Essiac Essentials

driving along a highway one evening, watching the most amazing sunset. The clouds were forming and re-forming around the sun, shot through with great rays of light fanning out across the western sky. A few miles further on, our driver suddenly swerved off the road beside yet another tree — and we found what we had been looking for in the front yard of a house just off the highway. Mali’s hands and face were itching and burning all the way back home, leaving us in no doubt as to the authenticity of our discovery!
    Ten-year-old powdered Slippery elm bark is sold as a coarse powder for external use and a fine powder for internal use. The inner bark was listed as an official drug in the United States and is included in the list of Canadian medicinal plants. Collected in the spring when the leaf buds are swelling with sap, it has an abundance of cells with a high mucilage content surrounding each fibre. These swell on contact with water, producing a lubricating or laxative effect when administered topically or by mouth. It is a cell proliferant, promoting rapid healing and restoration, and exhibits soothing, softening and nutritive properties.
    The inner bark, extracted from freshly broken-off Slippery elm twigs, made a favourite chewing gum and thirst quencher in the frontier days. An early American ethno-botanist observed the Native American Indians, pioneers and settlers of the West using the bark internally for urinary and bowel complaints, scurvy, diarrhoea, dysentery, cholera infantum, and as a nutritious food. Externally it was used to treat ulcers, tumours, swellings, boils, abscesses, chilblains, burns and sores. The powdered bark was added to rendered animal fat to keep it from going rancid, while soaked strips of the bark were wrapped around meats to preserve them.
    Native American Indians used the bark to make tea to ease fevers and colds, to treat bowel complaints and for pregnant women in labour. Mixed with milk or water, it made an easily digestible food for newly weaned babies and for treating stomach ulcers. The Ojibwe made a tea from the herb to treat sore throats. Both Indians and settlers used the outer bark to make ropes and baskets.
    In some states in the United States, local law does not allow the harvested bark pieces to be any longer than 1.5ins in length to discourage the old Native American Indian practice of inserting them into the cervix to induce abortion.
     
    ANALYSIS
    Vitamins : Antioxidants A, C+P; predominant source of vitamin B-complex in the tea; anti-haemorrhagic vitamin K.
     
    Minerals : Free radical scourging manganese, selenium and trace elements of zinc; calcium; sodium; chromium; trace elements iron; phosphorus; silicon.
     
    Other constituents : High mucilaginous content; organic acid as gallic acid; phenols (including antioxidant tannins}; starches; sugars; beta-sitosterol and a polysaccharide, both of which have shown “significant activity” (Pettit, G.R. et al., Antineoplastic agents).
     
     

    Turkey Rhubarb/Rheum palmatum
     
    A handsome ornamental perennial from the Polygonaceae family originating from the mountains of western China and Tibet, Turkey rhubarb or Chinese rhubarb grows up to 8ft/2.43m high when in flower and thrives in deep, moist soil, in full sun or partial shade. Growth begins early in March, the creamy flower clusters appearing on the distinctive stalk in May. An innocent little plant with three leaves in an eight inch pot bought in the beginning of May at the ,).y , Royal Horticultural Society’s Garden in Wisley, UK was planted in a small converted vegetable plot in southern England. It became a magnificent specimen measuring 5' high X 5'11" wide x 3' deep (152 x 180 x 91cms) at the end of the following July. Fourteen leaves sprouted in three months, nine of them averaging 2' 6" x 2'10" (76 x 86cms).
    Rhubarb was one of the first plants to be imported from Europe to North America. Already familiar across Asia and Asia Minor, this species was the first true rhubarb to be introduced into Britain when Dr. James Mounsey from Trailflat, Dumfriesshire brought the seeds of both Rheum palmatum and Rheum rhaponticum back to Scotland after his resignation from the Russian Imperial Court in 1762. He gave them to the Professor of Botany at Edinburgh University. Of the two, Rheum palmatum has proved the most difficult to grow in England, being liable to root rot. However a single root dug from a six-year-old plant can weigh as much as 36 pounds.
    Known to