Concerning pain and laundry…
Some years ago I wrote an article about wanting to live ‘the good life’, where I would grow my own veg, have chickens, raise pigs… you know they sort of thing. I had read a self-sufficiency book, and to be fair it looked doable. I had a few chickens, but they got killed by our resident fox; this happened three times before I gave up [not with the same chickens obviously].
Weeds took over most of my veg patch, and what was left the slugs ate. One problem was that we kept going away, and what a veg garden needs is consistency.
My husband said no to pigs.
I found another book called The Self Sufficient-ish Bible1 which scaled my vision down somewhat to just dabbling in bits and pieces of self-sufficiency, having realised [finally] that going the whole hog was too expensive, too time-consuming and too complicated. Plus, my husband was taking more of my time as his carer.
But still, I managed to grow a lot of my own medicinal herbs, and even got a polytunnel to mass produce courgettes; because growing things, and picking things to eat or use is like an itch that I just need to scratch. I can’t let it go…
And then there was my husband’s neck.
His Parkinson’s makes him stiff, and stiffness brings pain. His neck has been the worst, and to avoid popping painkillers I had a suggestion.
When my colleague and I first started the School of Herbal Medicine we used to do talks for the local community and get them making simple stuff. One such stuff was Ivy Butter, and one woman used it on her sciatica and had ‘fantastic’ alleviation from pain. At the time, I was also teaching how to make plasters in my Pharmacy classes, heating chopped herbs in a sloppy mix of ground linseed and spreading on strips of cotton, and this was another method of applying herbs topically. I was really keen to try it on my husband’s neck.
I have recently been trying to make a video for my HerbWorks membership using Ivy [Hedera helix] as laundry ‘soap’ [slow work – I get stuck on the techy side], and as I had harvested a lot of Ivy for a wash load I kept hoping for my husband to complain about a stiff neck so I could practise making Ivy plasters to try them out for pain relief.
There is a lot of Ivy in my garden, and when I pick it and chop it and make stuff, I can pretend to be selfsufficient-ish for a time. But the best thing about knowing what to pick and how to use it is that one day we all may need to revive skills that society has lost. Fairly recently several professional herbalists have found that there are herbs that are becoming difficult to get hold of from their usual supplier. Then what are they going to do?
I remember when I was training, I said to the clinic supervisor that my dream was to fill my Pharmacy with herbs that grew in my locality. When I have taught Pharmacy classes, I have sometimes given students cotton bags and told them – ‘you have an hour to go and find and pick samples of all the medicinal herbs you can find round here’. And when they would come back, we would lay the herbs out on tables labelled with each system of the body, and every time we found herbs to treat every single system of the body. They may not have been our first choice, but they were local, free, available – and they would work.
Back to my husband.
Finally, one day he was in quite some pain with his neck, and I had made these Ivy/Linseed pasters and rolled them up in the fridge [you can also freeze them]. I got one out and slapped it on the back of his neck. As it was bedtime he pulled a handy band, tube scarf, type of thing round his neck to keep the plaster in place – and he slept like it. In the morning he said that it had worked as pain relief.
Think of that – instead of popping NSAIDs I had crafted pain relief from my garden! It was free, it was effective, and it made me feel useful.
The rest of the Ivy harvest went into a zipped mesh bag and was popped into the washing machine. You have to chop it fine so the saponins get released as that is what the soapy stuff is in the leaves.
And it is the saponins which have shown most potential for pain relief, especially for neuropathic pain [so great for Parkinson’s], and this analgesic effect might help treat chronic pain conditions, thus avoiding life-long dependence on synthetic pain-killers.
The video of making the laundry agent and the plasters will go up soon on my HerbWorks Membership. We have a live monthly group Q&A also, and the cost is only £9.99 a month. So, if you want some informal chat about medicinal herbs, come and join us…
