Tag: comfrey

Home Made Conditioner To Stimulate Hair Growth and Garden Plants and Valuable Herbs

DSC01941Yarrow Herbal Hair Conditioner To Stimulate Hair Growth

This is a very good multi-purpose conditioner which is recommended for hair growth, because it nourishes the hair follicles, as well as helping to make the hair shiny and glossy.  It is especially good for removing excess oil from the hair. The recipe is shown at the bottom of this article, which is mainly about wild medicinal herbs such as yarrow,  and how we should be protecting them.

Yarrow is the herbal ingredient for this hair conditioner.  Yarrow is one of our valuable healing medicinal herbs which used to be common in grassland.  Unfortunately, the makers of herbicides have seen to it that all these wonderful herbs used in medicines for thousands of years, are being eradicated from all our grasslands and wild places.  You will have to hunt for yarrow now, if you live in New Zealand, where agricultural chemicals are used excessively all over our beautiful country, in the cities,  in the parks, and even in the bush.  No remote, way-side place  is safe anymore  from the herbicides and pesticides of the grim reaper.

Hardly any foreign plants and trees are allowed to exist here now, and the Auckland City Council appears to have  a policy of ‘NO COLOUR – NO IMPORTED TREES OR FLOWERS’ in its plantings around the city and its big bus centres.  In these places, you will see just  bland greens everywhere,  smallish trees and shrubs, with large areas of strange brown or green grasses  growing in groups, which nature never intended anyway.  It seems that these gardens are designed to subdue and depress us.

After all the trouble taken by our ancestors to bring beautiful, colourful, and useful medicinal herbs, plants and trees here, now many of these specimens are almost non-existent.  The absence of colour is the dominating force around many parts of Auckland, and in the  newly created bus centres, which have no flowering trees at all, such as magnolias, or camelias, or flame trees, and certainly no lovely cottage garden plants such as we used to see in abundance around our city gardens.  Colourful trees and flowering plants are all being punished because they require more work than these self-maintaining wiry green and brown plants. These things are symbolic of the New Zealand-Auckland psyche now, as perpetuated by the current government:  Thriftiness  and harshness over beauty and delicacy and generosity. Note:  To be fair, though, these ghastly mono-plantings were begun by the Auckland City Council,  and are not the responsibility of the government.

If we want our medicinal plants to survive, we have to start cultivating them again.  If everybody kept just a dozen potted medicinal herbs, letting valuable weeds such as dandelion, yarrow, plantain, dock, and pennyroyal have their place in our potted gardens, then there would be no danger of losing them.  To plant these things in your garden in certain areas, to let them flourish there, would be even better, but, sadly, not everybody can own their own house and garden these days.  Try to plant a magnolia, or a wild rose, somewhere around the place. Tell other people to plant some of our old garden plants and trees, as well as some of those wild medicinal herbs, called weeds.

Back to the Recipe For Yarrow Herbal Conditioner:

Make a brew of strong yarrow tea.  Use a cupful of chopped yarrow, put into a small saucepan.  Add one and a half cups of boiling water. Infuse on the stove, on a low heat, for 5 minutes.  It should not boil, but just stay warm.

Now let the yarrow tea cool.  When it has cooled, mix half a cup of yarrow tea with half a cup of rum, and 3 egg yolks. Do not use the white of the egg for your Yarrow herbal Conditioner, but put those in the fridge to use elsewhere.

Beat all three ingredients together.

Now wash your hair with your regular soap or shampoo. I preferably use only sunlight soap instead of shampoo, because it does not contain harmful colourants, perfumes, and other chemicals.

Dry the hair and apply your home made herbal conditioner to the scalp and the hair.  Make sure the hair is evenly covered, and massage plenty into the scalp to nourish the hair follicles and promote circulation to the scalp.  This helps hair growth.  Leave the conditioner on the hair for 20 minutes, and then rinse off in warm water.  Make sure the water is not too hot, or else the egg yolk will coagulate.

The home made conditioner can be used once or twice a week to nourish the scalp, put a shine on the hair, and stimulate hair growth.

You can use the same formula for making another herbal remedy for the hair, such as nettles, or comfrey, or rosemary.  These are all silica-rich herbs which are beneficial for hair growth and the general health of the hair. Just follow the recipe as given above, but make your herbal tea with any of these healthful hair herbs.  Drinking a cup of  weak comfrey tea, or nettle tea, each day will help hair growth.  Make the Comfrey tea with only one leaf chopped up.  Infuse in 3 cups of  hot water for 5 minutes and drink one cup of this.

Hair Loss Male Multivitamins

Diet Is Related To Hair Loss:

Conventional treatment of male hair loss in the past has been with topically applied preparations  such as Minoxidil. But this is an expensive treatment which also has some bad side effects, as it is absorbed through the pores of the scalp and into the blood.  One  bad effect is that it can lower the blood pressure.

Rather than using chemicals to encourage hair growth, it is better to use Dietary measures, with Multivitamins,  Homeopathy, Herbs, and  Massage.   These things will naturally enhance your good health and help to prevent hair loss.

Multivitamins can help the condition of hair loss in males.  But with those additional vitamins, it is important to consider the diet.  Multivitamins will be much more effective when the diet is corrected.

How diet affects hair growth: To give you an example – In Japan, before World War II, men rarely became bald. The Japanese diet before the war was traditional:  It was an alkaline  macrobiotic diet based around rice, which included an abundance of sea-foods  and vegetables.  Only small amounts of animal products were used, and acid-forming wheat products and dairy products were almost unheard of.

After the war,  the Japanese diet became more Westernized according to “New Choices in Natural Healing”, edited by Bill Gottlieb from ‘Prevention’ magazine,  and published by Rodale Press, Pennsylvania, 1995.   More animal foods, meats, fats and milks, and sugar, and wheat products, were introduced, and people began to eat less of the healthy nourishing traditional foods.

It has been observed by researchers that balding began to occur in Japanese men after the second World War.  This is when the Japanese diet became more acidic, and less nourishing. It is also possible that the effects of radiation from the dreadful nuclear bomb at Hiroshima might have affected the health of people all over the country, resulting in male hair loss.

Some researchers think that diets high in animal meats and other products raise testosterone levels in men, and that this is the main physiological reason for men going bald.  However, I think that the general acidity of the Western diet, and its lack of nutrients, is related to hair loss in  both men and women.

Importance Of Iodine, Zinc and Selenium  For Hair Growth: These two minerals are very important for the health of the hair. The Japanese macro-biotic diet  contains plenty of fresh and dried sea-weeds and fish, and these foods are very high in iodine,  zinc, and other nutrients.  If your hair is balding, then supplements of zinc, iodine and selenium could be taken to supplement a good nourishing diet.

The Macro-biotic diet is very alkaline. Alkaline diets encourage hair growth.   It also is high in roughage, which is an important factor in keeping the bowels healthy and avoiding auto-intoxication. Keeping the bowels clean and functioning properly is going to help your hair growth, as this will help the absorption of important minerals and vitamins.  A diet which includes mainly rice, soy bean products such as tofu,  fish, sea weed and vegetables is a healthy, alkaline diet which is rich in nutrients.  This is very healthy for the hair and for the general health.

The Western diet, which often includes bread, cakes, meat and dairy products, is more acid forming and is not so good for the general health. It also encourages sluggish bowels, which is not good for the health. Special effort needs to be made to get the diet more alkaline and more nutritious.  Excluding bread and wheat, sugar, and dairy foods and replacing these foods with more rice, vegetables, fish, and fish oils, will help your hair growth.

Acidophilus Can Help Hair Growth: A daily addition of acidophilus in the diet can enormously benefit the  digestion, and the utilization of vitamins and minerals.  This, in turn, will help those  vital hair-growth nutrients to get to the hair follicles.

Taking a Handful of Ground Sesame Seeds:  This amount of sesame seeds will supply more calcium than a cup of milk.  The sesame seeds will provide essential fatty acids for the benefit of your general health, your nerves, and your hair growth.  Sesame oil is used in Ayurvedic medicine to help promote hair growth.

Too Much Salt Can Cause Hair Loss. For most people, salt in moderation is a good thing.  However, some people will salt their food no matter how much salt has gone into the cooking of it.  This excessive use of salt should be avoided.

Tea Coffee Alcohol: Cut down on stimulating drinks such as coffee and tea and alcohol.  These do not help hair growth.

Eliminate the Use Of Toxic Chemicals For Good: These are very bad for the general health.  Agricultural chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides can cause cancer, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, sterility, and make your hair fall out.

Vaccinations and over-use of Antibiotics and other medications  may trigger hair loss.

Vitamins For Stress:  Male hair loss has often been attributed to stress. A lack of the important nutrients which help you to deal with stress can effect hair loss.  These most essential stress-nutrients which are needed to counteract male hair loss are Zinc, Iodine, and Vitamin C and Vitamin E, Vitamin B complex. Selenium is also recommended in small amounts.  Vitamin C is an underestimated vitamin for treating hair loss, I feel, as Vitamin C is a great reliever of stress,  It also negates and removes toxins from the body, which in themselves create stress.  Taking 1000mg once or twice a day will help relieve stress.  A 1000mg of calcium ascorbate taken just before going to bed will help you to sleep better.

List of Multivitamins for Male Hair Loss:

Iodine: The recommended amount of Iodine, as given by Dr Wagner and Sylvia Goldfarb, Australian doctors, is:   150 mg daily.  They say that this amount of Iodine is beneficial for increasing the amount of thyroxin in the thyroid gland.  A deficiency of Iodine in the diet causes the thyroid gland to under-produce thyroxin, and this, in turn, causes hair thinning and hair loss.  Of course, if you were in Japan and eating that beautiful macrobiotic diet which included fish and sea-foods which were gathered before the Fukushima nuclear disaster, then you would probably not need that extra Iodine in your diet.  But getting enough Iodine from radiation-free sources will be a problem for people for quite some time, now that the radiation has leaked, and is being dumped, into the sea.  Sea food will be contaminated everywhere, to some extent.

Liquid Iodine for Hair Growth:  Iodine may be applied directly to the scalp a couple of times a week.  Use only one or two finger-dabs – no more than 2 drops – and rub this into the scalp.  It does not matter if the Iodine does not reach everywhere on the scalp, as when you wash your hair, this will get diluted and get distributed all over the scalp.

Besides Iodine, Dr Wagner and Sylvia Goldfarb also recommend the following Vitamins as being important for hair loss and balding:

Vitamin E – 400 I.U. daily.

Wheat germ oil, which also contains Vitamin E –  One teaspoon daily, or 4 capsules daily.

Beta carotene Vitamin A:  50,000 I.U. daily,

Biotin, 5 mg daily:  Dr Wagner and Sylvia Goldfarb  say that Biotin is an essential supplement,  because hair follicles are made up mostly of biotin and cysteine.

L-Cysteine, taken twice daily in 500mg doses can help prevent hair loss.  Dr Wanger says that 3000mg of Vitamin C should be taken as well as the Cysteine, to prevent kidney stones from forming.  He recommends three times the amount of Vitamin C to the amound of Cysteine take.

They recommend 50 mg of Manganese, to be taken twice daily.

Fatty acids should be included from foods or a supplement.  One of the best food sources of the fatty acids are from ground sesame, almonds, and sunflower seeds.

Zinc: Interesting that they do not mention Zinc in their list – I am sure that this mineral has accidentally been omitted from their list, as most people need extra Zinc:  New Zealand soils are especially low in Zinc.  Eating plenty of onions and garlic will help to up your Zinc intake.  Onions and garlic have a high content of Zinc.

Vitamins For Restoring Hair Colour: Dr Wagner and Sylvia Goldfarb recommend taking a B complex, 50mg, twice a day; with PABA twice a day, 300mg each dose; Pantothenic acid, 300 mg twice daily; and Folic acid, taken once a day in a 5mg dose.

Selenium to Restore Hair Colour:  Some experts in nutritional medicine recommend Selenium to restore hair colour, but this one is not included in Dr Wagner’s list.  Of course, there are many different routes which will arrive at the same destination:  It  might not be necessary to include Selenium if you are taking all the other supplements which Dr Wagner and Sylvia Goldfarb suggest – this is because their list of recommended supplements might actually enhance your absorption of other minerals and vitamins, making it unnecessary to supplement selenium, and other more obscure minerals,  in your multivitamins.

Dr Wagner’s and Sylvia Goldfarb’s wonderful book is entitled: “How To Stay Out Of The Doctor’s Office:  An Encyclopedia For Alternative Healing”.  It was published by the National Library of Australia.  No date.

Homeopathy Which Can Help Reduce Hair Loss: Dr  John H. Clarke recommends Arnica 1,8h for baldness; Kali carb 6,6h for falling hair with dryness; Fluor.ac  6,gtt.ii.6h for falling off;  Depressing emotions with falling hair, Phos. ac. 1, 6h;  Nit. ac. 30,8h if falling hair occurs with humid eruptions of the scalp, with a sensitive scalp; Bryonia 1, 8h. if the hair is very greasy.

Herbs To Help Hair Growth:  Taken internally as teas, or added to meals –  cayenne and ginger, because these both increase the circulation to the hair follicles.   Horsetail, nettles and comfrey teas are all good because they are high in silica, which aids hair growth.

Improve the Circulation with Walking, Swimming or other Light Exercise. This will help hair growth, and will also help to disperse excess electro-magnetic energy from the body.  Radiation, and electro-magnetic energy is thought to be a major reason for hair loss and baldness in men.   Men who work in offices, or with electronic equipment are especially vulnerable.  Walking, especially bare-feet, takes this excess magnetic energy out of the body,  reduces tension, and results in better health.

Yoga inverted postures can help the circulation to the head and the hair follicles.  Ask your doctor or health practitioner before you do those head-stands, though.  If you have a heart defect, or blood pressure problems, or you are taking medication of any kind, then yoga headstands and other inverted postures may not be good for you.

Essential Oils Can Be Rubbed into the Scalp To Help Hair Growth: Lavender, Rosemary,  Cajeput, Eucalyptus, Cedar, Thyme, Marjoram, Basil, can all be used externally on the scalp.  Use only one or two drops to about a tablespoonful of almond or grapeseed oil.

 

 

How To Make Liquid Organic Comfrey Fertilizer

Nitrogen-Rich Comfrey Fertilizer

Here is how to make Comfrey Fertilizer for your garden.  Comfrey is rich in many nutrients, including nitrogen, and natural phosphates which are all good for the soil.

Using natural fertilizers such as Comfrey Fertilizer will encourage the worms to come.  Worms are really beneficial for your garden, as they aerate the soil, as well as carry nutrients from the top of the ground to the roots of your plants.

To Make your Organic Comfrey Fertilizer:  Simply put some comfrey, leaves, roots, flowers, and all, into a bucket.  You can almost half fill the bucket with Comfrey plant material.  Fill up the bucket with water, and leave the bucket to stand outside in a quiet place,  with a loose-fitting lid on the top to keep insects from falling in.

You can safely spray this over your plants to good effect.  The high silica content, and perhaps the allantoin too, help to discourage insects and fungus or bacteria from attacking your plants.

Add Potency To The Organic Fertilizer By Adding Onion or Garlic: Make your own natural organic insecticide and plant anti-biotic by adding left over onion skins, or garlic to your mix.     These can be a good addition to the Comfrey organic fertilizer, as garlic and onion  help to discourage pests and protect against diseases.  You would add these things into the original fertilizer mix, with the  comfrey and water, at the beginning of the process.

How Comfrey Was Used To Heal Bones

The Miracle Herb:   Comfrey, Knitbone, or Boneset: Silica and  Allantoin are the magic ingredients. Symphytum officinale, or Comfrey, is known by the common names:  knitbone, boneset, consolida, nipbone, bruisewort, church bells, and suckers, and allheal.  One of its more uncommon names is Abraham Isaac and Jacob:  This refers to the changing colours of Comfrey’s flowers, which resemble  ‘Church bells’.

Comfrey is a wonderful healer of wounds, and burns. I have used it with great success on burns.  For the healing of bones, I have no experience,  but Comfrey was used as a bone-healer in times long gone, and there is much to support this in the writings of the old herbalists such as Culpepper.

Comfrey Nutrients:  Apart from its healing components, Silica and Allantoin, Comfrey supplies potassium, iron, B12 and Calcium, which make it a wonderful tonic tea.

Comfrey Fertilizer: Comfrey is not just a great soothing tonic for people, it also a tonic for the garden, as it is rich in nitrogen and phosphates:  By soaking the leaves in water for several weeks, a nutrient-rich liquid fertilizer is obtained which you can dilute and spray over your vegetable and flower garden.  It is good to see Comfrey, which is banned,  included in Brenda Little’s list of important garden herbs in her book “Companion Planting in New Zealand”.  This fine little book is  illustrated by Ken Gilroy and published by New Holland, Auckland, New Zealand, 2000.

When Brenda’s book was published in 2000, Comfrey was already banned.  It was banned so that the drug companies could benefit through our being deprived of Comfrey.  I believe we should all campaign to defy this ruling, and get Comfrey back into our gardens.  It is too valuable as a home remedy, and as a garden nutrient, to be manipulated by the drug companies decision, banned and forgotten.

Comfrey’s common names  ‘Knitbone’ and ‘Boneset’ give an indication of Comfrey’s merits as a bone healer. The Way To Use Comfrey For Bone Breakage is to be found in the book ‘The Illustrated Plant Lore:  A unique pot-pourri of history, folklore and practical advice’, Guild Publishing, London, 1985.

The author is Josephine Addison, and it is illustrated by Rosemary Wise with a forward by David Bellamy, the famous naturalist  and wild-life campaigner.

Was  Comfrey  Used To Heal Bones and Breakages? :  Here is what Josephine has to say about the way Comfrey was used  for bone breakages, strains, swellings and bruises:

The method was to pound up a good amount of comfrey root to a pulp.  The macerated pulp was then squeezed of its juice, and this juice was applied directly to the affected skin or bone area.  For a breakage, the mashed pulp was put into a piece of linen cloth which was wrapped about the breakage.  The limb was then put into a splint to stop movement of the limb so that the bone could heal.

The mucilage in Comfrey,  is rich in Silica and Allantoin.  Both these compounds are great healers:  Allantoin is a powerful  cell proliferant, and Silica helps in the healing of tissues by hardening and helping to draw all the other necessary elements in for the healing.

Comfrey The ‘Miracle’ Healing Herb/Why Was It Banned?

Comfrey The Forgotten Herb

DSCO 1639

Just why has Comfrey, Symphytum officinale, become a forgotten herb?  Its value as a healing medicine has been recorded over a long period of time.  It has a long arm of proven efficacy as a healer of burns, a soother of the digestive tract, a strengthener of the teeth,  a healer of broken bones, and is a great tonic for falling hair and brittle nails.  And this is why Comfrey was known as The ‘Miracle’ herb.

Comfrey is high in Silica, which is a healing component.  Another aid to healing in Comfrey is the component Allantoin, which is a cell-proliferant. A cell-proliferant encourages the cells of the body to grow again:  bone growth, skin repair, and hair and nail growth are all affected beneficially by the Allantoin in  Comfrey, as well as its abundant silica.   And Comfrey has Mucilage, a slimy material which helps healing.   This means that Comfrey, with its Allantoin and Silica, and Mucilage, and Vitamins, is truly a ‘Miracle Herb’.   Comfrey can heal just about anything.

Well – I will explain why Comfrey has become a forgotten herb:  The reason is because  Comfrey was such a valuable household remedy, it often took away the need to visit the doctor and get a prescription medicine.  Which meant that both doctor and drug company were deprived of quite a lot of money, if you consider how many people were using home remedies, such as comfrey, during the 1980’s and 1990’s.

‘Research’ into Comfrey was, I think, manipulated by the drug companies to achieve a specific result, one which would convince the public that Comfrey should indeed be banned.

The article which I read in New Zealand, which was published just before comfrey was banned pretty much all over the western world,  said that ‘Studies had shown that there was a relationship between Comfrey and Cancer”, because PIGS which had been fed Comfrey for three months had developed cancer.  The article did not say just how many pigs had developed cancer, and nor did it tell us what other food, if any, the pigs were fed.  I suspect that the pigs were given naught else to eat except Comfrey.

And the result of this mind-boggling manipulation of facts and figures has resulted in the drug companies gaining complete control over the healing substances in Comfrey, the main one being Allantoin.

It is illegal in New Zealand to grow Comfrey in your garden.  You cannot buy fresh Comfrey anywhere, and I think that even the herbal comfrey pills have been taken off the market.

Making it illegal to have Comfrey in your garden, because ‘research’ has shown Comfrey may cause cancer, is just ridiculous.  The only people to benefit from this ruling is the drug companies who use comfrey components in medicines and cosmetics, and who will now have increased sales of other prescription medicines because we, the public, do not have access to Comfrey.

Comfrey can be used internally and externally. It can be taken internally as a tea.  Comfrey can be used externally on skin and bones. Comfrey aids the healing of burns.  Comfrey poultices would have been useful for people who had suffered radiation burns at Fukushima.  Comfrey was often known as ‘Knit-bone’, because of its ability to mend broken bones very quickly.  It is good for all kinds of skin troubles such as eczema and psoriasis, and ulcers on the legs.   Comfrey is good for the digestion and intestines, and has been used in cases of  Ulcers, Colitis, and Irritable bowel syndrome.  Comfrey has been used to treat people with cancer, in combination with other remedies.

Comfrey needs to be brought back into household herbal medicine.  This will benefit people, rather than harm them.  Of course Comfrey could be problematic if you were to have too much of it.  But you can die if you eat too many carrots, too, and whoever would want to do that?

Comfrey never caused cancer in people, because we never had a steady diet of it for three months, as the pigs did.  Comfrey has been banned for well over a decade now, but cancer is on the increase.  Cancer statistics really have nothing to do with Comfrey.

Postscript 2 April 2013 – Well, someone commented a few months ago that they had seen comfrey for sale in NZ this season.  Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I spotted two lone little comfrey plants in our local plant store.  I bought one, and a friend bought the other. I don’t know what is happening here – have our laws prohibiting the growing of comfrey been relaxed?  Or have people simply forgotten that it was put on the ‘banned’ list?  Either way, it is a good thing that comfrey is about again.

Shop-Bought Comfrey Is Ruined Medicinally, And Is Inedible