Wood Betony

Here is an herb worthy of being in everyone's medicine chest. Wood Betony is a small plant that grows in Europe. I will have to see about getting seeds or a plant to keep in my garden window as it produces pink flowers on long stems coming from the shorter plant. The leaves of this plant are scalloped and a bit hairy but what this plant can do will amaze you.

I learned about this plant during a phone conversation with another herbalist. She mentioned that she had to hang up and get some Wood Betony as she had a headache. My first thought was that I would use something else for a headache but when I did my research on this plant, I was convinced that this was the right plant to use.

Wood Betony has been handling problems of the head for centuries. I read where the Greeks proclaimed that it would treat "No less than forty-seven diseases", this according to Christopher Hobbs in his book called STRESS. Hobbs also stressed that it was a "Valuable tonic and nervine". This means that it doesn't depress the nervous system as many of our medicines do but will furnish the building blocks to remake or heal the area that is in trauma.

Last night my husband came to the kitchen to get an aspirin. I asked him what was going on and he said that he had a headache from what he thought might be a stiff neck. He mentioned that it has been bothering him all day. That told me that he had been taking aspirin all day to try to deal with this. I allowed him to take his aspirin and then told him that I would like him to take a dropperful of Wood Betony tincture before he left the kitchen. He wanted to know why? I told him that the aspirin would block the pain but that the Wood Betony would calm and rebuild the area that was creating the problem.

In our society, we want to get rid of the symptoms before we have handled the problem. It would be like shutting off the door bell and not answering the door. The symptoms are the road map to the problem.

Wood Betony, as previously mentioned is great when the body is in stress also. My tincture is fast acting. When you take a pill, it has to be processed through the intestinal walls but when you take something in alcohol; it is absorbed through the stomach walls making it "fast acting."

I want to list the things that Blake put into his Globalherb V2.0 computer program. He shows Wood Betony as being good for: Anxiety, Cancer, Congestion-general, Cough, Cramps, Fatigue, Gout, Head-Diseases of the head, Headache, Headache-chronic, Hysteria, Insomnia, intellect, Jaundice, Migraine, Nervous disorders, Nervousness, Pain, Parkinson's Disease, Senility, Sores, Swelling, Twitching, and Worms. You will notice that this list does not just contain problems of the head but other problems that a body can have from Jaundice…a liver problem to Cramps…a muscle problem.

I read in Hobb's book, STRESS where people valued this herb so highly that there is "an old Italian proverb" , it says to 'Sell your coat and buy betony'.

The next time you have the chance to do something organic and natural for yourself, try Wood Betony.