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

I have just made the most remarkable 3,000-year-old discovery that instantly soothes aching, inflamed muscles and nerves and relieves pain and inflammation.

And can’t believe that it’s taken me all this time. I must have first read about this technique at least 30 years ago and “learned it” again in numerous herbal medicine courses over the years.

The forgotten, ancient medical miracle used thousands of years ago in India and China and in other folk-medicine traditions in more recent centuries?

The ginger compress.

Just a hot, moist pack of ginger placed over acutely inflamed muscles and nerves.

I’d never tried it, having lost faith in herbal compresses years ago when I found that most I experimented with seemed to have no discernible healing power beyond the effect of the moist heat. Not so with the ginger compress. It really works. REALLY works. Fast.

It costs pennies, takes seconds to make. You probably already have the makings on hand in your house if you raid the spice cabinet and improvise a bit. And it instantly draws away the swelling and pain… Even better, the effect is lasting.

I’ll tell you how I made it in a moment. (more…)

by Ken Winston Caine

Soy milk, applied daily to patches of unwanted body hair, stunts its growth, strips its pigment and reduces the diameter of the follicle and hair shaft, according to this fascinating patent application.

The effect is substantial and noticeable within five weeks, according to the mouse and human studies (with photos) presented in the application.

Interestingly, soy milk fortified with (more…)

by Ken Winston Caine

You may already know that cinnamon is an anti-inflammatory — one that nicely complements ginger and turmeric.

Now test tube, animal and human studies are confirming that cinnamon lowers blood sugar.

As little has 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoonful of cinnamon per day lowered blood sugar by roughly 20% in a recent U.S. Agricultural Research Service study involving 60 diabetic volunteers who were not using insulin.

Added bonus: Their cholesterol and tryglyceride levels dropped, too.

Double bonus: Other studies have shown (more…)

by Ken Winston Caine

You’ve seen cartoon-like caricatures of traveling medicine show docs hawking magical remedies from the backs of wagons.

You’ve seen reproductions of the antique classified and display ads of patent “cures” sold by mail order in that same era.

Both types of medicines and tonics were ridiculed mostly into oblivion by the evangelists of early scientific medicine that took root in the 1920s and ’30s.

They were dismissed as snake oil. As nothing but 30 percent alcohol.

Or 40 percent alcohol.

Or 70 percent alcohol.

“No wonder they make people feel good,” snorted the white-coated crusaders for (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…)

Herbal supplement manufacturers don’t stress this. (A bottom-line issue for them?) Yet it was foundational in the herbal texts and trainings I went through in the ’70s, ’80s and even early ’90s. I don’t hear it any more.

And I wonder why? It didn’t suddenly quit being true.

I was taught by traditional Chinese, English and American herbalists, that you should always take herbal remedies in cycles, or “rounds.” Such as, take the herb (or herbal combination) for two weeks, then abstain for a week, then resume for two weeks, and then abstain for a week. Or, take for two months and then take four months off. (Sort of a wash, rinse, repeat routine.)

This is because the body adjusts to the herbs, adapts to the herbs, and then develops tolerance or resistance, and the herbs lose their (more…)