Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (52 page)

1 gallon water

Place herbs in water (in glass, stainless steel, or ceramic-coated pot) and bring to roiling boil. Remove from heat, hold head over steam, and cover head and steaming pot with large towel. Breathe steam deep into lungs. Bring herbs to boil and repeat as often as necessary. Replace herbs when their strong smell begins to noticeably diminish.

Essential oil steam:
This steam method can also be undertaken with essential oils. Use 30 drops each of the essential oil of rosemary, sage, juniper, eucalyptus, and bergamot in 1 quart of water.

Wound wash:
This recipe can also be prepared as a wash for infected or weeping wounds. Rather than boiling, bring the mixture to the edge of boiling, remove from heat, and let steep until lukewarm. Strain, use it to wash the wound thoroughly, then apply a wound powder.

Evaporative concentrates are remarkable medicines but are rarely used in herbal practice and are poorly understood. The most common evaporative concentrate in the United States is made from chaparral leaf and is used for treating mastitis in women. However, the primary reason to use evaporative concentrates—in my opinion—is that this is the one process I know of to create a topical corticosteroid cream as potent as those made by pharmaceutical companies.

An evaporative concentrate is made by making a very,
very
slow-cooking decoction. A slow cooker (or Crock-Pot) is necessary; I don't know of another way to do it. You need a cooking pot where you can keep the heat at the slowest simmer possible, very slightly below boiling or very slightly over it.

To make a corticosteroid herbal cream, you need to begin with an anti-inflammatory herb. There are many of these and it is worth exploring different plants to find which ones work best for you. I tend to use the ones that contain a lot of salicylates, like aspen or willow, and are water soluble. When the decoction is finished, it will be very thick—the consistency of a hand cream. When used on the skin, for rashes, varicose veins, skin eruptions, and inflammations, it is as potent as pharmaceutical corticosteroids. The only drawback—not solvable—is that the concentrates are nearly black in color. It's very visible on the skin. Difficult if it is your face you are treating.

I usually refrigerate these concentrates, but when I haven't, even after months, they have never gone bad. The chemical concentration is apparently too high for bacteria to deal with. Needless to say, these concentrates are
not
for internal use.

32 ounces water

6 ounces powdered willow (or aspen) bark

Put the water in a slow cooker, and add the herb. Cover and turn the cooker on high. As the water warms, stir the mix well. When the water has come to a boil, reduce the heat to just under or just slightly over a simmer. Leave the cooker on that setting, covered, for 2 days.

Turn off the cooker, let the mix cool, and strain out the herb, squeezing the marc through a cloth to extract as much as possible. Clean the slow cooker and then put the liquid back in it. Turn on high and bring to a boil. Reduce immediately to just under or just slightly over a simmer. Keep it covered. Cook until the liquid is reduced to nearly nothing, essentially 1 to 2 ounces. This will take up to a week.

As the liquid begins to approach 1 to 2 ounces, watch it carefully. At this point it can lose the remaining water very quickly and it will burn once it does.
Once the liquid is this low, the remainder will go very fast.
It helps to stir it regularly at this point to get an idea of how much liquid is left. Once it has reduced enough, turn off the cooker, let it cool, and then place the concentrate in a jar. Label well.
Not
for internal use.

Percolations are just the same as drip-grind coffee. You are letting liquid drip slowly through the herb—which is held in filter paper—into a container.

Percolations are handy to know about in case you run short of a tincture and need some in a hurry. They take a few hours rather than a few weeks. They are also the best way to make a cold-process water extract, much better than letting the herb steep in cold water. The main strength of a percolation, however, is its potency. This is due to the nature of solvents.

In essence, a solvent is a pure liquid; it doesn't have anything in it but itself. As a solvent leaches chemical constituents into itself, it begins filling up, or getting saturated as they say. Once it is saturated it can't take any more into itself. A good way to visualize this is to see, in your imagination, the liquid on one side, the herb on the other. The herb is full, the liquid is empty. As the two combine, the constituents in the herb begin to flow into the liquid. However, once the amount of constituents in the liquid are in equilibrium with those in the herb—like a weight scale where equal weights are on each side of the scale—it is very difficult for the constituents to keep flowing into the liquid. A saturation point is being reached.

The way a percolator works, however, means that the liquid never becomes saturated, the liquid that is touching the herb is always pure. So, the extract becomes very strong. You will see how this works when I describe how the percolator works in practice.

To make a percolation, however, you will need a percolator—this is why so few people make them. It is a bit more complex than using a jar to make a tincture or a coffee cone to make coffee. Some people do make their own percolators (it can be done fairly simply), or you can buy one from a scientific glass supplier.

Most scientific percolators are several feet long and look somewhat like a giant glass ice cream cone, wider at the top (big enough to easily put your hand and arm into) and narrowing to a point at the bottom. There is a narrow opening at the bottom that flows into an integral
glass tube with a control knob on it, a spigot essentially, that you turn to control the flow of liquid out of the percolator.

(You can make your own percolator by cutting the bottom off a glass water bottle—don't use plastic—such as a mid-sized Perrier container.
Sand the edges well
. Until they are smooth. Keep the cap; you will need it.)

To use a percolator, you first determine what kind of percolation you are going to make, water or an alcohol and water mix. Make up the liquid mixture you are going to need and keep it close. Then take the dried herb and grind it as finely as possible. Percolation will not work with fresh herbs; they have to be dried. For a percolation to work well, the herb really does need to be as close to a powder as possible. You need as much plant surface area exposed to the liquid as possible. Once the herb is powdered, and before you start percolating, put the herb in a large bowl and add enough alcohol to the herb to moisten it—not wet, just moist. This will begin breaking down the cell walls of the plant and make the extraction more efficient.

Let the moist herb sit a couple of hours, but if you are impatient, at least 30 minutes. Then take some filter paper—I use the same coffee filters as are used for drip-grind coffee cones—and place it in the bottom of the percolator. It helps if the inside of the percolator is slightly dampened first so that the paper will adhere to the glass and fit snugly. Press the paper into place, being sure to not punch a hole in it with your fingers. Once that is done, carefully put the moistened herb in the cone, making sure you don't get any between the filter paper and the glass. Press it lightly into place—you don't want it compacted though, since liquid has to flow through it.

Depending on the amount of herb you use, the percolator can be filled nearly to the top with plant matter. When all the plant material is in the percolator, put a circular piece of filter paper on top of the herb and put something heavy on that to keep the paper, and the herb, from floating up—a small stone works well. (Not scientific, I know, but very aesthetic.)

Then, slowly, begin pouring the liquid into the percolator. Do it slowly so that you don't stir up the powdered herb. The liquid will slowly percolate down into the plant matter, and air bubbles will come up. (You may not be able to get all the liquid into the percolator in one go. If so you will have to add the rest as the liquid level drops.) When the herb is fully saturated, put a container under the spigot and very slowly open the spigot. (Some people run a plastic hose from the spigot into a container—needless to say, the percolator has to be held in the air on a stand of some sort in order to work.) You want to get one drop per second coming out of the spigot, so adjust the spigot until you get just that rate of drip.

The reason this makes such a good tincture (or cold water infusion) is that
only
clean liquid is flowing over the herb. This means that the liquid is completely unsaturated; its extraction capacity remains very high. So as the liquid flows over the herb, it pulls chemical compounds out of the plant, then more clean liquid comes behind and pulls more out. It's very elegant.

If you are using a homemade percolator, prepare it the same way, but when you are ready to percolate, very slightly open the bottle cap—just enough that a very slow drip comes out. Again, one drip per second is very effective.

Because alcohol extractions, i.e., tinctures, keep so well over time and because they are so easily dispensed, many herbalists prefer them over infusions. They are made by immersing a fresh plant in full-strength alcohol or a dried plant in an alcohol and water mixture.

I am a fan of using pure grain alcohol for tinctures. What that means in practice, however, is using an alcohol that is 190 proof, or 95 percent alcohol. (There is such a thing as 100 percent or 200-proof alcohol, but the only people who generally use it are scientists or large commercial enterprises; you will probably never see it.) Most
people buy their 190-proof alcohol at their local liquor store; the most common brand in the United States is called Everclear.

Some states—some countries—will not allow their citizens to buy 190-proof alcohol (for their own good, of course). If you live in such a place, you will have to cross state (or country) lines and buy your alcohol from a more enlightened place or else make do with what they allow you to buy. In such places, most people use a 40 percent to 50 percent alcohol-content vodka; that is, 80 to 100 proof. Get the highest proof you can—you will see why this is important as we go on.

In the United States, the amount you pay for liquor, regardless of what you are buying, is directly proportional to its alcohol content. The actual cost of a gallon of 190-proof alcohol is about $1.00. The rest of the cost is federal and state taxes—which are then taxed again by sales tax when you buy the thing. So you may be tempted to buy a lower-proof vodka because it is cheaper. That is a bad idea. Your tinctures will be weak.

Fresh herb tinctures, again, are made by putting the fresh herb in pure grain alcohol. These tinctures are nearly always made in a one-to-two ratio, which is written 1:2. (There are a few exceptions.) This ratio means you are using 1 part herb (dry weight measurement) to 2 parts liquid (liquid measurement). The amount of herb in such ratios is always indicated by the first number, the amount of liquid by the second number.

So, for example, if you have 3 ounces (dry weight measure) of fresh echinacea flower heads, you would place them in a jar with 6 ounces (liquid measure) of 190-proof alcohol. I generally use well-sealed Mason or Ball jars, stored out of the sun and shaken daily. At the end of 2 weeks the herb is decanted and squeezed through a cloth until as dry as possible (an herb or wine press is good for this), and the resulting liquid is then stored in labeled, amber bottles.

Fresh plants naturally contain a certain percentage of water and alcohol is a very good extractor of water. (One of the main symptoms of a hangover comes from the alcohol extracting the water from your body—you get the same kind of headache from too much alcohol as you do from dehydration.) Alcohol will pull not only the medicinal constituents out of the plant but the plant's water as well.

The water in the fresh plant dilutes the alcohol, how much depends on the kind of plant it is. Peppermint has a lot of water in it, 50 percent or more by weight. So what you get when you tincture fresh peppermint leaves is a tincture that is about 50 percent alcohol and 50 percent water. Myrrh gum has virtually no water in it, so you end up with a tincture that is 95 percent alcohol and 5 percent water—and all that water was already in the alcohol, assuming you began with 95 percent alcohol.

Fresh leafy plants may be chopped or left whole before placing them into the alcohol or pureed with the alcohol in a blender. Fresh roots should be ground with the alcohol in a blender into a pulpy mush. (I generally think it better to make root tinctures from dried roots, but there are a few exceptions; coral root is one.)

Plants, as they dry, lose their natural moisture content (the amount of water you combine with alcohol to make a tincture is the amount of water that the plant loses when it dries). Tables detailing the moisture content of many medicinal plants are available. When making a
tincture of a dried plant, you always add back the amount of water that was present in the plant when it was fresh. This enables the extraction of the water-soluble constituents to occur.