For this week’s Thursday post, I wanted to write about natural remedies. I don’t know too much about them, and I’ve always wanted to learn more. I thought researching a blog post on the topic would be a good way to learn more about it. So I hit the internet (and a book on herbal remedies I picked up a while ago at my local used bookstore) and started taking notes.
I was not prepared.
For one thing, people dedicate their entire careers, their entire lives to this topic. And I thought I could learn enough in 10 hours to write a roughly comprehensive blog post about it?
Foolish, puny mortal.
As I’m sure any of you who have tried to start researching natural remedies know, this is a tough tree to climb. It has its roots in the anecdotal knowledge of generations, and spans cultures and continents. To make things more difficult, it’s muddled in controversy from advocates for modern medicine, and more often than not the “remedies” you do find have either not undergone sufficient clinical trials or the results of the trials they have undergone are inconclusive.
It’s a mess.
I am not a student of medicine. I don’t even like biology very much. By I want to know how to keep myself well, and I think there is value in searching for ways to do it as simply and naturally as possible, the way people have for thousands of years. I want to believe in the power of anecdotal antidotes; then again, I know that some things are better tested before they’re trusted. (For instance: my grandmother swears by applying cigarette ash to bee stings to dull the pain and reduce swelling. When I was 5 and stepped on a bee, I didn’t question anything my wise, all-knowing grandmother offered to relieve the pain. Looking back now, was that questionable? Absolutely.)
All this is to say, the amount of information I encountered was overwhelming. Even though I was able to initially draft a post that had a list of natural remedies on it, I didn’t like it. I realized what I needed wasn’t a guide to natural remedies—there are more than enough of those already making the rounds. What I really needed was a guide to researching and actually finding effective, reputable natural remedies. Faced with this overabundance of information, that’s really what would help—because when you’re sick, you don’t want to have to do thesis-level research to feel better naturally.
So, coming your way next Thursday is a new, revised post—this time not so much about the remedies themselves, but about how to research and find the best ones for yourself.
In the meantime, you can occupy yourself by checking out this cool graphic that explores some of the more popular natural remedies. I’ll come back to it later.
So stay tuned, and remember: cigarettes are bad, kids. Even for bee stings.