The Simple Guide to Natural Health

From Apple Cider Vinegar Tonics to Coconut Oil Body Balm, 150+ Home Remedies for Health and Healing

Melanie St. Ours

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781507205662
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Treat your aches and pains with these simple, all-natural solutions for colds, minor burns, acne, and more. The Simple Guide to Natural Health provides the latest information on all-natural remedies, featuring ingredients such as apple cider vinegar, coconut oil, and various essential oils.With these do-it-yourself recipes that harness the power of natural healing, you'll be able to treat—and prevent—common ailments. From how to grow and harvest your own ingredients to instructions for storing and organizing your homemade remedies, clinical herbalist Melanie St. Ours will take you step-by-step through the process of creating your own natural medicine cabinet.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCING THE WORLD OF NATURAL REMEDIES

You belong to Nature. Even amidst the noise and scramble of your busiest days, you are always being held and sustained by the Earth—just like every other creature on this planet. No matter what you eat, how you beautify your skin and hair, or what medicines you reach for when you’re suffering, you remain a child of Nature endowed with the right to receive her healing gifts. This book will show you how good it feels to know that you can lean on herbal preparations, healing foods, and natural remedies whenever you need support.

There’s a profound feeling of gratitude that comes from realizing just how abundant Nature’s gifts really are, yet the day-to-day experience of making and using remedies is entirely practical. There’s a reason for each ingredient and a rationale behind every step. Once you understand a few basic principles of herbalism, you’ll be ready to shop for ingredients, try your hand at the recipes, and experience the power of natural medicine firsthand. This chapter will give you insight into some of the special properties of herbs, the guiding principles behind natural healing techniques, and how to use natural remedies safely (and when not to use them at all).

Why Use Natural Remedies?

Traditional Chinese Medicine teaches that one way to understand the nature of illness is to picture it as a tree with many branches and a deep root system. The branches represent the various symptoms that cause a sick person to suffer while the root system is the underlying pattern of imbalance that feeds those branches to keep them alive. Cutting off a branch is analogous to treating a symptom; it might bring temporary relief, but it doesn’t cure the problem. As long as the root system remains intact, the illness will find new ways to express itself. Unless you uproot the underlying imbalance, it will be only a matter of time before symptoms return.

Think about how you might relieve a tension headache. Popping an ibuprofen might reduce the pain, but if your head hurts because you spent a stressful day hunched over your computer with no time to eat or stretch, that ibuprofen won’t get anywhere close to the root of the problem. Unless you change something at work, the pain will keep coming back. It’s okay to take something for relief when you need it, but don’t stop there! If you take regular stretching breaks, keep a water bottle on your desk so you stay hydrated, and negotiate healthier boundaries with that challenging coworker to reduce your stress, you’ll prevent headaches—and be happier. Instead of side effects, natural interventions like these that treat you as a whole person tend to have side benefits for your body, mind, spirit, and relationships.

Natural Remedies Encourage Prevention

Even though most people agree that it’s ideal to prevent health problems before they start, only a small subset of the population is able to put their knowledge about healthy living into daily practice. It’s not always easy to make healthy choices. Living a prevention-focused lifestyle requires you to pay attention to how you feel physically and emotionally, and to prioritize your health despite all kinds of external pressures. Lack of time—and its best friend, stress—often thwarts our plans to live healthier lifestyles. Natural remedies can help—though perhaps not in the way you think.

Since natural remedies can bring quick relief with minimal fuss, they make it easier to respond to your physical and emotional needs without fear that self-care will take too much time away from other important obligations. As you experience the benefits, you’ll want to keep taking care of yourself because it feels good—not just because you know it’s good for you. And the more you learn about health and come to enjoy the pleasurable parts of a naturally healthy lifestyle, the more interested you’re likely to be in making other changes that are right for you. You don’t have to overhaul your whole life all at once. (Or ever.) A gentle, consistent investment of attention is the key to doing more of what helps you thrive and less of what makes you sick, tired, and stressed. And that’s what prevention is all about.

Natural Remedies Awaken Your Senses

Aromatic remedies can revive your senses in a matter of seconds if they’ve been dulled by stress, mental work, or too much time in front of a screen. A cup of tea or a soothing blend of essential oils can banish mental chatter and bring you into the sensory pleasures of the present moment. Over time, the practice of tuning into your senses pays dividends. The fragrance, flavor, and color of a plant are good clues as to its health benefits, and as you work with natural ingredients, you’ll be training your senses to notice these cues. The more you practice, the more you’ll find yourself reaching for the herbs, spices, and essential oils that you need without having to consult a book or check the Internet. You’ll learn to trust yourself. Sharper senses enhance your enjoyment of life’s simplest pleasures. They’ll make you a better cook, support your intuition, and maybe even open whole new avenues of enjoyment when you walk through the woods and discover that you recognize subtle sounds and fragrances that you never noticed before.

Natural Remedies Complement Modern Medicine

There’s no need to feel conflicted about the choice between natural remedies and over-the-counter or prescription medications. They complement each other perfectly. Modern medicine offers advanced diagnostics, lifesaving emergency treatments, and precise surgical and pharmaceutical interventions for conditions that are impossible to treat on your own. It also includes drug-free approaches to healing, like physical therapy and psychotherapy. Natural remedies offer safe, accessible ways to be proactive about your own health. You can use them for self-care when you get a cold, during bouts of insomnia, or to ease your digestion without worrying about serious side effects, overdose, or dependence. As long as you heed your doctor’s advice about how to avoid unwanted interactions between natural remedies and any medications you’re taking, an integrative approach to medicine that includes both paradigms is ideal.

Natural Remedies Increase Your Vitality

Conventional medicine defines health as an absence of disease. It has little to offer people who aren’t suffering from an illness if they want to feel stronger, more energetic, or less susceptible to stress. This is where natural remedies shine! Certain preparations made from whole plants are known as tonics because they can increase vitality and enhance mental and physical performance. Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda have employed tonics to support longevity, fertility, immunity, and well-being for thousands of years, and scientific research proves that many of these traditional uses are valid. Beginning in the late 1940s with the work of Nikolai Lazarev, modern science dubbed many tonic herbs “adaptogens” for their ability to increase the body’s resilience to all forms of stress. You’ll find many recipes for tonics containing adaptogenic herbs (including ashwagandha, astragalus, eleuthero, and schisandra) in Chapters 7 and 8. Conventional medicine has nothing to offer with similar benefits.

Natural Remedies Are Cost-Effective

The benefits of using natural remedies would be enticing even if they came with a hefty price tag, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money to experience the connection, creativity, and self-efficacy that comes from practicing natural self-care. Just like home cooking, home remedies are tastier and more cost-effective than their store-bought counterparts. Don’t be seduced by the marketing in the supplement aisle. With very few exceptions (taking specific vitamins and minerals when you have a diagnosed deficiency, for example) the inexpensive remedies you can make at home will be better—and safer—than even the priciest mass-produced products you’ll find at a health food store.

Natural Remedies Connect You to What Matters

The most important benefit of a natural, homemade approach to self-care is also the least obvious: it’s a way to reconnect with the simple things that make life feel meaningful. Modern life is full of obstacles to nurturing authentic connections with each other, the land, and our own hearts. As a result, many people experience painful feelings of disconnection, isolation, and meaninglessness that have been proven to increase the risk of physical and mental illness. The act of making remedies and cooking healing foods is a powerful antidote for this distress. Every time you make one of the recipes in this book, you’ll deepen your connections with Nature, the people you love, and your own creative spirit.

Simple Remedies Are Best

There’s a lot of power in the little word simple. In Western folk herbalism “a simple” is a remedy made from a single plant chosen to match the specific needs of the person seeking relief. While not all of the remedies in this book are simples, the formulas throughout the book are as straightforward—and as simple!—as possible, using a minimal number of versatile ingredients. Once you’ve stocked your cabinets with herbs, essential oils, and natural ingredients, you’ll be able to recombine them in nearly endless ways to create elegant solutions for a wide range of health needs.

An elegant solution achieves maximum effect with minimum effort. It’s simple without cutting corners or dumbing things down. Scientists and mathematicians puzzle over a problem for years in order to find the simplest, most elegant solution. They follow a famous guideline called “Occam’s razor.” It goes something like this:

“All other things being equal, the simplest solution is best.”

This guideline is similar to the way that modern medical science seeks the minimum effective dose for a course of treatment. Far from being lazy, the minimum effective dose is safest—and simplest. As different as the remedies in this book might be from scientific medicine, they share a commitment to the principles of simplicity and seeking the minimum effective dose. As you experiment with natural remedies and make decisions about how to take care of yourself, remember: the simplest solution is probably best.

Do Natural Remedies Work?

Plants are genius chemists. They rely on their ability to manufacture chemical compounds for every single aspect of their survival. A plant with juicy leaves can’t run away to avoid being eaten. It relies on its own chemical defenses to kill microbes, deter pests, or poison would-be predators. Plants also need to reproduce. They can’t impress a potential mate with a fancy dance, a victory in horn-to-horn combat, or a well-constructed nest like animals do. Since plants need to attract pollinators to accomplish sexual reproduction, they’ve evolved intoxicating scents, sweet nectar, and pheromones that send signals that bees and butterflies can’t resist. When you consider that plants solve almost all of their problems by making chemicals, and that there are nearly 400,000 species of plants on Earth, it’s no wonder that the plant kingdom is a source for a dazzling array of useful substances.

It’s more than a sentimental notion to think of plants as our brothers and sisters. We grew up together over the millennia. At the same time that plants were evolving an amazing array of compounds and survival strategies, our animal ancestors were coevolving right alongside the plants. As plants developed their arsenal of phytochemicals (phyto = plant) to protect themselves from pests and predators, mammals developed the ability to use those same phytochemicals to their advantage. That’s why so many of the chemicals that plants make for their own purposes have such beneficial effects on human health. For example, plants make chemicals that can:

• Relieve anxiety and depression

• Kill bacteria and fungi

• Combat viruses

• Stimulate the immune system

• Heal wounds

• Stop bleeding

• Restore normal heart rhythm

• Relieve pain

• Stimulate or sedate the central nervous system

• Affect hormone levels

• Relax muscle spasms

• Prevent cancer

If you drink tea or coffee to perk up, crave chocolate when you’re sad or cranky, or eat fruits and veggies to stay healthy, you’re already relying on the efficacy of plant compounds in your everyday life. The remedies in this book will teach you simple ways to extract beneficial compounds from a variety of helpful plants so you can harness their power. Our human ancestors were doing something similar before the start of recorded history. It worked for them, and it will work for you too.

Are Natural Remedies Safe?

You’re on the right track if you’re wondering about whether or not natural remedies carry risks of side effects, overdose, and dependence like pharmaceuticals. Your instinct might be telling you that anything that’s powerful enough to heal is powerful enough to have the potential for harm. It’s true. Natural remedies are no exception to this rule. The good news is that the risks of using natural remedies are low and easy to minimize if you apply common sense.

The most famous part of the Hippocratic Oath is also my rallying cry to anyone embarking on a self-care journey: first, do no harm. Whenever you reach for a remedy for yourself or someone you love, you’re acting from one of the most beautiful aspects of human nature: compassion. It’s a vital ingredient that supports healing, but it’s not enough to ensure safety. Supplement your compassion with a protective dose of critical thinking by following the simple guidelines in the next section before you decide to use natural remedies. They’ll help you differentiate when it’s safe to take care of yourself at home and when you need to seek professional care.

Know When It’s Safe to DIY

It’s generally okay to use a home remedy when:

• Symptoms are mild.

• You are not running a high fever, having severe pain, having trouble breathing, or losing control of basic bodily functions.

• The situation is something that you could address with a trip to the drugstore for an over-the-counter remedy. Herbal remedies make great substitutes for many over-the-counter medications.

• Symptoms haven’t been present for very long. This varies by condition, but generally if symptoms persist for two weeks, or worsen despi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Introducing the World of Natural Remedies
• Chapter 2: Stocking Up
• Chapter 3: The Healthy Home
• Chapter 4: Hair, Skin, and Nails
• Chapter 5: Immune and Respiratory Systems
• Chapter 6: Digestive Health
• Chapter 7: Emotional Balance and Mental Health
• Chapter 8: Fitness and Flexibility
• Chapter 9: Detoxification and Damage Control
• Chapter 10: Women’s Health
• Conclusion: Next Steps and Resources
• Appendix A: Recommended Reading
• Appendix B: US/Metric Conversion Chart
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright