Natures pharmacy

As many can tell, I truly love nature and all it’s abundance. Even as a youngster I was fascinated by the wildness around me, wondering to myself what was edible and what was medicine. It is truly beautiful to think that after so many thousands of years of Man’s quest to understand, conquer, and make synthetic duplicates of it’s surroundings, we still enjoy to eat food that actually looks natural! I mean we still like to eat broccoli that looks like broccoli, squash that looks like a squash, almonds that look like almonds, etc. In fact we do more than eat things that still look like the original, we still eat the original. To me this is truly beautiful, as it represents a deep seated trust of nature and of our elders, who figured out so many thousands of years ago that the foodstuff’s we eat were edible in the first place! When we sit down to share a meal with our family and friends we want foods that are fresh, vibrant, and real. Can you imagine going out to an expensive restaurant, with a nice view of the harbour, and all they had on the menu was synthetic foods; vegetables, meats, nuts, and fruits in handy pill form. This would be ludicrous right?

Well now think about our largest medical establishment in the world. You know the one that argues the use of synthesized Bio-chemical drugs as being the best solution for your health needs. You know the drugs with names you cannot even pronounce, let alone identify as anything real or once living. The one whose drugs often cause greater side effects than the condition they are treating. To me it represents a great tragedy that, although we fight for our foodstuff’s to stay as the natural whole foods that they are, we don’t for our medicine. Is there really any difference?

Now western bio-chemical drugs are very powerful, they do save lives, and are a needed addition to our health care system. But are these drugs the best for long term, chronic, health problems? Look at the use of cortico-steroids. As I mentioned in past blogs, topically applied steroids quickly put out inflammation to stop pain and itch, but then they start to have problems. Steroids displace fat and protein in the skin, making it irreversibly thin and fragile, making the skin more likely to continue to have problems like eczema or psoriasis. Internal steroids actually shrink the adrenal and pituitary glands, leading to all kinds of health concerns.

But what about the plant/ natural based medicine? The history of using natural products from the earth is as old as the history of using foodstuff’s from the earth. Since before written time, peoples of this planet used natural products to cure and/ or alleviate our health problems, learning as they went. The Chinese society still uses herbs in its hospitals, from herb descriptions and formulations that are in texts over 2000 years old. I mean if a carrot was good to eat, was known to increase ones health, from 2000 years ago and now in our modern era we still eat carrots, why would medicine be any different? There are herbs described in texts 2000 years old, that were said to be beneficial to skin disease, that are still used today for skin disease by literally tens of thousands of Chinese medical Doctors world wide. Sheng Di Huang, or Radix Glutinosa Rehmanniae, which I just wrote about, is one great example. It always perplexes me why some still trust the eating of carrots, but have lost all faith in the power of plant based medicine to heal them!

From my mentor, Mazin Al Khafaji’s, strict clinical experience over the last 25 or so years, he has concluded of all the people treated with Chinese herbal medicine for psoriasis, 65 percent of them will clear completely. That is using no Bio-chemical synthesized drug, only natural medicines traditionally used by Chinese Doctors for thousands of years, and the results are better than the western drug. And most importantly, side effects to these natural methods were minimal and the results were long lasting. Western bio-chemical drug therapy does not even come close to the sophistication and efficacy of the Chinese herbal route! The reason? The Chinese kept things natural, plain and simple.

Anyways folks, when properly applied by registered Chinese medical Doctors, many health complaints like psoriasis, eczema, acne, rosacea, endometriosis, arthritis, and on and on, can be treated, and have been treated, for a very very long time with naturally occurring medicines. Just remember that the trust you put into broccoli or carrots or almonds to sustain you and make you strong and healthy, can be the same for the natural medicines growing all around you.

Dr Trevor Erikson