From Chickweed to Chamomile: Herbalist’s Remedies Stand the Test of Time [Opinion] | Farm and Rural Family Life

My friend Stacy is an herbal healer, a wise woman of the woods.

While visiting her 6-acre Berks County farmette recently, sneezing like mad and scratching my eyes due to combined pollen and cat allergies, she mentioned a chickweed compress she used to make for her son, now a Philadelphia-based communications professional.

Stacy’s grown kids — also including a daughter now living in the Allentown suburbs — often joke about her dandelion soup and other concoctions meant to fortify them as they grew into capable adults.

She dispensed catnip and chamomile tea for bellyaches, yarrow to bring down a fever and other backyard-harvested cures.

Since 2012, Stacy has been selling what has ballooned into around 200 natural body care products — either sourced sustainably or grown and harvested on her own property — mostly via the online platform Etsy.

These days, her doppelganger granddaughter traipses around the farm with her observing Grandma’s reverence for the “weeds” she turns into remedies.

Over the few years we’ve known each other, I have watched Stacy struggle with Etsy over being flagged for making medical claims.

These include terms such as healing, skin condition, alternative remedy, wrinkles, antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial, anti-aging, pain relief, arthritis, rash, itch, scars, cold relief and fever.

Basically, she is not allowed to say much at all. But she is allowed to direct people to her website, where they can read a fuller description of her products.

On Etsy, any word that can be interpreted as making a claim that a plant has therapeutic, medicinal value for helping to ease symptoms of a medical condition is strictly prohibited.

Stacy said standardized commercial herbal products that meet Food and Drug Administration guidelines typically isolate only the plant properties sought for a particular symptom or condition.

True herbalists, she said, believe in whole-plant medicine in which results reflect a lifestyle, not a pop-a-pill, quick-fix attitude toward healing.

There just aren’t enough studies on herbs, she said, which boils down to money and not enough funding put into research, in part due to being an alternative to pharmaceuticals.

That brings me to a recent Facebook post from another friend, a local holistic health practitioner, who suggested that medicine greatly changed from original natural remedies seeking to cure and heal to profit-driven synthetic pharmaceuticals thanks to businessman John D. Rockefeller and his involvement with the American Medical Association in the early 1900s.

I had to check that out for myself.

I found a book titled “Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America” (University of California Press, 1979), by E. Richard Brown.

A synopsis of the book on the Rockefeller University website (good for them) says: “This book tells the hidden story of the financial, political, and institutional manipulations whereby a diverse and eclectic range of healing modalities available to the North American public was summarily pared down to a singular style of medicine that would become the predominant medicine of the Western world and a major force in global medical culture during the 20th century.”

The blurb continues: “This was brought about largely by the collaboration of the American Medical Association, the philanthropies of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and the development of a revolutionary curriculum by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.”

It seems my Facebook friend was fairly spot-on.

Back in January 2023, I attended a talk co-led by Patrick McDuffee, whose grandparents Cyrus and Louise Hyde founded the world-renowned Well-Sweep Herb Farm in Warren County, New Jersey, in 1966.

McDuffee suggested any plant can fall along the spectrum of food, medicine or poison, depending upon how it is utilized.

So-called “food” can also be poison, he said, and while science made great strides with the advent of antibiotics in the 1920s, it left herbal knowledge behind, particularly in the U.S.

Clinical research is finally beginning to catch up with what herbalists have known for centuries, McDuffee said, but it’s been a slow process.

Stacy — a Berks County farm girl whose father ran a scrap metal yard — “experimented” with her own family following traditional folkways and found a calling in the process.

She named her farm and business “Meadow Muffin Gardens” after Erigon pulchellus, a North American flower native to all states east of the Mississippi, not realizing at the time that “meadow muffin” was also informal slang for a cow patty.

I find that both endearing and perfect.

Thich Nhat Hahn (1926-2022), a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who brought his teachings to the West, famously said “No Mud, No Lotus.”

No fertility, no herbs.

Self-taught out of books combined with her own experience helping sniveling children, Stacy’s mentors include herbalists Susan Weed, Rosemary Gladstar, Dina Falconi, 91-year-old Australian-born botanist Barbara Briggs and the late Jeanne Rose.

Maybe this not the best political climate — or maybe it is — to call for renewed understanding/study of the legitimacy of herbal remedies.

But perhaps Grandma knew best.