Yarrow and Nettles: Inside a Hedge Witch’s Medicine Cabinet

A few hundred years ago, it would have been normal for you to strip off and roll around naked in the nettles to alleviate rheumatic pains. These days, we prefer Western, modern medicine to complementary wellness therapies, but practitioners in Belfast still believe there’s something we can learn from the days of yore.

According to modern day Hedge Witch Joan Howard, ‘Nettles are an excellent blood purifier.’ Joan is an expert on the medicinal properties of what most us would see as common weeds and is so convinced of their power, she has given up a successful career as a horticulturalist to work full time in herbalism. However, that is not to say that Joan disavows conventional medicine. ‘I don’t interfere with it; I work in partnership with it,’ she says. ‘I treat the person holistically. There is cynicism about herbalism but that’s changing. A lot of medics work with alternative therapists.’

Along with nettle, dandelion, elder, hawthorn and yarrow, one of the herbs Joan specialises in is St. John’s Wort, which can in handy when her son, Luke, sustained a nasty injury while playing football. ‘It has an anti-inflammatory effect which meant he didn’t need antibiotics and he was back playing the next day,’ Luke recalls. ‘The rest of the team was amazed.’ Joan adds that yarrow is brilliant for fevers and staunching nose bleeds, wood betony is ‘great for grounding’ when your head’s astray, and that dandelion is an excellent cleanser for the liver and kidneys.

However, one of the exceptions in Joan’s Irish herbal medicine cabinet is cayenne, a spice which is indigenous to East Africa, India, Mexico and America. She explains, ‘If I feel a cold coming in I take cayenne right away and it stops it. It won’t stop those terrible viruses of last winter – I think that was a form a swine flu we all had – but it will alleviate symptoms. Where possible I use locally grown herbs – I think our bodies are more in tune with what is growing around us. We are connected to them. I don’t use Chinese herbs, with the exception of ginseng.’

Categories: Nettles, St Johns Wort, yarrow

Can Dietary Changes Reduce Your Seasonal Allergies?

The onset of allergy symptoms during Spring can have you desperate to find a way to relieve symptoms, and guard your wellbeing against them. Seasonal allergies, also known as allergic rhinitis, have an extensive list of natural treatments, but how do you know if they work?

According to Dr Sezelle Gereau-Haddon, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Beth Israel Medical Centre’s Continuum Centre for Health and Healing in the Integrative Medicine Department, ‘Sometimes patients come in with wacky things — they get all kinds of things from the internet. But if they feel better, who knows if it’s the placebo versus a real cure? If the things that they’re on are things that aren’t potentially harmful to their liver or their kidneys or their stomach, I usually tolerate it.’

Dr Gereau-Haddon continues, ‘For example, patients routinely want to eliminate dairy. There’s not any clear evidence that eliminating dairy does anything for allergies or sinusitis complaints. But, empirically, when I see patients do it, some patients feel better. If a patient wants to try it, I certainly encourage them to try it.’ She adds, ‘Even patients who don’t have a known celiac disease or sensitivity to wheat specifically or a wheat allergy, sometimes if they eliminate gluten, you’ll see them land in a better place.’

Dr Roberta Lee, Integrative health practitioner at Beth Israel Medical Centre’s Continuum Centre for Health and Healing, comments that foods can definitely impact your response to an allergen, noting that you may have a harder time fighting off allergies ‘If you have saturated fats in your diet, if you’re a steak eater, if you’re a junk food eater, if you’re a fried food eater, if you’re a high cheese eater.’ This is because your body isn’t getting the vitamins it needs to stay healthy and allergy free, and junk foods also cause inflammation in your nose and throat.

If you want a natural remedy to eliminate your allergy symptoms, Richard Mandelbaum, clinical herbalist of the ArborVitae School of Traditional Herbalism, recommends taking stinging nettles, whether in capsule form, as a tincture or in its completely unprocessed form. ‘Nettles have some natural antihistamine activity and can be very helpful in reducing the severity of the symptoms that one is experiencing,’ he says.

Can Dietary Changes Reduce Your Seasonal Allergies?

Categories: Allergy Symptoms, beth israel, continuum centre, Diet Changes, food eater, gereau haddon, israel medical, medical centre, Natural Methods, Nettles, Patients, seasonal allergies