HOMEOPATHY FOR HOMESTEADERS

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HERBAL REMEDIES

By B. Avalon Bruce, M.P.H.

Making a separate peace with illness.

Most country folks are comfortable using medicinal herbs to maintain the health and wellbeing of themselves and of their animals. After a lifetime of living in the city and three years of owning an herb and health-food shop, it was living independently that taught me that I had to radically rethink the way my family practices medicine.

We finally moved to the land in January, 1997. I began studying homeopathy a few months later and had to rely on my scant knowledge of it within weeks.

For starters, our first goat developed mastitis when her twin billys were weaned and sold. Since the reason we had a goat was for the milk, the infection was ruining both the goat's health and our nutrition. Several tubes of the antibiotic the vet had me squirt up into each nipple did little to cure her. Rather than try another trip to town and another round of the medication, I resorted to herbs and homeopathy for a few days. After trying capsules of Echinacea, Rishi, and Astragalus, I finally found that tiny white tablets of Pulsatilla seemed to get her over the mastitis almost miraculously.

Then, one hot July evening, we were moving bricks when my daughter, decked out in her swimsuit and hiking boots but sans the leather gloves I had suggested, was stung by a small scorpion. While the remedy Apis Mellifica is commonly suggested for bites and stings of insects and may quell anaphylactic reactions, Lachesis is a more specific remedy for scorpion stings. I had some on hand, gave her one tablet every twenty minutes for an hour, and had her soak her hand in a basin of cool water with a couple of ice cubes in it. Within forty-five minutes, the swelling and pain were gone and the color had returned to normal where she had been bitten. She had no further complaints but did agree to wear gloves in the future. Both one billy kid and my daughter, who came down with food poisoning on one town trip, have benefited from a few tablets of Arsenicum. They overcame bouts with diarrhea in record time.

History and Medical Mechanics

When the alternative could be a sixty mile round-trip drive to the nearest clinic, vet, or doctor, homeopathy is a valuable asset in the arsenal of every homesteader, both of the two-legged and four-legged variety. Developed in the early 1700s as a therapeutic system of medicine by Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician, homeopathy quickly spread through Europe to India and west to America in 1850. In the 1800s and early 1900s, four out of ten doctors in the U.S. were trained homeopaths, and there were over one hundred homeopathic hospitals. To this day, the Royal Family in Great Britain relies upon homeopathic physicians.

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