Three Cleansing and Detox Herbs

If you have ever had a visit to a naturopath (physician that uses natural remedies) or an herbalist for any illness or ailment then you may already know that cleansing and detoxifying is number 1 in their protocol for any healing program. All the good healthy foods, exercise and positive thinking you may do means absolutely nothing if your body is toxic. Good foods can not even begin to do their job until you have first cleansed the body by eliminating excess mucus and toxins that have collected in our bodies from lifeless foods, pesticides and pollutants, etc.

There are many ways to detoxify your body using natural fruits and vegetables, however this article is about the abundance of herbs that can be made into teas (capsules are fine too, but my personal preference are teas) for cleansing and as supplements to other detox and cleansing programs.

Here are quick highlights of 3 wonderful cleansing herbs for your pantry. Read more about them in the book that follows:

Dandelion (root and leaves) -
An amazing detoxifier. The dried root can be used in teas and the fresh leaves in salads. Chronic toxic conditions have been treated with dandelion, specifically dandelion root.
Dandelion is 28 parts sodium. The natural nutritive salts in dandelion purify the blood and help to neutralize the acids in the blood. It is a mild laxative, thereby cleansing the colon. Dandelion leaves are a safe and healthy diuretic, because of their potassium content. (Most diuretics cause your body to lose potassium, but dandelion leaves restore it.) Dandelion leaves improve digestion and elimination which are important factors in any cleansing program.
Dandelion root is also a well known liver tonic and cools and cleans the liver.


Plantain -
A common roadside and meadow plant you may even have some in your own backyard. Plantain was a familiar ingredient in early remedies, and many old-time herbalists believed it could cure all diseases. In medieval England, it was called slan-lus, "plant of healing".
Plantain tea is one of the best cleansers to remove toxins from the blood. (It is even used as an antidote to venom and poisons, including snake and spider bites, because of its blood cleansing properties.
Plantain is also a deobstruent, meaning it unclogs passageways, particularly lung plugs and liver obstructions (imbedded phlegm).
Plantain is a "specific" for infections and inflammations of the mucous membranes. It pulls toxins from the tissues and fights infections lingering there. It has silica to repair damaged tissue in mucous linings. It gets your body in better shape to heal itself.

Sarsaparilla -
Sarsaparilla is considered one of the best cleansing herbs for the body. Its magic comes from saponins which deep clean the body, removing toxins through the skin (by sweating), through the urine (with its diuretic nature), from the intestines (by stimulating bowel movements) and by vacating mucous from the lungs. Use as a tea.
Caution: Not recommended if you have kidney or liver weakness.
We all know sarsaparilla as one of the main ingredients in old-time root beer.


Also, a wonderful book on healing herbs is The 20,000 Secrets of Tea by Victoria Zak. Mine is worn with half the pages falling out. An engaging book for novice and seasoned herbal tea drinkers and herbal enthusiasts. You may be able to find a copy in your local library. If not, then you most definitely will find it at Amazon.

Stay tuned...

Blackstrap Molasses...a Powerful Cleanser?

I quite by accident came across a site yesterday, earthclinic.com and stumbled upon a thread on blackstrap molasses and was amazed at the testimonials there for this seemingly innocuous syrupy liquid.

Being from the South, I remember molasses as being a condiment my mother used on her homemade biscuits. Quite delicious actually. A very unique taste from honey biscuits or butter biscuits. But yummy of course with butter too!

So I was quite surprised to read about all of the amazing health benefits of molasses. Blackstrap molasses (preferably unsulphured) is rich in minerals such as potassium, iron, calcium and magnesium. The iron alone can give you energy better than a cup of coffee. Much of what we think is lack of energy is a deficiency in iron and many of us are bordering on anemic and don't even know it.

Well, went to the store yesterday afternoon for a package of shipping envelopes and what do I find misplaced in an aisle of granola? A lone bottle of Brer Rabbit molasses! Obviously in the wrong aisle I took this as a sign that I was supposed to purchase this little bottle of molasses. So I took it (bought it first :) and brought it home. I decided to experiment with it in a cup (plus) of milk. Put 1 tablespoonful in milk and I must say it tasted absolutely delicious! Like a milk shake or melted ice cream. I also put about a tablespoon in a cup of Bigelow peach green tea later that evening. Mmmm. A nice treat.

Well, if it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't have believed it, but wouldn't you know that not even 2 hours later that molasses/milk combo went through me like a waterfall? One minute in next minute "out"! and I mean out! No details here, but suffice it to say that I think that combo is a magic cleanser if I ever witnessed one! I don't think that Master Cleanse salt cleanse has anything on this!

Enough said...and on to more pleasantries...

Read up more about it here:
http://www.earthclinic.com/Remedies/molasses.html

And also here:
http://www.healthdiaries.com/eatthis/blackstrap-molasses.html

You may be there for hours...

Benefits of Water Fasting or Detoxing

Fasting for 10 or more days with a diet consisting only of drinking water throughout the day has been touted as having benefits to those with chronic illnesses. Have you had a chronic illness and received benefits from a water fasting or a detox diet? Please email or share your comments here...

Disease Names

What is your opinion on the following article?

Disease Names are Misleading and Misinform Patients about Disease Prevention

Disease names like diabetes and osteoporosis are misleading and misinform patients about disease prevention.

There is a curious tendency in conventional medicine to name a set of symptoms a disease. I was recently at a compounding pharmacy having my bone mineral density measured to update my health stats. I spotted a poster touting a new drug for osteoporosis. It was written by a drug company and it said exactly this: "Osteoporosis is a disease that causes weak and fragile bones." Then, the poster went on to say that you need a particular drug to counteract this "disease."

Yet the language is all backwards. Osteoporosis isn't a disease that causes weak bones, osteoporosis is the name given to a diagnosis of weak bones. In other words, the weak bones happened first, and then the diagnosis of osteoporosis followed.

The drug poster makes it sound like osteoporosis strikes first, and then you get weak bones. The cause and effect is all backwards. And that's how drug companies want people to think about diseases and symptoms: first you "get" the disease, then you are "diagnosed" just in time to take a new drug for the rest of your life.

But it's all hogwash. There is no such disease as osteoporosis. It's just a made-up name given to a pattern of symptoms that indicate you've let your bones get fragile.

As another example, when a person follows an unhealthy lifestyle that results in a symptom such as high blood pressure, that symptom is actually being assumed to be a disease all by itself and it will be given a disease name. What disease? The disease is, of course, "high blood pressure." Doctors throw this phrase around as if it were an actual disease and not merely descriptive of patient physiology.

This may all seem silly, right? But there's actually a very important point to all this.

When we look at symptoms and give them disease names, we automatically distort the selection of available treatments for such a disease. If the disease is, by itself, high cholesterol, then the cure for the disease must be nothing other than lowering the high cholesterol. And that's how we end up with all these pharmaceuticals treating high cholesterol in order to "prevent" this disease and lower the levels of LDL cholesterol in the human patient.

By lowering only the cholesterol, the doctor can rest assured that he is, in fact, treating this "disease," since the definition of this "disease" is high cholesterol and nothing else.

But there is a fatal flaw in this approach to disease treatment: the symptom is not the cause of the disease. There is another cause, and this deeper cause is routinely ignored by conventional medicine, doctors, drug companies, and even patients.

Let's take a closer look at high blood pressure. What actually causes high blood pressure? Many doctors would say high blood pressure is caused by a specific, measurable interaction between circulating chemicals in the human body. Thus, the ill-behaved chemical compounds are the cause of the high blood pressure, and therefore the solution is to regulate these chemicals. That's exactly what pharmaceuticals do -- they attempt to manipulate the chemicals in the body to adjust the symptoms of high blood pressure. Thus, they only treat the symptoms, not the root cause.

Or take a look at high cholesterol. The conventional medicine approach says that high cholesterol is caused by a chemical imbalance in the liver, which is the organ that produces cholesterol. Thus the treatment for high cholesterol is a prescription drug that inhibits the liver's production of cholesterol (statin drugs). Upon taking these drugs, the high cholesterol (the "disease") is regulated, but what was causing the liver to overproduce cholesterol in the first place? That causative factor remains ignored.

The root cause of high cholesterol, as it turns out, is primarily dietary. A person who eats foods that are high in saturated fats and hydrogenated oils will inevitably produce more bad cholesterol and will show the symptoms of this so-called disease of high cholesterol. It's simple cause and effect. Eat the wrong foods, and you'll produce too much bad cholesterol in the liver which can be detected and diagnosed by conventional medical procedures.

Yet the root cause of all this is actually poor food choice, not some bizarre behavior by the liver. If the disease were to be accurately named, then, it would be called Fatty Food Choice Disease, or simply FFCD.

FFCD would be a far more accurate name that would make sense to people. If it's a fatty foods choice disease, then it seems that the obvious solution to the disease would be to choose foods that aren't so fatty. Of course that may be a bit of simplification since you have to distinguish between healthy fats and unhealthy fats. But at least the name FFCD gives patients a better idea of what's actually going on rather than naming the disease after a symptom, such as high cholesterol. You see, the symptom is not the disease, but conventional medicine insists on calling the symptom the disease because that way it can treat the symptom and claim success without actually addressing the underlying cause, which remains a mystery to modern medicine.

But let's move on to some other diseases so you get a clearer picture of how this actually works. Another disease that's caused by poor food choice is diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the natural physiological and metabolic result of a person consuming refined carbohydrates and added sugars in large quantities without engaging in regular physical exercise that would compensate for such dietary practices.

The name "diabetes" is meaningless to the average person. The disease should be called Excessive Sugar Disease, or ESD. If it were called Excessive Sugar Disease, the solution to it would be rather apparent; simply eat less sugar, drink fewer soft drinks and so on. But of course that would be far too simple for the medical community, so the disease must be given a complex name such as diabetes that puts its solution out of reach of the average patient.

Another disease that is named after its symptom is cancer. In fact, to this day, most doctors and many patients still believe that cancer is a physical thing: a tumor. In reality, a tumor is only a side effect of cancer, not its cause. A tumor is simply a physical manifestation of a cancer pattern that is expressed by the body. When a person "has cancer," what they really have is a sluggish immune system. And that would a far better name for the disease: Sluggish Immune System Disease or SISD.

If cancer were actually called Sluggish Immune System Disease, it would seem ridiculous to try to cure cancer by cutting out tumors through surgery and by destroying the immune system with chemotherapy. And yet these are precisely the most popular treatments for cancer offered by conventional medicine. These treatments do absolutely nothing to support the patient's immune system and prevent further occurrences of cancer. That's exactly why most people who undergo chemotherapy or the removal of tumors through surgical procedures end up with yet more cancer a few months or a few years later. It's also another reason why survival rates of cancer have barely budged over the last twenty years. (In other words, conventional medicine's treatments for cancer simply don't work.)

This whole situation stems from the fact that the disease is misnamed. It isn't cancer, it isn't a tumor and it certainly isn't a disease caused by having too strong of an immune system that needs to be destroyed through chemotherapy. It is simply a sluggish immune system or a suppressed immune system. And if it were called a sluggish immune system disease or a suppressed immune system disorder, the effective treatment for cancer would be apparent.

There are many other diseases that are given misleading names by western medicine. But if you look around the world and take a look at how diseases are named elsewhere, you will find many countries have disease names that actually make sense.

For example, in Chinese medicine, Alzheimer's disease is given a name that means, when translated, "feeble mind disease." In Chinese medicine, the name of the disease more accurately describes the actual cause of the disease, whereas in western medicine, the name of the disease seems to be intended to obscure the root cause of the disease, thereby making all diseases sound far more complex and mysterious than they really are.

This is one way in which doctors and practitioners of western medicine keep medical treatments out of the reach of the average citizen. Because, by God, they sure don't want people thinking for themselves about the causes of disease!

By creating a whole new vocabulary for medical conditions, they can speak their own secret language and make sure that people who aren't schooled in medicine don't understand what they're saying. That's a shame, because the treatments and cures for virtually all chronic diseases are actually quite simple and can be described in plain language, such as making different food choices, getting more natural sunlight, drinking more water, engaging in regular physical exercise, avoiding specific food toxins, supplementing your diet with superfoods and nutritional supplements and so on.

See, western medicine prefers to describe diseases in terms of chemistry. When you're depressed, you aren't suffering from a lack of natural sunlight; you are suffering from a "brain chemistry imbalance" that can only be regulated, they claim, by ingesting toxic chemicals to alter your brain chemistry. When your bones are brittle, it's not brittle bones disease; it's called osteoporosis, something that sounds very technical and complicated. And to treat it, western doctors and physicians will give you prescriptions for expensive drugs that somehow claim to make your bones less brittle. But in fact, the real treatment for this can be described in plain language once again: regular physical exercise, vitamin D supplementation, mineral supplements that include calcium and strontium, natural sunlight, and avoidance of acidic foods such as soft drinks, white flour and added sugars.

In fact, virtually every disease that’s prominent in modern society -- diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, clinical depression, irritable bowel syndrome and so on -- can be easily described in plain language without using complex terms at all. These diseases are simply misnamed. And I believe that they are intentionally misnamed to put the jargon out of reach of everyday citizens. As a result, there's a great deal of arrogance in the language of western medicine, and this arrogance furthers the language of separation. Separation never results in healing. In order to effect healing, we must bring together the language of healers and patients using plain language that real people understand and that real people can act upon.

We need to start describing diseases in terms of their root causes, not in terms of their arcane, biochemical actions. When someone suffers from seasonal affective disorder or clinical depression, for example, let's call it what it is: Sunlight Deficiency Disorder. To treat it, the person simply needs to get more sunlight. This isn't rocket science, it's not complex, and it doesn't require a prescription.

If someone is suffering from osteoporosis, let's get realistic about the words we use to describe the condition: it's really Brittle Bones Disease. And it should be treated with things that will enhance bone density, such as nutrition, physical exercise and avoidance of foods and drinks that strip away bone mass from the human body.

All of this information, of course, is rather shocking to old-school doctors and practitioners of western medicine, and the bigger their egos are, the more they hate the idea of naming diseases in plain language that patients can actually comprehend. That's because if the simple truths about diseases and the causes of health were readily available to everyday people, that would lessen the importance of physicians and medical researchers.

There's a great deal of ego invested in the medical community, and they sure don't want to make health sound attainable to the average person without their expert advice. It's sort of the same way that some ultra-conservative churches don't want their members talking to God unless it all goes through their priest first. Doctors and priests all want to serve as the translators of "truth" and will balk at any attempts to educate the public to either practice medicine or talk to God on their own.

But in reality, health (and a connection with spirit) is attainable by every single person. Health is easy, it is straightforward, it is direct and, for the most part, it is available free of charge.

Don't believe the names of diseases given to you by your doctor. Those names are designed to obscure, not to inform. They are designed to separate you from self-healing, not to put you in touch with your own inner healer. And thus, they are nothing more than bad medicine masquerading as modern medical practice.

Source: http://www.newstarget.com/002800.html

Comments?...

Fasting and DetoxTestimonials Wanted

I'm an herbal and aromatherapy enthusiast just looking to share information and find others interested in the same.

This blog has been started to create a database of sorts for people who have done fasts/detox diets and those looking for more information on doing their own fasting/detoxing. There are a lot of sites online of people touting the benefits of certain fasts and detox brands, but you never know if they are just marketing a product or if they are real people that have used and found benefits from these products. This site is NOT associated with any brand, nor am I trying to sell anything. I just want your views and opinions on fasting and detoxing. What benefits of fasting and detoxing have you received? Did it cure anything? For what purpose are you fasting or detoxing? Are you trying to lose weight, cure an illness, regain energy, just spring cleaning? Please email me or share your comments here. All are welcome. (However posts are moderated and posts deemed to be advertising related will be deleted.)

(Daphne)