher for the Foundation for Guyan Studies at gianstudies dot org. Welcome, Stephen.
Hi, John. Thanks for having me here.
No problem. Thank you for coming.
Great having you.
So, you know, I want to start with this is I was reading that, from especially from your books that you come from a long line of healers. Your great uncle was midwife, in Indiana in the nineteenth century, and your great grandfather, CG Harrod, was a doctor who primarily used botanical medicine. So so your great grandfather was treating people's acute and chronic ailments using herbs, but how was the day to day life of people and in their relationship with plants in your great grandfather's day? Did everyone use herbs for day to day health care and basic first aid, or did they just leave that all to your great grandfather?
Well, they did a lot. I mean, the interesting thing about watching how things flow through time is just the little adjustments that people make the ways that their thinking changes. I mean, there's still herbal presence of the nineteenth and eighteenth century in the United States, though most people don't know it. Like, Doctor.
Pepper was originally an herbal drink, a tonic drink. Root beer was a tonic drink. It was actually often fermented, so it was alcoholic. And a lot of the herbal infusions that they used in the eighteenth and nineteenth century actually were fermented, which you got better extraction from the plants because as the yeast produced alcohol, they would begin to draw other constituents out of the plants beside the water.
Water pulls different constituents, and so you get great patient compliance. So we've just got this shadow of stuff that's left. Coca Cola, Doctor Pepper, and ginger ale was originally one of the major kind of it was a fermented beverage. It sold better than any other kind of beer in the United States at the time of the American Revolution, but it's an amazing, herbal concoction for colds and flu and winter and things.
So that's still there. But the the thing that's interesting as you go further back, and I was, you know, lucky enough to know four of my great grandparents quite well, and, I was really close to a couple of them. And one of them you've mentioned, C. G.
Harrods, who was a physician. And even though he trained as an allopathic physician, which is what doctors really are, they're allopaths, and he didn't train as an eclectic or physio medicalist.
He but most of the healing agents that physicians used before World War II actually were botanical in nature. I mean, they used other things too. They used mercury and various other things. But if you look at the U.
S. Pharmacopeia from nineteen eleven, which is when my great grandfather began practice, most of them were herbal medicines. And but the thing that was most different in hanging out with those people because they'd all been born in the nineteenth century and their parents were had been born before the Civil War and being with them, there was a kind of a slowness of pace there that went deep inside of them much more than now. And what's more, their kind of general relationship to the world around them was very, very different.
They I mean, if you think about it, I mean, my great grandparents, they used kerosene lamps and horses and there were no telephones and no radios and no television. I mean, when my great grandmother was born, that's how it started. When she died, men had landed on the moon. It was this amazing technological transformation. But that kind of slowness of going into the woods and ticking plants and blackberries and all of that kind of slowness and getting most of your food from your own farm and the land.
There is something that happens to people when they take the wildness of the world inside of them like that as as a regular way of life. And they're different, very different than the way we are now. And I think I was really lucky because there's a kind of a lineage that was passed down that way that very it's very rare to see it in people anymore.
So there was real medicine and not just plant constituents that they were using, but also Yes.
I mean, that's an excellent point. That's the thing that people miss is the difference between medicine and plant constituents. They aren't the same thing. I mean, yes, sometimes a cold is just a cold, but oftentimes it's not.
Diseases have both emotional and spiritual dimensions to them. And, yes, you can just treat the body, but the thing about my great grandfather that I really learned from him is that he never treated just the body. He treated the people. And I was reading a thing the other day about physicians in Cuba, how they there's one physician and one nurse for every two thousand people according to this, thing that I was reading.
And each physician lives in the midst of those two thousand people and they meet all of those people. They don't just have a clinic where the people come, but they visit all of those families in their homes. So they've got, like, let's say, six hundred homes that they have to go to because they've learned that if you can't see the environment in which the people live, not just the house but the emotional environment, the way the family is, how can you really work with them as a healer?
And my great grandfather was like that. He made house calls and, you know, as well as having a office behind his home. And there's with a different kind of dynamic working in the healing equation then.
And so then how about people then as far as, like when I'm telling people on my website about, you know, using common herbs that even just, you know, I I have this course that I I give for free on our on my on Learning Herbs called Supermarket Herbalism.
And the idea is it's a little video thing. You go and you basically get a few common things whether it be lemon or honey and ginger and potato things like that right from the supermarket. So you could show how simple it is and people just often the comments that I see back to me are like, wow, this is really revolutionary.
You know, wow. I can't believe this. It's that simple. So, like, what was the role of of of what people that everyone like, how much do people know really about these like, we go to these workshops, we learn about herbs, but something tells me that the things that we learn in these workshops and what we study in herbal programs was probably common knowledge to most people, not just the doctor.
Yeah. I mean, I I love Gerda, the German poet and botanist He's one of my favorite people. And, you know, he said, it only seems that we've learned so much because we've forgotten even more.
You know. It's like we have to keep relearning this stuff. And and this kind of ties back into some of the stuff you mentioned earlier, like, so my grandma my grandfather is this botanic physician, you know, and he's working with all these people. Well, what's interesting is antibiotics really come in after World War II. In nineteen forty six or so, they start to be made available to the public.
And the allopaths at this time have a monopoly on medicine, so you have to kind of go through them to get all this stuff.
And, you know, they're very excited. It's all new. You know, it's like radios, you know, airplanes, television, antibiotics, you know, and so everybody's real excited. So the people that actually began using all of that stuff were the highly educated and the people that were better off financially the middle class, upper middle class, the rich, and the well educated.
The only people that still used roots and herbs were the ignorant, uneducated people in the country, right? So that it got kind of attached to that. Well, it's just an old granny, you know, she's planted by the light of the moon, you know, it's like, what a fool, you know, and everybody's like into this kind of thing. Now what happens is the only people that really are totally, completely, and utterly still in the technological medicine and that's all they want, they tend to be the least educated and the least wealthy.
So it's all of the kind of the yuppies of the upper middle class, the rich that go, Hey, I want some herbs and I want some organic medicines, natural stuff. And so we're kind of going back in the cycle. But originally back then, everybody knew a little bit of home health care and that was very common knowledge. I mean, think what would happen now if students in school instead of being taught, you know I mean, I don't do they even learn home ec anymore?
I don't know. But when I was in school, it was home ec for the girls, shop for the boys. But what if everybody was trained about how to do health care on themselves from the herbs that grew around their houses and stuff? I mean, the health care budget would drop the expense would drop ninety percent because most of the stuff people can take care of and that's the way it is in Cuba and the way it was back then.
And then if you didn't couldn't really figure it out, if it was beyond your skill, you would go to kind of a community practitioner, which would be a general practitioner of some sort. In nineteen eleven, when my grandmother our grandfather began to practice, there were maybe six or eight different kinds of physician that would be commonly found in a community.
And one of the earliest ones I mentioned, that you touched base on was Elisabeth Luusterheide, who was a midwife and herbalist who was from Germany and worked in southern Indiana, and they would go to her. And then you just kind of move up the scale of excellence and specialty, as your need increased and you whatever you had was beyond the capacity of the people there. But like, my great grandparents, they would, pick dandelions in the spring and have dandelion greens as a part of their diet. You know?
And their daughter, my grandmother, Edna Buener, she just thought that was horribly superstitious. She would never eat anything grown in the yard because it wasn't modern, you know? Mhmm. And then, oh, they couldn't believe it when frozen food came out and frozen TV dinners.
They were so excited. But now we're back to the whole thing of dandelions in the yard and that knowledge is really coming back. So, yes, the knowledge was really, really wide spread and it was denigrated considerably by mechanistic, scientific, technology oriented doctors who just thought, Oh, they're putting dirt and sticks and leaves in their wounds. They're ignorant savages.
And we have to, like, educate them.
But we're really finding out now things that people have known all along that that older approach that had a great deal to recommend it. And as I work more I've worked with herbs really intently for over twenty years now and more and more, I go toward the more simple all the time. As you were mentioning, Supermarket Herbalism, I tend to call it Kitchen Herbalism a lot.
Yeah. Which is better. It was more of a catch name to get people to download it.
Yeah. That's right. Supermarket or buzzer.
But you kind of like support Safeway, and, you know, I just been to the You're right.
So speaking of the, you know, you were mentioning before, you know, it all really just starts with using an herb really having an experience.
And you were mentioning before about when you're talking about the origins of the, of the, what we call soft drinks now, and you were mentioning ginger. So what about ginger? Is ginger a great one to kind of explore?
Because you don't have to just use this on the recipes in our cooking, you know, we can use this for the whole Yeah.
I mean, ginger is turning out to be one of my major plants. And, you know, when I got into herbalism, I, you know, I'll just give you an aside here. Like, a lot of people are into preambles, which is what you say before you get to the point. I'm into prerambles, you know, so I could go all over the place.
You go ahead all over the place. I have my full permission.
But I lived in this great place outside of Boulder, Colorado up in the mountains for ten years, and and I must have worked routinely with about one hundred and fifty plants. There was the most astonishing diversity of plant life and the pharmacopeia that I had there was astonishing. And I've never seen anything like it anyplace else. And, you know, I was so excited and I was learning all these plants and, you know, Usnea, which is a tremendously potent antibacterial and tremendous for lung infections.
And there were local echinaceas that grew in the region and just all kinds of magnificent things. Various ginseng family plants like Aurelia nudicollis, one of my favorite plants, wild sarsaparilla, it's called. And, and so I was very much into tinctures and and everything, and I I became really fine. I don't like echinacea purpurea much at all, but I'm a real angustifolia freak, and I love that.
And so I came up with all these things for, like, colds and flu. And, you know, a really great cold and flu tincture combination is Red Root, which is which grew up there, which is, you know, it's just tremendous for clean, you know, stimulating lymph drainage and echinacea, which was from the region, and then also licorice. I used not just the Chinese licorice, but I harvested the local licorice, which has a very similar action even though it's not as sweet. And, you know, it's a very great combination and I used it for years, but slowly is partly is going through middle age, a change into my physiology, but I began working more with other plants and more fresh plants rather than tinctures.
And then I came across this whole ginger thing, gee, I don't know when, maybe seven, eight years ago.
And I've been working with it more and more. And so for colds and flu now, I very rarely use echinacea or anything like that. What I do is I get fresh ginger root, which you can get everywhere pretty much all the time. And what I do is I juice it rather than any other way of working with it. And because, like everybody from the sixties, I have a champion juicer, you know, and sitting on the counter, you know, taking up space.
And so, you know, I take, maybe a couple of three pieces about the size of my thumb and I juice them. And I take that fresh juice and I add hot water to it and a squeeze of lime and some honey and some cayenne and I might get a full blown flu about every three to five years max. But if I start getting sick and I do that, it'll knock it out almost every time, and it's so much more potently effective than I found those other kind of tincture combinations to be.
And that whole process has begun to move me more and more into kind of a kitchen herbalism dynamic all the time. And I think ginger is an amazing thing, especially for people that have gone through middle age, ginger and cayenne, because they stimulate blood circulation so tremendously, but there's something about ginger as an antiviral, an antibacterial, and an immune stimulant, I find that it does in practice all those things incredibly well. And I'm it's actually become one of my, probably my primary herbs that I use for just a considerable number of things.
Yeah, it's also just active against staph, right?
Yeah. It's really active against a lot of things like that, a lot of bacteria resistant or antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Another thing it's good for, ginger juice put on burns eases the pain of the burn. I mean, it seems counterintuitive. It would do the opposite, but it's actually fairly magnificent for that. So, you know, I'm a big fan of cayenne and ginger and honey and lime, those things in there, those four elements are just tremendously potent medicinals, all of them.
Now with cayenne, like it doesn't take very much.
So you're just putting a little in your brew there that Yeah.
I might put a sixteenth teaspoon and a ten ounce cup of hot water with all that stuff. And I'll probably have, a half an ounce to an ounce of ginger juice. And after I and the neat thing about that is after I juice it, I've got the pulp left over. So I actually take that pulp and put it in a soak it in water so I'll get another, you know, soak it for four to eight hours in one of those kind of teacups where it has a ceramic strainer that sits in the top of it, and you know, I'll get another cup of it during the day. So I'll probably drink, you know, two to four of those a day if I'm getting sick.
If I'm really starting to get sick, I might do sick, because it's fairly intense.
And what's great is there's just no way to take too much.
No, there is no way to take too much of that stuff. I mean, it's a and after I'd worked with plants for a long, long time, I basically started having kind of a rule of thumb of herbal classification.
And I'm just totally not into the Ayurvedic or TCM orientation, the hot, the cold and all that stuff. It's just it's it's just not where my brain goes. I go to food herb, medicinal herb, drug herb, and those are kind of the three categories for me. And, and more and more I begin going toward food grade herbs like this all of the time.
And with a food grade herb, you can't take too much of it in general. I mean, yes, of course, you can I mean, there is the case of the guy that what did he read, Back to Eaton or one of those things, I forget which one it was, and he started living on carrot juice? And actually, if you live on carrot juice, if you juice eighty carrots a day and drink it every day for, like, three months, you will get cirrhosis of the liver. But, you know, you have to work really hard to hurt yourself with these things and there's always somebody that figures out a way to do it.
But nevertheless, you know, for normal people, it's very, very difficult to take too much of any of these things.
And I kind of you were actually a mentor for me in that area of dosage because when I took a class from you on herbal antibiotics and all, you know, you're the first person to break me out of the mold of read the label of the take three droppers a day or something, you know what I mean? Like, you're you're actually like, well, if you're sick, you know, and you're you're you say you're we're talking about, like, an Asia tincture or something, I take a dropper every hour until you're not sick anymore. It's not gonna Yeah.
And that and that's the thing, you know. It's it's like Americans are real wimps about dosage because and it's kind of a crazy thing because we've been led to believe that pharmaceuticals are not that dangerous and that herbs are. And it's completely opposite. Herbs, it's very, very difficult to hurt somebody with herbs. It's very easy to hurt somebody with pharmaceuticals.
Like, you know, most people don't realize that the fourth leading cause of death in the United States is properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs. Wow. Like Heath Ledger died, Wow. Like Heath Ledger died from properly prescribed pharmaceuticals, okay?
One point two million people per year end up in the hospital or permanently disabled from pharmaceuticals. Over one hundred thousand of them die.
This was And your grandmother did too.
Yeah.
This was a study put into the American Medical Journal of the American Medical Association.
You know, if it was people dying from herbs, the whole country would be up in arms. But they kind of go, Oh, well. You know, it's like, Oh, well, we need them. You know? So so you died.
You're just a sacrifice collateral damage.
Collateral damage.
Yes, collateral damage. It's a really weird thing. But in when you're looking at and that's part of the thing. We inherit this kind of fear of the wild and it's very pervasive in the herbal community, not just amongst the general population.
And people are so terrified about dosage and stuff. And you see all of the time people that take echinacea for colds and flu, and they don't get well. And there's a reason for it. When, when you, you know, echinacea is a general tonic.
Three times a day is fine, but if you're coming down with something like strep throat, for which echinacea angustifolia is specific, and I don't find purpurea as effective even though the Germans like it and they've done most of their studies on it. I just don't find it as strong. But you take a dropper full of that in your mouth and it stimulates all the saliva and you let it very slowly dribble down the back of your throat and coat that that surface of where the infection is present, I've never seen it not fail for curing a case of strep throat. And for severe colds and flu I mean, it's neat because you got a sore throat, but echinacea kind of numbs the throat, so it's perfect and it's just very effective.
But you have to be willing to see that's one of the things we have such a hard time as Americans and as herbalists learning here, to see what's right in front of us. And you have to see the disease. You have to see the person that's see the person that's right in front of you and then you have to come up with a dosage regimen specific for that person and you have to be very focused about it. Like, if you've got somebody in an acute condition, you need to have what I think of as acute treatment.
I mean, the treatment in a way needs to match the degree of intensity of the condition. So, like, you get somebody hit by a car and they've got a lot of bleeding or broken bones, you what happens is you move into acute care dynamic.
They don't ever really say this, but your treatment is actually it's at a level of intensity you might then call acute healing.
So then you have to match your level of intervention to the level of the disease, but at the same time also have to understand something about kind of the flow of energy dynamics so that you don't you have to have that balance. You don't want to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly. You have to have that balance and work with it. And it took me, you know, disease to me is not a bad thing.
It's we're all we're all biodegrading and we're meant to biodegrade and that's nothing is ever going to stop that. So that's another thing my great grandfather really understood is that he wasn't here to cure disease. He was here to alleviate suffering because he knew everybody he worked with was gonna die sooner or later. His job was to help them not to defeat death.
And that's a whole different deal.
So in working with people who are ill, you have to understand the dynamics of the disease match your treatment intervention to the level of intensity of the disease, but also you have to ask yourself very important questions every time like, you know, what's the secondary gain? Is there And so few doctors now are trained to facilitate the movement into dying. And as far as I'm concerned, that's one of their primary job descriptions. Yet my family is filled with physicians, and other than my great grandfather, not a one of them knows anything about facilitating the movement into death.
They just don't. They weren't trained in it, and every generation their training in it became worse.
Wow.
So that's just really fascinating, especially when you were talking about that fundamental thing and being about the fear of the wild, that really caught my ear.
I was like, oh, yeah, that's true, you know, because and and when how do we work at Wilderness Awareness School for so long? I mean, that's exactly what I felt like my job description was for so long was to help people not have that fear of the wild by just teaching them that there's nothing to be afraid of, you know. And then and then by and by just establishing a relationship with the with nature and, developing your own stories with nature.
And And then that part, you know, that part's really crucial. It's, you know, this there's this thing that's been really clear to me, like, at a certain number of herbal conferences, like the International or, even Breitenbush had it, or the Green Nations Gathering.
It's not really present at the Rational Phytotherapy Conference. Conferences. That's a whole other deal as the chemical constituent neocortex freaks that sit around in their suits. But the other conferences where it's people that somehow, once upon a time, a plant saved their lives.
And once that happens, nothing is ever the same. Again, we've eaten the wild Redeemer, and there's something that comes inside of our body, this healing that comes from the wildness of the world, and we're just changed after that. And there's this kind of energy we become subsumed by what we conquered in a sense. It's a very interesting thing, and that dynamic is extremely present at more of the like the international or the there at Breitenbush or the various other conferences like that.
That thing itself so receiving that healing from the wild, it's an amazing experience. And at the same time, one of the inevitable realizations is in the wildness of the world, there is a certain amount of danger, but we are so disassociated from it that we actually are, as a people, are unable to tell the difference between a dangerous dynamic and a not dangerous dynamic. Like, we think plants are dangerous, which in general they aren't. There's very few poisonous plants that I mean, there are some, yeah, but there's very few of them compared to the plant diversity on the planet.
And I love this thing, Joan Halifax, the Buddhist teacher who lives in Santa Fe, said this wonderful thing. She said, Whenever rattlesnake, mountain lion, poison ivy is removed from wild ecosystems, the ecosystems immediately begin to degrade.
Because those things serve one primary function, you know, along the lines she's developing in the thought and that is they force us to be aware.
Yes. And as long as we're aware we will walk carefully.
We will have care in those ecosystems.
When they're gone, we can become careless and they begin to degrade.
So, you you know, that's an amazing insight. So that recognition of that there's this danger in the wild, but understanding what it is. I mean, you know, then we get into that nature is red and tooth and claw stuff. And actually, nature is mostly cooperative, and you've got this thing about everything's meant to biodegrade, everything is meant to be eaten, to become food, to move back into the humus of the world once again. In older cultures and my great grandfather perhaps was the last generation that I knew of where that was intrinsic knowledge.
In older generations and older cultures and more indigenous cultures, the recognition that we have a limited time here and that we're destined to biodegrade into the system one way or another, it was an integral, inherent understanding. And therefore, the fear was less because we people grew up understanding that's what would happen. And there was almost a giveaway of the self back to the system, and there was new generations that would come to replace us. That cycle was accepted. So, that's the thing I find the most, to be able to get to the place to accept that tremendous bounty of healing from the that a rattlesnake creates is an essential kind of it creates a kind of acuity of perception about wild landscapes. You can't get any other way.
And I love that because that's exactly what we used to test together. We teach at Wilderness Awareness School as well as the whole awareness as teacher. And some of the things like when people do one of our programs and they wanna learn about plants, the first thing we do is like, okay, first you're gonna journal all of the poisonous plants. And then they quickly quickly realize going through their local field guide that there isn't that many. And they're really easy to tell because what I get over and over again every time I mention a plant to people is, like, okay. What do the poisonous look alike? So I'm like, well, there's Enchanter's death plantain.
One of my favorite things to do about every year or two, two, I get kind of bored and I decide I want something for some humorous entertainment. And what I do is I get out, Jim Duke and Stephen Foster's plant identification Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Medicinal Plants, right? And I love I know both those guys and I think they're great. I love them. But Peterson was the whole Paul Press is really into, you know, any possible danger has to be listed. You know, I mean, they you know, it's like they have these liars standing over their shoulders, some ridiculous thing, to say, you know, you look under Cherry and there's a big warning sign, you know.
You know, it's like cherry No wonder, people. You know, cherry contains oh, my brain. I'm middle aged. I lose facts all of the time.
Cyanide. Yep. There you go. Thanks. It's got okay.
It's got cyanide in it. And basically what that does, there's just enough in it to slightly paralyze respiration.
And that's why it works as an antitussive, okay, because it calms the respiration. It's just like people shooting Botox into their face, though well, actually maybe that's a bad metaphor, but in any event, they're using a poison to relax themselves in a certain way. And then there's another one that he's talking about, prickly ash, right? And it's got a huge warning on it, you know, and I'm like, What the heck is a warning on prickly ash for? And it goes down and it goes, warning warning, spines may poke out eyes.
And I was like, so I met Steven Foster once. I said, what the heck is that? That's ridiculous. He goes, it happened once.
And I was like, oh, god. You know? Come on. You know? It's just like, you know, you get a book on ladders and then you go warning warning people could fall off like, okay, I guess, did you guys go to public school or what the heck's going on here?
So but yeah, you're right. There's very, very few poisonous plants and you can learn those, but it's like even the poisonous plants, most of them were used as medicine and it really comes down to the dosage and understanding that. And there's a lot of like fearful stuff in most herbal books and I've been guilty when I knew less of spreading some of that scurrilous information. I mean even Michael Moore who is one of the knowledgeable of the United States, in his book on, plants of the Rocky Mountain region, he writes a thing about, Bainberry in there, red cohosh, where he says, If you take it, it can damage the intestinal mucosa, so you can't take it internally.
And, you know, he's admitted he's never corrected the text, but he's admitted later that that's not true. You can use red cohosh interchangeably with black cohosh dealing with muscle problems and it's a great internal herb. The Eclectics used it. There's no problem.
And there's a lot of stuff about elder root or elder bark or elder leaves being dangerous and You well, you know what? Okay.
You got you got to set this straight. I mean, about the elder. Like, because I'm in the northwest, you know, where we have the red buried elder.
Right.
And and and I only all I can go in in the with the red one is what's in the book because I don't wanna try it. And so so I was like, well, I heard the seeds are poisonous, and it's like, well, what's true about? What can I say about that?
Yeah. The thing the thing that I got into a long time ago is I began, you know, actually trying some of these things to actually see what would happen. And so it turns out the leaves of the elder, they're a fairly reliable nervine similar to past flower. They've got their own kind of dynamics to them, but they're really quite nice.
And and, you know, I haven't actually worked much with the root or the bark, but I found that the leaves were fine, so the warning didn't make sense. And then there's all these warnings about poke, right? So people start to take, you know, people take this stuff and then they get panicked and then, you know, they bring on the symptoms. But poke is not nearly as dangerous of an herb as they say, and it's gotyou've got a lot of dosage range there that most people don't know about because they're into kind of this American tiny dose thing.
But poke is a it's an extremely powerful lymph stimulant, and it's when somebody's lymph system is just laying there and it won't do anything.
Red root doesn't touch it. You give them some poke for a while, and it kicks it in the ass and really gets it going. And and I pretty much felt if I was gonna give herbs to other people, I needed to take them myself to a point of symptomology to where I would start to get a side effect so I could find out what the herb actually did before I start giving it to people. And, you know, that I did kind of provings on most of the plants I used.
And so I could see what the range was like for me. And it's not an absolutely guaranteed thing. Like some plants like Skullcap, I've drank an ounce of that at a time. It does nothing for me.
It just doesn't. It has no effect. So I can't really suggest it to people.
But nevertheless, that's the way you start finding out about these things. Like, you know, it took me a long time to skunk Western skunk cabbage is a mildly psychotropic plant. If you grind the herb in a Vitamix and then you take the top off and you've got that fine flowery powder coming off the top of the Vitamix and you breathe that in, it actually completely relaxes you. You go into kind of this you become aware about three minutes later you've been standing there and you haven't moved and it's so completely relaxing, but nobody had actually talked about this. And it took me I had to go back to some texts from the nineteenth century to find any mention of it.
But, you know, to me, when you're working as an herbalist, it's like immersing yourself in that world. And, I remember another story.
The very first, it was really humorous. The very first time I went out to dinner with herbalists was nineteen ninety one. I was a speaker at the American Herbalists Guild second annual conference and, went out to dinner with Christopher Hobbs and Mark Blumenthal and David Winston and Feather Jones and one or two other people. And we're sitting there and then, everybody's talking and, everybody's always gossip about each other.
And, you know, pretty soon I hear this, somebody goes, Well, you know, I really respect Susan Weid, but and then they fill in all this stuff. And then another person goes, Yeah, she's really knowledgeable. Accept and then they say all this stuff. Well, it turns out one of the things that really set them off is that in the spring, Susan would add, poison hemlock to salads, the new shoots.
She would eat them in spring, and then they're all freaked out about this. Right?
And, actually, water hemlock is more dangerous than poison hemlock, and I think the names are messed up. But anyway, so so then I read a story a couple of years later about this professor. He'd gone out, harvesting plants, edible plants in a college class with his class. And one of the students had mixed in some, poison hemlock with the stuff and had actually eaten it. But nobody could figure out none of the students could actually figure out who had eaten it, you know, and who had actually picked it.
And only one of the students had actually eaten it. But two of the students went into classic poison hemlock poisoning symptoms and they went cyanotic, they couldn't get breathing, they had to take them to the hospital, but nevertheless only one of them had eaten it. The other one, it was fear.
So these professors, they thought that was really intriguing and they thought, well, I wonder how much of that stuff you can really eat. So they went and picked a bunch more and they began eating it, right? And they said, you know, there's no toxic effects from, you know, this one professor had eaten almost a whole stalk of the of one of the leaves that came out and eaten the whole thing. He said, It's a fine food. There's nothing wrong with it. That's just what the books say. It's more the root, and if little children, because it's a hollow stem, if they pick it and they're using it as a blow gun or something and they get the juice because of their body weight size and they tend to blow from the end more down near the root, it's more poisonous that way.
So, as time went on, I began to find that there's a lot of the knowledge that has been put in books was from because one person had a weird reaction or they were overly cautious or something, but they're much less poisonous than we're led to believe, actually. And I just have not found it to be the reverse of that in all these years.
Wow.
That's very, very interesting. I never really, yeah, because when you're teaching, you just all I can do is from the book because I haven't actually done those kinds of Right.
And that's the thing is we kind of pass on this information about things. But, you know, it's, you know, weed is kind of like a racial epithet, a plant that, you know, applied to the plant world. And there's a certain amount of bad press plants get that I'm not really sure that they deserve. I think a lot of it comes down to fear of the wild more than a genuine knowledge of the plant world itself.
Because I always wonder why Michael Moore has this whole thing about all these ways of using nightshade.
Right.
Bitter Sweet Nightshade in one of the books and and then, you know, in all the other ones, everyone says, you know, oh, don't eat the nightshade.
And that's just terrible. Bitter Sweet Nightshade is an extremely good plant. I've used it many times. And it's Sure.
There you know, I mean, I yeah. I guess if you drank a whole cup of a a really strong decoction, it might make you sick. I've never done that, but I've used the plant many times. It's an excellent the nightshade family itself is an excellent family and it's, you know, as herbalists, we've lost a lot of our traditional basis because of these fears that have been put in like, okay, one of the things that's very difficult for us to do as herbalists is to, find painkillers because the painkiller market has been sold up by the allopaths and their drug dealer pharmacology friends, so the pharmaceutical company.
But the Aglactics were really tremendously brilliant. And if you start going back to like King's American Dispensatory or the different eclectic Materia Medica, you start to find some extremely potent painkillers that are not narcotic in, like morphine or opium or things like that. So they used to use Hembane for surgical, as an anesthetic for surgeries.
And, you know, that fascinates me. And I've used another one that they would use for tremendously good pain relief is, Indian pipe, which you would use the root. And I've you know, that grows up in your region.
And I had a guy once that had an abscessed tooth and I gave him Indian pipe and he would take a tablespoon of the tincture and he said, It's really amazing. He said, okay. Keep the Indian pipe with me and I'd have this, you know, because, you know, an abscessed tooth, it comes on just like that. It's like a wang. It just hits this incredible pain. And he said, I'd take a tablespoon of the tincture and then, the pain would still be there, but it would be like there was a sheet of glass between me and it. I could see it on the other side of the glass, but I just didn't feel it.
And so I slowly started to learn these different painkiller dynamics that they use back then when they found morphine or the various opiates to be not usable. And that was before the introduction of opiate analogs. And there's some really good stuff in our pharmacopeia that we just don't work with anymore.
Well, that's very I mean what you're saying for the stronger type of pain killer, but what about the effectiveness for just your mild pain killer like for headaches and stuff? I mean, anything in the Willow family or?
Well, the thing is I've never actually had a lot of success. There is some interesting stuff I'm doing about with Willow now that's really cool. I'll tell you in just a second. But, for headaches, you know, Rosita Arvigo, who's an amazing herbalist who lives in Belize and everybody thinks because of her name, you know, she's like from Belize, but she's actually from Chicago.
So, you know, she does an accent kind of like this, you know, and she talks, hey, let's take some herbs, But she works in this tribe down there and she actually works with headaches a lot using depending on the kind of headache it is, and it works in this tribe down there.
And she actually works with headaches a lot using depending on the kind of headache it is and it's a whole long story but she will either wrap a cold towel around your head and put your feet in hot water or vice versa.
And by doing that, she could get rid of most headaches and because aspirin just wasn't available down there. And she said it was an extremely effective approach in terms of, you know, like dealing with headaches and stuff like that.
I'm a kind of an ibuprofen guy myself.
But and I've tried Willow, and I just don't like the taste of, the salicylates in like willow or aspenbark. Aspenbark is one of my favorite ones. But the thing I've been doing with it though, I've been really curious about anti inflammatories, for a long time, like corticosteroids that they use as creams topically for as an anti inflammatory.
Uh-huh. And then this, doctor friend the mine said, well, you know, you can just crush up aspirin and make a paste and put it on there because it's an anti inflammatory. It's like when I realized that hops actually does something in beer when it's in there because it's the most powerful estrogenic plant practically on the planet. Guys drinking beer, it lowers their testosterone levels.
But I had my beer making stuff in one box and my herb stuff in another and I never mixed the knowledge. So we all know aspirin is an anti inflammatory, but we think of it as an internal anti inflammatory for headaches or for pain or swollen muscles or something. But then that whole concept of using it topically, then I went, Well, you know, aspen and willow bark, that's what this stuff was originally made from. You got birch, you got aspen, you got willow as three primary kind of salicyl containing plants.
What do you do to make it as effective as an aspirin?
Like, I can have a headache and take an aspirin and I'm fine. But how how do I translate that to the amount of willow decoction I have to make or cochine?
Well, that that's a whole other thing. See, I tend to use other plants for if I have a headache like that, I'll I'll tend to use pass flower and American wood betany, which is a particularis species.
The lousewort rather than the past flower for instance, our coral root is another extremely good one.
And wood betany, the American wood betany is a muscle relaxant and it's absolutely phenomenal. And if you drink enough of it, you basically all of your muscles unwind like rubber bands and you lay there and you can't do anything, but you feel great. Okay? So there's that. Half flower is a central nervous system relaxant.
And coral root is kind of almost a blend of the two. So those are the kind of things I tend to use for headache dynamics.
And I will tend to use, and Motherwort is another one. So, like, I might take a half an ounce to an ounce of a Motherwort American Wood Betany combination and blend it half and half, and I find those but in terms of Willebark for headaches, I just don't like the taste, so I can't really take it.
It makes me gag.
And so what I began to do with that stuff though because if aspirin will work as a topical anti inflammatory, then these things will too.
So you take a crock pot and you make a really strong decoction at a really light boil of willow bark or aspen or whatever you're using. Then you put that decoction in the crock pot and you cook it really slow till it cooks down into a sludge, which it'll do quite nicely after a few days. And then you apply that topically as an anti inflammatory and it just works great.
But it's like this kind of it was this obvious inherent knowledge in herbal practice.
Nevertheless, in twenty years, I've never heard anybody talk about it, but we should have been.
So anything where the skin has a hot inflamed condition on the outside. Right.
And there are certain things that you'll get like where you'll get this inflammation and you want to reduce it and the typical response is to prescribe corticosteroids topically from an allopathic physician, but and we haven't really had anti inflammatory options that I thought were very potent that we could use and that's kind of a new one for me. Another one another new thing for me that I've gotten into in the last few years, which is a little bit older, is, you know, phytoestrogens. Everybody knows about phytoestrogens, whether it's soy or whether it's licorice or black cohosh, whatever it is. But I never heard anybody say the word phytoandrogen.
Okay, if there's plants that contain molecularly identical hormones to female steroid hormones, there's got to be plants that contain analogs or molecular there's got to be plants with testosterone in them because there's plants with estradioles, so, you know, and estradiol and all of these things. So, then it turns out, yeah, as a matter of fact, there are a lot of plants with testosterone in them, exactly the same testosterone in our bodies, and pine pollen is incredibly high in those. And the Latin for pine pineus, which in Germany is pronounced penis, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.
And nevertheless, you know, it's so funny how we'll go year after year after year, but the obvious question as herbalists continually escapes us and that and I do that all the time. And, you know, it's just this constant adventure of learning to just see the obvious thing. And in a lot of ways, that's really what plant medicine is about. And so this whole concept of topical anti inflammatories. And then, you know, the next thing that's just kind of a new thing for me but then to get to an interior anti inflammatory that would have the same kind of effects as corticosteroids taken internally for inflammatory conditions. And we're just kind of locked into the willow decoction thing. And there's a lot more sophistication available to us than just that.
And what about the speed of topically and the inflammation is like people sometimes talk about topically uses of honey because you're talking about the kitchen herbalists and stuff.
Oh, yeah. Honey is a major one for me. And, and I learned about there's a couple of neat herbs I learned about from Hispanic herbalists, and honey's one of them. The other one, which is just an aside, is a actually, I don't remember the Latin on this plan. It's, green American green genshin, they call it sebadilla down here. And, talking about a lack of fear of the wild, the people down here, they may go to an herbalist or a doctor or curandera.
They don't really have a thing about it. If they've got cancer, they just kind of go to whichever one feels right. And the local Curendarra, as an herbalist down here, use a topical preparation of Sebadia on skin cancers. They mix it, they powder the root about like flour and then mix it with Vaseline.
The Hispanic herbal cerulean, the Vaseline, they're like, hey, you know, we don't want any of this organic stuff. Give us some good petroleum jelly, you know? And they mix it up till it's a real thick paste and they put it on the skin tumor, the skin cancer, cover it for seventy two hours, and the thing just falls off. They go, Yeah, it came out of the skin, kind of like, you know, it had all these tentacles.
It's really interesting. And I've used it four or five times with people with small skin cancers, and it just cleans, you know, the the thing just falls out.
And the what's the common name on that one again?
Green Green Jensen, g e n t I a n. I used to I'm not I'm Latin challenged. I I know in vino veritas, you know, but that's about that's about it. So but anyway, so, but, honey, yeah, that's another one I learned from these guys.
And they use it in Mexico a lot for, treating, abscesses in the buttocks, for instance, that go all the way to the bone are with severe burns and they, you know, like third degree burns, they put this stuff on there and you'll get a complete healing of the thing with no loss of muscle mass and almost no scarring, sometimes no scarring at all. K. I thought this is really intriguing, you know, and it turns out honey is and actually even some allopathic physicians, some of the hospitals, when they're doing transplants, they actually will put corneas in a sugar solution because when you have sugar at that concentration, it's antibacterial.
Honey is also very high in hydrogen peroxide.
And plus, if you're using, which you should only use, a wildflower honey, never a clover honey or alfalfa honey, that stuff is not good. But the wild, raw, unprocessed honey and Because of pesticides?
Yes, pesticides and all of the different pharmaceutical products that are put on those crops to grow them. But I another thing I do is that I every few years I buy this some kind of interesting house that I remodel. I've been doing this for like thirty years, like really insane.
But I was working, we're working on a four thousand square foot adobe house down here. Now it's a big warehouse, you know. And, I was working on this cabinet, I was using a nail gun. And the nail gun every so often a nail gun, because it's an air compressor, it'll double shoot.
And this time, it double shot. The first nail went in. The second nail hit the top of the first nail and then ricocheted off, and it actually went through the joint on my left pointer finger and nailed it to a joining two by four, which was kind of intense. So I'm standing there holding it nailed to this, you know, I felt like Jesus for a minute, you know, just a minute.
And then, so I had to get a a hammer and pull And one of these great stories. Anyway, so what I did was, you know, everybody's like, oh, you better go to the doctor. I said, I don't think so. I've been to those guys before.
So what I did was I put, I got a antibacterial tincture that I use. It's a gum kind of thing. It's got a lot of this potent stuff in it. But anyway, I poured that over the nail, just pulled it right out of a finger, and then I wrapped it, I bandaged it with honey.
Okay? And the thing just healed up fine. I mean, I've got complete movement and mobility back, gets a little stiff in cold weather, but there was no infection, nothing. And I've had that several times where I've got some sort of a wound that starts to get a little messy and it's kind of deep.
And the honey thing, the fastening thing about it is there's no infection.
And what you also get is that the skin regenerates perfectly. There's no scarring. There's virtually no way to even see where that nail went through there. That's pretty much it. So honey is one of the most amazing things that everybody's got in their kitchen and it's just, you know, it's great.
Is there one other amazing kitchen thing that's in there that people should use? Well, another one is It's not on the on our websites for cost and stuff.
So everyone knows about that. But, yeah, that's great. Thanks for just saying that.
Wound healing, it's one of the most amazing wound healing herbs that there is, wound healing substances. Another one is, Rosita Arvigal uses oregano a lot, and she's a huge fan of it. And I've just messed around with it a little bit. I don't have nearly her background. But what she does is that, she makes a really strong decoction of oregano, just your regular old cooking oregano.
And so if people get, like, a severe burn from, scalding from water steam or something like that. She washes them with a cold infusion of their a cold decoction of of, oregano and and says that the whole thing, it just completely heals. It's the most astonishing thing that she's ever seen. So that's I've kind of luckily, I haven't been burned that way yet, and hopefully, I never will be. But those are kind of three of the major ones, the cayenne, I love the ginger, the econia, the honey and the oregano are three of the real good ones, I think.
I recommend that, everyone, pick up Steven's pick up all of Steven's books, but, I think, but, I think I've got most of them. But Herbal Antibiotics has a lot of these ones we've been talking about and even some great immune system boosting and supporting recipes during this time of year. I think I even posted one with a little book cover of Herbalife antibiotic on learning herbs. I have one of the immune ones on there. Yeah.
And see, another herb that I've really gotten into it's not a kitchen herb, it's what I talk about in that book is cryptolepis sanguinulinta, and that's an herb from Africa, primarily Ghana.
And, I'd heard about it because of antibiotic resistant malaria and they've done some work with it over there and it's no side effects and it's very effective for antibiotic resistant malaria.
Resistant staph moving in resistant staph moving in out of the hospitals and into the community over the last twenty years at its inevitable pace.
And I get people coming to me now three, four times a year and it used to be never. And, they've got a systemic resistant staff that antibiotics won't touch, which, you know, they're gonna get amputations or I mean, they're just basically there's the doctors go, Well, let's just watch it. For a while the people are like, Are you insane?
But cryptolepis sanguinulenta is a tincture.
I've never had it sale for systemic staph that's antibiotic resistant. And one of the neat things about if you're looking at a systemic infection you know, I hear a lot of people, they say, Well, how about garlic or how about this stuff? But the thing is, when you've got a systemic infection, the one thing that you've got to do to get rid of is you have to have an herb that's going to be carried throughout the entire body in the bloodstream that'll become pervasive in the blood. And that's one of the neat things about malarial herbs, not the malarial herbs used for just fever or chills, but the ones that actually treat the parasite itself.
When you get an herb that's disseminated throughout the body through the bloodstream where it really has a high presence in the blood, you get a perfect systemic translation of the herbs throughout the body. And Crypto Lepus so if you start looking at traditional malarial herbs, you get the best cryptolepis is an absolutely amazing herb and, it's and I keep trying to get some of the larger herb companies to start carrying and I just can't get them to move into it.
But Kate Gilday at Woodland Essence in New York State, she carries it and it's just it's really remarkable for things like Babesia and systemic infections like that, it's a great herb.
And it's great in the herbal antibiotics as well, with the hepatitis C in the liver book, are you kind of go into real simple layman's terms on describing bacteria as well as viruses in the other book and that's really, really powerful if you're getting into learning about herbs. You know, you read about all these herbs and they're good for this, this, and this, but you kind of have to have a basic understanding too of what those other things are. And it's as these it says it so nice and simply, you know.
Yeah. Thanks, John. Thanks.
That's really great. So, yeah, you should write a book on, on kitchen herbalism. I mean, Tracy.
A lot of your family have done that.
Actually, I'm most not sure.
I'm most interested. Yeah. But you'd write a different one.
Yeah. That's right. I would. I'm actually, you know, playing around now with a book on, treatment of cancer because there's not really a good, definitive text on that, and I I really think there should be.
So that's And and you're probably the only person that I've come across that would to tackle something like that.
Well, I mean, there's so many decent and I studied with, Elizabeth Kubler Ross and a lot of people early on in my career, and I it would just be really nice to have a definitive text. And there's a Michael Murray's got a decent one. Donnie Yance has one, but it's not nearly as I mean, it just needs to be more in-depth and exhaustive. And those are kind of the two major ones, and they're just but there's so many good treatments for cancer different kinds of cancer that are really reliable, but there's no real definitive text either discussing what cancer is and how to approach it and actually how to think like it so that you know how to approach it early. So that's kind of the most intriguing thing for me now. I just did one online a couple of years ago and that kind of whet my appetite for something that's complex really.
Yes, yes. I'm from the East Coast, so I think I did have that happen to me once and before I began this herbal journey.
New Jersey, a place where they actually acknowledge Lyme disease exists.
I took an antibiotic course for it before I knew.
And antibiotics are actually great for Lyme in about sixty percent of the cases. But for about forty percent of the people, they don't work. And one of the things that's also really intriguing is, in general, invasive plants tend that are moving into ecosystems where Lyme is endemic tend to be specific for Lyme. So, you know, that's a really kind of intriguing ecosystem phenomenon that I just love.
I have a patient here who, who got it here in Western Washington, though the doctor refuses to admit or say, you know, that that's true because it's not here. But all Oh, man.
It's ridiculous. It's all up there. You know, from San Francisco Francisco all the way up. Northern California is endemic, and there's a huge population of people in the Seattle area and up in Vancouver that have Lyme. I mean, it's real a bad problem there. Not as bad as the East Coast or around Wisconsin, but it's still significant.
So, yeah, I mean, I see that stuff all the time time where doctors And it's hard to get the people to acknowledge or know what it is because there's not the same education. You don't ever hear about it, you know.
Well, doctors aren't educated. They're schooled. There's a big shift.
That's true.
That's one of our problems as Americans. We can't tell the difference between education and schooling.
You know? Exactly. Like your on your website, you say, you went to you went to college in the six like the sixties where you I majored in the sixties. You majored in the sixties.
I'm like school.
Exactly.
Oh, guys, we could probably talk forever, but we got to stop at some point. But I'd like to have you back on some time and kind of talk a bit about Sacred Plant Medicine and what you talked because when you taught in the workshop, you didn't it was great about your teaching style is stories, you know, and you and you teach you these stories.
And you just really it was really effective and really got in there because Yeah.
Thanks.
You know, you have these engaging stories. And and and and I got it, you know, what you were talking about through you teaching through these stories. And I don't know if I would have gotten it just, you know, say this is what Zirker plant medicine is. And so I mean, got to just to hear some of your stories would be great.
And I was glad that you published some of those stories in, Lost Language of Plants. Thanks. Yeah. That was great.
I was like, oh, it's the story about the Oh, I remember that one.
I love that one.
Thanks, Johnny. It was great to be back on. That would be wonderful.
Thanks.
And just to recap too, everybody, you can go to guianstudies dot org. But probably the easiest thing to do is just Google Stephen Buhner with a p h, Stephen, b u h n e r. And then you can get all your sites as well as a good list of all your books in one neat spot like on Amazon.
Again, all there's even antibiotics naturales on there, which is There is.
Actually, my books have been translated into fourteen languages, which is really nice. Even Russian, right, herbal antibiotics have been translated into Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian.
I mean, it's What do you say in Russian?
It it it's it's written in the Cyrillic alphabet, so I have no idea. My name is in the Cyrillic alphabet. I didn't know it was me.
Hard time recognizing myself in Cyrillic. Yeah. That's the truth.
Okay.
So oh, gosh. So this been it's been a lot of fun.
So thank thanks so much, and we'll we'll we'll get you back on here someday soon.
Great.
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