Health: These Days It's Up to You

Grow food to eat, grow food to heal

Before we began our family food growing journey, I already knew that many of our best medicines (the ones you get from the pharmacy) were first discovered and derived from various plants and fungi around the world. I just thought they weren’t accessible to the everyday person. I naively assumed only an entity with a state-of-the-art laboratory and highly credentialed scientists could safely extract the medicinal properties of a given plant. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong in my life!

Comfrey blooming in my herb garden (Source: Gluck Farms)

Obviously, big pharma companies don’t make natural medicinal extracts from these plants in their laboratories. Instead, they synthesize the beneficial active compound, making a supposedly perfect lab-created copy. That’s the only way they can cheaply mass produce their products and garner huge profits from the patented result. How did we get here?

Waging war on proven natural cures

Once upon a time, medicinal plant lore was common knowledge. John D. Rockefeller put a stop to that:

“…oil tycoon and business magnate John D. Rockefeller helped remove ‘holistic’ and ‘alternative’ plant medicines from the teachings of medical professionals in the United States.” (Source)

Never satisfied with his victorious business conquests, no matter how great, Rockefeller hoped to monopolize the medical industry just as he had with petrochemicals.

“This was early in American History and, at the time, herbal and natural medicines such as essential oils, aromatherapy, and others were highly popular, which hampered Rockefeller’s plans.” (Source linked above)

In 1910, the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations funded the Flexner Report, authored by Abraham Flexner. Essentially, the report found common therapies like herbal medicines, naturopathy, chiropractic, and others modalities amounted to “unscientific quackery.” There’s more to the story, but suffice it to say that this marked the beginning of what we know as allopathic medicine today.

We’ve given our health over to the enemy — an enemy once hidden beneath a guise of benevolence, but now the dark veil is torn and we see.

Reclaiming stolen knowledge

Over the past three or so years, I’ve become keenly aware that natural health solutions are all around us, even in the weeds. My studies have introduced me to countless valuable plants as well as new skills for making salves, tinctures, syrups, and more.

Check out Master Herbalist Judson Carroll’s Substack for a treasure trove of knowledge about herbal medicines and more. He’s an expert of experts:

The Herbs and Weeds of Fr. Johannes Künzle

Here’s a true story illustrating why we simply must reclaim what was taken from us — our knowledge of medicinal plants:

We grow a plant called comfrey (Symphytum officinale) because it’s a nitrogen fixer. That is, it helps fix nitrogen in soil, giving nearby plants access to more essential nitrogen. It’s easy to propagate, so we plant some in and around each of the areas where we grow our various seasonal crops.

Back in the day, before we lost our healing knowledge, comfrey was known as ‘knit-bone.’ People use it to treat wounds, bruises, reduce inflammation from sprains and broken bones.

One day this past July, I was picking up some bandages to replenish our first aid kit and I happened across a product called Mederma Scar Gel. It shocked me to see it priced $27 for a very small tube (1.76 ounces). Curiosity caught me in a bear hug and I flipped it over to check the active ingredient.

This little product is $27! (Source: mederma.com)

Wouldn’t you know it? The active ingredient is a compound called allantoin — at a 0.5% strength, to be precise. Allantoin is the medicinal compound in comfrey! The minute I returned home, I began reading up on making a topical salve using comfrey extract. No need to pay $27 for the big pharma product. I sell my tins of the salve in three sizes for $7, $5, and $3 at local farmer’s markets and other community events.

A tin of salve made with comfrey extract (allantoin)

In a future post, I’ll share more about various herbs with antiviral properties as well as weeds with very impressive health benefits.