Review by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Grow Your Own Drugs
by James Wong
224 pages – hardcover – 23.4 x 19 x 2 cm
Published by Collins in Mar 2009
ISBN: 978-0007307135
Make your own remedies and beauty treats from plants in your back garden and other easily obtainable ingredients
The book is full of easy recipes for natural remedies and beauty treatments. Whether you’re struggling with insomnia, the kids have eczema, or your partner is feeling under the weather, this book could have the answer.
James Wong, an ethno-botanist – that is to say he is a scientist who studies how people use plants for medicine and other uses – has created a fantastically informative guide to plants and how their beneficial properties can help with minor everyday ailments.
In a delicious mix of gardening, cooking, health and beauty, he devises a range of natural remedies which may help relieve the symptoms of ailments from acne to athlete’s foot, and winter blues to nits.
He demonstrates how to make creams, cough sweets, teas, and much more from plants which can be easily grown in your window box, picked up at the local garden center or found in the hedgerows you pass on your favorite walk.
Over the years we seem to have lost the knowledge of how to use plants for health benefits in our daily lives. Our ancestors – and not even that long ago – knew how to do it and what plant would do this or that. So-called medical science arrived and poo-pooed it all as “old wives tales” and in some places even outlawed this and so, therefore, most of the skills got lost.
The fact that many remedies are cheap to make and can be prepared in five minutes at home, make them all the more appealing and convenient. James says: “Natural remedies are sometimes portrayed as rather wishy washy and ineffective, but they are not.
This book will reveal that many plants contain the same active ingredients as over the counter drugs.
Inspired by his grandmother in Malaysia who taught him about the health-giving properties of plants, James uses his top class academic knowledge to show how easy – and inexpensive – it is to make creams, lotions, lozenges and more which can help relieve the symptoms of a variety of common complaints.
I personally have had a run-in with a “normal” physician when having a “popped” cartilage in my knee for which a doctor of Chinese medicine had given me some Chinese herbal medicines, including Tiger Balm, when the GP's locum claimed that it was dangerous to take those herbal remedies as they were full of steroids – her words.
Inspired by his grandmother in Malaysia who taught him about the health-giving properties of plants, James uses his top class academic knowledge to show how easy – and inexpensive – it is to make creams, lotions, lozenges and more which can help relieve the symptoms of a variety of common complaints.
He chooses his top 100 plants to grow or buy, complete with ideas for a whole range of uses. Using the flowers, fruit, roots, trees, vegetables and herbs that are all around us James provides preparation which could help relieve the symptoms of anxiety and cold sores, and soothe general aches and pains. He also has great ideas for plant-based beauty treatments such as bath bombs and shampoos. So unleash the power of plants and find out how you could soothe the symptoms of everyday ailments the natural way.
A great book that should find its way into the reference library of anyone wishing to be more sustainable and who wishes to live a live more away from synthetic drugs and such like.
© 2009
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