@Lookout @Lookout knowledge alive in America. He lived and practiced through a time when many herbalists were harassed and prosecuted for practicing medicine. It was an effort to stop watching the video to finish my comment responses.

Yellow root has deep cultural history in the south. I like how the author compares it to Oregon Grape a native plant growing on my place.

I use yellowroot in a similar vein as how I use oregon grape root (Berberis spp., Berberidaceae) or goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis, Ranunculaceae). I wouldn’t say they are interchangeable, just as I wouldn’t confuse any long-haired, gray-bearded, barefoot man on the street for my husband.

Chinese doctors are paid for their services. In historical past there were times treatment had to be successful for payment. A failure to cure a prominent individual could result in execution.

are paid when their clients are well, and not paid if they are ill? I've always heard that but don't know if it is true.

We had a well known herbalist living down the valley, Tommy Bass. He had bright blue eyes and didn't claim he could heal but merely give ease. Here's a link to a film about him with a transcript too. http://www.folkstreams.net/film-detail.php?id=83
He came to mind because of the use of herbs in Chinese medicine.

My primary go to herb is yellow root which I use to make a tea. It is great for sore throats.

I hope all is well on the homestead and the livestock is healthy and happy.

@QMS Forever chemicals and toxic substances in our personal living space and exterior environment has severe health impacts. Safety features keep being added to various commercial products to prevent harm and induce us to buy a new modern product. Yet little or no attempt is made to minimize or eliminate the risk of man made chemicals. Not just by government. I have a neighbor with a water contamination problem localized to the property who continues to drink, bath and use the well water for the domestic household. It is too expensive and inconvenient to make other arrangement. Even a short term solution of using containers to carry water from my well to her house. But time and energy is taken to deal with the health issues.

Our local hospital uses “just-in-time” scheduling practices for its nursing and patient care staff based on hospital admissions. Plus forced overtime and on-cal during off hours to reduce the need to create more employee positions. Patients staying several days may see a different nurses every day. The local Community College keeps churning out new nurses to feed in the system burning out the employees. If it is hard on the employee, how does it effect patient care?

Came across a couple of health related stories at naked capitalism this morning.

Dark Waters -- forever chemicals
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/12/dark-waters-tells-the-origin-sto...

and

Hospital staffing problems
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/12/why-hospitals-never-have-enough-...

Is the cure worse than the disease?
Cheers

@smiley7 not keeping up with inspections.

Plants making drugs for U.S. consumers are supposed to be inspected every few years, according to a risk-based system. However, in the past decade more than 2,500 facilities, both foreign and domestic, have gone more than five years without an FDA drug-quality inspection, a KHN analysis found. The FDA has no drug-quality inspection records over the past decade for more than 1,200 domestic plants and nearly 400 foreign plants, excluding those that make animal drug products, according to the analysis. Gottlieb said in December that he hopes to clear the backlog of uninspected drug facilities by the end of September 2019.
...
David Gortler, a former FDA medical officer, said most drug plant inspections involve looking over paper records and trusting that they’re real, instead of randomly testing medicines.

“Anybody can write down anything on a piece of paper,” said Gortler, who is now a consultant at FormerFDA.com. He added that FDA inspectors aren’t reprimanded — or even told — if they’ve passed a plant that issued a recall shortly thereafter.

Unsafe products is one of the risks we assume with each medication we need to take for treatment. for a long time no one was looking for the contaminant. have not found information as to when it became available in the drug products, only when it was found.

Some people become knowledgeable on causes, home monitoring parameters alternative treatments, preventative techniques only the narrow information related to their medical information. The relationship between lung conditions and acid reflux is interesting. There are numerous home remedies for acid reflux including slippery elm which your neighbors probably collected it locally.

a major concern is where and under what conditions are our modern medicines manufactured. Many oversees and i frankly don't have knowledge about regulations and inspections. Recently for instance, a daily over-the counter drug i used for heartburn was recalled due to a cancer chemical found in it.

Afraid i'm a novice with it comes to medicinal natural remedies, there is an old rich family in the community, purveyors of natural products the surrounding mountaineers gathered and sold them 100-150 years ago.

Many thanks for this OT and enjoy you Oregon day.

@Raggedy Ann the only accessible medical care was the home remedy and local nonphysician practitioners. Lucky for you to have knowledgeable family members.

Have a good weekend.

My mother was born in 1908 and had all kinds of home remedies for things. My children only saw doctors when my mom couldn't do anything for them. Between her and her sister, my kids grew up very healthy!

Hope all is well with you on your farm!

Have a great Friday and weekend, everyone!

@detroitmechworks Mutual Benefit and Welfare is a welcome relief from the competitiveness in many parts of American life.

My journey of learning this past year has expanded to martial art traditions. Been surprised of the Chinese medical theories permeating the various practices. General physical movement improves health. A focused program like Judo can enhance the progress, especially with experienced sensei to guide one.

MUCH better. The constant daily calisthenics also help.

Good health, I've seen from experience is a matter of daily maintenance, not expensive medications. My medication is cheap, plentiful and effective. Breaking a sweat every day keeps me focused.

All medicine really is just observations about what works. I've had enough time to know that exercise every day and writing every day are the two things that keep me healthy. Last time I went to the hospital for a BROKEN BONE, all they did was tell me to not sleep on that side for a while. Kept the routine, modified my calisthenics, and boom... got a nice big lump on my collarbone now, but I'm doing better than ever at Judo. My O'goshi is really coming along, and I also am enjoying Harai Goshi as well, which works very well with my tendency to stand on my toes while fighting. (I prefer a slightly higher stance than recommended. I'm working on it, but it's a hard habit to break, especially when I find it easier to go in for throws on my toes than only slightly elevated.)

Random thoughts, but the philosophy of Mutual Benefit and Welfare really does apply. You don't show up when you're sick, that's not helping everybody else. You take your falls, because it's also training YOU... How to fall. Just a long, basic instruction.

The thought does come to mind that it's similar to an old Mystery Cult, in which you simply gain a fuller understanding of the same story, over and over, until it becomes a part of you. Yes, I'm of the opinion that religion does have a purpose in health, in that it can inspire behavior that is beneficial to society. Problem is that all our current cults demand subservience, not service. Big difference.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ItHLz5WEA]

@enhydra lutris I have observed were based on sound scientific research and modified by anecdotal observation, plus clinical markers where appropriate. Somehow there is this belief personalized medicine can only come about by future technology, including DNA information being developed by corporations.

Personalized medicine and diet has been promised as the practice of the future most of my life. Yet I have seen it successfully implemented. 1) By a few physicians who listened to their patients feedback and made adjustments appropriately. 2) By individuals who had given up on professionals and designed their own programs.

Thought provoking response - thanks

topic. Trad med vs modern med presents a window on a lot of things, including a frequent dip into the errors of mono-causal thinking and other methodological problems. The more we learn about biology, the more the human organism begins to resemble an ecosystem on one hand, and a factory on the other. Cities, towns, societies and economies, on the other hand begin to resemble organisms. Modern/western science is highly analytic and hence prone to over-abstraction and oversimplification. It is all input=>process=>output == throughput in a very simple and simplistic sense, but as a model that just sucks immeasurably. Nonetheless, that view underlies so much of what passes for economics and business management that it is positively scary.

One of the errors inherent in mechanized application of overly paradigmatic rule based thinking is the automatic rejection of "anecdotal evidence", which is, as we all know "not data". If an entire culture chews willow bark to alleviate certain symptoms, and none debunk it, it can in fact be bunkum, clever marketing and propaganda, or some religion based mass placebo effect, or it could be a simple and "primitive" manner of ingesting the basic active ingredient of aspirin. If all such folk remedies were always rejected we'd lack a ton of what we think of as western medicine. Another side of that is that what works for me might not work for you, biomes and biosystems are all different. A February 19, 2019 article in Quartz entitled New Science Shows Managing Blood Sugar Isn’t About Counting Calories or Carbs -- Put simply: there is no one-size-fits-all diet. ( https://getpocket.com/explore/item/new-science-shows-managing-blood-suga... ) takes a peek at just one example of a scientific study that tried to delve into the effect of just one part of the fact that we are complex systems with the finding that "yes, we can tailor diets to specific biomes to have at least some specific desired outcomes to some degree." So that right there means that, for practical purposes, anecdotal evidence of how ones own biosystem reacts to things is, in fact, actionable data for ones own self and something one should, at least to some extent, pay attention to and heed.

Meanwhile, more and more studies focused on individuals and stressors and health show that we should work less and less frenetically per day, week and month. It is child's play to come up with scenarios for needs based economic production systems that would work with more workers working fewer hours per worker with the same output of product and we could readily arrange for that product to be distributed so as to meet everybody's needs and more, so long as it wasn't driven by the need to funnel evermore wealth ever upward only. This can even be done so as to rein in the cancer of constant uncontrolled growth.

The problem is that for health and medicine, the cure to the difficulties is seen as a desirable good and there is some sort of group will to bring it about, even where impeded by those trying merely to profit from it, but we have not yet developed any sort of coherent group will to address the problems inherent in capitalist economic systems as currently implemented or even to seriously consider alternatives.

Too much of that before breakfast is not good, time to go eat.

Have a good one.

@Lily O Lady I would like to see stop around the world and those are two of them.

bear gall bladders.