Hands on herbs colour/b:Incredibly Sexy colour
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40 Out of joint Arthritis may be the oldest disease on the planet: typical signs of wear and tear show up even on dinosaur skeletons.
So human beings have had plenty of time to work out which plants might help soothe their aching joints. Here are some of the best. Roman armies, on frontier duty in Britain 2000 years ago, suffered miseries from the cold damp climate, so unlike warm, sunny Italy. Solution: their army surgeons brought the seeds of wild nettles to Britain to plant around their camps. Then they prescribed the stinging treatment: flogging swollen joints with the nettles. Believe it or not, many arthritic patients today still practise nettle-sting therapy. In a small study carried out at the UK’s Southampton University, stinging nettle leaves were applied to the hands of twenty-seven osteoarthritis sufferers daily for a week. At the end of the trial, fourteen of them said they preferred nettle relief – even with the stings – to their usual drugs, and seventeen said they’d continue with it. Nettles work just as well inside you, too, especially for gout victims: they help cleanse irritating wastes from joints. They also supply a mineral, boron, which is especially helpful in arthritis. In one trial, 70% of a group of 1257 arthritic patients showed improvement after taking a daily dose of 1.5g of dried nettle for three weeks.
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