Arnica - A Home First Aid Essential For Bruising and Inflammation

I have never really thought of Arnica as a herb, but only as a homeopathic treatment. It is usually found in homeopathic first aid kits, and I always used to keep it around the home when still living in England. A herb it is, though. Arnica is a plant found in Northern Europe with pretty daisy like flowers.

Mostly, homeopathic treatments are for certain individuals for certain conditions and symptoms. Homeopathy is about the whole person, a holistic form of medicine which I discovered had some powerful uses back in the mid 1980's. For a genuine homeopath to treat a patient, they need a long consultation to get the full picture of the patients personality as well as medical history, and current problems. The homeopath may treat different people with identical symptoms with a different remedy.

Arnica, though, is a remedy that does seem to work with a wide range of people, hence its effectiveness as a first aid treatment, usually for inflammation and bruising. I wish I had know it when I was being crippled by Ankylosing Spondilytis in the 1970's.

When it came to the 1990's, I had to have two more hip replacements, making it hip joints number 5 and 6. By then, I had been off NSAIDS , the anti-inflammatory group of drugs, for more than 10 years. I had such confidence in Arnica by the time of the two operations, that on both occasions I took my arnica remedy bottle into hospital, knowing that I would be offered an NSAID after being cut open, sawed with a hacksaw, hammered with a hammer, and sown up again. On the second occasion, the surgeon broke my thigh in the process, just to add a bit of variety.

After the first operation the nurse came in with my medication. I looked suspicously at one tablet: "Anti-inflammatory?" I asked. It was.

I declined and showed her my arnica bottle. Later the surgeon came in, and when I mentioned the arnica, he said "that's good." He was understanding and not at all put out. He had come to learn the effectiveness of arnica for inflammation and bruising from other patients.

So, arnica was all I took to relieve pain, bruising and inflammation. The first time was an experiment; the second time the surgeon never even prescribed the anti-inflammatory.

When I moved to the Philippines there was no hope of finding homeopathic treatments, and when our daughter was born and getting mobile I wanted to keep arnica in the house for all those inevitable falls. I ordered some from the US, and it has been used often for my clumsy daughter for the last two years.

Yesterday, I had an emergency phone call from my wife, I thought at the local market. She couldn't talk, but handed the phone to her friend. "Please, come quick to the medical center", she told me. "Mhe Ann can't walk, and she blacked out."

Her dizzy black out had probably been caused by a spasm in the back as she heard a click in the base of her spine. The doctor prescribed several medications, one of which was an NSAID. After discussing it later, she preferred to try arnica after my very bad experiences with NSAIDS.

She rubbed the arnica ointment on the source of the back pain, and eventually fell asleep. When she woke in the night, just a few hours later, she felt no pain. Another victory for arnica? Probably, it has never really let me down when needed.

Should We Take Food Supplements?

The question of whether we should take food supplements has been debated endlessly, and there is no single answer that all will agree to. When I first took an interest in diet and health, and supplementation, more than 20 years ago, the standard view of doctors was that you do not need food supplements. Eat and drink a good diet, and you will get all the vitamins and minerals you need - that was what doctors would say.

That was the public view anyway, although I could not help but note, when I visited the home of a doctor I knew in England, that he had a good supply of multivitamins and minerals on a kitchen shelf. He also had a couple of other vitamin bottles, vitamin E and one other I fail to remember after all this time. Interestingly, he had always been a "scotch in the evening" man, but had suddenly switched to red wine. I made no comment, just smiled inwardly. I was a red wine drinker anyway, and I had been taking a general multivitamin and mineral for some time already.

By the early 80's, the health food revolution was already under way, and the food supplement industry preparing for rapid growth over the next 25 years. I ignored what doctors were saying, and started taking a general multivitamin and mineral supplement. I did so through common sense and logic, for the following reasons:

1. A good diet may have provided all the vitamins and minerals needed 200 years ago, so in a way the doctors were probably right.

2. The human body had evolved very slowly over thousand of years, always with plenty of time to adapt to environmental changes. Over the last 2 centuries, though, and especially the last 50 years, the human body has been bombarded with massive quantities of toxic substances, chemicals in our food, water, and the air we breathe. Could our immune systems possibly have dealt with that through evolution, in such a short space of time? My common sense told me no. While a virus can change rapidly, the human body cannot.

I decided to err on the side of caution and have taken a general vitamin and mineral supplement ever since. Have I benefitted from that long term use? I am certain I have, but that is not science. However, I did observe a notable drop in incidences of colds and flu. When I worked in London, I would get 7 or 8 bugs a year; that quickly dropped to 2 or three after taking the supplements, and with a faster ability to recover. That had a knock on effect of reducing incidences of iritis, which tended to follow a cold or flu when I was run down.

One thing I noticed a few years later was that two large cysts I had had since a teenager, or maybe earlier, had gone. One enormous cyst by my knee had quietly disappeared, and a smaller one on my arm too. Any connection? There is no scientific evidence that there is a connection. But those cysts were seemingly there for life, and the only change I could think of that could have made them disappear was the addition of multivitamins and minerals.

Welcome to the Health Food Harvest Blog

Every day it seems there are new reports of reputed superfoods, speculation of health benefits from "newly discovered" foods that have been around for thousands of years, and results of studies into hot topics such as red wine, broccoli, and resveratrol.

All this interest in naturally healthy foods is no bad thing, although keeping up with all the studies, and separating it from hype and speculation, can be both difficult and confusing. Who do you believe, and who don't you believe? And when? A food or drink that is bad for you one day, according to a "scientific study", may become "rich in antioxidants" the next and a great health food.

Sometimes you just have to make your own judgement and trust your instinct, or at least experiment with a superfood, or one of its components, you think may be helpful in maintaining a healthy diet. The fact that many of the recent "discoveries" have been ordinary fruits and vegetables should come as no surprise really. The most common chronic diseases in the so called First World, cancer and heart disease, are modern diseases caused by modern living, including diet.In earlier times, these diseases were not the common killers, and diets were more focused on vegetables and fruit than they are in most households today. Evidence is mounting that a lack of fruit and vegetables in the diet is one of the main causes of the modern scourge of cancer and heart problems.

That, of course, is an over simplification, but it does give an indication of why so much attention is being given to simple fruits and vegetables by scientists, sometimes with surprising results, sometimes confirming an "old wives tale", and sometimes explaining why people in a certain part of the world seem to live longer.

The new Health Food Harvest blog will try to keep up with at least some of the developments in this fascinating area of study.