... back to the naturopath.
Thanks for coming back.
We're going to talk about some different herbs for digestive conditions.
These are not going to be the standard common herbs I commonly talk about, like garlic and
tumeric and things like that.
These are different ones.
What I've done, I've grabbed some of my cards.
These are my cheat sheet cards, cards I made up when I was a student when we used to use
typewriters.
Remember when we used to use typewriters a long time ago?
Let's talk about these five different herbs.
Five of some of the best ones that I know.
Simple herds, good quality ones always work well.
Remember when you're taking an herbal medicine for your gut, your digestive condition, you
don't necessarily need to take a whole mixed mash of 10 or 15 different herbs mixed up.
My favorite herbal teacher said to me, "It's best to understand the essence of the herb,
or the signature of the herb."
You'll only do that by taking that herb on its own for a while to get a feel for it and
see if it really relates with you, if you're going to get a good effect out of it.
All right, so let's have a look at one of the first herbs.
We've got these in alphabetical order.
The first one is dandelion or taraxacum officinale.
It pays to learn that the Latin names, or the technical names of plants.
Then you never get confused.
Dandelion, dandelion, or tooth of the lion ... If you look at the leaf of the dandelion
it's got that jagged kind of edge.
Now that the correct dandelion to have, or if you've got some growing in your garden,
it's got a single flower on a stalk.
We're not talking about a stalk with multiple small flower heads.
We're talking one big yellow flower.
The dandelion, or the dandelion, is a fantastic herb for liver cleansing.
It's a cholagogue, so it helps to clean the liver out.
It helps you to poop better.
It's good for a sluggish bowel.
So it helps to stimulate the flow of bile.
It's also very, very good herb to use for people who are mild drinkers.
Drinking of alcohol, they want to clean up the gut.
As we'll see, the last herb we'll talk about is more for people who are heavy duty drinkers,
or people who want to seriously detoxify the liver.
This is a good introduction to liver detox, is the dandelion, the dandelion.
That's the first herb you can really use effectively to get the bowel working.
It's not going to make you very sick or queasy or nauseous.
If you've got a very sick liver, you're not going to going with a heavy duty, straight
off the cuff, off the bat.
You could get quite sick.
This is a good introduction for you.
Good spring cleansing herb to use.
Nice to get dandelion root coffee.
You can actually get a coffee.
That's basically roasted dandelion roots from their second year.
Dandelion, like parsley, is biennial, so it lives for two years.
It will grow.
It will die back, and the root will get big.
Then in spring it will sprout out again.
The second year is when we dig up the roots.
The roots are actually quite pleasant if you scrub them.
You can actually steam them or cook them up and them like carrots.
They're really healthy too.
The leaves are high in vitamin K, vitamin C. Very healthy to eat the leaves, as long
as you're not people who spray all this crap around the place.
Just watch out for people with chemicals.
Just avoid those kind of people that spray things.
I can't stand them.
You'd be surprised how many weeds like dandelion can be eaten and used to your benefit.
Think about the gallbladder, think about the liver.
Also, the leaves or diuretics, so you'll pee better.
If you've got a bit of blood pressure, it could be a good one to have the leaves.
The roots, or the below the ground part of the dandelion is really liver.
The top is a bit of a diuretic.
It's high in potassium but it's also high in vitamin C and many other things as well.
Very good.
Last tip for it, you can also try the juice off dandelion on water.
It's supposed to work with that.
That's a dandelion.
Tea's commonly available, and for the leaves and roots you'll have to grow your own.
The second one, of course, is ginger or zingiberaceae officinale.
Ginger is a very warming kind of a root of a plant.
I used to grow ginger when I lived in Australia years ago.
I used to grow ginger and cardamom.
They both belong to the same family.
Ginger is fantastic when it comes to the gut, especially the stomach.
It's going to help you with a bit of dyspepsia or nausea.
I know some patients with helicobacter pylori, who have good benefit with taking ginger.
Ginger is used a lot, also for travel sickness, for some women during the first stages of
pregnancy, use ginger quite effectively to stop morning sickness.
It's a stimulant, so it's great for circulation as well.
When I had quite a bad motorcycle accident, in the 90s, I got hold of about two pound
of ginger root, put them through the blender and then packed my whole leg in a ginger poultice,
much to the disgust of the doctor who thought I was a nut job, who thought I was going to
die of a blood clot, which I didn't, of course.
I packed my leg in this.
I had a very bad contusion.
A very bad twisted leg and I had sore muscles.
I knew I was in a bad way.
When I got out of the hospital I went straight home and I did a self treatment with a ginger
poultice.
You can use it for bad bruising or an accident like that.
If the skin's not broken, it's going to help.
Also it will help, to some degree, to prevent blood clots.
This is a really good one.
Also, if you've got spasms in the gut like bloating or gas or things like that, or you've
got what we call incarcerated flatulence, or gas trapped in there and it's causing a
lot of pain.
A Cup of ginger tea can offer a huge relief, very much so.
I'll just read off my cheat sheet.
It's also a sialagogue, which means it helps to produce saliva.
Fr those with dry mouth, ginger could be quite good.
It's a calminitive, so it helps to calm the gut.
A bit like fennel seed will do the same with babies with colic.
Flatulence and Internal congestion, painful elementary spasms, diarrhea from over relaxation,
flatulence, any smooth muscle spasm in the gut or reproductive area, this is a good one
for.
Also can be used a bit for a fever, or if you're feeling a little bit ...
About two weeks ago, because we still got winter here, I woke up with a bad facial pain.
I think it was a bit of sinus because we're working in a temporary kitchen.
My place at the moment is very cold.
This stuff worked really well to allow me to sweat a lot.
That night I had a cup of strong ginger tea, just graded some root into some boiling hot
water and a bit of honey on there.
I found that night I had perfuse perspiration, and the following day I felt fine.
No trip to the doctor, no pills.
Think about that for ginger.
It's warming and it helps to loosen up things inside the gut.
It's going to stop bloating and gas to a degree.
It stops sickness, it's good for nausea, and it's also what we call diaphoretic, so it
helps you to sweat.
That's good for that too.
That's the ginger, one of my favorites.
Okay, the third one, cynara scolymus.
What the hell is that?
Have you ever heard of that?
That sounds like something out of Harry Potter, doesn't it, cynara.
Well, actually, I think cynara was the wife of Zeus.
I think it's one of those old legends, Zeus.
Apparently he turned her into a big round artichoke when she didn't really come back,
and regarding affections, or something like that.
That's the old story about cynara scolymus it's clove artichoke, that's what it is.
It's beautiful to eat and it's very good for liver function, okay.
Again, it's a bit of a cholagogue.
It stimulates the release of bile flow.
It helps to induce the liver into a nice state of cleansing.
It's, although not commonly regarded, but it can also be used like dandelion a bit as
a laxative.
This is one of my favorite herbs to use for sluggish digestion, sluggish bowel.
I'll read out some points here: in sluggish digestion, liver insufficiency, liver disease,
gallstones, billary disease, any liver impairment, chronic constipation it stimulates liver cell
regeneration.
Of particular value in jaundice, liver damage caused by poisons.
This is a nice one to have alongside dandelion, for example, or the herb we'll talk about
a bit later on.
Also, it's quite nice to eat dandelions.
You can actually eat them in salads.
You can get canned dandelion for example.
I think this was traditionally one of the herbs used a lot for jaundice in young people,
and also hepatic insufficiency or poor or sluggish liver.
Whenever I think about liberal gallbladder, I think about globe artichoke, and of course
the better the liver function, and the more the bile flow, the better that the colon is
going to be The less hassle you'll have with bacteria and yeast and things like that.
Let's look at the fourth one.
Ulmus fulva, what the hell is that?
That's called slippery elm bark powder.
Slippery elms is quite a tall elm tree and it's the pink inner bark that we're looking
for.
This is the best demulcent herb for internal and external use.
Demulcent means it's soothing.
It's very soothing, and it's building and soothing.
It soothes the elementary mucosas, so the whole digestive tract will be soothed with
this.
It's particularly good for infants up to about two or three years of age can be fed this.
Some American Native Indian tribes would feed that the baby's only slippery elm powder with
breast milk for the first 12 months of their life.
That's all they would get would be a powder like this.
It's particularly good for ulcers or burning or things like that in the gut.
I would recommend it for stomach conditions, and I would also recommend it for colonic
conditions or bowel problems.
Whether there's diarrhea or constipation, irritable bowel syndrome where there's helicobacter,
where there's reflux disease or GERD, you want to try slippery elm bark powder.
Make sure you get a pink one.
Look at my face.
It's not blue is it?
It's pink.
That sort of pinky color, hope it's not too red, that pinky color is what you're looking
for.
The more pink, the color of the slippery elm, the higher the quality of it.
You don't want to buy stuff that's brown or looks a bit old and smells stale.
A good test is to get a good pinch of the stuff and put it in water.
Within literally a few minutes, it should turn into a mucilaginous, like a jelly almost.
That's a good slippery elm powder.
External it's nice to put on burns and cuts and abrasions and things like that.
It's often used for wounds externally.
Internally it's soothes and calms and it just moves things.
It's also a fantastic prebiotic.
This will allow good bacteria levels to grow, particularly the bifidobacterium bacteria.
That's slippery elm powder.
Getting harder to get the good stuff now.
A lot of junk on the market.
Now, drum roll.
One of my favorite herbs, St. Mary's thistle, silybum marianum.
Silybum.
Literally silly bum, it' means.
Silybum marianum, this is probably one of the best liver herbs you can get.
It's fantastic.
It's particularly good as a hepato-protective, so it protects the liver and helps to reverse
a lot of liver damage.
Dandelions are the mild one.
The St. Mary's thistle is more the chronic one.
This is one of the one of the best herbs you can use for a period of three or four weeks,
six weeks, if we're coming into a good detoxification.
If you really want to rejuvenate the body and get it into a very high shape, of course,
St. Mary's thistle is quite a smart move.
It's hepato- restorative, it's hepato-protective and it's a mile cholagogue.
It stimulates bile flow, but it protects the liver.
This is a nice one to use if you've had a history of a lot of pharmaceutical drugs,
if you've been taking lots of Paracetamol, Ibuprofen, drugs like that, Voltaren or drugs
that reduce inflammation in the body.
They wreck the gut, they make the liver sick, they make it toxic.
This will help to undo a lot of the damage from that.
Garlic and St. Mary's thistle combination is particularly good for liver drug detoxification.
Agent of rehabilitation, of any acute or chronic liver condition, hepatitis, alcohol damage,
drug or dietary supplement abuse, gallbladder disease, spleen problems, blah, blah, blah.
It goes on and on and on.
Good for heavy medic medicine takers.
I've made a note here.
Any detox or fast helps to protect a clear liver.
So try and get the liquid if you can.
A good reputable company, like Standard Process, for example, in the states.
One of my favorite companies in terms of from the seed right through to the bottle.
Grow stuff and they make stuff.
They make some nice St. Mary's thistle products, but there are many good ... there's Gaia Herbs
and there's many different companies that make a good St. Mary's thistle.
Fantastic herb.
There you have it.
That was just five of some of the more unusual herbs I don't often talk about.
The St. Mary's thistle, the slippery elm, the glob artichoke, the ginger and the dandelion.
I'll probably do some more videos like this of similar kind of herbs.
Thanks for tuning in.
Don't forget to click on the link below in the description box.
Thank you.