Christopher Vasey - Natural Compresses and Poultices: Safe and Simple Folk Medicine Treatments for 70 Common Conditions

Natural Compresses & Poultices

Ancient Chinese physicians believed that a competent healer had no need to cut into the body; herbal poultices, acupuncture, water treatments, and herbal brews were the mark of the advanced practitioner. In this book, we are given a glimpse of modern cures that do not involve violence to the physical form. With simple and easy-to-follow directions, Dr. Vasey shows us how to use the skin, our largest organ of elimination, to effect a cure. This book includes many commonsense precautions and a well-crafted collection of compresses and applications for common injuries and conditions, many of which involve foods we already have in the kitchen like potatoes, onions, and lemons. I highly recommend this book!

ELLEN EVERT HOPMAN, AUTHOR OF SECRET MEDICINES FROM YOUR GARDEN AND A DRUIDS HERBAL OF SACRED TREE MEDICINE

INTRODUCTION

Rapid Relief with Easy Home Remedies

When suffering from headache, toothache, indigestion, sinusitis, painful menstrual periods, joint inflammation, nerve pain, cough, and so on, the patients primary desireeven before that of being curedis to find rapid relief from pain and suffering.

What is the most effective nonpharmaceutical way for someone who is not a health care professional to do this?

A simple method that can easily be done by anyone, often using materials you already have on hand, is to use compresses and poultices. When applied to the ailing part of the body, a compress or poultice can make the patient feel better immediately. It can soothe pain, reduce swelling of inflamed tissues, relax the patient, and take an active role in the healing process. Applying one of these remedies is extremely easy, and the necessary ingredients and materials (scraps of cloth, onions, potatoes, and so forth) are readily available. Rapid relief can therefore be easily and quickly achieved in all circumstances, even if no professional health practitioner or prescription is available.

Compresses and poultices are not only useful for first aid, they also provide valuable treatments for existing illnesses, whether chronic or acute.

But we would be mistaken to believe that compresses and poultices can cure all disorders. While it is true that in certain cases they represent the most appropriate treatment, in other instances they are at best a backup or complementary treatment. In these cases their use will not be sufficient to adequately treat the condition.

If compresses and poultices were highly valued by our grandmothers and the traditional medical practices of many countries through the centuries, it is because they provide a healing method that is simple, quick, and effective. In additionand this should not be underestimated in our modern timesthey offer natural and nontoxic methods for healing.

Why Are Compresses and Poultices So Effective?

Elimination Equals Healing

Illness is due to an accumulation of toxins in the bodys physiological cellular terrain. Healing is achieved through the elimination of these toxins by means of the bodys emunctory, or excretory, organs. The skin is one of these organs of waste clearance, and it is where compresses and poultices go to work.

There is something disconcerting about the use of compresses and poultices. How is it that simple applications of cloth steeped in hot or cold water, or applications of clay, potato, or cottage cheese, can have an effect that is not only therapeutic but also powerfully beneficial?

The fact remains that there are proven results over a number of centuries. If compresses and poultices had not been used successfully by the great physicians of antiquity (Hippocrates, Galen, and so on) and, until the early twentieth century, in all hospitals, and if they were not still being used successfully in the folk medicine of the vast majority of developing countries and in the West, they would by no means be considered serious procedures and their effectiveness would be rejected as a myth.

A Little History

Hippocrates, often referred to as the Father of Medicine, was a Greek physician who lived during the fifth century BCE. His enduring legacy is a vast body of knowledge on the art of healing that is still relevant today. His approach was quite naturopathic: do no harm, treat causes and not symptoms, and stress the importance of diet.

Their efficacy is quite authentic. However, their use requires an understanding of the true nature of disease and of the functions of the skin, as well as what compresses and poultices are and what effects they can trigger in the body when applied to the skin.

A Little History

Galen, dubbed the Prince of Medicine, practiced in Rome during the second century CE. He brilliantly synthesized all of the known medical practices through his time and gave new impetus to the art of healing. This included a more extensive study of anatomy and experimental research. His influence on Eastern medicine lasted into the seventeenth century.

WHAT IS A DISEASE?

Illness is not an independent, self-contained entity that enters our bodies from the outside. Illness is simply a defective state of our organs and their functions. From the perspective of natural medicine, illnesses are not created by chance but are always the result of the deterioration of our inner environment, or physiological terrain.

Our terrain consists of all of our bodily fluids: blood, lymph, and the cellular fluids in which all our cells and organs are immersed, which simultaneously serve as their source of nourishment and their environment. As long as the terrain maintains its proper characteristics, our cells function normally and our organs remain in good health. When this is no longer the case and the composition of our bodily fluids has been altered, cellular life is disrupted, the organs become sick, and germs can develop and infect the body.

Thus we can see that illness is not possible unless the terrain has been damaged.

WHAT CAUSES THIS BREAKDOWN OF THE TERRAIN?

This damage can occur in two different ways, which can combine and accumulate. On the one hand, the cellular terrain can become saturated with metabolic wastes (toxins) or poisons from the outside; this creates overload diseases. On the other hand, the terrain can develop a deficiency of substances needed by the cells (amino acids, vitamins, minerals), which will lead to deficiency diseases.

When they collect in the body, toxins thicken blood, clog blood vessels, cause congestion in the organs, and weaken the bodys resistance to infection. Any deficiencies in needed substances will only increase the poisoned state of the body, because organs deprived of the nutrients they need function less efficiently. This will result in increased production of wastes, which will eventually saturate the terrain.

Good to Know

The terrain: The human body is 70 percent liquid, including intracellular fluid (50 percent), extracellular fluid and lymph (15 percent), and blood (5 percent).

The root cause of the vast majority of physical disorders and diseases is an undesirable accumulation of waste, including cholesterol that causes blood to thicken, fatty deposits that hamper circulation, crystals that block and inflame joints, acids that injure the skin of eczema sufferers, pus that oozes from abscesses, stones that hinder the work of the gallbladder, phlegm that burdens the bronchia and sinuses, and so on.