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May 8, 1996 - Bill Cooper
58:38
Michael Cottingham #2
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Time Text
*Piano music*
*Piano music* I'm Pooh.
You're listening to The Hour of the Time.
I'm Pooh.
And I'm William Cooper.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you.
What was that that jumped in the middle of your pledge?
A song?
Yeah.
This old thing just got replaced and hopefully we won't have that happening when we get this new studio all fixed up.
Looks like someone came here.
Looks like someone's here, that's all right.
But Sugar Bear's on patrol.
Yep.
Now he's barking.
Yeah, you better believe it.
He doesn't let anybody get away with anything, does he?
Yeah.
Okay, I'll see you later.
Ladies and gentlemen, we've got our Fantastic broadcast for you tonight, and I think you're going to really enjoy it.
You've heard our guest before.
He was one of the featured speakers at the last conference that we had, and was the guest on one of our broadcasts during that conference.
He's been a guest, I think, a couple of times since then.
And just recently.
His name is Michael Cottingham and he's probably one of the nicest people that I know.
He's a gentle man.
He's a gentle man and a gentle moon, if you understand exactly what I mean.
He has chosen for his profession a Well, I don't even know if you would call it a profession.
Well, we'll let him explain it to you right after this.
Thank you.
How are you doing, Bill?
I'm doing pretty good.
Do you recognize the title of that tune?
It's very Appalachian-oriented, it seems.
Yeah, I played it just for you.
It's the Golden Wildwood Flower.
That's nice.
And it fits right in with what you do.
What is it that you do?
Is it a profession?
Is it an art?
Well, I think it's actually a little bit of all of those.
I often think that working with herbs and working with herbal medicine is a very ancient profession, if you want to call it a profession.
It could be practiced as a profession.
I like to practice it as an art form.
I feel it goes back thousands and thousands of years.
It's definitely been a part of man's And part of mankind ever since we started this thing and you know people's relationship to plants and their usage of plants as medicine I think goes back to the very beginning and I always feel it's an old profession and that's also an art form and can be practiced with almost a philosophical approach.
You know, when you say herbs, Michael, you're not just talking about peppermint and thyme and things like that.
You're talking about a whole range of plants and shrubs and trees and the whole works.
What really is the definition of herbal medicine or herbal nutrition or just herbs?
Well, I always like to, I'm teaching my classes and trying to give a definition.
I like to say that herbs, a definition of herbs in general, is herbs cause change, and it's that change that we're after, and the change is different and varied, but it's the medicinal aspect of this change.
Herbs cause change, and so when you take them into your body, you can expect a certain change, and we try to make this change Directed so that the change that we get inside the body from taking this plant helps to heal us.
It helps us to approach a problem with a specific end result in mind.
What is herbal medicine or what is herbs?
It's basically, you know, we eat food.
Food supplies nutritional value and is something we need to live.
Herbs are something that we take, that they can be foods at times, but often we take them for specific change other than nutrition.
Is this change in the form of a stimulation in certain areas of the body?
Stimulation, and if you break down that plants have chemicals in them, and they consist of many chemicals, complex chemical relationships, and you take this into the body, Change as a result, stimulation.
I also like to try to describe diseases and health problems as a stuck condition.
You have a chest cold, a sinus infection, constipation.
These could all be looked at and classified as a stuck condition.
The body has no movement.
And I find that with herbal medicine, there's a link to a lot of philosophies and martial arts.
And everything, every good philosophy and every good, you know, every good martial art and acrobatic movement and gymnastics, it's all about movement and it's all about flow.
And that's so we can take herbs into the body to affect a stuck health condition, thus creating change, thus creating movement and actually creating healing.
Because I don't know, I view life as What got you started in this?
When you get stuck, you get problems, of course, and health problems are a stuck condition for me, and I use herbs to create a change, a stimulation, a movement in the body.
What got you started in this?
I know that at one time, not just in this country but all over the world, this was a folk craft, if you will, and it was passed on from mother to daughter and from father to son, And people treasured their herbal remedies and their herbal concoctions and teas and all of these things.
And they used these in many times and eras and conditions and locations where they couldn't get or didn't know or there wasn't available at all any kind of any other I don't know.
It's a good question.
our remedies, our nursing, our medical facilities, and that kind of thing.
But then it went by the wayside and people began to forget about these things and then all of a sudden along come people like you.
And how did that happen? - I don't know, that's a good question.
I'm still asking myself that from time to time.
And I find I have a gift of working with people and plants and that, you know, Early on, my parents exposed me to the natural world.
Mushroom hunting, where I grew up, hunting for morale mushrooms was a very common pastime for a lot of people in the spring.
I think if we expose children, and myself included, when I was a child, exposed to plants and animals in the natural world,
You know, things can arise out of that, and I think maybe there was a natural gift already there, but it was sort of cultivated by being exposed to plants and animals, and I've always yearned for wanting to have a relationship to the natural world.
Not that I didn't like people but for an early part of my life it was much nicer to actually be with plants and animals and the woods and swamps or deserts or wherever it was at.
It always suited me better to be there learning from nature than being around people.
I find that to be the opposite today that my early years as a child growing up in the has now allowed me to work with many, many more people than I would have ever imagined.
And just a side note that even today, three-quarters of the world, the majority of the world's population uses herbal medicine as its first form of healing.
And I always find that to be an amazing concept because in this country, it's basically the opposite.
Do you think we've, in this country, we've divorced ourselves from nature?
There's no doubt we have.
We've come to the point where hardly any of us grow any percentage of our food.
Everything that we use, we buy.
We've become less self-sufficient, which is definitely, to me, A true weak nation is the lack of self-sufficiency on a daily basis.
Well, you sure got that right.
It stems into everything.
Every facet of our life.
If we're not self-sufficient on the daily needs... Then we're dependent, aren't we?
We're absolutely dependent on everything else and everyone else around us.
I've never liked that.
I've always wanted to at least try to answer some of my problems with my own endeavor.
Healthcare was one of those.
It was like, what could I do to control?
What could I do to help myself other than having to depend on others?
I realized that three quarters of the world uses herbal medicine and that it seemed like a good thing to really cultivate and learn more and more about.
It came always very easy for me.
Now for those listening who might believe that this is a bunch of baloney because you've been raised to go to the doctor and you get a shot and you take this pill and that pill and the other thing and you sniff this stuff out of an inhaler and you have a tendency to think that this is just a bunch of baloney and you shouldn't listen to it or Michael or myself or Wacko, let me assure you that
When you go to the doctor, most of the things that the doctor gives you came from herbs, plants, trees, shrubs, and have been highly synthesized.
In many cases, they have learned how to manufacture chemical substitutes that supposedly do the same thing.
But there is a big difference in that even when they synthesize a drug from a plant, it has a completely different effect and different side effects, much more severe usually.
And although it may alleviate some of the problems or symptoms of whatever you're experiencing, when you actually take the plant that it came from and treat the person with the plant instead of the chemical that was derived from the plant, You get completely different results.
Less or no side effects.
And when they are present, they're much less severe.
And the healing is a more natural, quicker type healing when this is allowed to occur.
And this, you know, I'm not just coming off the top of my head with this.
This is something that's been proven over and over and over and over again.
And no matter how much we try to get away from nature and rely upon chemical substitutes and all of these other things, we end up going right back to nature eventually because that's really where it's at.
And I believe that not only is our health suffering because of our separation of ourselves from nature, but our political structure is suffering.
Our family life is suffering.
Everything is suffering because we have tried to create an artificial world based upon rules that contradict the laws of nature rather than living as we should in concert with nature.
And I'm not talking about Looney Tunes environmentalism.
I'm talking about just good old common sense.
Would you agree with that, Michael?
I would find that that's absolutely correct.
I know when we talk about the natural world and living with plants and animals, a lot of people that might be listening, definitely as you've said, are shrieking.
They automatically stereotype you as an environmentalist.
I'm not even sure what an environmentalist is.
I've seen extremes to all sides of it.
It's environmentalists and the fight with cattle and ranching and mining.
Those are all important issues, especially for the individual, but they're all sideshows for the most part.
They all just occupy us and waste our time when we're all, whether you're an environmentalist or you're a miner or you work wherever, we're all as a nation.
non-self-sufficient so far from the natural world that it's you know it jeopardizes everything in that you know the health care industry you were talking about prescription medicines and synthesized medicines in this country they have a thing not but in all the countries were you know industrialized medicine or prescription medicine
is the normal situation.
They have a thing called iatrogenic illness and this is basically drug-induced illness and it comes from taking prescription drugs that are inappropriate that cause problems.
It struck me the other day that I was thinking of prescription drugs and side effects and how we accept side effects of prescription drugs as a normal I do not believe that you have to harm the body in order to heal it.
that actually may be life-threatening.
But in general, we accept side effects, negative side effects of prescription medicine as a normal activity.
I find that just, it's shocking.
It's so ludicrous to accept.
I do not believe that you have to harm the body in order to heal it.
I've always tried to practice just the opposite.
And it's very, you know, we're going through an awakening in this country and more and more people within the healthcare crisis are questioning the authority of established medicine in this country, which I find very positive.
Yeah.
Well, folks, I can tell you that everybody who knows Michael or met him, watched him work with plants and with herbs love him and love his presentations.
I just am enthralled when I'm around Michael.
I enjoy it so much.
And I have seen him stand in front of a group of people with a bucket full of plants that he collected just from beside the road on the way to the presentation.
And when he picks up one of these plants and holds it in his hands and begins to talk about it, something is born there that is just incredible.
And it's like he's holding, he holds these plants so gently like they're little babies or something.
And when you begin to listen to him and he tells you about the plants and what it can do and how to treat it and how to raise it and how to use it and how to make the teas and the medicinal poultices and things of this nature, then something occurs Within me and within the other people and with Michael.
It's like Michael has a glow about him almost.
And so we're going to try to sort of create that here on this broadcast.
And so for the rest of the hour I'm going to shut up and Michael is going to talk about plants.
And if you can just imagine this tall man Very handsome man with long just I guess just a little past his shoulder length hair wearing blue jeans with a belt and a regular just a normal cotton shirt.
And if you can imagine him standing beside a bucket of herbs and plants and bark and small things that he's picked up alongside the road and just listen to him, I think that you're going to experience the same thing that I and many others have experienced in Michael's company.
So Michael, the rest of the hour is yours.
In about ten minutes I'm going to have to play some music and I'll lead that in sort of softly so that you can finish whatever you're talking about and then I have to do a commercial If it helps anybody, at one time I did have real short hair when I was in the military.
I don't know, some people have.
We all have hang-ups.
I think when I hold a plant in my hand, or I'm leading an herb walk in the field, I try to think of myself as the interpreter.
between people and plants.
And I find that that's just who I am and that's what I do.
I'm not necessarily an oracle, but I interpret plants to lots of people in order to help them understand plants better.
Because for me, each individual plant is an entire world with stories and secrets and uses and And thousands of years of history behind it as far as man's use.
To me, it's romantic and fascinating.
My quest for knowledge of these plants is immense.
I like to spend time with them.
I like to share them with people.
I want to talk about a few plants.
People may actually have access to that could really help to improve their lives.
One of which, if you live in the tropics or very humid climates, you might even be able to grow.
And the first one is ginger.
Ginger is ginger root, which can be found in just about any and every grocery store throughout the United States.
It's a semi-tropical, tropical plant, and often you could buy one of these roots from the produce section, and since it's a fresh root and it's healthy, you could actually stick it in a pot of really nice soil and water that root, and pretty soon you'd have shoots coming out, and you'd actually have a ginger plant growing from this root that you bought from the grocery store.
And in time, if you had the right climate, or you had a greenhouse, or humid place in your house, you could actually grow your own ginger root for medicine.
So even though it's not a native plant, and it's kind of exotic from the tropics, it could be cultivated in over half this country's homes, and so it does become practical.
I would say getting fresh ginger root, and you make a tea with it.
A way to make a tea from fresh ginger root would be to
Take a piece of the root and grate it up until it's a fine mash and you could add a tablespoon of this fine grated ginger root to about a quart of water and bring it to a simmer on the stove and don't let it boil because ginger is a very aromatic plant and if you boil, sometimes if you boil herb leaves and
flowers and roots you destroy much of the medicinal properties so you basically want to simmer it under a low heat for five minutes or so and have it covered and have the pot of water covered so that the aromatic oils stay in the pot and and after that five minutes of simmering you basically have a medicinal tea ginger root tea and
Drinking ginger root tea on a regular basis is probably one of the best herb teas for improving general circulation in the body.
Ginger in general is classified as a vasodilator, which means it helps to dilate capillaries and arteries and veins and the blood vessels in the body.
This is important, especially in our culture, which most of our illnesses come from a lack of circulation.
Most of our digestive problems, and the list is immense, but I truly believe that a majority of our health problems arise definitely from our diet, and our lack of exercise, or lack of movement, lack of circulation.
And by drinking ginger tea, you get dilation, you get blood flow, you get movement.
And anytime you improve movement in the body, in general, you improve health.
So, people who drink a lot of coffee, actually, because of the caffeine in the coffee, they constrict the arteries in the veins and capillaries.
They close things up.
So, a perfect example where ginger root tea might be useful is people who drink too much coffee.
They might find that ginger root tea This is a good exercise for the capillaries.
The caffeine or coffee constricts and the ginger root tea dilates the capillaries.
So you get this constriction and dilation.
I don't usually tell people this.
Stop your drinking of coffee.
Stop your smoking of tobacco.
I'm a very reasonable person.
I'm giving suggestions because we're all human and we all have our ups and downs and our dependencies.
But if you could match for every cup of coffee that one drinks, match it with a cup of ginger root tea, you would find in general you have better circulation.
Ginger root tea is very good for helping with congestion in the lungs.
And helping with sinus congestion.
Remember, ginger root tea is a circulatory herb.
It creates circulation in the body.
It creates movement in the body.
And this can help when you have lung congestion, which is a stuck problem.
There is no movement in the lungs.
And ginger root tea will actually help to create circulation in any stuck condition, but it's very good for lung infection and lung congestion, sinus congestion, Um, and that's, you know, that is accessible to everyone, you know, and anyone can buy ginger root tea.
Uh, if you have cold hands or cold feet due to poor circulation, uh, ginger root tea actually is very good for that.
Um, it's also classified as what they call a cognitive.
It's something that aids in digestion.
So people who have, uh, a slow digestion And they have lots of gas or flatulence as they call it.
Lots of indigestion.
They find that a cup of ginger root tea after they eat will help to improve circulation in the stomach, thus helping to improve their digestion.
Ginger root tea can help with certain types of headaches where you have over constriction.
Usually the people who drink too much coffee find that they may get headaches.
If you drink coffee cup after cup after cup after you start to get tight capillaries, tight blood vessels and this can lead to types of migraine headaches and different types of headaches and ginger root tea can do the opposite of what the coffee is doing and create better circulation thus helping to improve circulation in the head and thus helping to improve headaches.
Ginger root tea is also good for people who have poor circulation in their kidneys.
These people are usually people who drink too much coffee.
And in general, when I say too much coffee, we're talking in excess for the average person, whatever that is, five cups of coffee or more a day.
It's usually excessive in my opinion, but everybody's body is different.
But I find that if you drink too much coffee, time after time after time, that you get tired.
More and more tired.
Ginger tea can help not only be a stimulant and a dilator and a blood circulator, but it can help to give us a little energy because it is improving our circulation.
it actually can help to create more oxygen.
I had the wrong pot down.
Ha ha ha.
Go ahead and finish your sentence there.
Ginger in general is something that improves circulation in the body.
That's an important concept in healing.
Especially in our culture where we tend to have illnesses that cause impaired circulation.
And, uh, that's an easy one.
Everybody can actually start this party drink ginger tea.
It actually is very stimulating, improves digestion, uh, gets blood to flow.
very very very good time you you you you you you you you
you you you you you you you you you you Amen.
With that, what was supposed to be a slow lead in to let him finish out what he was talking about.
But that's what happens sometimes when you have one person doing everything in a radio broadcast, and that's what we have here.
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All of yours, Michael.
Oh Oh, okay.
Definitely, the last few days we had been collecting medicinal plants out in the desert and haven't been out in a few weeks and was really shocked at the gasoline cost all of a sudden had skyrocketed and it's just like It's amazing how things change so quickly.
Ginger tea leads us from improving, well actually improves our circulation and that leads us to a very important thing when we have colds and flus and sinus infections and lung infections.
There's been a lot of talk about the immune system and what the immune system is.
Basically, the immune system is your first line defense in keeping you alive and fighting off infection.
But the immune system helps to keep us in balance.
It helps to regulate everything in the body so that there is balance within the body.
And when you have a health problem, you need to think about your immune system because your immune system Ginger tea is the first line defense.
It is the main defense against an imbalance in the body.
A health problem of some sort.
Ginger tea, because it improves circulation, actually is a tea that can improve the immune system.
And it actually can be used for helping to deal with a cold, or flu, or a viral infection of some nature.
Because it is a ginger root tea.
It stimulates the immune system.
Now, Michael, can I break in here for just a second?
When you say immune system, I know a lot of people automatically think of white blood cells, and that's the only thing that they know of that's an immune system.
And, of course, if the blood circulation is opened up and speeded up, that of course helps the immune system.
But you're talking about the lymphatics and a whole bunch of other things that are all interconnected that make up the actual immune system of the body.
And it's much, much more than what most people understand it to be.
Absolutely.
In fact, the immune system is basically another way of saying the human body.
Because when it comes down to it, every part of the body is part of the immune system.
And that's why it's really hard.
For years and years we've basically You know, white blood cells are part of the immune system, and we left at that.
But the lymph glands, the heart, the kidneys, the liver, the lungs, everything is part of the immune system.
And when we get ill, whatever we do to the body is basically helping the immune system, or in other words, helping the body fight the invaders, or fight the problem that we have.
I think it's easier.
There are parts of the immune system, like the white blood cells and all the other different types of immune system cells, make up the immune system, but there isn't one part of the human body, including the brain, including eyesight, hearing, smell, taste.
You know, it's often, it's been shown that sometimes you don't even have to take any medicine.
All you need to do is go to sleep.
And that helps the immune system.
So I'd like to make it complex, but at the same time it's very simple.
The immune system is the entire human body.
And that gets us to thinking, not just of little individual white blood cells, but of thinking of the body as a whole.
And that's really where the medicine lies, is in holistic medicine, where the entire human body is imbalanced or not imbalanced.
And it's what we're not dealing with, you know, poor digestion or we're not dealing with a sinus infection or tonsillitis.
You know, our problem in this country and in the way we practice medicine for the last hundred years or so has been looking at the specific little tiny problem.
And that's it.
My question is, why do we get reoccurring tonsillitis?
Actually it's what they do is they look at the symptom of the problem and all of the medicines that doctors use and come from drug companies treat symptoms and not problems.
Exactly and you know the symptoms are just, I don't know, we've been taught to look at the symptoms or we've been taught to be distracted by the symptoms when we really need to look at the root of the problem.
And so I always like to talk about the immune system basically represents the entire human body.
And so when you drink ginger tea, you improve circulation, not only in those areas that I talked about, like the lungs, or the stomach, or the replacement for coffee, or something to balance coffee out with, but ginger tea, root tea, regardless of what anybody believes, you know, you could actually not believe about ginger root tea at all, but if you drink it, you get
I mean, if you don't believe in it, and you're very good at controlling your mind, you might actually stop vasodilation, but that's beyond the realm of most people, and it would be ridiculous.
But if you drink ginger routine, you increase circulation, and that's what the immune system always really, really needs when it's fighting a war or fighting, you know, An infection or dealing with the problem is basically is to create movement.
So creating movement in the immune system can be done by one, drinking a lot of water when you're sick, drinking a lot of water with ginger tea.
And so now you've got water as a vehicle of movement.
Ginger tea helps to create circulation and movement.
And what this really comes down to is you're helping to You're helping to move your blood so it can be filtered better.
You're helping to move your blood so the viruses or the bacteria are taken out or attacked by the white blood cells.
You're improving circulation and thus improving filtering and fighting.
Just by the simple action of drinking ginger tea can be an immense thing when you're sick.
So global medicine, I don't know if that's just, you know, a lot of information that has no direction, but I find that it can be very simple.
I'm talking and elaborating or being redundant about one plant, but if only you brought in ginger tea for two weeks time and drank one or two, three cups a day, you would find that your circulation has improved and many of the tiny little problems that you
From a sinus or allergy problem to digestive problem, things start to disappear just because you did one simple key, one simple action.
But the action that you caused was immense.
You created circulation in the human body which hadn't been experiencing circulation.
And that can be an immense healing tool.
So I find that looking at herbs, since herbs cause change, Looking at the herbs as to what kind of change is my foundation that I'm after.
What kind of change do I really want here that will solve most of my problems and be as simple as I can.
So, yes, one cup of ginger tea can eliminate a lot of problems.
If, indeed, your problem is due to lack of circulation.
The immune system Being the entire human body, if you think in terms of the entire body, often you will solve all the little problems.
And that's why I labor ginger tea, because it's an herb that affects the entire human body by improving circulation.
And it's common and available to a lot of people.
No matter where you live?
No matter where you live, and if you want to become more self-sufficient, you initially buy some fresh ginger roots, and then stick them in pots and try to grow them.
And in time, you'll learn what they like and what they dislike.
And more often than not, you will actually grow, in time, you will grow your own ginger roots.
And that one plant, I've always, over the years, you know, people ask me what are my favorite plants, and my top ten hit lists, or, you know, and You know, it varies according to where you live, because I always believe that you should be able to find all the herbal medicines that you need in your general vicinity.
And to learn the plants where you live is the most important thing to do, because you can't rely on commerce all the time, especially can't rely on commerce, for the most part, for good quality herbs.
Because most people are just out to make a buck, and they're not necessarily worried about the quality, even though they I won't say that they just don't know better.
Most people do not take their own medicines.
It's a big concept.
Going out into your yard and actually taking a plant to heal yourself, which is frightening for a lot of people.
The lack of knowledge definitely causes a lot of questions.
And people just don't believe it could be that simple as going out and taking a weed out of your front lawn And taking it for a specific period of time and actually you will be healed.
Michael, why don't you just show them how easy it is and just go very quickly without getting into what all these plants can do or everything.
Just name off some common plants that anybody can find in their yard at any time during the growing season that they can use in this manner.
Well a lot of gardeners will already know a plant called Lamb's Quarters.
It's a very common weed that gets pulled up out of most people's yards or out of their gardens, and it's thrown off to the side as they're sticking in spinach seeds or such.
Basically, wild lamb's quarters is more of a food than medicine, but very common, found ubiquitous in the United States, very common in the United States.
And by eating lamb's quarters, you get more vitamin A and more vitamin C than that package of spinach seeds that you bought if they go to maturity.
Here's a wild weed that actually is better for you than spinach.
And people throw it away.
And people pull it out and toss it in the garbage or what have you.
It's just that lack of little bit of knowledge that here's a plant that volunteers, comes up very easily, needs very little watering for the most part.
and the How about dandelions?
through lack of knowledge.
What else?
How about dandelions?
Dandelions is a very good, what they classify as a blood tonic or a blood cleanser.
It helps to increase the kidney's filtering capacity, moving waste out of the body.
And I have enough of that in my yard alone to probably furnish half the health food stores across the country.
Yeah, definitely.
It's often sprayed and it's often eliminated or people strive to eliminate it out of their yards.
Always make sure it isn't sprayed with any herbicides or pesticides.
It's very important to try to pick clean grass just like it's important to pick clean herbs.
The list is immense.
There's, of course, peppermints which can be grown.
Many of these herbs It can initially be bought little small like catnip and peppermint and thyme and rosemary.
Many of the things we consider basic spices, especially like rosemary and thyme and sage.
These are all herbal medicines in their countries of origin, as well as here for those who know how to use them.
Rosemary is one of the most powerful antioxidants and is great in migraine.
It's also a nerve herb.
It actually helps to relax the nerves and use them in migraine headaches and to relax the muscles.
And that's rosemary, the spice that we just throw in on pasta or in the spaghetti sauce.
But in its herbal usage, it's a powerful medicine.
Thyme, sage, rosemary, marjoram, oregano, all of these are herbal medicines, but they get treated As spices and are not thought about any further than that.
And in their normal application in cooking their herbal qualities are actually lost due to high heat and boiling and all of these things.
Pretty much and often all those plants I mentioned can be grown and you always get better quality and you always develop a relationship and if you grow a plant or you pick a plant you learn more about it.
There are places to start.
I mean it's the basic books and start with the spices on your shelf and and learn what rosemary is good and all the herb books are taught to people who may use it for headaches or and there's a lot of research on rosemary as an antioxidant which means it helps to keep things with you and from breaking down so it actually helps in the aging process rosemary it also helps for better mental
And this is just a common spice, so I would often say maybe start with ginger, start with reading a little bit, and start with the spices on your rack.
Start looking, suspect the plants that are growing around you as having something to offer.
I won't say hidden agenda, but just look at them in a different light.
It's so funny but often people will walk right past the herbal medicine that could probably benefit them the most.
I have a perfect example of somebody who had colitis and we were walking down the sidewalk on the way to my shop and he was telling me his problem and we were talking about it and lo and behold I said stop for a moment.
I said you're telling me about all sorts of colitis.
And look at this plant grown out of the crack of the sidewalk.
It happened to be a plant called Canadian Fleabane, which is perfect for helping in that problem.
The T actually helped to heal the ulcers and improve the colon and the intestinal tract.
And I said, we were walking right past your herbal medicine growing out of the sidewalk.
And how amazing it can be, really, at times.
You know, I can bear testimony to all of this because when you were at the conference, I was on my feet from morning until late at night, except for just a few times when I actually got to sit down because I was the host of the whole thing.
I had other duties, and I had the intelligence service and the CAGI news service that I had to run.
I had to do a broadcast every night, so I had to prepare for that.
I had to make sure everybody was comfortable, and the speakers were comfortable, and people did things on time.
I have problems with my legs, and with one leg in particular, very serious problems, and some of it is in circulation, and some of it is others.
But I experience an awful lot of pain, and Michael could see this, and he was giving his talk, and he came to a particular section where he was talking about the bark of the Oh my gosh.
Come on, Michael.
The Aspen Bark.
I don't know why that slipped my mind.
We're covered with aspen here.
We live at 7,500 feet and 30 minutes from here you can be at 10,000 feet in the mountains.
Aspen is everywhere, and aspen is always peeling its bark on one part of the tree or another, and you don't even have to hurt the tree to get aspen bark.
You just walk up and break off a piece that's peeling.
He handed me some aspen bark, and he said, chew this, and your pain will go away.
And by golly, I chewed it, and it was a little bitter, but my pain went away, and nothing else had ever And has not ever since, except for that, made my pain completely go away.
What is it about aspen bark that does that?
Well, aspen bark, willow bark, and another little herb called meadowsweet all have salicylic acids in the salicylates, which are basically aspirins.
The first aspirin was isolated from meadowsweet in the 1830s by By Mr. Bear, who has actually got a patent on it.
And if you eat some aspen bark or some willow bark, what you're basically eating is a more complex form of aspirin.
It's actually safer and better for you to eat it in the plant form, because as everybody knows, too much aspirin can cause bleeding and ulcers and hemorrhaging.
And that is not very... I mean, you have to eat a lot of aspen bark and a lot of willow bark to actually get any Well, I can say this.
It makes my pain go completely away.
Even though aspirin is a very safe medicine for the most part, it still has side effects.
But the herb is complex and has many buffering agents which allow the polycylates to actually work much better.
Well, I can say this, that it makes my pain go completely away.
So when I'm suffering from extreme pain, I'll go get aspirin bark and nothing else will Aspirin will not do it.
Ibuprofen won't do it.
None of these things will make the pain go completely away.
They will alleviate it.
But aspirin bark actually makes it completely go away.
And as you said, you would have to take an awful lot of aspirin bark in order to have the same side effects that a couple of aspirins might cause you to have.
But you only have to have a little bit of aspirin bark to do much more That's right.
And I find that absolutely fascinating.
Michael, we're out of time.
Can you come back tomorrow night because we've barely scratched the surface.
Yeah, I'd love to.
That would work fine.
Okay, great.
Well I'm very happy to hear you say that because we just barely got started.
I hope you've enjoyed this hour and I hope you come back tomorrow night to welcome Michael back to visit with us and talk some more about herbal medicine and plants and shrubs and trees and what they can do to help us live a healthy, long, happy life.
Michael, thank you so much for being our guest tonight and I'll welcome you again tomorrow night.
And for all of you out here listening, good night.
And God bless each and every single one of you.
Thank you.
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