learn alternative medicine

As soon as possible I’m going to take classes for holistic medicine and energy healing at Columbus state community college. :)

its something i’d love to do but its just not the right time just now

more of a long term thing :)

Over the past 17 years, I’ve been almost obsessively into the use of herbs for healing purposes. Of course, having spent such a long period of time studying these things, my medicine cabinet has been satisfactorily stocked with the basics: Feverfew (for my migraines), Peppermint oil (aromatherapy for tummy-aches), Echinacea (for respiratory ailments), Skullcap (for insomnia), Dong Quai and Black Cohosh (for those not-so-friendly period pains)...as well as some not so basic items, such as Birm (an immune system modulator that comes from a mixture of herbs native to Ecuador) and a variety of special homemade tinctures for varying ailments. It seems a brilliant idea to use the things that grow naturally on our planet, rather than chemicals produced in a lab and put into pill form.

Sometimes alternative medicine is just simple common sense. I’ve been interested in holistic healing all of my adult life. My mother and grandmother practiced some home remedies, and I was fortunate to read the book, “Back to Eden” among others in my young adult life, later to read “Prescription for Nutritional Healing” and many others.

One event that occurred over 20 years ago, before I was a nurse, has stuck in my mind and really cemented my desire for alternative healing. It’s an example of simple common sense. I was in a small-town hospital after the birth of a baby and having had a tubal ligation with a larger than normal abdominal incision. I had student nurses who checked on me. I’d tell them, “My stomach hurts.” That’s all that would be said. They’d consult the nurse, roll me over, and give me a shot for pain. That would knock me out, then I’d awaken wild-eyed because I don’t react well to medication. This went on for a couple of days. Finally, I told the student, “My stomach hurts”, and the nurse on duty came to ask me about it. She was a nurse of advanced years. She probably could have retired many years earlier because of her vast number of years in nursing. She asked me a couple of questions about where and what type of pain, then she said, “Have you had a bowel movement?” She offered me a glass of prune juice, and in about an hour my bowels and stomach pain were relieved. That was a lesson in nursing care that has stuck with me in my career that came later; but it was a basic lesson in life that vividly demonstrated the need to assess our needs holistically and exercise simple common sense in utilizing remedies. Sometimes the answer really is as simple as drinking more water to eliminate toxins, gargling with warm salt water for a sore throat, using a bleach solution externally for a fungal infection, or drinking a glass of prune juice for constipation.