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Free Plant Secrets
The healing power of plants.
Today there are disputes between medical doctors and alternative health practitioners over the prescription of plants and herbs for illness. But herbal medicine and mainstream medicine have never been completely separated. If they had been separated you would not be able to take an aspirin for a headache.
3 thousand years ago when ancient Egyptians suffered from Rheumatism and backaches, they took dried myrtle leaves.
Ancient Grecians took juice from the bark of the willow tree for fevers. Both the myrtle and the willow bark contain salicylic acid, and that same remedy sits in your medicine chest today in the form of Acetylsalicylic acid, or Aspirin.
Aspirin isn’t the only synthetic drug derived from plants. If you don’t like novocaine shots, try chewing coca leaves, novocaine is the anesthetic derived from the coca plant.
Other painkillers come from plants, codeine and morphine are found in the milky fluid of opium poppy seed pods.
The bark of the cinchona plant is the source of quinine, a remedy for malaria.
Native Americans used the tuberous roots of the plant called Mayapple for a lot of ills, including a salve for the treatment of warts and tumorous growths on the skin. Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) has edible ripe fruit but the leaves and roots are deadly if eaten.
Hundreds of years later mainstream medicine has started prescribing a cream containing resin from the mayapple for cancerous tumors and polyps.
Another amazing plant that has anticancer properties is the rose periwinkle, which has boosted the survival rate of childhood leukemia from 20 to 80 percent.
Scientists have developed a semi-synthetic from of taxol from the needles of the yew tree and these needles are a renewable resource.
Taxol is used in the treatment of ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
Before the needles were used the bark of the yew tree was used, and that killed the tree. Now that the needles can be used as the source of the drug the tree can be maintained.
Herbs are a billion dollar business. People are popping ginseng to increase energy, applying aloe vera on sunburns, and brewing pots of echinacea tea when they have a cold. New studies demonstrate that echinacea can relieve the flu symptoms.
Ginger appears to be good for nausea.
Feverfew can relieve migraines.
