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The Green Pharmacy: New Discoveries in Herbal Remedies for Common Diseases and ConditionsBy James A. Duke PhD ISBN: 9781579541248Publisher: Rodale Books
Summary of The Green Pharmacy: New Discoveries in Herbal Remedies for Common Diseases and Conditions
There's still a lot to learn about the healing power of plants, James Duke points out, but what we do know is already prodigious. Much of that knowledge is gathered in The Green Pharmacy, an A-to-Z guide to that relies on plant-based medicines to cure what ails us. Between the listings, Duke crams personal anecdotes from a lifetime of studying herbs, berries, and bark. For example, he relates how he worried about telling a pregnant niece that ginger could help alleviate her morning sickness because he'd learned from a pharmacologist that ginger could also induce miscarriage. Then he solved the mystery: he'd recommended ginger tea, which contains about 250 milligrams of ginger. The Chinese, he learned, use about 80 times that much to end pregnancies--another testimony to the amazing versatility of these natural medicines. |
Review of The Green Pharmacy: New Discoveries in Herbal Remedies for Common Diseases and Conditions
This compendium of natural remedies, compiled by James Duke, offers herbal and occasionally nutritional solutions for coping with over one hundred different health issues. You can find "Arthritis soup", broth for strengthening bones, "Biblical brainfood soup", soup for strengthening your heart, herbs for dealing with allergies, tea from breast enlargement, even how to make your shampoo to get rid of dandruff.
I have an assortment of books with herbal remedies and this one is among the best of them. What puzzles me is that while they may mention which parts of the herbs to use, practically none of them mention that some constituents in herbs are water soluble, some are only soluble in alcohol, some in oil, and that different methods of preparing herbs will influence what you get out of those herbs.
