Wild Thyme in the City (eBook)

An Historic Guide To Cooking and Creating Remedies With Medicinal Herbs for City Folk and Herbal Apprentices

Marguerite Dunne (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
248 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-7885-8 (ISBN)

Infos

For centuries, women have foraged, catalogued, and cooked with vegetables and herbs to soothe, caretake, and heal their families' health issues. Rich in history, 'A Wild Thyme in the City' explores the simplicity of herbalism, common ailments and disorders, preparing herbal remedies for the city dweller (or beginner), and recipes for medical vegetables. A materia medica, a list of herbs, is included listing easy definitions, therapeutic uses, and precautions.

While practicing as a medicinal herbalist for 40 years, Marguerite Dunne earned a double master's degree in education, a certification in herbology, and candidacy as a Doctor of Naturopathy. As an adjunct instructor of Biology for twelve years in herbs and nutrition, she gave historic herb lectures, wrote articles, made media appearances, owned a health food store, worked as the regional manager for three major supplement brands, and had her own radio show called The Urban Herbalist. She trained doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, pharmacists, health food industry store teams, and herbal apprentices. She is a member of the American Herbalists Guild, the American Botanical Council, and the National Health Federation. Marguerite is also profiled as the featured herbalist in the recently published book, 'The New Healers' by Dr. Barbara Stevens Barnum.

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For centuries, women have foraged, catalogued, and cooked with vegetables and herbs to soothe, caretake, and heal their families' health issues. Forbidden, hidden, and discounted, women are reclaiming their rites as healers and keepers of the hearth. "e;A Wild Thyme in the City"e; explores the basics of herbalism, including common ailments and disorders, dosages, selecting antidotes and medicaments, preparing remedies for the city dweller and herbal apprentices, and recipes for medical vegetables. By explaining the properties and applications of botanicals, Marguerite Dunne shows readers how to assess their health issues and create a practical healing protocol for maintaining good health through medicinal herbs. With this compendium, readers are guided through the transition from a standard diet to making smarter choices for maintaining good health. A materia medica, a list of herbs, is included listing easy definitions, therapeutic uses, and precautions. Back story, current statutes, and health food industry insider information are added as well.

Textauszug

Introduction

A health issue becomes bothersome when it morphs into visiting doctors, a quarry-load of tests, and a shopping cart full of prescriptions. After leaving their doctor’s office, newcomers to naturopathy venture into health food stores, look down long aisles of vitamins and health bars, and don’t know where to begin. All natural, GRAS, extracts, tinctures, vacuum-sealed capsules, powders with excipients, gummies.

You come to a health food store to find answers about getting well. Those seemingly random symptoms in the body do tell a story. A small pain in one spot on the forearm, an ongoing sniffle, waking up in the middle of the night, and fidgeting are signs your body is speaking to you. These signs are telling you what is out of balance and needs healing.

Solving compounded, chronic health issues can involve false starts, dead ends, fabricated promises, and a stack of specialists, none of whom agree with each other. With holistic health, there is no one-herb-pill-fits-all because each person’s story is different. Yet when the human body is understood, where to begin is answerable. It’s beginning at the beginning and putting the pieces of your puzzle together. This puzzle is solvable.

Getting to the truth about my own body wrung a conflux of fortitude, second-guessing, research skills, grit, and trust out of me. I did discover answers, though, and some of them were thousands of years old; Mother Nature still prevails.

When my own healing journey began…

My dad was Puerto Rican, and my mother was Hungarian. I grew up in New York City, in the public housing projects with black neighbors relocated from the South, adjusting to city life, surrounded by neighborhoods of Italians off-the-boat, and Jewish people nursing wounds in the aftermath of World War II. The projects where I lived were on the East River, and every day, between garbage heaps and gang wars, I stared at the million-dollar skyline of Manhattan, which promised, and delivered, so many fortunes and adventures. I excelled at school, so was always placed in advanced classes which took me out of that neighborhood and brought me into contact with wealthier, more-worldly classmates. While I’ve invariably felt like my background had something for everybody, this multi-cultural, multi-class childhood did give me an odd kick to my gallop. It impelled me early on away from the idea of limitations, outmoded rules, and arcane, ingrained traditions that did not serve me. Even as a young child, I got to pick and choose from a potpourri of cultural values, guided by a heightened female intuition and honed through the crucible of the streets.

I first began using herbs in the 1970s, when, as a college freshman, the Margaret Sanger Birth Control Clinic put me on the birth control pill Norinyl, which led to painful leg cramps and a whacked-out endocrine system. After only seven months, I stopped taking them. When I stopped taking birth control pills, I lost my period, gained forty pounds, got a slew of allergies-including to penicillin, and began running 104-degree fevers. I saw nine different doctors: three medical doctors, three gynecologists, an internist, an endocrinologist, and a radiologist. Each doctor poked and measured me, siphoned my blood, surveyed my brain, took a stack of ex-rays, and prescribed shots and pills. At one point, they required I do a twenty-four-hour urine analysis, which meant I had to carry around a big glass jar in a plain brown paper bag to pee in all day. (Once, I forgot my bag in a college class and had to go back to retrieve it. Ugh.) There was no Internet with information-filled websites, medical libraries were only open to medical students, biology textbooks just described the names of bones and muscles, and the one PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference) at my college was in the hands of a student council member who refused to let anyone look through it except himself.

All the doctors concluded for me, “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

I asked one doctor if, as a college student, I was going through menopause. Looking at the ceiling he responded, “That’s a possibility.”

I asked another doctor why I’d gained so much weight since I was down to eating one meal a day. He smiled and said, “Some people need very little food.”

As a young girl, I didn’t know how to respond to their stonewalling, non-diagnoses, nor probe for real, palliative answers.

Nobody would answer my questions.

Nobody would define for me what was wrong with my body.

Nobody would give me the steps to heal my body.

This medical limbo lasted more than three years.

Karmically, when I was home one night with my latest “there’s-nothing-wrong-blood-work-report,” my friend Richie telephoned. Through tears I described my latest, useless test and how I wanted to know what was going on with my body.

Richie simply said, “Let me take you to my chiropractor. He does herbs too.” I stared at the pile of duplicated reports from those orthodox medicine men and remembered what C.S. Lewis said, “What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.”

We went to see the chiropractor. He examined me, cracked my spine (which broke the 104-degree fever I was having), and told me which herbs to use. After just two weeks of herbal teas, I got my period for the first time in three years. Additionally, fifteen pounds fell off of me. That was it. I signed on the dotted line to become an herbalist and never looked back.

I got a few more gifts from that experience with birth control pills. There was an enormous sense of accomplishment, like an Olympic athlete setting a new world record, with paparazzi snapping away on the finish line. I hadn’t given up. I had made it across that finish line when they told me that I could not, would not, should not try anything except orthodox, prescribed drugs.

(I would later learn that the birth control clinic had been acutely aware of its experimenting with my body. The closest I got to an acknowledgement of the damage done to me came in my late twenties. I’d moved to San Francisco and went for an examination by a new gynecologist. When asked about my medical history, I told him the tale of my missing menses. He replied, “Yes, we didn’t know much about dysmenorrhea from birth control pills then.”)

Growing up in a housing project, dodging bullets and gang wars, and fending for myself on a violent playground taught me not to accept any role society tried to assign me. After isolating myself from that torrid, outside world, I didn’t have time to submerge myself in any tidal waves of grief nor retaliation. I already learned to set my own course and followed every new path out of that place. This birth control pill saga opened up a world of possibilities to me, and I was perfectly poised to discover what ancient herbology could do to restore my body to good health. No more letting health care facilities slice and dice me after another round of redundant tests.

As Mahatma Gandhi

said, “Even if you are

a minority of one, the

truth is the truth.”

At that time, there were still two, genuine herbal apothecaries in Greenwich Village, and I got to know each one very well. I began testing each herb one-at-a-time on my own body to figure out what worked for me and how it worked for me. There is so much to be said for that Yankee-know-how, rustic, pioneer spirit of carving out what is needed from the forest. And this was an old growth forest of knowledge, carefully passed down through generations of womenkind for nurturing and healing the family. There had to be something both powerful and right in her-story to have lasted this long.

Herbalism is an oral tradition, handed down from grandparents to grandchildren, shaman to apprentice, curandera to novice, practitioner to pupil. When I began, in the halcyon days of innocence before corporations and backroom politics invaded the health food industry, I was lucky enough to be living in Greenwich Village, New York City, legendary home of bohemian artists, writers, musicians, and free thinkers. In walking distance from me was Kiehl’s, a then 125-year-old apothecary, in the same building where it began in 1851. With my waist-length hair and hand-embroidered jeans, I easily strolled over between my college classes at Fordham. In those days, the Feds actually sent plainclothes agents to these bulk herb shops to ask questions like, “What’s good for a cold?” If the person behind the counter said so much as, “echinacea,” s/he could be arrested for practicing medicine without a license. So, while the people working at Kiehl’s knew a lot about herbology, they would never disclose information about the virtues (virtues = what each herb can do). I found myself standing online at Kiehl’s with people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who’d all grown up with plant medicine. Resistant to the early 20th-century hoopla around the ballooning pharmaceutical industry, these elders had been raised on farms or in town-houses with home gardens; they’d always been treated with teas, poultices, and liniments. Their elders came of age in the 1800s, real farm-to-table kitchen-witching, growing up gathering, picking, pickling, drying, baking, sautéing, and nibbling on medical vegetables. They inherited the wisdom of ancestral herbology and, like their elders, were more than generous about passing this wisdom...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.10.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-7885-8 / 9798350978858