It's amazing to me our ancestors were able to figure this stuff. This mushroom is good to eat. This one will kill you. This one will lower a fever. This one will make you see things. There must have just been huge numbers of them that died experimenting. I guess death was so common back then and life so unpleasant you didn't have a whole lot to lose. Interesting lore indeed.

GD Hippy froo froo wannabes just make me want to beat them bloody.

Y'all know I teach wild foods and medicines. I learned this from people who had to know it before modern medicine was honestly even invented, much less available here in the wild west of Texas 100+ years ago. I have stories of uses in my head from almost 200 years ago on the damn Trail of Tears. We HAD TO know this to survive.

I'm also the family hospice nurse. I would stay with family in the hospital as their patient advocate, then I would bring them home and care for them, and I would ease their passage into heaven. I have treated many cases of diabetic gangrene, various end stage cancers, wounds that would not heal.

And this GD hippy "big pharma" [censored] where they're wanting to leave modern medicine behind to go back to using plants, but not knowing what they are, what they actually do or why, and wanting to cure sh*t with the spiritual vibrations of plants and rocks and sht just makes me want to take a switch to them and beat until they come to their senses. You can EITHER peel willow stems, cut into 1" lengths, boil down gently for an hour, or soak for 3 weeks, and drink that liquid, OR YOU CAN TAKE A FKING ASPRIN.

Science is the careful observation, testing, and recording of the natural world. We find a plant that works. We observe then extract the useful compound from the plant while discarding the either useless, or counterproductive parts. That leaves us with the pure form that we can then properly dose for just enough to be effective without overdosing the patient. You can't tell me how much useful properties are in one leaf to the next, much less how much you need to use. But we now have these people who want to teach medicinal plants as though they are experts at it, when they can't tell me the active compounds that we are using. They can't tell me WHY you would feed a plug of tobacco to a horse or why you would sprinkle a little bit around and in the hole for a newly planted tree. These are people who swear by organic because it's "chemical free".

I teach to preserve knowledge. I am extremely careful to not teach the dangerous stuff that we had to know in order to save lives. And then I see these idiots wanting to use dangerous treatments that I know better than to use because "big pharma". Go to the damn doctor. Get it taken care of before it turns into gangrene or something worse. And stop acting like it's spiritual. You're not a shaman or a doctor. You're playing fairies in the woods.

End rant.... ish.

Sorry but this is over the top. Obviously a lot more important to you than the rest of us heathens.

Use kratom for migraines, also Restless Leg Syndrome, also for pain, also for getting off of opiates.

Vitamin C hit in the early spring when they're young and green. Chew on them or make a tea with hot but not boiling water.

Any good uses for pine needles?

so youre sayin that if I rub a bunch of beauty berries around my junk the bugs will leave me alone?