agk’s Library of Herbal First Aide
There are various kinds of bites and quite a few remedies. If one lives in an area where there are a lot of poisonous bugs, spiders or snakes one should study this topic carefully and know the local venomous creatures and antidotal flora. I myself live in the north, where we have no poisonous snakes and few poisonous spiders, so I am not as experienced with this problem. Yet, I have had to invent remedies to save people for pain and suffering and perhaps even the loss of limb.
Immediately after receiving a bite a person should chew or chop up some plantain and put it one the bit. The sooner the better. Bee stings and mosquito bites will respond promptly and there is a history of its use in snake bites as well.
Dr. Shook, who lectured on herbs more than fifty years ago, told a story about a woman who can to see him in hysterics. She had been stung by a bee on one arm, had an allergic reaction, and had to have it cut off to save her life. Now she had been stung on the other arm and was again threatened with amputation. Dr. Shook went out in the back yard, chopped up some plantain, put it on her arm, and saved it.
Keewaydinoquay, the old Anishinabe healer on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan said, “every herb has thirty or forty uses, and four or five that it is especially good with, but there is one thing it excels at and plantain is the remedy to pull out venom.
This is the specific for hard edema from venomous bites – or from any cause. Hard edema occurs when there are not only fluids in the swelling but proteins.
I was teaching at my friend Ellie Levenson’s in New Jersey. A woman was virtually pleading with me for help with spider bites that were driving her crazy. One was on the check of the face, the other on the check down below. They were hard, a little red and excruciatingly painful. Plantain failed to help. Rattlesnake master, my remedy-of-choice in hard swellings and a good spider bite remedy from past experience did nothing. I was sitting there feeling like a chump, starring out the window into the yard when I saw a stalk of white snake root “twitch” back and forth. There was not an iota of wind. “Ellie, why don’t you go out and pick some of that white snake root there,” I said as if it was merely the next thing on my list of spider bite remedies. It was only after a rough poultice of chopped leaves provided instant pain relief and reduced the swelling that I told the two of them how the leaf had waved at me.
I have also used boneset and gravel root, cousins of white snake root, when nothing else was available. Late one Sunday night I was called by a friend from White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. Her brother-in-law was bitten by a poisonous spider. There was a big, open wound with purple flesh around it, redness and a red streak going up the arm – all developed within twelve hours. The doctors had him on drip antibiotics. Of course, this does nothing for poison; it only stops a bacterial infection. The poor man was shaking with fever and chills from the severe, deep poisoning of his system. My friends only had a few good Indian medicines on hand so we did what we could. It was just before winter and we could only get a few things fresh. She took plantain and St. John’s wort leaves (picked fresh but long after the flowers were gone), poulticed the wound all night, and had him take hourly doses of boneset, gravel root and sweet leaf tincture (about 15 drops per dose). In the morning the red streak was gone, the chills had subsided and the pain was down but the putrefaction needed more time to clear up – which it did. He might have lost his hand.
What was the logic behind this treatment? We gave boneset and gravel root because of the chills, for which the former is a specific, and the sepsis, for which the latter is known. They are both cousins of white snake root.
This is now considered a powerfully toxic remedy and indeed, I would only recommend its use as a homeopathic remedy. However, at one time it was a prized snakebite remedy, as the name testifies. It was particularly used in the worst cases, where the patient had fallen into a “low” state, with near-unconsciousness, great exhaustion and lack of circulation, the limbs turning blue. In such a state this poison was itself most curative. It was a stimulant that would get the blood moving and increase consciousness and protect the poor victim. Such is the testimony we have from an old nineteenth century doctor, William Cook (1869). He recommended it in puerperal or childbed fever, when the woman was not able to completely expel the afterbirth and some of it broke down in the uterus, resulting in putrid decomposition, pus in the blood, and low grade fever.
When the herbalist/nutritionist John Heinerman was in the United Kingdom he ran into a medical doctor who had been treating some of the early cases of ‘flesh eating strep,’ when the subject captivated the newspapers. Heinerman asked how they treated that. Oh, explained the gent, the patient asked her village herbalist what to do and the latter gave her homeopathic Aristolochia serpentaria 12x. The situation cleared up nicely. (The remedy didn’t make it into the newspapers of course).
Aristolochia is suited to such cases of low resistance, where the disease gains a momentum because the body is too weak to fight it. I have only used it once. A woman had a break out of herpes lesions. I took her pulse and was surprised to find it low and discouraged. Clearly, there was some kind of exhaustive process going on, which allowed the herpes to attack her system. I gave her Aristolochia serpentaria 12x and the symptoms were better immediately.
This homeopathic remedy was adopted from American Indian sources. In the 1840s a homeopathic doctor was called in to treat a young boy who was suffering, all summer long, from a hot, burning fever that was finally starting to look like it would terminate in death. He had been called in after all the allopaths in town had failed and he too failed. About this time a Narragansett Indian woman happened to be strolling by the house and she heard of the little patient and asked if she could be of service. She looked him over and requested that several honey bees be captured in a pan, roasted over a fire, and made into a tea. This was given to the boy, who quickly gained strength and turned a corner on the fever, eventually recovering completely.
The homeopathic doctor did not cure the case but he did not lose the opportunity to learn. He observed that the boy was red and swollen, like a bee’s sting, and concluded that the treatment was homeopathic – i.e., the symptoms caused by the sting of a honey bee were those it would treat. This led to the introduction of one of the most important remedies in the homeopathic materia medica: Apis mellifica (roasted honey bee).
The indications for Apis are those of a bee sting: tissues swollen, red, hot, painful, stinging. The mind is usually either agitated like a bee hive or semi-comatose, like a child stung by a bee, with swelling on the brain.
Many years ago one of my students told me a story after this plant which has since helped me in a number of situations. Her ten year old daughter was bitten by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock (pale, cold, difficulty breathing and staying conscious). She ran inside, called 911, ran to the shelf of herb books, grabbed Michael Tierra’s Way of Herbs, looked under insect bites, found gentian, ran to her Bach flower kit, got gentian, ran back to her daughter and gave her drops of the flower essence. She quickly returned to normal. When the ambulance arrived five minutes later she was fine.
Since that time I have found that gentian is specific for anaphylactic shock. We usually come across this in association with bee stings, but even foods can set off a reaction. I remember one time when I had to use it because one of my students had a bad reaction to tasting corn silk during class. I was glad I knew about it then.
Gentian is a wonderful remedy for panic and that’s what we get during anaphylaxis. We often learn from the acute use more about the chronic use. This is a remedy which helps people with weak instincts. It strengthens the solar plexus, the nerve center where we feel instincts which is right next to the stomach. Gentian people doubt their own instincts and those of others. They have weak digestion and are prone to weakness or inflammation in the gall bladder.
------------------------------------------- from Matthew Wood: THE EARTHWISE HERBAL © 2008–2009 North Atlantic Books (two vols) -------------------------------------------