Why I don't participate in the "health care system"

NOTE:  This essay no longer reflects the full reality of my thinking or my life -- October 2012


"Whatever people say they believe in terms of spirituality and religion, what they do when they are sick and in need reveals the true basis of their belief system."

-- Matthew Wood, The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism


When dogmas reach a certain level of acceptance they begin to be treated as self-evident facts beyond questioning.

So it is with the notion that "people without health insurance cost us all money" because "everyone will eventually need to go to a doctor, a hospital, or an emergency room."

The idea that health care is a service that we receive from doctors is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is impossible for most people in our culture to imagine anyone choosing not to participate in the "health care system."

In order to understand why I refuse to participate in that system its necessary to understand its history and its nature.

------------------

In traditional societies around the world everyone knew some of the medicine that the world around them provided.

The art and science of medicine were practiced by witches, shamans, midwives, herbwives, medicine men and women -- people who were responsible for maintaining the soundness, wholeness, and integrity of all things. The health of the individual, the health of the family, the health of the village or tribe, and the health of the land were inextricably linked.

Knowledge and technique were passed down through oral tradition. But the medicine itself came through direct interaction with the living world. It was deeply relational.

The healer was responsible for making all things sound. And the community supported the healer.

This approach to healing and medicine continued to prevail throughout rural Europe well into the early modern period until it was systematically suppressed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (It is still the primary approach to healing in poor communities around the world, including parts of the U.S. like the rural south.)

But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new social and economic forces caused knowledge to become a regulated and privatized commodity.

The Catholic Church had already made some attempts to suppress these practices because of their ties to traditions that taught that the divine was present everywhere and healing grace was abundant and freely available. As Starhawk writes in Dreaming in the Dark:

"The Catholic Church had for centuries served for a model for an approved body that dispensed approved grace. Many of the charges against Witches and heretics can be seen as charges of dispensing 'Brand X' grace, one that lacked the official seal of approval"

But while this ideology held sway in the cities, in rural areas where people continued to work the land together, older beliefs still held sway. And many feudal landlords looked the other way, seeing old customs, old beliefs, and old festivals as outlets for energies and impulses that might otherwise feed rebellion.

But other forces began to come into play. Over farming and over grazing (a result in part of pressures on the countryside to provide food of the cities) were leading to diminishing returns on the land at the same time that the infux of stolen gold from the Americas was causing massive inflation in Europe, leading landlords to break up and sell their holdings. The Witches who were both healers and priests to their communities were responsible for the rituals that reinforced peoples' ties to the land. And so they were persecuted.

At the same time, the urban market economy was expanding into the rural areas. With its spread, Starhawk writes, "Knowledge itself began to be an 'intangible commodity.' It was something to be sold only to those who could afford to buy it." It became the property of licensed professionals. And medicine was one of the first professions to be licensed. Just as the clergy had been the guardians of the soul and sanctioned dispensers of grace prior to the Protestant reformation, in the newly emerging and more materialistic society, doctors were the guardians of health and sanctioned dispensers of medicine. Licensure was the legal instrument by which they established their monopoly.

The story we are told is that this is the point in history at which medicine became a science and it became necessary to have means of certifying that practitioners were sufficiently well versed in the appropriate knowledge. To say this is to belittle the richness and complexity of the body of knowledge and wisdom passed down from practitioner to practitioner throughout human history prior to the 1600's.

There is no evidence that the licensed physicians of the time had better results in treating their patients than the unlicensed herbwyfes, midwives, and witches who they condemned.

As Starhawk writes, citing the work of Jean Baker Miller:

"Licensing is supported by the premise that it protects the consumer of services from incompetents, charlatans, and unethical practitioners. In reality, licensing protects those with approved credentials from competition by allowing them to limit their own numbers and raise their fees. It is one of the primary ways in which 'functions that a dominant group prefers to perform . . are carefully guarded and closed to subordinates.'"

In the case of medicine, the system of licensure led to the criminalization of traditional healers and the marginalization of their methods and knowledge. Fortunately the fact that women's work in the kitchen was largely invisible and innocuous to the powers that be allowed some traditional knowledge to continue to be passed on from woman to woman.

In North America, the mingling of kitchen witch traditions with Native American and African healing traditions led to the development of rich healing traditions in many rural areas which in turn informed the rise of the Physiomedical and Eclectic medicine in the nineteenth century. These threats, along with the emerging threat from European homeopathy, was dealt with through the establishment of the American Medical Association which successfully lobbied for the passage of new licensing regimes.

--------------------------------
Well into the first half of the twentieth century, no matter how mechanistic their model of healing was, physicians used plants as the basis of most of their medicine. Healing was still about a chemical and electromagnetic conversation between living beings.

But after World War II, doctors began switching to pharmaceuticals made from synthetic chemicals primarily made from petroleum products -- the long decayed bodies of ancient plants and animals.

The biochemistry of plants is remarkably similar to the biochemistry of our own bodies. Plants create medicines to address their own chemical imbalances and to support the healthy functioning of their own systems. When we ingest a plant medicine, our body recognizes its structures, and over time can begin to imitate them. Subtle medicines can bring profound healing over time.

But ecause of our limited understanding of the chemistry of life, synthetic pharmaceuticals act at a very crude level, stimulating or suppressing a particular chemical reaction in our bodies.

This can have a host of unintended consequences. Our bodies can become too dependent on these outside stimuli, allowing our natural feedback loops to atrophy. And turning one reaction on or off can have a cascade of consequences elsewhere in the body.

Bacteria and viruses quickly learn and pass on new responses to these simple chemicals, setting off an escalating arms race between the chemists of the pharmaceutical industry and the infinitely more innovative infectious microorganisms that grow resistant to each new generation of drugs.

And since our bodies don't recogize these chemicals, we excrete most of them and they end up in our wastewater. They are taken up throughout the environment with often devastating results -- excreted Prozac in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico is altering shellfish mating patterns and excreted synthetic hormones are altering the sexual development of fish, amphibians, and possibly humans. (See Stephen Harrod Buhner's The Lost Language of Plants for an in depth exploration of these issues.)

-------------------

I spent much of my own life dependent on asthma medications that kept me breathing but taxed and weakened my body.

In the winter of 2006, I was introduced to Elecampane, an herb that would help my lungs release everything they were holding onto.

Mischa Schuler, the herbalist who introduced me to Elecampane, also introduced me to the possibility of learning directly from the plants, transforming my sense of the world as alive from an abstract belief to a literal reality.

Over the next few months, the plants began speaking to me more and more directly. They healed and transformed my body in profound ways.

They also transformed my sense of myself -- I had believed my body to be a broken machine in need of constant support. I came to see it as a living entity just like the forest capable of regenerating itself given the right conditions. That transformation required faith in my body's ability to heal and faith in the plants as teachers.

That faith was tested dramatically in June of that year when I contracted Lyme disease. Most of the people in my life were telling me that I risked debilitation and even death if I did not take antibiotics. Instead, I opted to put my faith in my body and the plants, and immediately began a complex herbal protocol that spared me from the dire consequences my friends and family predicted.

My relationships with the plants around me deepened, and I spent a lot of that summer walking in the woods alone, listening. By the end of the summer it was clear that I would spend the rest of my life deepening those connections. And it was clear to me as well that I could never again take the synthetic pharmaceuticals that had created such dangerous imbalances in my own body and the body of the living Earth.

Many herbalists I respect greatly continue to use pharmaceuticals themselves for various reasons -- and I don't think any less of them as a result. I am in no position to place judgement on anyone else's relationship to medicine.

But the integrity of my own relationship with healing plants and with the living Earth requires a radical trust. That includes trusting death's place in every life, and knowing that the time will come when it is time for me to die, and that I would rather die in right relationship with the world around me than prolong my life through methods that violate the sacred trust I have placed in my plant teachers and allies.

As an herbalist, I place myself firmly in the tradition that sees the health of the individual, the health of the community, and the health of the land as of a piece. I cannot justify trying to heal my body with chemicals that will damage the forests and fields that provide my medicine any more than I could justify digging up ever Lady Slipper root in the woods around me. Either would represent a betrayal of everything my work is about.

And I will not comply with any law that insists that I pay money to health insurance companies with a vested interest in maintaining a model of health care that insists that we cannot heal ourselves without poisoning our planet.

Consider me a conscientious objector. I will not obey.

LISTENING TO THE WILD: AN ONLINE WORKSHOP

Six Weeks Beginning January 11
Sliding Scale -- $40-60

The world is alive and speaking to us. All we have to do is remember how to listen.

We are all born knowing this simple truth, and begin our lives in a world rich with meaning. But in our culture, the voices around us are quickly drowned out by electronic noise, and we are taught to ignore the bits of song we still hear on the wind or risk insanity. Eventually we reach a point where we no longer trust our own senses.

But for some of us the vibrant memory of the world we knew as children is stronger than the fear of madness.

The wildness of our souls can be recovered, just as a forest can grown from an abandoned field.

For poet and herbalist Sean Donahue, that process of recovery started when he began listening to the voices of the forest -- voices that guided him on a journey of healing, discovery, and transformation.

In this six week online workshop, Donahue will lead participants through an intense process of connecting with the living Earth and awakening the wildness within themselves.

Through reading, writing, meditation, and direct experience of the natural world, we will explore:

-- Our personal, familial, and cultural histories of relating to the land we live on and the beings that inhabit it
-- Engaging nature through engaging our senses
-- The use of the heart as an organ of perception (drawing from the work of Stephen Buhner)
-- Developing and deepening relationships with the plants that grow around us

Participants will share their experiences with each other and build community through an e-mail discussion list.

To register, please send an e-mail to seandonahuepoet@gmail.com before January 1.

The class will be limited to 20 students, so please register today.

Early Succession

The Quaking Aspen is one of the first trees to come in, behind the raspberries and the sumac, reclaiming abandoned fields, heralding the forest's return.

In the autumn wind, the Aspen's leaves seem to tremble with desire to return to the Earth, giving themselves over to become the soil that will feed the Maple, Oak, and Pine that follow.

Sometimes I think this is the role I was born to -- to make the fertile soil where the forest will grow again.

In this generation, we are witnessing the end of a civilization that seemed poised to make the world unlivable just before it began to collapse under its own weight -- like an old barn separated from its foundation and caving in on itself.

My home is at the edge of the field behind the barn, where the wild begins to creep in again. In the soil where I plant my roots there is still the memory of the forest that came before, It is enough to begin calling it back into being.

In this life time, in this body, I may never know the damp fullness of the deep forest, or the luminescent green of its lichens and mosses.

But I will know sunfire and rain and from them make a trunk and branches and leaves. My sap will run in spring time, making me supple and strong. And in autumn I will know the bliss of surrender, letting parts of me fall and feed and become Her fertile darkness.

And my descendants will know sweetness because I lived here, celebrate me in the scarlet passion of the Swamp Maple in October.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I wrote these words long before I admitted to myself that the world is alive and speaking to me. Fourteen years later, they take on new meaning:


I apprentice myself
to the quaking aspen,
setting down roots
in thin soil
at the clearing's edge.
Here in bright sun,
autumn brings
pale yellow
resignation.

Someday,
sweet darkness
will bring forth
maple red.

Hanover, NH -- 1995

Breath and Power: My Journey With Elecampane

"The same war //continues. /We have breathed the grits of it in,/ all our lives, our lungs are pocked with it,/ the mucous membrane of our dreams/ coated with it, the imagination/ filmed over with the gray filth of it:"

-- Denise Levertov, "Life at War"


Grief is a watery thing, that works its way into the lungs, moving downward.

When the waters become stagnant, infection can set in.

Since early childhood, I have struggled with asthma and frequent bouts of bronchitis, born of grief breathed in and pushed down deep.

My great-grandmother took her own life on Christmas Eve when I was five months old. She had a long history of developing breathing problems when she would become emotional. And she also had a long history of drinking -- perhaps to dull her senses. She was a psychically sensitive, college educated widow living in conservative suburban upstate New York.

I shared a strange bond with her. I was supposed to meet her the day she died, but I had bronchitis so my mother didn't take me to see her. Months later my mother saw her ghost move my crib across the bedroom.

I inherited her patterns of breathing. I stuffed down grief and let it fill my lungs until I couldn't breathe. When it overflowed, I would swallow it, and experience horrible gas and indigestion. When it got bad enough I would throw up, which allowed me to breathe again.

Sensitive to the world, I worried from an early age about endangered species and nuclear war. I was a melancholy, otherworldly child and a depressed teenager. I felt like I lived in a drowning world and could only pull more of its water into my lungs. Catholic theology twisted in my mind to make me believe that by taking that grief into myself I could somehow transmute it. The struggle for breath coupled with that theology to alienate me from my body.

As an adult, I made a profession of being a carrier of other people's stories of suffering.

In December of 2005, a few weeks after returning from gathering stories of torture, displacement, and the loss of land and culture in Oaxaca in the south of Mexico, I developed severe bronchitis that had me bedridden on New Year's Eve.

A chance phone call that day from a very perceptive herbalist I met at a party the night I returned from Oaxaca resulted in my introduction to Elecampane.

Elecampane is a medicine that reaches deep into the lungs and gets things moving again -- releasing and cleansing buried grief just as it brings up old, infected mucus.

In The Earthwise Herbal, Matthew Wood writes:

"Elecampane is a warming, stimulant, pungent, aromatic bitter that permeates the bronchial tree. It resolves bacterial infection, reducing heavy, thick, green mucus down to yellow and eventually to white or clear mucus. It is specific to yellow and green mucus, indicating bacterial infection. The removal of the layer of old, adhesive mucus allows for the secretion of a new layer of thin, clear mucus that is impregnated with immune factors. Meanwhile, the bitters protect the stomach against indigestion caused by mucus that is swallowed. Very typically, the person needing elecampane (often a child) swallows the mucus."

Wood, of course, is describing word for word, the pattern of disease I had developed.

I still remember the warm zing of the first drops of Elecampane tincture on my tongue that winter.

The day after I started taking Elecampane, I was breathing well enough to take my dog on a long hike through the Bangor City Forest -- the very place where six months later, the Usnea lichen would begin to speak to me, claiming me as his own, bringing me deeper into relationship with the wild, and beginning to lead me on the path of becoming an herbalist in my own right.

Elecampane gave my my breath, and my breath brought me into my body, allowing me to begin to move and transform it, coming into the world in a new way.

------

"Come away, O human child!/ To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand,/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."

-- William Butler Yeats "The Stolen Child"

Elecampane takes both its common name and its Latin name (Inula hellenium) from the legend of Helen of Troy. Wood writes that

"The legend is that when Helen was kidnapped by Paris the plant sprang up from where her tears fell. Afterward the plant was known as 'Heart of the campagna' -- elecampane."

and notes that the plant is indicated for a person who has been "'torn away from one's home', causing grief and suffering."

I believe that the plant is also often indicated for those who have never felt at home in their surroundings to begin with.

Its a familiar archetype: the bookish, asthmatic child whose imagination is captivated by stories of other worlds that sound more like home than this one. At once distant and emotionally sensitive. At times deeply empathetic and perceptive and at other times completely oblivious to social norms and cues. Asthma in these cases is often closely associated with social anxiety. Breath is a tenuous thread barely keeping the child present in this reality.

Sometimes the distance can be associated with an early trauma -- as in the case of Elizabeth Bishop and her mother's mental illness (Marilyn May Lombardi explores this in a fascinating essay called "The Closet of Breath" in Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender -- but just as often there is no obvious external cause.

In another time and place such a child might be called "fey" -- perhaps a changeling, a faery child left in place of a stolen human one. And indeed Elecampane is a plant strongly associated with the faerie realm. In England, it was once commonly known as Elf Dock. And according to Alma Hutchens in her oddly mistitled Indian Herbalogy of North America "

In Russia they call it De-via-sil, or Deviat Sil, which means nine powers. Also Di-vasil which means fair or magic power."

(Hutchen' book is a far better source on Russian folk medicine than on North American ethnobotany.)

Such feelings of being born into the wrong world and the wrong body can linger into adulthood. And by the time such a child has become an adult he or she has often internalized a lifetime of stories about being broken, powerless, and insufficient, eroding confidence.

This can lead to an attempt to deny and suppress the sensitivity and vision that are the core of such a person's identity. More emotion pushed down into the lungs, continuing the pattern of illness.

This may suggest the plant's possible historical use to treat "elfshot" which Wood describes as "wasting and preoccupation caused by being shot by an elfin arrowhead."

At the time that I was introduced to Elecampane, I was emerging from a period of my life where I had tried to suppress my imagination and my spirituality to gain acceptance in relationships and and in the culture around me. This meant denying fundamental aspects of both my childhood and adult experiences. It is the classic experience of the "dysfunctional shaman."

In his book, Fire in the Head, Tom Cowan writes that

"From the vast literature on mysticism and shamanism, it is clear that once the faculties of perception have been expanded, they cannot be restricted without causing mental or even physical illness. The malingering illness that results from denying the initial vision is well documented by reluctant shamans around the world. Most frequently the disease clears up when they commit themselves to shamanizing."

Elecampane can be a powerful ally in bringing gifts from the other side of the veil between worlds into this one, integrating spiritual awareness with physical reality, and bringing the spirit into the body. Breath is powerful too for altering consciousness, and restoring the fluidity of breath can help someone to make the transition between different levels of reality more fluid.

Just as Elecampane works at the physical level to resolve the associated respiratory disease, the plant's flower essence can help such a person bring the gifts gained from a lifetime of gazing into other realms more fully into this world, gaining confidence and stepping into power.

Elecampane brings moisture up from damp soil to feed a bright yellow flower that grows high above the ground.

Christine Tolf of Lichenwood Herbals writes that:

"Elecampane is an essence for the experience of 'initiation'. This essence helps people adjust to new spiritual growth spurts. The process of spiritual emergency is more easily accepted and integrated when Elecampane flower essence is taken. Elecampane gives confidence in the intellectual mastery needed to adjust to spiritual growth, and trust that you will make appropriate choices."

For me that choice involved coming more fully into my body and into this world without denying the reality of the music I heard from the other side of the veil. It meant allowing the pagan concept of a living Earth that I professed to become real and embodied by listening to the forest and working with plants to bring healing to others and to myself.

Elecampane gave me my breath. My breath gave me life and power.

Update on Monotropa Uniflora

A brief note on a few clinical experiences I've had with Monotropa uniflora (Indian Pipe/Ghost Pipe/Fairy Smoke) since my first encounters with the plant this summer:

-- A client had a panic attack while visiting a friend. She found him doubled over and only able to say "The pain! The pain!" She assumed that he was in excruciating physical pain and reached for the Monontropa uniflora tincture she had on the shelf and gave him a moderate dose (I don't know for certain but I suspect 10-20 drops).

He came to see me a few days later and told me that "The Indian Pipe took everything I was worried about and put it outside me, in front of me, where I could work on it." I told him that was almost exactly how people described the plant's effect on physical pain. (Tommy Priester says that it puts you "beside your pain" where you are aware of it without feeling it.)

Over the next two weeks or so, he continued using the tincture for acute panic attacks that were coming almost daily. When I saw him next he told me that one day he began having a panic attack and began thinking about the plant and remembered the way it worked inside him. He said he realized then that he didn't need to take the tincture anymore. Despite dealing with some large setbacks in his life since then, his emotional health has remained excellent.

-- A client had been experiencing severe migraines since sustaining a Traumatic Brain Injury in the first Gulf War. As he described his experiences, I immediately saw Monotropa uniflora, its form resembling the brainstem. I told him to take 3 drops for acute migraine pain. He came back to me the next day and told me it was the first medicine that had ever touched the pain of his headaches. (I also gave him a formula including Ashwagandha, Wood Betony, Oat Milky Seed, and Clematis for daily use but have not heard back about the effectiveness of that formula.)

-- On two occasions, I have used Monotropa uniflora with people experiencing acute psychotic episodes brought on after taking large doses of psychedelics. (As Jim McDonald and others have pointed out, psychedelics don't cause psychosis, but they can bring out an underlying psychosis.)

In the first instance, I gave 30 drops of Monotropa uniflora and 30 drops of Monotropa uniflora to a man who was disoriented and very verbally agressive. After a short time he became much more subdued though still severely disoriented, and a little while later fell asleep. He was lucid when he eventually woke up.

In the second instance, I was part of a team working with a man who had gone into a full scale dissociative state after taking 5 hits of LSD and had become extremely physically and verbally violent. We initially gave him 10 drops of Monotropa uniflora tincture with no response. Over the course of the next hour we gave him two 30 drop doses of the tincture. (In addition to Mimulus to address his panic.) After the second dose his pupils became less dilated and his eyes became more responsive and he began to respond more directly to outside stimuli. Our sense was that the Monotropa uniflora had brought him "down" from the trip at a physical level.

However, it didn't touch the underlying psychosis. He remained physically violent, emotionally agitated, and verbally incoherent for the following four hours. Eventually he became physically exhausted enough for friends to take him to a hospital at which point we lost touch with him.

(We had avoided calling 911 because we knew there was little that an Emergency Room could do in this instance that we couldn't and that an ambulance would have required police assistance. Given the near certainty that he would have assaulted the officers trying to help him, we erred on the side of sparing him from facing felony charges.)

Green Man Botanicals Holy Basil Tincture

Holy Basil Tincture
(Ocimum sanctum)

1 oz -- $10 2 oz -- $18 4 oz -- $35
Leaves and Flowering Tops in 80 proof alcohol

• Adaptogenic – helps the body adapt to respond to stress.
• Helps the immune system respond to changing conditions.
• Helps to release stagnant energies and emotions.
• Traditionally used to improve memory and energy and to treat coughs, colds, and indigestion.
• Contains antibacterial, antiviral and antioxidant compounds

NOTE: These statements are for educational purposes only and have not been reviewed by the FDA. Neither this product nor this information are intended to diagnose, treat or cure any medical condition.

To order e-mail seandonahuepoet@gmail.com. Check or paypal accepted. $5 shipping per order (shipped Priority Mail.)

A Swampy Medicine for Swampy Lungs

This post is part of the October Blog Party: Bio-regional herbs for the Cold and Flu Season being hosted by Rosalee de la Foret at www.methowvalleyherbs.blogspot.com

Photo by Darcey Blue French

My relationship with Eastern Skunk Cabbage began with a dream about digging its roots to treat my own asthma -- a journey chronicled in an earlier post.

Recently I have been finding that many of my own experiences with the plant are consistent with the discoveries and practices of the Eclectics who knew the plant as Dracontium foetidum. (By the 1890's, most botanists were using the name by which the plant is known today, Symplocarpus foetidus, but I much prefer the older name.)

I believe Eastern Skunk Cabbage deserves a place in the Materia Medica of modern New England herbalists as an excellent ally in treating asthma and respiratory infections -- including the stubborn, lingering respiratory infections that often follow when someone does not get enough rest to fully recover from a serious bout of the flu. We have a tremendous amount to learn from earlier generations' usage of the plant.

The 1898 edition of King's American Dispensatory describes Skunk Cabbage root as "a stimulant, exerting expectorant [. . .]" Just as the plant's contractile roots reach deep into swampy soils to drink up moisture, the root as a medicine brings up excess mucous from deep in the lungs. Energetically it is neutral to warm -- well suited to treating the kind of deep, cold congestion that can set in with a stubborn lingering case of bronchitis or pneumonia.

Yet as a diaphoretic herb it can also help to release the excess heat associated with influenza and the ensuing inflammation of the lungs.

The Eclectics frequently combined Skunk Cabbage with Lobelia in their formulae. Lobelia would help to open the airways while Skunk Cabbage would help to bring up phlegm.

Both medicines are profoundly antispasmodic, and Skunk Cabbage is slightly narcotic, so the combination would also help to quell violent coughing fits and allow a sick person to sleep.

Skunk Cabbage root is also a nervine. King's American Dispensatory notes that "Its action upon the nervous system is marked, relieving irritation, and it has a tendency to promote normal functional activity of the nervous structures." As an asthmatic I know that the shortness of breath caused by the contraction of my airways is always compounded by the wave of panic that ensues when I can't get enough oxygen. Skunk Cabbage helps tremendously in calming that panic.

I harvest the roots Eastern Skunk Cabbage in March, when the green buds of the flowers have emerged but have not yet turned purple. There is usually still snow on the ground -- Skunk Cabbage is thermogenic and melts the ice, frost, and snow around it to become the first plant emerging in the swamp in spring. I dry the roots for a few days as a precaution because drying diminishes the levels of calcium oxalate crystals present, and then tincture them in 100 proof vodka. For acute respiratory infections I use 5-15 drops 4-6 times a day.

For bronchitis and bacterial and fungal pneumonias I usually use Skunk Cabbage along with Usnea.

For persistent, deep, cold, wet bronchitis and pneumonia I use Skunk Cabbage along with Elecampane and Pleurisy Root.

Large doses of Skunk Cabbage root may be emetic -- and in one nineteenth century formula, Skunk Cabbage was combined with Lobelia, Wild Ginger, Pleurisy Root, and Bloodroot as an "emetic for children and infants, [. . . ] safely used in croup, whooping-cough, bronchitis, asthma, convulsions, and in all cases where an emetic is required." When my asthma was at its most severe growing up, I often felt relief only when I would throw up, forcing some of the mucous from my bronchi in the process. In my own practice, I am not quite ready to revive old emetic therapies for acute bronchial and pulmonary congestion, but the idea is worth thinking about.