From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
We're listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. Today, for the very first time, we have a guest return for a third visit on Herb Mentor Radio, and that is none other than Michigan's own Jim McDonald. Hey, Jim. How you doing?
I'm doing well, John. How are you?
Good. Well, you know, HerbMentor.com members know Jim's plant walk videos on the site. If you haven't watched those, please go do, as well as his participation in our forum. Jim will be teaching at the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference in New Mexico this September, this two thousand eleven, as well as the Root Stalk Festival by Mountain Rose Herbs in, September as well in Oregon.
And you can check these out at traditions in WesternHerbalism.org. And, LearningHerbs.com is a proud sponsor of the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference. And Rootstock is at RootstockFest.com. That's in Oregon and both are, like I said, are in September.
And Jim's website has tons of awesome free information at herb craft dot o r g. And you can check out a brand new DVD that he produced with our friend Dave at Herb TV.
And, if you loved Jim's plant walks on Herb Mentor, you will love this video. And you can check that out at, at Jim's website at herb craft dot o r g because I always recommend people get stuff directly from the Herbalist websites if they can. So, yeah. Jim, welcome back. It's great to have you back.
Yeah. Vice versa.
Well, speaking of, back. Ow. I it was a bad segue. I know. I'm sorry. But, No.
Yeah. I thought I bet I'm I life revolves like, what could be better than bad pun? But the worst upon the better the pun.
Exactly.
Because today's, episode is very it's a special episode dedicated to back pain, which Jim knows, oh, just a few things about.
Ironically, the first time I hung out with you, Jim, I my back happened to be out.
I I recollect that. You were kind of hunched over.
I was videotaping you, crouched on the ground. If anybody wonders why a lot of those plant walk videos are shot from the ground angle, I was so thankful when you would when you would when you would kneel down. I'd be like, thank you.
So, yes, it's the back pain edition. We need we need a little theme song or echo there. Back pain. Ow.
Ow.
You need to put echo on the out. Ow. Ow. Ow.
So, Jim, there must be a story as to why you have the most thorough article on the Internet on herbs and back pain.
Yeah. I think the story goes back to that owl.
So, you know, I can I can think back? I had this one teacher that was like, you know, oh, sit up straight. Watch your posture. And as a kid, I was like, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mhmm. And I always figured, you know, because we all think we're invincible, don't we, for a long time?
You know, I could do everything that I wanted to do, but, I had let's see. Just so, you know, a couple run of the mill things like I think a lot of people do because a lot of people have back pain. Gazillions and gazillions of people. I think, David Winston, once told me, you know, sixty five million people in America suffer from chronic back pain.
And, every once in a blue moon, I'd be like, oh, I feel a little bit stiff today. But the real, the real clincher that that made me have to dive into this, was, you know, I live out not I can't say the country compared to the country in other places, but, you know, outside outside of the Detroit area, if you keep going northwest from Detroit, you keep driving, driving, driving. And right after all the sprawl settles down and and sort of dissipates out and there's a bunch of big parks and big open areas, that's sort of where I live and it's all dirt roads out here. And so I got a flat tire and, you know, I went to, jack the car up and, you know, the problem with jacking up a car on a dirt road is that the dirt underneath of the car keeps giving way.
And so I jacked the car up, I think, like, four or five times and it kept falling off the jack. And finally, you know, with with sticks and rocks and bark underneath of it, I got it, you know. And right as I was pulling the tire off of the axle, the car all of a sudden fell down off the jack and yanked me down. And when it hit the ground, the tire plopped off and sort of bounced on the ground, and then I bounced backwards with the big truck tire in my hand.
Wow. And I was like, ow. And I sat there for a second, and I thought, like, okay. That's not gonna be like, oh, I'll be sore for the rest of the day.
That was like a serious owl. And I looked at my, my car with three wheels, and I I did something which I don't recommend, but, a really good example of what not to do and what I would stress not to do, which was I jacked the car back up again, you know, two or three times until I got it the steady. And then I pulled the car off the back of the truck and changed the tire and put the other car back or the other tire back on and drove home and laid down, in bed just kind of like in an exhausted, like, oh, this is sore. And I I probably put some saff or something in my back and laid down.
And when I woke up, you know, I I couldn't move. And I don't think that people who haven't had back pain realize, like, when you say you can't move, it's not like you're you're paralyzed and you're unable to move. It's that the muscles are so seized up that if you try and twist at all, even though they feel like their clench is hard as they can possibly go, all of a sudden they punch harder and it hurts so horrifically bad.
And from there, I started experimenting and I really relied, pretty heavily on a lot of information from Matthew Wood, who's got great information and I had known him for a while and, so I gleaned stuff from him. But a lot of it was trial and error and trying things out and, you know, I thought to myself like, it's nice that I'm learning about a back injury from firsthand experience rather than something more horrible than that. Because even though they hurt really bad, there are more horrible things to deal with.
But, yeah, firsthand experience. And most of the people that I've met who are really good with musculoskeletal problems, it comes from firsthand experience. They had a bad thing and they had to do trial and error and, it got them thinking outside of the box. And I think that that's actually what makes for a good approach is not thinking the way that conventional medicine thinks because a lot of people approach holistic treatment of, not just back pain, but joint injuries too. Mhmm.
Exactly the same as conventional medicine does, except they use herbs and supplements rather than using drugs, which is pain relief and anti inflammatories.
And there's just more to think about. And so what I wanted to do, because I didn't want to just be managing something, I wanted to actually get better from it, was to try and think about it more holistically. And it turns out that if you think about that seemingly to some people nebulous idea of energetics, you know, of hot, damp, cold, dry, tense lax. You can, you can actually create some formula that works for you much better than just thinking anti inflammatory and pain reliever.
Okay. So you're saying that we're we're changing the way we're we're approaching looking at the healing and maintaining process. So it's not just painkilling.
Right. Right. Because it well, I'll talk about that more.
Maybe the the first thing to think about is that there's, you know, these foundational concerns, which is like if you have an injury, there's foundational building blocks that are really they're more important than just taking herbs that are medicinal in action. And that would be like a lot of your, nutrition, you know, basic nutrition.
And for all of the emphasis that people have on calcium, you know, there's been such a great ad campaign that if you'd like, oh, what builds strong bones and teeth?
Right.
Everyone in the world can say calcium.
And it turns out and So we're we're first so sorry to interrupt, but we're first talking about, like, a preventative or healing process in nutrition. Is that the first thing we're Well, it's not necessarily preventive because most people, if they could prevent their back injury, would not choose they would call AAA to change their tire.
Right.
You know, or they would not go walking on the icy sidewalk or whatever it was that that they may have done as an accident. But after you have this thing, you can use you can use medicinal plants and the nourishing plants even. It makes a lot of sense. But we wanna make sure that we have all the ground bases covered. And that's why we're thinking about nutrition.
Okay.
So we wanna, not just focus on calcium, you know, the strong bones and teeth mineral. That is a really important mineral, but it turns out that most people are getting enough or more than enough calcium and they're not actually and they're taking calcium supplements on top of that and not actually getting all of the co factors that let your body utilize calcium properly.
Okay. So, although he's not a source, I would say, oh, check out this guy. He's the greatest source in the world. I learned this from, Gary Null, who to me, I mean, he's worth watching around here on PBS when they have PUDs Drive Week, he's always doing some show on, you know, health and supplements. And Mhmm. He he recommends you take, like, sixty thousand of them, I think.
And he's a case study in the Vata dosha too, by the way. If you wanna understand what Vata is, you just look at him and he's Vata. Okay? So Google Gary Null.
Go to YouTube. Type in, Gary Null, n u l l, and then watch him and you'll know what Vata is. But anyways, he actually quoted, that the countries that have the highest calcium intake Mhmm. Also have the highest rates of osteoporosis, also have the highest rates of hip fractures.
Crazy. All these things that people are taking calcium thinking that's preventing. But we're also the countries that are deficient in vitamin d because we're inside all day working our full time jobs and we put sunscreen on. We're deficient in magnesium, because it's, you know, deficient in soils.
It's not even in a lot of the food. Even if you're eating organic food, there's still it's hard nowadays to get magnesium dietaryly and to the degree that most people needed.
We're deficient in boron, we're not getting silica, it's a great source of silica. Horsetail is a great source, but oatstraw infusions are I think the best, you know, source for a lot of these minerals and especially magnesium and especially silica to use. And then omega three essential fatty acids are really important. And again, it's something that many people are deficient in because, you know, they used to be found in so many different foods. And now the way that our culture raises foods, you know, whether they're plant or animals, it's efficient in that. So we wanna make sure we have all those bases covered.
So so how about how, though? I mean, I heard you say oat straw. So I imagine an oat straw infusion. You said silica.
Oat straw infusions or oat straw decoctions Decoction.
Which, my friend, Margie Flint, just calls mother's milk. You know? Mhmm. That is one of your ultimate, sources of magnesium, of calcium, of silica.
It's it's not gonna provide vitamin d. It's not gonna provide omega three essential fatty acids. But vitamin d, you can spend time out in the sun, which is great. Or you can really easily and really cheaply get, very high quality, vitamin d supplements and you want to get d three. If you're vegetarian or vegan and you don't wanna use anything that's animal based, you can get d two, but d three is really preferred by the body.
And I and I got those in drops at Whole Foods by Carlson that were pretty not too expensive.
Right. Right. You can get there's a the kind that I usually get is by a company called RX Vitamins, and it's called Liqui d three. Mhmm. And every drop is two thousand IUs and the bottle costs like fifteen dollars, you know.
How much do you take or know what's safe of that vitamin d?
The best source for supplemental info on this Mhmm. Is, Paul Bergner has some great information and there's also the vitamin d console. And if you type in vitamin d console, you'll find really good information.
About maybe six months ago, they upped the RDA, but they didn't up it in my opinion enough. I think they upped it from four hundred to eight hundred. But I would say most people if I was going to make a suggestion, I would say look between four thousand IUs and five thousand IUs. Some people need much more than that.
But if they're gonna take, higher doses than that, I think they're getting a blood test, is a good idea. Good. Is it totally necessary? No.
But it's probably a good idea.
Right. Okay.
I have seen people been, prescribed vitamin d in, like, fifty thousand IUs.
Wow. Right.
For that kind of dosage, I would want to be looking at at blood levels, rather than just tell someone to take that much. But five thousand IUs, most people are going to be safe. If you go to that vitamindcouncil dot org site, you'll have tons of really good information and lots of references to back it up. Great. And then omega three essential fatty acids, that could be fish oil or cod liver oil.
If if someone needs a vegan source or a vegetarian source, they don't want to use fish. Flaxseed oil is flaxseed oil. So a liquid is probably some degree of rancid anywhere you're getting it. And I know that's going to raise the ire of people who really like flaxseed oil, but you'd be better off getting, and that only is providing ALA, which your body can convert into EPA and DHA, but not enough, maybe five percent or ten percent.
Some people don't seem to be able to convert it, but you can get algae based omega-three supplements that are DHA and that would be in my mind preferable to just taking flaxseed oil. It doesn't mean you can't grind fresh flaxseeds. You know, you just get flaxseeds and grind them on the coffee grinder and put them on your food. That's really good to do.
But the flaxseed oil, I think, is not a good omega three source.
Okay. So that's like foundational stuff. If you know that you're dealing with some kind of injury to the bones, the muscles, the joints, the connective tissues, that's all stuff that's going to help.
Omega-three essential fatty acids and vitamin D are also anti inflammatory, but they're not necessarily anti inflammatory in a like medicinal way like by preventing inflammation.
They're anti inflammatory because people who are deficient in those nutrients are more prone to getting inflammatory conditions or they have a harder time resolving inflammation because they're lacking something that they need.
Right. Right.
Okay. Alright. So that's a great overview of the of nutrition. And I'm happy to say that I I do those things on a regular basis anyway. So, boy, I feel like I got it all. Maybe that's why my back's gotten better.
Yeah. You know, and I'll say because I know that there are some people that are a little like, oh, I don't really like taking supplements.
I'm with you. I don't really like supplements either.
But I think that there's a I actually had this this sort of insight where I was trying to get someone to drink, you know, oatstraw and nettle infusions rather than taking, you know, like a multi mineral something or another. And they just weren't going to, Right. You know? And and my attitude could either be like, well, if they don't wanna do that, you know, too bad for them. That's their, you know, resistance or whatever.
But that actually I looked at it differently. I thought like, well, my idealism is getting in the way of them being able to get a nutrient that their body needs, you know. So if they're not gonna do oat straw infusions, which are great, or oatstraw and other herbs, I'm a big fan of putting oatstraw in almost any other tea that you're making. Exactly. You know, I think it's got a really neutral flavor and you could mix all kinds of different things with it. But oatstraw is just so good for us.
That sometimes supplements make sense and sometimes even if you're doing the oatstraw, straw, if you're trying to like restore from a deficiency, you might need to use a supplement for a little while.
Or using a supplement for a little while, if you don't need to, it might actually hasten your improvement and then you can use it for a little while and then just rely on that.
Well, you know, a lot of people listening to this though, Jim, who are gonna be listening to this call, probably do nourishing herbal infusions every day.
Hopefully.
So so it's a Well, really, I mean, that's one herb mentor. That's why we feature it on the main section. You know, that's that's a core routine, if you will.
And, and I have for a while as well. So I found that I'm also not a big supplement person. But with the d three drops, and I became a convert after Paul Bergner, was a guest in my house for a couple of days, luckily.
Yeah. I think I think Paul Bergner is the the vitamin d converse for a lot of herbalists.
And he made me feel like coffee wasn't so bad either. But that's another story.
Yeah. And then Hooray for Paul.
So so but it was easy just to stick a couple of drops in my infusion before I had it with my my dinner every night. And then and then all I had to do was add a, I I I added a fish oil capsule because, because, actually, I was doing it for high triglyceride count in a test. So, but, that was I was a little resistant there, but I got used to it. But other than that, you know, it's pretty easy if you're already doing a liquid to get the d three if you're already kinda taking an infusion anyway.
Yeah. And, you know, for people that have supplement aversions, which again, I had major supplement aversions for a really long time.
Mhmm.
If you can see and you can feel that, wow, this is really helping me, you'll get over that. Right.
And I would I would love to say, like, oh, you know, eat salmon three or four times a week, but that's not feasible for Unless you live where I live.
For different reasons. Yeah.
Unless you live in that For me, it's a little harder.
We got him jumping out of his dreams onto our fry frying pans. No.
Yeah. I saw, actually, I saw a maker document in the PDF, and there was, like, all the bear. Was you catching salmon.
Exactly. Well, it's true. So there's a couple times in the area you can go down to my, you know, ten minute walk down to the the river and literally just so easy to catch them.
So let's see. So that was good on nutrition. While we're on that kind of level of more looking at that, oh, you know, more that nourishing kind of approach, what about, like, therapies and things that you can do or body work?
I think that, bodywork is imperative if you have a back or a joint injury, which means you have to do it. But the real quincher become I there are two I guess two real quinchers that I think are are very important is finding the right practitioner.
Mhmm. So there's there's a difference between, I guess, maybe within this two facets too, there's so many different body works techniques that I can barely keep up with them. Every time that I hear about, one, I end up hearing about six more. You know, there's structural integration and rolfing and there's chiropractic and there's Bowen and there's myofascial release and there's like sixteen different kinds of myofascial release.
It can be sort of confusing.
But to a great degree, I think that finding the right person to work with is as important as whatever specific, therapy Totally agree.
First accuses. Mhmm.
Because I've heard I you know, I know a lot of people because chiropractic here is, you know, it's been around for and well known for a longer period of time. You know, I've met people that because they went to one bad chiropractor, they're like, well, I don't I don't like chiropractic.
And to me, I would equate that to, like, who hasn't gone to a bad Chinese restaurant. Right?
Like, you go to a place and then, you know, you feel horrible afterwards.
Or a pizza place for crying out loud. Right.
Right. That doesn't mean that you need to stop eating Chinese food or stop eating pizza or whatever.
It means that that particular place did not have good food and you don't need to go back to that one. You know?
So there's a lot of different ones. But before I talk about a couple specific practices, none of them account for these two important points which is take it easy.
Sometimes someone will want to or they'll be encouraged to like, you know, like, go, let's say to the chiropractor, okay?
And there may be a period of time where the twenty minutes, half hour you spend at the chiropractor that does you good is completely undone by your ride drive to the chiropractor and your drive back home.
It's true.
Because being in a car I mean, actually for for lower back injuries, especially sitting is horrible. You know, if you have a very bad herniated disc, and sitting in a a car that's bouncing around on the road and speeding up and slowing down and then needing to twist to get out of the car, it can be more traumatic to do that than to stay at home and just take it easy and just rest.
So not overdoing it. If I had to say that there was a main reason that people's back injuries especially, but also joint injuries end up being worse than they need to be, it's because they try to do too much too soon.
And again, I say it's not from experience.
Most of the things I know I've gleaned from experience. So the bad things have not to do too.
So that's one. And then really cultivating a body awareness, which means that, if you're going to like you're laying down in bed and you feel horrible and you think to yourself like, oh, I have to like get out of the bed to go to the bathroom or something, you know, something necessary and you know that twisting to put your legs off of the bed is something that really, will trigger severe spasms for you, What you can do is like really slowly move your leg over. And then if you can feel like the earliest tinges of the spasm, put your leg down, stop, wait until it relaxes.
Rather than trying to do things too fast and then sort of like your movement gets ahead of your ability to judge where it's gonna lead you and then all of a sudden you end up having these really severe spasms or you know tweaking and aggravating the injury. So the more that you can really pay attention to how you're feeling and how your body is reacting to even very subtle movements and the slower that you do things, the better. Okay.
So that's important because especially, it can be yoga. Yoga is great for your back, you know, but if you just had a herniated disc, you don't need to be doing like cat cow.
And that can be too much. Even though that's good for your back, it's too much at the state that you're in.
On the whole though, yoga is really good and the core principles of yoga, of breathing and really paying attention to your body, that's what you need. You don't necessarily need to get into your car and drive to the bad backs class. You might need to do that in a week or two, you know, in three weeks or a month or something. But I know a lot of people, again, they want to rush. They want to get better and they want to stop hurting so quickly that they sort of can overdo it looking to these adjunct therapies.
Chiropractic, if you find the right practitioner, it's great. There's so many different types of chiropractic and I actually, again, I think it more has to do with the practitioner. A good practitioner will not, you know, just like a good herbalist, you don't walk in and they're like, oh, this is what I do for bad back. They'll see how you're doing and they'll respond to you and they will start off gentle and increase the force of the adjustments if they need to rather than just getting in there. There are bad chiropractors that I think believe that the louder they hear you crack or pop, crack or pop, the better a job they did. You don't want to go to a person like that. You want to go to a person that is really good at what they do, is really good at their craft, you know, with all the practitioners that you see.
But I I started, when I saw you first time when I when I had the back when I got back, the my local chiropractor, which a lot of people raved about, wasn't really doing it for me.
It seemed to be making it worse. I and someone recommended the network style of chiropractic. And I've been doing that ever since then, every couple of weeks. And, oh my goodness, it's, like, transformational for me. But that like I said, styles, different practitioners, like, different people.
Yeah. And network is a really subtle kind of chiropractor.
The guy that the guy that we see, he does something called the drastic technique. Uh-huh. And it literally looks more like like he very gently touches and pulls his hand away. You know? That the whole time that he was treating, a herniated disc in my lower back, he was only ever adjusting my atlas, and I never cracked or popped or, you know, like there was virtually no force used. And that's the entirety of the treatment that he did. You know, he never twisted, pulled, yanked or cracked anything.
Wow.
And I found that that worked better for me. Some people need, you know, a more aggressive approach, but especially in those initial stages, I don't think anyone needs anything abrupt or jarring, because that can create more of a reaction that that is going to be defensive in nature and that's to help them get better.
Right. Right.
There's also like even with massage, if the person that's doing the massage, which is going to be great is being too aggressive, your body's going to try and defend itself. You know, a lot of the pain actually that people feel is a defensive mechanism that the body is using to try and protect itself. Right. You know, we might not think like that because we just want it to stop.
But, yeah, it's it's a total defensive thing. And I can totally relate to wanting pain to just get better and go away.
So that's some great information on just, you know, like I said, body work and therapies to pay attention to. Now, how about herbal treatment for injuries?
Before I get into that, I wanna cover one more thing. I was I was teaching up in Duluth and the people that I stayed with were just awesome. And one of them was herbalist and occupational therapist and energy worker named Stacy Quaid and her partner Joseph Quaid who's, also an herbalist and a physical therapist. And Joseph and I stayed up one night talking, you know, sort of like nerding out on injuries.
And one of the things that he was telling me about, which was, I don't think he uses this term or maybe I'm corrupting it a little bit, but like postural dynamics, which is that a lot of people have learned postures that put stress in certain areas and your muscles learn to hold stress in some areas and get weak in other areas and then this become habituated postures and they sort of predispose you to illnesses. So maybe where one person might not react to bending over or twisting in a certain way, another person will.
That's really important to, to address because so if someone's pelvis for example is tilted forward, that puts a whole bunch of strain on certain discs in their body. It leaves them holding tension in their lower back to compensate for that. It leaves certain areas of their back weak. Okay.
So that will predispose them to having injuries in those areas because it's already distributing weight unevenly on the discs and that is so important to sort of learn and figure out and address.
So one simple thing is like you know, ears, shoulders and hips. Are they lined up? You know, and for a lot of people, especially if they work like desk jobs, so they're sitting down all day working in a computer, their shoulders are going to be forward, their head is going to be forward and oftentimes they may have a pelvic tilt in one direction or another, which is just it's bad. So that's something that is maybe not an initial consideration, but something that you'll start learning and paying attention to so you can sort of correct that weakness.
So what about, herbal treatment of back and joint injuries?
I think herbal treatment of back and joint injuries is so effective if if you nuance it properly.
The difference between herbal treatment and say like conventional treatment, and even some other holistic treatments is that conventional treatment helps the pain right away, can get you back up and going right away, but in the long term often does not really help you recover as effectively.
As we're herbal treatment, you need to take more time at the beginning. You need to take it easier at the beginning. You need to work more slowly, to rebuild strength.
But in the long run, you end up with a much fuller recovery because you're addressing things in a much more holistic and more nuanced fashion rather than just having like, oh, if it doesn't hurt, it's better.
And I think that that is the big problem with the way that most people, approach back injuries especially, but even a lot of joint injuries.
Most back injuries and joint injuries share a lot of these common traits. So as I go through and assess sort of the categories of how I look at them and make an assessment, it applies whether it's your back or your shoulder or your knee or your hip.
Certain joints can vary in their structure, but you'll look at these same principles to see how they apply. You're looking at the conditions of the injury rather than what the name of it is, you know? Alright. And that's that's a problem throughout, you know, holistic medicine is people like, oh, what what herb or what treatment is good for this problem? They name a problem. And we want to think more seriously than that.
So, you know, pain is the first thing that people want. They want their pain to go away.
And if that's your goal, to help with the immediate pain, the really the most effective thing you can do is take, you know, some kind of pharmaceutical painkiller.
I am not a big proponent of that and partially because I maybe have a higher pain tolerance than some people or I'm more stubborn and I have a desire to try stuff out and see what works.
But you can use the pain meds. It's not bad to. I think it's really important people don't think like, oh, I'm failing if I am not in constant pain and trying, you know, the larian tincture.
Right.
That's not the case. You can use pain meds, but there's still things that you need to think about, you know.
Obviously there are side effects of pain meds. There may be interactions between pain meds.
There's a potential for dependency and or addiction, which is really serious.
I met several people who had been prescribed, like, OxyContin or related drugs, for pain relief.
One of them is dead. One of them was spent, like, the next four or five years addicted, got fired from like three different jobs.
Yeah. I have a friend in rehab because of that too.
Right. And this wasn't like someone who went out looking for a drug to do and got addicted. He was legitimately prescribed for for an injury that he had. And then one of them is a story so distressing that I'm not gonna get into it here, but it's a really, really horrible nightmare story.
That's a in my opinion, that's a bad drug. See, before you take any drug, you wanna look into it and do some research. I mean Google is great. You can type the name in.
You can look on there and make some assessments about what might be the least problematic because it had the least dependence issues. And then there's also withdrawal issues. So even if you don't have a problem with getting addicted to a certain drug, a lot of them you need to wean off of them. You can't just abruptly stop taking them because the withdrawals that you can have are horrible.
And then on a totally non pharmacological basis, as I said earlier, our pain actually is a way that our body communicates with us.
It tells us what we can and can't do.
And when we cover that up, what we can do is engage in all kinds of movements that are worsening our injury and we can't feel how bad they're hurting us. So we keep doing them and then we go for our follow-up appointment and we see that the injury is more, you know, aggravated, you know, there's greater problems or it's not recovering and then that becomes justification for like, oh, well, it's not getting better. We need surgery. And really, one of the biggest reasons it's not getting better is because the person didn't take it easy. They didn't take the downtime that they needed.
That's a serious problem. Okay.
So when I'm thinking about paying and using herbs, it's a more subtle thing and it's more nuanced And you need to use the herbs specifically instead of getting to know like, oh, certain herbs work better for certain kinds of pain than other. So that the one simple thing you can do is sort of address like well what kind of pain do we have? Well, there's there's muscle pain and that's the main thing that most people struggle with is these really horrible seizing up spasms that they're getting.
Okay. Pain relievers, strictly pain relievers aren't so good at stopping pain from spasms because they may or may not be antispasmodics as well or muscle relaxers as well. And there's also nerve pain that people get. A really common example of that would be sciatica.
Yes.
And there's inflammatory pain, which is just inflammation causes pain. It hurts. You know, again, that's the way that our body tells us to take it easy. There's a inflammation of a healing response. But while that's happening in order for it to facilitate itself, we get pain so that we're not doing things that are inhibiting that.
Okay. So muscle reactions, if we think about those first, that's the first thing that most people think about. A really good example, you know, if I was, you know, lying in the bed and I woke up and these muscles were totally frozen up. Well, what the body is doing especially with your back is by clamping down the muscles on either side of the spine, it's basically your body's way of forming a splint.
You know? Like if you were out in the woods and you fell down, you know, a hill or the side of a mountain and you broke your arm, one of the things that would be smart to do would be to get some sticks and some, you know, duct tape maybe and splint your arm so that it can be held still so that you don't aggravate it and worsen the break.
You can't really do that as well with your back so your body does it for you.
By clamping down those muscles, your body is, you know, sends really clear strong messages to you like don't twist, don't move, don't bend forward.
That can be really horrible. Like I said earlier, like if you're in bed and you need to do something like get up and go to the bathroom, but you have to take it easy while you're doing that. And there's different herbal antispasmodics that I use for that.
Probably the most general of them that still works really well is Kramp bark.
Viburnum opulus.
Yeah.
Viburnum obulus, viburnum prunifolium, viburnum acerifolium, which is the maple leaf viburnum. It's not one of the ones you read out in books, but it works. There's probably other viburnums that work. And what that does is it just like lowers the tension threshold of the entire body down a few degrees and that can help a lot. It's not this super potent, powerful like you take it and all of a sudden it's like oh the spasm is gone but it just brings everything down a few notches and sometimes that's enough to be able to get yourself from that stuck in spasm state to be able to relax. Another one that I really love is black cohosh.
And black cohosh is good when they're tapping and there's kind of like this dull achy tenderness.
And even almost like a sort of queasy feeling in the muscles with pain where you just feel like oh, oh, this just hurts but it's a constant dull aching pain. Black Cohort is really specific for that and they work for dull aching pain throughout the body whether that's menstrual crayons or headaches or joint pain, but that's one that I absolutely love using. I tend to use fresh black cohosh tincture. I'm not as fond as some people are of taking black cohosh capsules or even dried black cohosh tincture. I think it can work. I know other people who use it, but I really like fresh black cohosh.
Okay.
There's kava kava and Kava Kava is like the melts your body herb.
And so you can take that in relatively copious doses.
There is among popular opinion, there's a question about whether kava is liver toxic and rather than get into that here, I would just say I've got a page, herbcraft dot org slash kava.
You can look into that delves into a lot of the ideas of where that comes from. It's not an herb that I have stopped using or that I grant a lot of credibility to the liver toxicity issue.
But that one is also good for anxiety and so when people have a lot of anxiety over the stress of their injury, it helps them relax because sometimes your mental anxiety over being hurt is causing your body to tighten up as well and that makes your muscles more hyper reactive. Okay.
And then Lobelia inflata.
Okay. So there's different species of Lobelia. There's the cardinal flower, there's grape blue Lobelia, there's Lobelia calnei.
I'm sure regionally there's all kinds of different lobelias, lobelia spicata, but lobelia inflata is an incredible antispasmodic.
It works best when the spasms are happening. So I would say that this is a carry around in your pocket bottle.
Okay.
Okay? Because sometimes you can be, you know, you're getting better. You're able to get up and walk around the house to the kitchen and, you know, like getting better as you walk from one room to another.
And then you twist the wrong way, you know, and then all of a sudden you get these spasms that are so bad that you literally crumple down onto the ground. You don't crumple down and then you're down on the ground laying. You're like, you're so spasmed up and pretzel up. You can't really, like, you couldn't get up, but you can't just surrender and crash on the ground either. You're kind of like in this in between state. I think writhing in agony is a good descriptor.
That's a moment for lobelia tincture.
And so if you can have that in your pocket rather than, you know, somewhere on the counter that you can't reach to or back in the bedroom or something, just a few drops of that. A lot of people will say that, you know, oh, you have to be careful with lobelia because it will make you throw up. I don't find that the tincture is as likely to do that as other forms of lobelia.
Definitely if you eat lobelia, you may very well throw up. If you drink strong teas or even weak teas of lobelia, you might throw up. If you take capsules of lobelia, you might throw up. I have not had that issue with the tincture And the dosage of that would just be like one drop, maybe three drops.
But start at one drop and see how it is. It's better with a lot of these herbs actually, specifically the antispasmonics, I find that taking smaller doses in frequent intervals is way better than taking, you know, like thirty drops and then waiting, you know, four hours to take it again and then waiting four hours. Like that to me is a ignore what the bottle says. It would not be taking something too much to say take five drop doses of most of these herbs, not lobelia that you'd want to do one drop and maybe a little bit less often.
Most of these herbs, you could take five drop doses every twenty minutes if you need to.
Right. That works better than the two to three times a day that all the bottles stay on them because, you know, if you take your antispasmodic tincture at nine in the morning and then you're going to wait until noon to take more or one o'clock or two o'clock, that it's not gonna work for you. You're not gonna be able to achieve the the effects that you can get from them.
Right. And and the bottles never really take into account, like, acute situations. They're just trying to give the, you know, equilibrium or what am I trying to say?
Right. Right.
Standard.
Yeah. You know, the bottles I mean, that's if if I have to think about putting a dosage on a bottle, that's like the hardest thing in the world to do because Right. I actually, you know, I don't believe that there are doses for herbs. There's only doses ranges that apply to an herb for a person with a situation happening. You know, and even then, even when you get that specific of that little triad of person conditions and herb, there's still a dosage range that you're working in rather than a specific dosage.
Certainly there are herbs like lobelia that have a smaller dosage range and herbs like kranpark that have a larger dosage range.
But still, it's just it's all sort of guesswork and it takes playing around with. I'd like to say that, you know, oh, Del Ichi Pain always use black cohosh, you know, like anxiety always use Ava Cava, but it takes some trial and error too to figure out what works best for you, what combination of things. Okay.
So, another kind of pain would be nerve pain.
Right.
And here's where you've got, like, a My eye patch just hurting talking about this.
I don't know about anybody else.
But So, like, a shooting pain or a searing pain or you have numbness, maybe. Mhmm. You have tingling, like pins and needles tingling. Okay?
The A number one herbs to think about in those situations that is the most effective and most generally applicable to all people herb is to think about a St. John's wort. And I know that, that's supposed to be like the antidepressant herb, but it's the real real miracle nature of that herb is for nerve injuries and nerve pain. It's also good for sore muscles.
It's also anti inflammatory but for nerve injuries, it just ends up being so effective and it's such a broad array of situations that it's one of the first things to think about. And you can use it internally and topically of St. John's wort oil or putting the things around topically too, but that's the A number one first herb that I'll think about using.
Another one that I've used that's not as easily had is Jamaican dogwood and it's a more medicinal herb, so your dosage range is a little bit lower.
But Jamaican dogwood combined with St. John's wort is a great one which helps us muscle pain and nerve pain and it's more of actually a pain reliever I think than St. John's wort, which is I think works a little bit more holistically and helps resolve some of the underlying issues.
I know that probably the only source of making your own Jamaican dogwood is to Mountain Rose carries Jamaican dogwood. Wow. The kind of thing that they get in and they have for a little while and then it gets sold out. So if you see it there and you know you have these issues or you have in the past, that's a good one to have on hand and I've used, not the roses, making dog when we had good results with it. You could maybe also like pasture Sevin's on and see if he'll touch up his secret spot. He probably won't.
Another herb that I learned about from Matt Wood was prickly ash. And Matt calls prickly ash the writhing in agony herb. But it's like, it's not spasms, like writhing in agony with muscle spasms. It's like nerve pain writhing in agony. And he's very small dosages of that.
And if you've ever taken prickly ash, you know that it's actually like, you know, echinacea gives you that that that tingly feeling in your mouth?
Prickly ash is like that, but it's a little bit more of a peppery tingly feeling. Echinacea is cold, prickly ash is hot.
And it seems to move all through your nerves and it has a disuse of action. And I don't understand physiologically how it works, but I've seen it work in situations and it's one of those herbs that if it's the right situation for that herb, you take it and it offers a lot of relief.
It wouldn't be the case that you know you have horrible awful terrible nerve pain and you take this one time and then poops you're healed and better and you don't need to take it again. But it can be an important ally for treating that kind of pain.
And then another one that I've used is sweet clover or melolot.
So there's white sweet clover and yellow sweet clover around here. We got both species.
And that one has coumarins in it. And when I tincture that one, I actually dry it out first because it brings out the coumarins and then tincture it like as soon as it's dry and I think it was David Winston who said like, so imagine you someone plugs in a fork to an electrical outlet and then pokes you with it. So it's like this electrical stabbing, searing kind of pain for that. And so that's how I've used that one.
I haven't used that one as much but I have used that one to good results and that one also blends well in combination with these other herbs.
Okay. I know that a lot of people like to use single herbs. I don't think you can use single herbs for back injuries and have it work.
Really?
Maybe in a couple cases, it's an uncomplicated like issue. There are certainly been times when I've just say taken mullein root and gotten great relief out of it. But I find that if you don't work on all these different issues at once, you know, the muscles and the nerves and then the things I'll talk about later like the structural issues or the lubrication or stagnation of fluids. If you're not working in all those things at one time, there's always, you know, you're getting improvement in one area that you're ignoring another one. So, yeah, I'm all for fun with, you know, like look at what issues apply.
You know, we just talked about pain. So, you know, nerve pain, muscle pain, inflammatory pain.
Well, you may need to combine things. You may need to kind of black co ops in St. John's. What is an awesome combination?
So so you're saying that you're coming up with a formula in the different categories. So for example, your formula would be like something for muscle pain, something for the nerve pain, something for inflammation, that kind of thing?
Yes. Absolutely.
Okay.
Okay. So you wanna consider all the categories. So we're talking about pain now. And then there's inflammatory pain. This is the pain that is usually the first thing that people think is like, oh, I need to take an anti inflammatory.
And they may be thinking like, oh, if you're thinking pharmacologically, you might think, you know, steroids, prednisone, right? Or you may be thinking non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs like Tylenol or Motrin or Advil. Okay? Or maybe people are thinking herbs or supplements and they're thinking like, you know, turmeric. There's an anti inflammatory.
But me, I think about like, well, there's a whole bunch of herbs that are anti inflammatory. They're anti inflammatory in different ways for different tissues. So a really good inflammatory, a really good way of thinking why the term anti inflammatory is problematic is to just think about any three anti inflammatories like say slippery elm is anti inflammatory, blueberries are anti inflammatory, and ginger is anti inflammatory.
Right. So but they're all very different, aren't they?
They're really, really different. Superlma is anti inflammatory because it's demulcent. It coats and soothes inflamed tissues.
I see.
Blueberries is cooling flavonoid rich anti inflammatory.
Ginger is this warming, you know, stimulating anti inflammatory. You want to figure out which one a person needs rather than just saying like, oh, there's inflammation. I need to pick, you know, whatever the popular anti inflammatory is.
Right.
Or, like, the blend of a hundred thousand anti inflammatory.
Or or you look in the book and it says anti inflammatory herbs and it has a list of, fifty of them and you just choose the one in the cupboard because you have it.
Right. Right. So if you were to think, like, anti inflammatories, you could think, like, black cohosh is an anti inflammatory for the muscles. Arnica is anti inflammatory for the muscles.
Saint John's wort is anti inflammatory for the muscles and nerves. Jamaican dogwood, I would say is anti inflammatory for the muscles and nerves. Sweet clover for the nerves.
Salomon's seal, which we'll talk about is anti inflammatory for like the tendons, cartilage and connective tissue and actually the joints as a whole themselves, TESOL for the muscles and tendons and cartilage and connective tissues, the aspirin containing herbs like Willow and Wintergreen and Aspen and Birch are like systemic anti inflammatory, licorice, and especially in large doses is a systemic anti inflammatory. Ginger and turmeric are systemic anti inflammatory.
I like to be more specific and I find a lot of times if I completely ignore inflammation and I look at these other categories and I put together a formula, I can then look at the herbs that I pick and be like, oh, well, there's there's a few different anti inflammatory is already in there that I don't necessarily have to think about anti inflammatory because when I address the other conditions Mhmm. There's automatically gonna be an anti inflammatory component.
So formula, but try to keep it simple is what you're saying.
Yeah. Yeah. Think about, you know, each category. Okay? So there's the pain. Mhmm. Think muscle pain.
Think inflammatory pain. Think nerve pain. Okay. So you assess that. Some people, they have a joint injury, they have a back injury.
They don't have any nerve pain. Okay. Well, they don't need to take herbs for nerve pain. You know, if you have, a herniated disc but you're not getting any nerve pain, you don't necessarily need to take St.
John's Wort. If you do have nerve pain, I would absolutely take St. John's Wort. Okay.
So another category, separate from pain would be like the lubrication of joints and tissues. And this is one that I think is really important and probably the most overlooked.
And the best I could say is like imagine say just one of the joints in your finger. Okay? You have a bone and a bone and both the bones end in some cartilage. Okay?
So that they end in some cartilage where they meet together and then there are tendons and ligaments connecting the bones together and connecting the joint together. Mhmm. How would they join together? And then where they meet, there's a synovial membrane and inside the synovial membrane that sort of surrounds the joint is a fluid called synovial fluid.
And that fluid, that basically lubricates the joint. So as you move your finger or your elbow or your knee around, there's not abrasive action. There's not direct friction of you know, cartilage on cartilage, right? Because if that happens, there's going to be abrasion to that cartilage and there's going to be structural damage. So you have this lubricant in there, the synovial fluid.
If for some reason and it's always a chicken or the egg in terms of why this might be the case, but if for some reason there's not enough of that synovial fluid or it's not the right consistency and you're getting more friction, maybe there was inflammation there and the inflammation sort of dried out the fluids in the joint or maybe there was an injury that caused inflammation and so the inflammation could cause the dryness or the dryness could result from the inflammation.
If you take an anti inflammatory, so you go out and it's like oh my back hurts and my joint hurts. I'm going to go out and buy some Xyflamed.
A great anti inflammatory product, you know, really good formula. It works.
But if the reason you have inflammation is because there's not enough lubrication and you move the joint around and you're getting friction that's causing structural damage and then inflammation is resulting from that and you suppress the inflammation, the causative factor is still going on. You still have friction in that joint.
You still don't have adequate lubrication in that joint and maybe your pain gets better and maybe the swelling goes down because you're using some anti inflammatory it's affecting that, but the underlying cause is still there and you're going to get more and more and more tissue destruction, you know, actual structural problems from the friction in that joint.
And the one thing that I know that is the absolute best thing to use in that case is Solomon's seal.
And I know other people that use false Solomon's seal. Okay? So salamens and ciel is some polygonatum species. I use polygonatum biflorum. I know people who use polygonatum canyuzatum which is a really big giant thalamicio.
I know some people that have used the polygonatum odoratum.
But there's something about that herb that, gets into the joints somehow and increases the synovial fluid so that it re lubricates the joints. Okay.
And and you know what?
The root, if you dig the root up and look at it, it kinda looks like a Yeah.
It's really cool. It's a total back into things to think.
I I should say that that I'm saying pretty declaratively that that's what it does. You know, are there clinical studies, showing that that's how it works? Not really. But I've given small doses of this to people where they, you know, one of the ways I find out whether someone needs this and you wouldn't necessarily do this if someone had, like, a really severe joint injury, but, like, if they move their neck around or their waist or their wrist sometimes and you can either feel or even sometimes hear like a Yeah.
Like this sense of friction. You don't have adequate lubrication. You need to get some salam and seal. Okay?
It helps with that. I've given people this and have them take a few drops of it or in some cases even put it on the joint and heard that noticeably lessen within seconds of giving it to them, which means that the reaction of moistening the tissues is a systemic response of the Salomon's seal rather than the Salomon's seal gets in urine gets absorbed through your bloodstream and goes into the joints.
It's tempting to make a connection between the mucilage in the solenoid seal, which is lubricating Mhmm. Thinking that somehow the mucilage is is acting on the joints. But I don't I just don't know physiologically how you can do that. It's something that I can't say that that's how it works is that it's directly related to the mucilage, but it's also something that I always wonder about because mucilages lubricate tissues even if they don't come into direct contact with them.
But I also know that like marshmallow doesn't really work like that, that has mucilage. Slippery elm doesn't really seem to work like this, that has mucilage. Other herbs that have mucilage don't seem to affect the joints like salmonezil does. So there's something really special about it. It just has a strong affinity, those plants, salmonezil, false salmonezil for the joints and they're really incredible. I consider them totally invaluable to addressing any kind of dryness in the joints and also it ends up acting as an anti inflammatory because if you have lubrication in the joints, then you don't get the friction and then inflammation doesn't result or if inflammation is there and that's what's drying up the tissue and the lubricates the joint, it soothes the inflammation.
For tendons and connective tissues that are dried out, now this is something I don't know physiologically how this works, but there's a very poor blood supply to the tendons. You know, they're not loaded with capillaries in them. They don't really have the same kind of blood supply that other tissues in the body have. The fascia is this way too. Fascia runs all through your body. Basically, your body is one piece of fascia, which you could kind of look at and say like oh this is the fascia in this area but it separates all your muscles.
I always think about a piece of leather and if you ever found like an old dried out belt, right? Mhmm. You know that it's it's really stiff and it lacks pliability.
Yeah. I think I'm wearing one right now.
Yeah. Right. Right. So if you pull on that if you pull on that, it gets it doesn't tear in half.
Right? It's not so brittle that you can tear a belt in half. Mhmm. But it gets all these fine little tears along the length of it.
And that's just like the micro tears that that tendons and ligaments get when they're inflamed and dry it out. I mean, they actually use the word micro tear to refer to that. And so somehow I think by restoring moisture to the tendons, to the fascia, to the ligaments and tissues, Salmonecile, false salmonecile restore their pliability and that helps it adjust tendons that are like stretched out and tight and dry, like stretched out and dry and stiff and it also helps when they're bunched up together because if dried tissues lack pliability, if they're scrunched up and dry, they stay scrunched up. If they're stretched out and dry, they stay stretched out. And that's how I sort of make sense about the fact that Salmons works both ways. If tendons are really tight, it'll loosen them. If they're really loose, it'll tighten them, right?
It's just restoring their pliability.
Another herb that probably works by moistening tissues or at least the best guess anyone has is, mullein. Okay?
Oh, really?
Yeah. This actually, you know, I've talked with Matt Wood about this. He's he's just really good with back stuff too.
And he says he thinks it lubricates the vertebrae and that's his I don't have any better idea about why mullein works. That's rational. My irrational idea is that mullein just is an alignment verb that helps with alignment, but he says it seems to lubricate the vertebrae so that if they're better lubricated, they can slip back into place easier and that makes pretty good rational sense. They're better than anything that I have to think about it.
And we also know that mullein, it's a plant, lubricates other tissues so it lubricates lung tissue. You know, as an example, if you have really dry stiff coughing, it lubricates the tissue and that helps it relax. So, Moen seems like it may lubricate the spine so it can slip back into place and I think about it as being an alignment herb. When I first started using it basically one morning I woke up and this wasn't a serious injury but I couldn't straighten out.
I sort of tilted off to one side and I tried stretching and I did, you know, some yoga type stuff and I hung from the ceiling and I tried getting voice to crack my back and nothing was working. But I kept hearing this voice in my head like millinery millinery millinery millinery millinery millinery millinery. And in terms of voices in your head, if they're talking about plants, always go with them.
Other stuff, who knows? But if they're talking about a plant, just just go with that. If you have this nagging feeling that, oh, maybe I should try this, but I don't know why.
Just go with it and see see what it is. And so I went out, I dug up some mullein, and I made tea with it, and I slipped right back into place.
Wow.
And the mullein root, Yeah.
And I don't at that time, I had not heard about anyone using mullein root. Since then, I know that Michael Moore uses it for treating urinary incontinence and I know that David Winston has used it for certain types of nerve pain. I've not really used it like that, Although maybe when I've mixed it with other things that's had that effect, and it just wasn't my intention to think about using that. But he's used it for like facial neuralgia, trigeminal neuralgia and TMJ type stuff and also Bell's palsy.
But as I was thinking of the plant, the main thing that I was thinking, and this goes back to not really being a rational explanation, was that the root stores up energy its entire first year of growth to put up that really strong straight tensile stock. It's just strong. Mullens are one of the only plants that's not really woody that you can grab onto the stalk and bend it over almost to the ground and let go and it will boing, you know, stand right back up. Most plants with the stalk would kink and it wouldn't grow. You know, you can do that if you're really rough with them, but it's got a lot of resilience to it.
And so that's what I think every time that I use it. I just think it has this affinity to getting your spine to line up.
But again, you would need to use it in conjunction with other stuff because if you're having really severe muscle cramps and the cramping is pulling your spine off, you know, it's cramping harder on one side than the other.
You can take the Mullen root and it helps get your spine aligned and then you have a cramp and it pulls it back out of alignment.
Another issue, category of issues would be like fluid stagnation. Okay. And there's all kinds of different ways that the fluid around a joint or an injury could be stagnated.
It could be, blood, you know, you've had an injury and there's some kind of blood stagnation and the first herb to think about there is yarrow.
And a lot of people know that yarrow is really good for stopping bleeding, but it's also really good if you have a lot of congested stuff blood like a hematoma or bruise and you put Yarrow on it, it helps to clear up that blood congestion. So it works very paradoxically in both ways.
I like to just say that Yarrow knows what to do with blood.
So you can use it in formulas either when there's bleeding or when there's like hematomas or blood blisters or bruising and it'll work in the way that it needs to. But that one's really specific for blood.
And yarrow you can use on open wounds. One of the herbs that's really famous that people would think about using for an injury like this would be arnica.
If arnica, for the most part, you don't use that on open wounds. It's like arnica works as a counter irritant. It's bringing blood into that area.
And so if the wound is open, that may not be something that you want to do is bring a bunch of blood to an open wound, right?
Right.
But arnica is really good at getting stuff, cleared up and cleaned out. It's kind of an all purpose fluid stagnant, thing for injuries. So you have an injury and there's so many different fluids that are milling around and spilling out they're supposed to be. There's lymphatic fluid, there's blood, there's kind of tissue debris and arnica gets in there and really helps to clear things out and clean things up.
Another one for like the swelling, the lymphatic swelling that often occurs is calendula And people can easily gloss over calendulas, you know, just like this gentle herb, you know, that you use for like, oh, all kinds of cuts and scrapes. But it can be really good for severe injuries when there's a lot of swelling and a lot of it's not just pooled blood and everything like this, but the swelling, by helping the immune response, you help clear the swelling down. The swelling is a part of the immune response. You create extra fluid in the area so you can clean up all the stuff that's there in places where it shouldn't be.
Calendula doesn't suppress the swelling, but it helps to facilitate the process that the same process that the swelling is engaged in, which is cleanup of all that debris.
And then another thing that can get stuck in congestion and this comes from Matt Wood is, he talks about with black cohosh. This idea, especially in case it's a whiplash, he uses the terms bunching up of the cerebral spinal fluid. And if you were to ask me to explain that, I really I don't know how I I just always end up quoting him, but I've used it in cases of whiplash and it excels.
It's one of the really important herbs to use in cases of whiplash.
Wow. And how do you use them?
Is there any tinctures, drops? I mean Yeah.
For for black cohosh and nip loss, just like, I would say five drop doses.
Okay.
You know? And that seems like a small dose. But to me, the dosage range of black cohosh is five to fifteen drops anyway, not thirty drops. I think thirty drops of black cohosh is too much. I think that fifteen drops of black cohars is usually too much. I don't I don't almost ever give anyone more than ten drops of that.
A favorite of mine actually, for whiplash is black kosh and arnica together.
That's an awesome combination. And when I speak of arnica too in terms of that, I'm not talking about the homeopathic preparations, but either a tincture of arnica that you take in small doses, you know, one to five drops.
Maybe you can take more than that if you have experience with it or you're working with an herbalist who has experience with it but for the most part one to five drops of Arnica tincture, or applying the tincture topically and you can dilute that a little bit. Some people are sensitive to it and react to it, but most of the time I find that you can put the tincture on topically.
Just diluted a teeny bit with some water and it works great. You can also make an infused oil with the tincture and I think myself that that works better than any of the homeopathic preparations that I've tried.
Okay.
So those are all working in fluid stagnation. So either blood or lymph or, you know, cerebral spinal fluid in terms of whiplash. And I wish you could explain, you know, I think that people who have used it, when I talk to them about this and I say, you know, the cerebral spinal fluid feels like it's congested in an area, they go, they sort of like their eyes get wide with this recognition and nod like, Oh, I know what you mean about that congestion. And it's like the energy in your spine just feels congested in that area and stuck.
And black cohosh seems to open that up.
And then another category is like structural integrity. Okay.
So that means that like the bones themselves, you know, they need this kind of goes back to our nourishment, okay.
Horsetail provides silica which is really good for the structural integrity of bones and cartilage.
Now I use horsetail tincture and that doesn't make any sense at all because tinctures don't extract silica well and we think about silica as being the thing that helps horsetail in terms of bones or the minerals in horsetail and none of those are extracted by a tincture and what little bit does get extracted certainly doesn't come through with small doses of it.
But fortunately I started using it before I understood or knew any of that and I used it and it worked. And so this is a phenomenon that the Finnish herbalist, Henriette Kress says, herbs don't read books. So they don't always know all the things that they're not supposed to do or the ways that they're not supposed to work.
And I know that Kiva and a number of other people have also used horsetail tincture for treating actually breaks and cartilage injuries where there is torn cartilage. I've had MRI show really significant improvement in torn cartilage which is not something that is considered to be easy to heal. And the main thing that I was using for that was horsetail tincture.
So, the tea is really good, right?
But as a silica source, I am more inclined to use oatstraw with a little pinch of horsetail than just horsetail by itself because horsetail is also an additional plant for the urinary tract and if you don't need an action on the urinary tract, it doesn't make sense to use it just because it has silica, right?
As where oatstraw is more nutritive plant that you take that has silica in it and all these other nutrients.
So you can put a little bit in but you don't want to be, you know, medicating your urinary tract by using horsetail if that's not something that you need. Right.
Another thing that I use is royal fern.
And royal fern, I learned from Nat Wood and he talked about, I think, learning it from Maude Greaves Herbal and some old, you know, folk history, as it has the folk name lumbago break. So break means furnace and lumbago means back pain. Oh. And he said that that was the one thing that he used that really really, helped him with his back pain. That was like his his back pain, you know, totem plant.
And he would make like a, an extract of the leaves rather than the root. It has the strangest root I've ever seen. It's like dragon scales that are all dry and flaky like pine cone and then, you know, you can get down to this really tiffy, mesologous, section of the root or sometimes you collected a whole bunch of it and you pull off those, you know, hard drive scales to get to this nise lodge in this sticky section of the route and there's only this really thin root fiber going through there after you've spent, you know, hours in the swamp digging it up.
So you can use the leaves. I know Matt uses the leaves. He even talks about making something that's not like a flower essence, but like a leaf essence where he leans the, the leaves over in some water and lets them infuse even while they're connected to the plant. Kind of like you would use the flower essence and then adds enough brandy to preserve that and he's used that effectively.
Finley Ellingwood, the old Eclectic talked about this plant and he said that it actually helped to strengthen the back and strengthen the muscles around the back.
And I think there's a book on I don't remember who the authors are what the title of it is but it's on like folk medicine in the British Isles or ethnobotany of the British Isles or something, folk herbalism in the British Isles. They said that, whereas places with that had comfrey growing would use comfrey for all of their breaks and bruises and sprains, The people who didn't live where would use will affirm that they would dig it up and pound it up and use that as pulses and infusions for healing all of their, you know, the bodily woes of breaking and tearing and ripping and smashing.
So that one in terms of finding it, I don't know commercial sources where you can get royal ferns. Usually if you can find it, you find a lot of it, but you have to understand that it does grow in wet areas. And so you want to figure out where the water in those wet areas are coming from because if there's pollution nearby, there's a pharmaceutical plant up the royal fern root or leaves.
So and then, you know, there's more damage stuff. So, Comfrey.
Comfrey is awesome. Short term use, I feel pretty comfortable with. Long term use, you got to start thinking about the pyrrolizidine alkaloids debate. Yeah. Which which has no answer.
You know, really great herbalists, really great herbalists totally disagree on this. Some really great herbalists think it's totally fine. Some really great herbalists say don't use it at all. Some really great herbalists say use it, but only in acute situations for a limited period of time.
And my opinion on that is if you're going to use it, you should look into this issue and come to some kind of conclusion yourself rather than saying like, what does this person say or what does that person say? You know? I'm I'm really all for an informed decision rather than just surrendering your opinion to, you know, oh, Susan Weed says it's totally okay or, you know, Paul Bergner says, well, maybe in some cases but not for long term use, you know. Oh, but wait, Susan Lee says you can eat it and you should eat it.
You should drink it. Comparing infusions all the time. But Paul Bergner says no, you know, look at this. We have information that says that.
It's it's a more confusing issue and the only way you can really make a decision about it is to look into it and spend some time seeing what both sides have to say about the issue and looking at some of the source material. But comfrey really works. You know, comfrey is incredible and for poultices and salves and oils, I've really got no problem using those. So I would definitely recommend that kind of topical approach. Comfort baths and compresses I think are great. Poultices are great.
Arnica again helps with damage.
Salmonezeal helps with damage. I think that Salmonezeal also helps to heal bones.
I think that it definitely helps with these micro tears to the tendons that we talked about earlier.
St. John's wort helps with nerve damage and injuries and it helps with bruising. So like when someone gets into an accident and that's how they hurt themselves, maybe a car accident, it helps to heal that injury.
Horsetail, again, provides nutrition and silica and gives you the raw materials to heal injuries.
Yarrow again clears out blood stagnation and gets things moving. As a general whole, wherever you have stagnation in the body, if it's a prolonged stagnation, you need to get energy moving through it.
Corey Pine Shane in North Carolina has this great analogy where he talks about like, if you think about a river, where the river is flowing, it's clean. Where it's stagnant, stuff is growing and festering.
So stagnation creates the environment for stuff to grow. And in a lot of cases in the body, if there's not supposed to be stagnation there and the body for the most part is not supposed to be stagnant anywhere.
The stuff that ends up growing there is not stuff that you want to be growing there.
Teasel seems to be really specific for like rips and tears to the muscles and connective tissues.
And so I know that that it's gotten a lot of like, popularity of being one of the things that you can use if you have Lyme disease. You know, not the one and only thing but one of the important things to think about trying. But it's also really good for like wrenched muscles, wrenched joints, you know, football players, teasel and thalasse root is something that's probably gonna be really good for them, So some of the things are getting twisted and pulled and yanked.
There's more of a damage going on there. And then there's Goldenseal and Goldenseal goes back again to Matt Wood. In his book of herbal wisdom, he talks about Goldenseal strengthening discs And, I think I'm probably gonna paraphrase, but he says something to the effect of, you know, I figured that if goldenseal conceal like a wound in the flesh of the mucus membranes, it can seal a disc too that's been herniated.
And I just know that when I was in that desperation of actually being in a lot of horrific pain, I tried it out and I could tell that it helped. And so I started using it, you know. I don't understand quite how it works, physiologically, but I could tell that that plan helped me out. But I always use it as a really small dosage. So actually the formula that I ended up making, it was it was a fraction of a drop I would get in each dose that I took from the blend that I made.
Okay.
And so when you're thinking, when you're dealing with a specific illness, okay, so you think about like, okay, pain's an issue. Muscle pain, nerve pain.
I want to think about herbs that will work for those. What kind of muscle pain? What kind of nerve pain? That will help me determine. I mean first you think whether I need one or the other or both and then I think, well what kind of pain I'm feeling will help me pick out which one of the herbs that falls into that category is good for. And then, you know, do I feel like there's friction in that joint?
I need something to lubricate the tissues.
So I want to think about maybe Mullen, maybe Salomon's seal, maybe false Salomon's seal because the lubrication in the tissues and then I think about is there swelling, is there fluid stagnation? And then what kind of fluid is it? So I might eat yarrow or calendula or arnica or black cohosh. And then you think about are there structural issues? Do I need to strengthen the foundational structure of the tissues themselves?
And then you think about herbs that provide silica or is there the structural damage and things that are going to help maybe come free, maybe teasel. So you look at these categories, you think about which ones apply and then you start putting together your formula.
And the more specific you can be, the better your formula is going to work for you and really the smaller dosage you can take. Whereas if you're just throwing everything in there because you think everything's going to work, you need to take larger doses because you're using shotgun approach and things aren't really tailored specifically to your situation and you know, you just like a shotgun needs a broader spread, you know, there's more pellets.
The formula is gonna work the same way. I think actually that's why a lot of commercial formulas have these high doses. It's because they're not specific to a person. You need to use a higher dose.
It's because some of the herbs are right for that person, some of the herbs maybe not necessarily. Right. Right. You know.
So so, alright. So that's a lot of internal stuff there. And I know folks are thinking, well, actually before we because I wanna ask about topicals. And and before we do that, I just wanna mention that we will honor mentor dot com where this is posted.
We'll have a link over to the page where Jim talks about a lot of this in case because you might be, you know, frantically writing down herbs and stuff. Stuff. And you you probably have all these listed, right, in your categories?
And Yeah.
Okay. Yep. So that way, you can just link over and and get the notes there, because I know some folks might get like, oh, what was that again? So anyway Yeah.
And I think it ends up being about, like, twenty pages that you printed out. So it's sizable. Not anything you wanna read off the screen.
Right. Right. So print it out, put it in your binder.
So, topical. So what I guess before getting into different herbs and topicals, I I I heard you talk once about, like, the whole hot versus cold debate. So is that the place to start with that?
Or Yeah.
That's a really good place to start.
Some people are all about, like, ice it, ice it, ice it, ice it, ice it, ice ice it. Some people are like no no no don't ice it don't ice it give it heat give it heat and I'm I'm like ninety eight percent on the heat side and two percent on the ice side. Okay? So I think about like you just think about what each of those things do.
Okay? So people that are are in favor of ice will say like, oh, ice stops the inflammation. It stops the swelling. Okay.
Well, it stops the insulin and it helps with the pain.
It stops the pain by numbing it. Okay? So it's not really stopping the pain, it's stopping your sensation of the pain because it's numbing the tissues of the cold and it's helping the swelling because what do tissues do when they come into contact with cold? They contract.
Okay. So it's a reaction to the cold which is kind of suppressive and, that's that's how it's helping with the swelling and with the inflammation, it's also it's the inflammation is hot. You're putting ice on it. It's not cooling it down.
It's freezing it. It's halting processes. Exposure to hold slows down processes. And so where is that appropriate?
I don't think at all long term, ICE is a good idea. Okay.
I always grant exceptions to any declarative statement that I ever make but on the whole on the whole I don't think long term ice effect. I've seen people that, that had injuries that were old injuries months or years old that had been icing it and icing it and icing it, you know, and then they saw me and I told them to stop icing it and gave them some herbs and and I don't even know if maybe it was I could have just told them to stop icing it and it would get better because they had frozen the place of the state of their injury by icing it. They kind of stopped the process.
All of the horrible part of a back injury or joint injury is correlated with, you know, the pain has to do with getting us to not be moving around, so our body can heal itself. Inflammation is a part of the healing response of increased tissue activity, right?
Swelling is increasing the fluid so that more repair can get done and so the waste products can get done. If you use something that's pressively stop that, it's not going to help you get better.
So one place I can see doing that is like right when the injury happens. Okay? So right when the injury happens and blood is spilling out and lymphatic fluids are spilling out into the tissue, you know, the open tissues, everything that's ruptured is all leaking its fluids out everywhere.
That might actually be an initial good time to put ice on it right when the injury happens, maybe for the first few hours. After that, I personally don't ever really recommend ice.
Exception to that, which falls into the I don't like to give declarative statements without acknowledging that there's exceptions.
Some people just say, but I put ice on it and I can it just feels right to me to do that. If that's the case, go with it. But go with it knowing what cold does and what ice does so that you can see whether you feel like those things are happening.
If it feels good, it might feel good for a longer while than I would be inclined to use it, but I still don't think it'll ever like Isis is ever going to be a long term great solution because I think that it freezes the healing response and then if you freeze the healing response, you can't get over it.
I'm much more on the side of like heat.
Probably the only reason anyone should have a microwave, Okay? Well, there are two reasons.
It's an expensive light to shine down on top of your stovetop.
That's one reason that you can just get one of those hoods with a light. Mhmm. Or you can put it in your basement or your garage or some faraway place from where you live and use it to heat up like rice packs or flaxseed packs or buckwheat hole packs. Mhmm. You know, but a really simple heat pad is to get a pillowcase or a big muslin bag, fill it up with the cheapest rice you can find. Ideally, I guess you get organic rice because you want to support organic farming, but you can buy like a whole bunch of cheap rice, you know, secondhand store or something and put it in the microwave for a minute or two. It'll get hot and then you can put that down and lay down on top of it.
You can put that on a joint in the looseness of a pillowcase or a big muslin bag or even just wrapped up and tied with a hair tie or some hemp twine or something, a sheet or something, is that it'll mold to whatever you put it on. So you can either put it on your bed and lay down on top of it or if you feel better laying on your stomach and not on your back, you can put it on top and it spreads out the heat. It holds the heat for a good amount of time and that's a great way to apply heat. You know, and I know that they make all kinds of different heat pads, but this is a great way to apply heat just because of the way that it molds to your body.
Right. Right. That's a great idea. I wish I thought of that last time. I I don't intend for my back to go out again, you see, Jim.
So Yeah.
I think that that's a good intention.
I think it's a great intention. I feel the same way.
So, and that actually transitions us into, topicals and oils and salves. And I will say that I'm not, I don't really use essential oils, but not as an idea.
It's not an ideology that I think essential oils are bad. I know some people do.
I don't think that they're bad. I don't use them mainly because I can't make them here in my house.
You know, I do think that there are some ecological considerations in terms of how much resources it takes to make a little bit of oil, but I would rather have, say, like a giant organic lavender field than, say, a strip mall.
So I think there's a balance to be had there. But to be honest, you know, when I think about essential oils, I just I like the way that sage smells better than I like the way that sage essential oil smells. I like the way that chamomile smells better than the way that I like chamomile essential oil.
And so, since within essential oil, what you have to do with just about all of them is to dilute them down, you know, and I even know people that will become sensitive to lavender if they apply lavender without dilution.
Not everyone, but some people do. And I know that there are some companies that using essential oils undiluted specifically for spine problems.
Don't do that. I know people have gone to the hospital because people were putting essential oils undiluted on the spine.
Really? Wow.
Yeah.
So that that can be seriously dangerous. And if the person has a reaction, they're not detoxing. They're being poisoned by some of the essential oils that are commonly used in that practice. Okay.
But I just have a preference for stuff that I can make myself and infused oils are incredible.
So everyone who has access to St. John's wort this summer should make St. John's wort infused oil.
Every year.
Every year. You should make as much as you can make. You will find use for it. Okay?
Sore muscles, bruises, bumps, sprains, nerve pain, Sunburn.
Yeah. Sunskin. Sunburn. Just it's it's such a great all purpose topical oil, but really good for back injuries.
Okay? And one of my favorite things to do, it's really common for people when they lie down to go to sleep and then they wake up and they were more relaxed at the end of the day, even after they moved around a little bit all day, just not overdoing it but a little bit and then they go to sleep and they wake up and their muscles are rock hard and they're totally tight and they can't move and they can barely sit at bed and what's happening is as their body is laying there motionless, their muscles tighten and tighten and tighten and tighten and tighten and then when they get up, it's really, really tight.
And so what I started doing is having, you know, I did this myself and I've had other people do it, if they're clients, is so number one, you go to sleep with a hot rice pad or whatever, some kind of heat pad. But in addition to that, before you go to sleep, put some kind of infused oil blend on your back where the injury is that's helping with the injury and then lay down on top of your hot pad.
And that combination of the heat and then the heat kind of like opening up the pores of the skin, helping the oil to soak, which is what I think anyway, relaxes the muscles, helps the oils to soak in better to the skin, helps you not wake up so tight. Actually, one of my favorite, infused oils that not many people make is infused kava kava oil. Wow. I could not rant about that one more strongly, but that's a really good one.
You mean rave?
Yes. Rant rave.
Yes. Rave.
So, you know, you can mix that with other stuff. You can mix that with Saint John's wort, to Mix those together and then put that on and then lay down on your hot pad and that will help you so that when in the morning you don't get so much tightening as you're going to sleep. If you're waking up and you're always worse when you get up in the morning, that can be really discouraging because you think like, oh, I felt like I was getting better and then I wake up the next day and I feel like hell again in the morning. I feel so tight and so stiff. It's just that as you're lying there, those muscles are tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening. You can use a lot of relaxants, a lot of antispasmodics before you go to sleep and topical stuff before you go to sleep that'll lessen how much you tighten up overnight.
Gives you kind of a better starting place in the morning.
Arnica is of course really great and infused arnica oil, I think is better than homeopathic stuff. Another thing to think about the homeopathic stuff and I know that some people love this stuff, but look at the ingredients. Almost all of the homeopathic cretins are in a petroleum base. Really?
I even thought Oh, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Look at look at, just about all of them really.
They're, you know, they'll say like petrol oil or and then petroleum jelly. You know, those if if it's that white creamy stuff, that's almost always petroleum based and that just sort of skeeds me out. Yeah. Could they?
You know?
Rooted perfectly good herb.
I know. I know.
So salmonezeal also makes a really good infused oil, and I'll often have that and mix that into my oils and with oils too. I always I like using blends, you know, so different blends of St. John's wort and Solomon's wort together is a great base for an oil.
I love goldenrod oil, which I learned about from Kiva Rose and Kiva Rose learned about it from Lady B and Lady B learned about it from somebody whose name I don't know.
I think on the wise woman forum. So there is some originator to this who probably learned about it from someone else that goldenrod infused oil in some ways seems to work similar to arnica oil.
So there's a lot of people that don't have access to arnica who have tons and tons and tons and tons of goldenrod going around them because that's the nature nature of goldenrod to grow in colonies.
And that infused oil seems to help with swelling and pain and injuries and sprains and contusions.
Lobelia oil is a great antispasmodic.
Stellar. And then another thing that I like doing, especially for older injuries, so someone's had an injury for a while and they're kind of stuck and especially if they spend a long time icing the injury is I want to use something warming and spicy and you could use an infused cayenne oil, right? But me and Cayenne don't get along. Like, I'm too dry to work with Cayenne. It dries out all my mucus sprains and then they feel crappy. So I'll either infuse ginger or I'll infuse wild ginger, which grows around here.
And then I'll mix that into the oil if I need to sort of like restart the process if it feels like it's been stuck for a while especially.
But the determination as to whether I add something hot and spicy into the oil is usually to like look at the area. If the area is like really, really red and it feels really hot, you put your hand over it and you can feel the heat radiating off of it, you don't really need to throw in any ginger oil. If it doesn't feel like that, if it feels stuck and it doesn't feel so hot and it doesn't look so red, then you can put it in there.
People who like tiger balm, you can make some kind of I know Henriette Kress had this recipe. I think it's on her blog somewhere of a warming oil and it was like a cayenne and ginger and I think mustard seed and maybe black pepper or something. Wow. Which is a great put it on, stimulates circulation, warms everything up, helps relax tight knotted muscles. That's another thing that warming oils do is they really help with relaxing tight muscles, but don't rub your eye after you use it.
That'll that'll create a whole lot more tension in your life.
I don't think that I since I that's the one thing that's actually not on the website is the section on topicals and infused oils. Oh. I don't since I really started focusing on that, that I really realized how important that was because it just becomes another thing that if you apply, infused or if you get an injury, it's a car accident, you fell down a hill, you just bent over to put your sock on wrong, you know, and then all of a sudden you have back problems and you can't, you can't trace it back to like, you know, oh, what did I do? I don't know what I did.
If you're putting on that oil like two or three times a day, day after day after day after day after day, it really adds up and certain people don't seem to have the predisposition to do it. Other people do. In the people that I've seen that are real religious about it, they get a lot better quicker than the people who don't do it. And I think that it actually one of the things that can happen especially with with muscle reactions is everything just becomes like hyper vigilant.
You know, you basically have like post traumatic stress disorder of the muscles where they're constantly waiting to react to something.
And if you use these infused oils and you use relaxants internally, you're just approaching the problem consistently and you can potentially sort of stave off your body habituating that hyper reactivity or that hyper vigilance that they have and avoid sort of like the complicated knot of a mess that that learned learned hyper vigilance of the muscles can can turn into.
Okay.
Because then it becomes sort of like this whole body respra response that's keyed in with the fight or flight response and it gets really complicated and becomes more challenging to treat. I think that you start off with an injury whether you know what it was or not, but it's not tied into that anxiety state.
You can you can prevent that from manifesting, you know.
A lot of people will say things like, oh, you know, your tension is causing, you know, your mental tension or your stress is causing all of your physical tension.
That's, you know, true and false. Anyone who has an injury that causes them a lot of pain is eventually going to get really stressed out about it. And that doesn't mean that the stress is a causative thing. It just becomes like a vicious circle, you know, like the pain and the injury and the whole situation causes stress and then the stress reinvigorates all the processes correlated with the pain and all of a sudden it's spinning around in what's what. Sometimes you can't quite tell which thing you have to work on. You just work on both and everything.
If you take all these different categories and you address them and you're also doing some kind of body work and you're also taking it easy.
You'll have a much more holistic approach to deal with things than just taking painkillers and anti inflammatories and muscle relaxants.
And then taking two days off work and then going to work and overdoing it Then all of a sudden, they're like, oh, it's not getting better. We think you need surgery.
So speaking of that, you know, before we wrap it up here, I was wondering what you thought about surgery because, like, some folks listening because it goes back to, you know, there's some confusion a lot because when sometimes when you having all this pain or, you know, you might be thinking that, you know, there's something wrong. I should go get surgery when when it may not be. So it can be confusing especially when you have doctors telling you one thing.
And so what's your opinion on on your experience too about with with when people might need surgery or You know, I've I've I've had people that have, had surgeries Mhmm.
You know, and they still have pain. I've had people that, have been in a lot of pain and are thinking about surgery and I think, again, it's really important to be open minded and go back to just like using conventional pharmaceutical painkillers.
Like to me, the idea of holistic To me, the idea of holistic medicine means that it's inclusive and it's even inclusive of things like drugs and surgery, but not really as a first resort. I mean, obviously if you're, you know, you get hit by a car or something, you need to go and have surgery to get stuff fixed that's totally broken. But there's a lot of situations in which you can address them other ways but that doesn't mean that you need to have constant pain. If you're in constant pain and you try a whole bunch of things, you try all the right things, you think about it really holistically, you think about, am I just trying to relieve the pain or am I working on issues of structural integrity and my issue, fluid stagnation or lubrication of joints and tissues.
You do all that and you're still in pain or you get a little bit better, but you're still in pain day after day after day after day, surgery might be the right thing to do. You know, there was a client that I had some years ago and she had spinal stenosis, which I found is really not easy to treat and I haven't found anyone that I've ever met who said like, oh I work with that all the time and you know this is what I do and it goes away. Most people agree that that's difficult to treat. And what stenosis is is the hollow tube that goes through your vertebrae that your spinal cord goes through, you start to get calcifications and swelling of the, the tendons and ligaments or maybe not ligaments, tendons in the connective tissues, let's say, so I haven't mixed that up, Get my physiothery wrong.
You get swelling and you get calcifications inside and it starts to pinch on the spinal cord and one of the hard things about stenosis is that often by the time that it's really hurting and the pain is constant, the calcifications are substantial enough that it's I mean you've got bone built there that's pinching your spinal cord and I do think you can use things that help with bone spurs and I know people that have used salamcin that help with bone spurs but once there's enough physical change in the tissues, it can get to the point where it's unlikely that you're going to be able to only take something and have it get better.
And that being the case, you know, this woman, she rocks. She was so good. You know, she did a lot of stuff, prior to talking with me and then we worked together for a period of time and she's like, you know, I feel like it's helping but it's only helping. I'm still in pain every day.
And, I completely agreed with her that she should go in and and get the surgery done. When she did that, she found, maybe like two or three other, you know, substantial structural problems and she did the surgery.
She's not back one hundred percent where she was and but she's better. She's not in the same kind of chronic pain every single day. It was the right thing for her to do to get the surgery. And so, it's sort of sometimes we can be obstinate out of a sense of idealism and thinking like well, if I can't use herbs to fix this problem, then I wasn't good enough or I failed. And that's just wrong headed. You know, there's that that's a lack of humility.
Right.
And we have to be in touch with that humility. We have to be accepting and we have to say sometimes, you know, surrender all of these ideals and have some trust in what your instincts are saying. Like, you know, there's a lot of people I think that they feel like, oh, I can tell this isn't working. I should get the surgery. No, I don't want to. I feel like nothing I'm doing is working but I don't want to get the surgery.
You might need to just trust your instincts and surrender and let go, you know, and and not feel like that means that you failed, you didn't do good enough, you didn't know good enough, or that after that, who's gonna want to work with you because you weren't able to do this thing. You know, that's a myth that, like, if you're a good enough herbalist, bad things won't happen to you. You know, Like, Nicholas Culpepper, all of his kids died or almost all of them. I think one lives. And he died when he was like thirty eight, I think.
Really?
He was credible. Yeah. Yeah. He was not a long lived fellow.
A bunch of his children died. You know, he died early.
He was still an incredible herbalist. It's just the fact that he wasn't able to solve everything.
At the last traditions in Western herbalism, Chuck Garcia said something that I still think about.
He said like just the struggles of being an herbalist that you might think like you were able to help someone who had cancer and then, you know, your best friend dies of it and you weren't able to help that person.
Just humility in the face of how complicated life is and all the things that can happen to us and that sometimes you just can't fix everything.
You know, it's been my experience that I've been able to offer a lot of help both to myself and to other people using herbs and thinking about it in this specific way and fussing it out and trying different things. So there's also trial and error mix in there.
And maybe in closing, when herbs do work, that doesn't always mean that you are like you were before the injury happened.
That a lot of times you get a lot better like me. You know, I had this horrible herniated disc and I mean, like, as bad as pain can get. I have, you know, I would turn the wrong way, you know, or lean down to pick something up, you know, drop something, drop a pen, lean down to pick it up, and then all of a sudden fall down and be frozen in pain.
I can portage a canoe net call on top of my hat, but that doesn't mean that I also don't sometimes, when I'm overdoing it, feel my lower back saying to me, like, you're overdoing it.
Right.
So I'm not back to, like, I never had an injury. And I don't know that that's the kind of goal that we should shoot for, you know? Like, to be like we were before something happened. Because I don't think life works that way. I think that everything that happens makes us grow. And while some ways that we grow aren't really comfortable, but it's still growth, you know. True.
True. You know, Jim, it's been incredible and, you know, only you who's been on three times has the power to make it a doubleheader, or mentor radio edition.
Yeah. And I was about twenty thirty minutes in, I was like, oh, I think we're just gonna make this a double one.
And, now I know a lot of folks, submitted I'm not really good at brevity.
Oh, no. It's great. I love it.
Thank you.
I know a lot of folks submitted questions, and the cool thing is I actually gave those questions ahead of time. So Jim was able to kind of incorporate a lot of people's thoughts and all into what he was saying, and as I noticed. And, though, you know, couldn't get to everything.
And, you know, with I just we just chose here to to to to go with, the full the full lecture here, versus, you know, cutting it short and getting the questions. So what we'll do, maybe at some point, we'll do a Q and A thread maybe in the forum on her mentor dot com. And You are. And that's a good way.
Also, let's see. Once again, if you, I have a link on the page here to over to Jim's page, on, on back pain, the notes there. And if you were listening to this, not on our mentor dot com, you could just go to herb craft dot o r g, where you will find that article.
And that's Jim's awesome website. And, once again, everyone can catch Jim McDonald live, live, with in person. Live, live, live, this September, at the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference at traditions in western herbalism dot org and Rootstock. It's rootstock fest dot com.
And there are class descriptions of the classes that Jim's giving there.
Hey, you could just do like a Jim McDonald tour, and and you could follow him. You could start in New Mexico, take September off and and and hang out there and then kinda go up to to Oregon and and catch them live there.
So it'd be, you know, be like following the dead or something, you know.
Yeah. Right. Right. Get get a van and scrounge for money.
But, see, if it's like the dead, then you guys would have to, like, wait out in the parking lot because you didn't have enough money to buy tickets. Follow me and wait in the parking lot and try and get someone to give you a ticket.
That would work too.
It's my birthday.
Looking for a miracle. No.
So, Jim McDonald, thank you so much once again for joining us and sharing this incredible wisdom that you gained over the years. And, I'm sure we'll see you again here.
Yeah. Pleasure, dude.
See you.
Ciao.
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Thanks so much for listening.
