Why I Use Natural Remedies

What's a young woman living alone in San Francisco to do? I learned about natural remedies and still use them to this day. This is my story.

I was twenty, living alone in San Francisco, pregnant. My baby's father had gone to Southern California to work. He wasn't mentally prepared to be a father, but I happily looked forward to my baby's birth, with or without Dad on board.

Only a few months after finding out I was pregnant, I started itching - all over. I broke out with terrible eczema rashes - mostly on my arms, hands and legs. It was so... distressing! Anyone who has had eczema knows whereof I speak.

Of course I asked my gynecologist about this as soon as I saw her again - and was told that it was a natural side effect of the changing hormones of pregnancy. She prescribed cortisone cream - a lot of it! Unfortunately, while cortisone cream may soothe an eczema itch, it does little to heal it... and the problem continued, and continued, until I gave birth to Joshua, and then, the eczema simply went away.

During that pregnancy I found a flyer for a new educational opportunity in San Francisco. It was called Heliotrope University. Anyone who wanted to teach could advertise in the flyer. I looked through and identified one class I wanted to take - a class in Herbology that was taught by San Francisco herbalist Jeanne Rose in her Sunset / Haight area flat on Carl St.. I think I paid only $15 for that course, which included five or six evenings in her home with others enrolled in the course.

The first night I was there she pulled out a lavender book and said, "This is the book for this course. I want everyone to buy it." Very clever, because it was her own recently published first book, "Herbs and Things". It looked familiar to me, and I realized I'd already purchased it a few months before at one of the natural food stores on 9th Avenue. I'd been looking for natural cures for my eczema!

I guess you could say I'd had a long-time love affair with natural foods already. I became a vegetarian at the age of seventeen, breaking free from my family's traditional eating habits.

In Jeanne Rose's kitchen I had herbal tea for the first time, and learned about a variety of herbs useful for natural healing and longevity. These were lessons that have stayed with me a lifetime. I will always be grateful for what I learned there, and just for the blessing of being there and meeting her!

That was thirty-eight years ago (I'm writing this in 2010.) Throughout my life I've been learning sporadically about natural foods, healing methods including Reiki, emotional freedom techniques, Geniyyah Consciousness Transformation, and other energy healing methods, and herbs, essential oils, and the rest. I've integrated these things into my lifestyle and am maintaining the vegetarianism that's served me so well all these years.

Natural remedies are what are intended by the Creator, our Source... but there's no reason why they couldn't be scientifically studied and used in pharmaceutical medications to isolate healing ingredients and control portions - all for our benefit.

The problem arises when pharmaceutical companies include ingredients that are not for our true well-being, such as aspartame and fluoride, which are used as ingredients in medications. Aspartame is even used in children's over-the-counter pain medication. These are not healthy substances, and in fact, are quite harmful, but we're not even being told if this poison is being placed in the medications doctors prescribe.

I take a medication regularly for high blood pressure - but I have no idea what it is made of. It bothers me terribly that I feel I must take this medication but don't know if it contains things I normally wouldn't touch - like animal parts, fluoride, or aspartame. What am I putting into my body? I don't know. But I take it anyhow because it makes my blood pressure go down to what I've been told is a normal level. Whether it really is necessary to lower blood pressure that much is yet another question - see that link I just posted for more information on that.

The point is that so long as pharmaceutical companies put their greed before the well-being of people, we're not getting reliable, trustworthy products or information from them. Medications should come with ingredient lists - and I mean, information about the true natural source of ingredients, not just a list of scientific names of substances that are impossible for our brains to digest.

So long as I don't know what I'm using or putting into or on my body, I'm always going to prefer natural remedies... including herbs that grow in the fields, vegetables I can grow in my garden, and other things I can find natural source ingredients on. There are many effective natural remedies that I can trust a lot more than a pill that comes with no ingredient list.