by ken winston caine

Reliable, detailed monographs on medicinal herbs are available free, online, from the North Carolina Consortium on Natural Medicines.

They come in three flavors:

1. For health professionals.

2. For everyone else.

3. For growers.

You can access any of them.

They are limited to herbs that can be grown in North Carolina — so you won’t find an extensive list of medicinal herbs here. But the information you will find is very thorough and well vetted.

Find them here: (more…)

by ken winston caine

Naturopath Leslie Taylor maintains an extraordinary database of known information about medicinal herbs on the rain-tree.com website. A nice feature: It includes the scientific (and other) citations.

Much of the information comes from Taylor’s book, The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs.

To look up an herb, go to: (more…)

by Ken Winston Caine

Cleveland Clinic medical researchers think they have uncovered a major nutritional factor in several common types of hair loss plaguing both men and women.

Even better, they report that a pennies-per-day nutritional supplement can regrow lost hair.

However, the supplement they use, elemental iron, can be dangerous, even fatal, so don’t rush out and buy a bottle of cheap iron pills.

Iron toxicity can build up without obvious symptoms. Iron supplements are best taken with periodic medical monitoring.

About 15 percent of people are super sensitive to iron and can quickly develop toxicity. If you don’t know whether you are one, ask your doctor to test you. And ask also for a ferritin test to determine your true iron levels.

Oft-ignored, minor deficiency of iron implicated in balding

Medicine has long recognized that severe iron deficiency could lead to hair loss, but the Cleveland Clinic researchers contend that even slightly lower than optimum blood levels of iron (more…)

The father of clinical medicine, 17th century English doctor Thomas Sydenham said that sometimes “I have consulted my patients’ safety and my own reputation most effectually by doing nothing at all.”

Unfortunately, malpractice (more…)

Every medical (and naturopathic) student is taught Hippocrates’ first principle of medicine:

“Primum non nocere,” Latin for “First, do no harm.” Or, sometimes translated as, “Above all, do no harm!”

(It is almost always cited with the exclamation point at the end of the sentence.)

One little problem, says researcher Cedric M. Smith, MD, FCP: Hippocrates didn’t say this.

In a Journal of Clinical Pharmacology article, (more…)

A just-reported study conducted by the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, found no link between even heavy marijuana use and lung, neck, throat, mouth, tongue and esophogus cancers.

The large and comprehensive study examined more than 2,000 people, including more than 1,200 cancer (more…)

A decade ago medical science discovered that something in grapefruit juice spiked levels of certain prescription medications.

The antihistamine Seldane was pulled from the market in 1996 because this interaction could lead to strokes.

Chemists at Florida’s Citrus & Subtropical Products Lab report that they believe they have isolated the substance that causes this reaction. And what that means for you (more…)