Heal Local: 20 Essential Herbs for Do-it-Yourself Home Healthcare

Mother Earth News Wiser Living

by Dawn Combs

Grow your own first aid Most of us understand the value of eating and buying local. Taking back our food, goods, and services from multinational corporations and sourcing them from small growers, producers, artisans, and entrepreneurs benefits our families, our environment, and our communities. Heal Local argues that "100-mile healthcare" can be equally valuable in terms of how we treat illness and injury and maintain wellness. This innovative guide demonstrates that by harnessing multifaceted whole plants, we can rely on homegrown or regionally produced herbs rather than importing exotics and non-natives. Based on the small apothecary model, author Dawn Combs explains how Many herbals overwhelm their readers, presenting a list of hundreds of herbs, each with a different purpose. Heal Local empowers readers by showing that you don't need to know everything about every herb on the planet to create a complete home apothecary. Anyone can be self-sufficient with their wellness, regardless of their previous knowledge, experience, or available space. Dawn Combs is a homestead herbalist with over twenty years' experience and author of Conceiving Healthy Babies . As well as training others in herbal home healthcare, she treats her family's common illnesses and minor injuries with natural therapies, herbal remedies, and appropriate foods.

Genres: Cookbooks, Gardening, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2015

About the author

Dawn Combs, M.A., Certified Herbalist, is an Ethnobotanist and functional foods expert. She is the best-selling author of the books Sweet Remedies, Heal Local and Conceiving Healthy Babies. Dawn's favorite media appearances include MarthaStewart.com, MindBodyGreen, NPR, and The New York Times

A professional speaker, educator, wellness coach and frequent contributor for several magazines, she is best known for her expertise in using honey and plant-based sugars as a medium for medicine-making and for empowering people in their innate wisdom to be well using local food medicine. The Combs family were named "Homesteaders of the Year" by Mother Earth News magazine for their life on the internationally renowned Soda Farm, a United Plant Savers (UpS) botanical sanctuary, and teaching facility. Dawn and her family model how to grow personal health with a strong community focus, practical solutions, and Creator, rather than man-made, foods and remedies through her “Proactive Health Club” online membership forum and her unique line of healthy supplements at SodaFarm.com

Reviews

[Pat Mckay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most herbal-medicine books I've read, this one fails the reader by often not explaining how the treatment should best be administered. I'd love to try using herbal treatments but I'm left uncertain whether to give teas or tinctures, whether some can be used everyday for chronic conditions, or whether there is a time limit for some treatments.

[Joanna Leona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Practical and down-to-earth

This book includes very practical ideas for developing a local community of healing along with information and instructions for developing a personal and family system of healing and extensive protocol. The book makes the information both accessible and easy to understand. This is definitely a resource that I will reference often.

[Jeanne Ruczhak-Eckman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Practical advice for herbal remedies. First aid in my own herb garden and kitchen! This book will definitely stay on my shelf for future reference.

[Angel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I decided to skip ahead to the canker sore section just to see what remedies were offered. To my shock, Ms. Combs directs the reader looking for information on canker sores to the "Herpes Simplex" section. She wrote that herpes simplex I is "often called a canker sore." That is entirely incorrectly. Cankers sores are not the same as the cold sores caused by herpes, and canker sores are not caused by herpes. If the author is incorrect on such a simple but crucial distinction, I cannot help but think that there must be other similar misinformation throughout the book.