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

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…)

Who coined the phrase, integrative medicine?

Andrew Weil has popularized the term. Has been integrative medicine’s greatest ambassador. Created incredible demand for it.

Pretigious medical schools across the country have developed departments of integrative medicine in the last decade. (Including Duke University, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, San Francisco, University of Arizona, Columbia University, University of Maryland, University of New Mexico, Thomas Jefferson University, University of Massachusetts, Albert Einstein/Yeshiva University, Georgetown University, and the University of Minnesota, among others.)

I don’t recall being aware of the terms, integrative health, integrative medicine, integrative healing, before about 1988 or 1989.

Earliest reference I can find to “integrative health” is this (more…)