Hands on herbs colour/b:Incredibly Sexy colour
28/3/08
11:23
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Helpful herbs for health and beauty
Here’s an idea for you...
If the streaming, itchy, irritated eyes of hay fever are driving you to distraction, keep a bottle of distilled witch hazel in your fridge. From time to time soak cotton-wool pads in this soothing, icy liquid, and use them as eye compresses for ten minutes. Cooled chamomile or elderflower tea bags will work well too.
liquid warm with a tea cosy and drink three cups a day. You can buy ready-made elderflower teabags or an elderflower cordial which is, in effect, a concentrated syrup. Diluted with water, apple juice or white wine, it’s a delicious summer drink in its own right. Something to celebrate? Elderflower ‘champagne’.
The common stinging nettle offers wonderful relief for hay-fever symptoms. In a doubleblind randomised study, 98 sufferers took 300mg of freeze-dried nettle three times a day for a week. Of these, 68% rated it moderately or highly effective, while 48% also found it as good as, or better than, the antihistamine medication they had been taking. When my Dutch husband – a long-term hay-fever sufferer – went to his Amsterdam gym one summer morning, he spotted an interesting suggestion on the notice board. A fellow member had found that a Chinese herb called Scutellaria baicalensis had been extremely effective for his own severe hay fever; he urged fellow-sufferers to give it a go. Curious, my husband tried it as recommended, with a gram of vitamin C and some vitamin E. He found it worked even better than his favourite antihistamine. Word has got around in Holland, and most health-food shops in Amsterdam lay in stocks of scutellaria root capsules come summer. Almost certainly, it owes its new Western reputation to well-known Australian herbalist Kerry Bone, who studied Chinese and Japanese research on this traditional Chinese remedy, noted that it seemed to have striking antiallergic and anti-inflammatory effects, and
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