Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (50 page)

As you learn the plants, you will come to know how they
look
but also how they feel to the hand, how they smell, how they taste, even how they
sound
. Aspens make a sound completely unlike any other tree as the wind moves among them. You also learn, over time, how a plant subtly changes your body the moment you take it inside you.
All
plants have different effects and this becomes part of the knowledge as well.

Learn, also, to pay attention to how the plant
feels
to your non-physical sensing. You have learned to pay attention to how a restaurant or someone's home
feels
to you when you first walk in the door, to notice whether it feels welcoming or not, emotionally warm or not, safe or not. This kind of sensing can be extended to the plants you use for your medicines. Pay attention to whether or not the plant you are
harvesting feels healthy and vital to you. Your medicines will only be as good as the plants you use to make them.

And … thank the plants as you harvest them. This is a form of saying grace for food, only now you are doing it for your medicines. This may not be a regular part of your life, this kind of thankfulness, but after 25 years of this work, I can tell you, it does make a difference to the quality of the medicines you make and of the relationship you will ultimately have with the plants you use for healing.

Making plant medicines is a full-immersion, full-sensory experience; it's very physical. Harvesting plants often means walking miles to find the ones you are looking for. If you are working with roots, you will be digging, of course, and some plants are very difficult to dig. You will need a shovel, sometimes a pick. Other plants, such as nettles or devil's club, have stinging hairs or thorns; you will need gloves. And despite their use, you will get bitten by the plant—
everybody
does. It's part of the journey.

Take an easy-to-carry bag, with a fold-up shovel, plant cutters, a knife, and plastic bags to put the plants in. Big plastic bags. Paper is relatively useless; it won't hold up to walking miles in the field and it is much bulkier than plastic. You can use a woven basket instead of a bag, but it's better to keep the herbs you are harvesting in their own bags, not roughly mixed together in a basket. Take Band-Aids and tweezers and comfortable walking shoes and a staff, a hat and water and a lunch to eat. Also: Don't walk any farther than half the distance you have the energy for. (Just an FYI on that one.)

Once you have harvested the plants, take them home and begin preparing them as medicine right away; they will rot if you leave them in the plastic bags, or dry badly if you just dump them in a pile on the table and leave them too long. Never, never, never leave them in the
truck overnight. (
Everyone
puts plant preparation off sooner or later and then has to throw the plants away. It
only
takes once … usually.)

Roots should be shaken and brushed to get the dirt off. Washing them is generally a bad idea unless, due to the nature of the root (e.g., coral root), they have to be washed. (Washing removes essential oils and the outer bark—things you don't want to lose.) Some roots are as tough as steel once they dry (e.g., red root), so cut them into small pieces while they are fresh. (
Everyone
fails to do this once.)

Get a good drying tray for seeds, roots, bark, and so on. Flattish trays that are fairly shallow are best. I like woven ones that let the air circulate or high-impact plastic trays. You will always drop and break a glass one. (Eventually.) Metal has too many reactions with plant chemicals and moisture and can contaminate the herb.

Leafy plants can be tied together—you will need some good twine—and hung from the rafters to dry unless you are making medicine from the fresh leaves. They dry well that way.

Label
everything
. Everyone, and I mean
everyone
, thinks they will never forget the plant they just harvested, but everyone, and I mean
everyone
, does if it is not labeled. Then you will find yourself with a lot of unidentifiable plant matter on your hands that you can't use (and no, using them for illnesses you can't identify either won't work). And … label
all
your medicines once you've made them as well. You
will
forget what is in that bottle.

You will need bottles, of course, to store your finished medicines in. Tiny ones are nice for salves. Brown ones are nice for tinctures; they keep the light out and minimize degradation. Everything is best if kept in the dark; light has a strongly negative impact on the life of your medicines. (You will need droppers too—they are ridiculously expensive compared to the bottles they go with.)

If you are making tinctures, you will need Ball jars or something similar for the herbs to macerate in. I often get old olive or pickle jars, the
big
ones, from restaurants to use for larger batches. Make sure they are clean—the smell does get into the tincture if you don't. There are other things you will find you need as you go along. I will mention a number of them when I talk about the particular kinds of medicines you can make.

In general, there are only a few kinds of herbal medicines: salves, infusions, tinctures, and powders. The list I am going to give you will appear more complicated than that, but that is pretty much all it comes down to. There are just a number of different
forms
to those four types of medicines. Most of them you will never need; still, I'm going to tell you about them. You never know what might come in handy.

Remember: Have fun. This is an art as much as a science and art always,
always
, has a depth of feeling and intuition to it that can never be captured and quantified. Trust your
feelings
and understand that your heart is as important to listen to as your head. Life without heart, you know, is not much of a life at all.

Unless you are using the plant itself in some form—as powder, food, juice, or so on—what you will be doing when you make your medicines is extracting the chemical constituents of the plant in some kind of liquid solvent. (When you take the whole herb internally, the stomach acids, bile salts, and so on
are
the solvent media. They leach out the active constituents of the plants for you.)

Every solvent has its own properties and people use different ones for many different reasons, some of which I will go into in this chapter. Generally, a solvent is referred to as a
menstruum.
It comes from
menstruus
, a Latin word meaning “month.” It was felt, in the old days, that the moon and its cycle of 28 days had an influence on liquids, just as it does on the tides. So, herbs were placed in liquids—on particular
days by the fanatical—and left in there for one cycle of the moon. Hence
menstruum
. Though derided as superstition by scientists, there is some legitimacy to this kind of thinking. Plants really are stronger when harvested on certain days, the moon does affect the underground aquifers of the earth, just as it does the oceans (causing the ground to breathe out moisture-laden air), leeches really are useful (surgeons use them regularly now), maggots really do clean gangrenous wounds better than anything else, and … oops, sorry, got carried away again.

Anyway, the solvent is called the
menstruum
, herbs are placed in the menstruum, and once there they begin to
macerate
. Maceration is the soaking of something—usually a plant of some sort—in a solvent until the cell walls begin to break down so the compounds in the herb will leach into the solvent, where they are held in suspension. When you later separate the liquid (now containing the medicinal compounds) from the solids, the solids that are left are called the
marc
. The liquid is called whatever kind of medicine you were making: tincture, infusion, or so on.

Water is considered to be
the
universal solvent; it works for most things to some extent. For most of human history, it has been the primary solvent people have used. Alcohol is the next most effective solvent. Combining them will give you the most comprehensive solvent medium that exists.

Just as with the plants you harvest, use the best-quality solvents you can get. Your water, especially, should be well, spring, or rain water—if you can get it. If you use tap water, have a filter on the water line if you are at all able to do so. Or else buy a good-quality water. The better the water, the better the medicine. (Tap water is, as well, filled with minute quantities of pharmaceuticals—you really don't want to ingest them. They are highly bioactive.)

Another thing to understand is that the more finely powdered your herb, the more surface area that is exposed to the solvent. This allows more of the chemical constituents to leach into the solvent.

When you are making extracts, part of what you learn, and develop in your practice, is knowledge of just what kinds of solvents are right
for which herbs and in what combinations. The goal is to get as many of the medicinal compounds as possible into the extractive medium. Each herb is different and needs different combinations of water and alcohol—that is, a different formula for preparation. Some do better in pure alcohol, some in pure water. Some need oils to extract the active constituents (
Artemisia annua
is an example of this; artemisinin is more easily soluble in fats than in either alcohol or water). Some need boiling, some prefer cold liquids.

Pharmacists, prior to World War II (before pharmaceuticals began to dominate medicine), were extensively trained in very sophisticated forms of herbal medicine making—many of which are beyond the scope of this book (and of most pharmacists these days). This is why pharmacists are still called “chemists” in England and the drugstores there the “chemist's” shops. Distressingly, that kind of training no longer occurs; it is now a lost art. I doubt there is a medicinal pharmacist in practice anywhere in the Western world who can prepare a tincture of
Colchicum officinale
and determine, exactly, the amount of colchicine in it—as all pharmacists could do in 1920.

In becoming an herbal medicine maker, you are learning how to be a practical dispensing pharmacist. Part of what that means is discovering how to best prepare the herbs and with which solvents.
Chapter 9
is an herbal formulary that will give you the ratio of alcohol and water for several hundred plant tinctures.

The two most common forms of water extractions are infusions and decoctions. Two lesser-known forms are evaporative concentrates and percolations.

Teas are, at heart, weak infusions. When making medicine, however, you are usually working with what would formally be called an
infusion. Infusions are stronger than teas since the herbs sit,
infuse
, in the water for a much longer period.

An infusion is made by immersing an herb in either cold or hot, not boiling, water for an extended time. Again, the water you use should be the purest you can find,
not
tap water. Water from rain, a healthy well, or a spring is best.

The weakness of infusions, cold or hot, is that they do not keep well; they tend to spoil very quickly. Refrigeration will only slow the process a little. Infusions, unless you stabilize them with something like alcohol, need to be used shortly after you make them. Their strength is that nearly everyone has access to enough water to make them without resorting to the expense of buying alcohol.

Although the guidelines below call for short timelines for hot infusions, I often make my infusions at night just before bed and let them infuse overnight. I usually make enough for one day, then drink the infusions throughout the next day.

Most
hot
infusions are consumed, confusingly, not hot but warm or at room temperature; the infusion periods are too long for the water to stay hot.
Hot
infusion, in this sense, is a description of the extraction process, not of its temperature when used.

Some herbs, however, are best consumed while still hot, such as diaphoretics that stimulate sweating. For example, yarrow, if being used to help break a fever, is best consumed hot (steeped 15 minutes, covered). If being used for GI tract distress or to stimulate menstruation, though, it is best prepared as a hot infusion but consumed hours later at room temperature.