In Praise of Traditional Medicines By Mrs Vera West
Dr Naomi Wolf has moved from being a Leftist feminist critic, to a Covid vax critic. In doing so she has slowly begun the process of rethinking the health consequences of the other products of Big Pharma. This journey has led her to move to attempt to revive the traditional medicines that were used in the past. As she details, the key globalist early in the 20th century, John D. Rockefeller, had the idea of doing to medicine what he has done to the oil industry. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1910 funded the Flexner Report, which mounted a critique of the herbalists and healers of the time. Medicine was to be regulated, and this was done by the formation of the American Medical Association (AMA). Only people who had qualifications accepted by them could practice medicine. This led to the destruction of traditional medicine, and the takeover by Big Pharma. And the rest is history.
Despite all of this centralisation and over-regulation, alternatives to mainstream allopathic medicine continue, although the medical establishment attacks this when it can. People like Dr Mercola, and Mike Adams' Natural News are key players, but there are many who go under the radar, such as physical therapists, who help keep people from falling under the surgeon's knife.
Dr Wolf will be putting up material at her site: https://dailyclout.io/
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/do-you-want-to-hear-about-naturaltraditional
"Until 1910, many people who were not licensed physicians, took it upon themselves to understand health and illness, and to practice everyday arts of healing.
Women in both Britain and America were expected to understand basic nursing care for their family members who fell ill, to understand childbirth and "women's troubles", and to be able to create poultices, tisanes, and other herb-based remedies for their households. Midwives usually attended home births; obstetricians were called only when things went gravely wrong, and only for very well-off patients otherwise. Pharmacists offered a range of remedies, many of them derived from ordinary plants. And in many communities, a healer - often a woman — who understood and worked with herbs and plants, and made tonics and tinctures, was regularly sought out for advice about mild or serious ailments.
In other words, while there were certainly quacks and "snake oil salesmen" in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and America, it was also the case that many ordinary people were expected to know something about healing and herbal remedies.
Mostly male physicians' treatment outcomes at that time were sometimes catastrophically wrong (see "calomel", a derivative of mercury minerals, that physicians used inadvertently to murder or cause brain damage to many a patient in the 19th century) and their results were at best hit-and-miss. It took a long, arduous and sometimes bullying effort for them and their professional organizations to secure for physicians higher status, to arrange for them exclusive access to licensing for the act of healing, and to harry everyone else — the women at home, the midwives, and non-physicians in general — out of the marketplace where people sought healing or the prevention of illness.
In the early 20th Century, John D Rockefeller moved from the oil industry to the medical world, via his purchase of a German pharmaceutical company. The Rockefeller Foundation then funded the Flexner Report in 1910. The Flexner Report concluded that the many natural healing modalities in use at that time — ranging from chiropractic to homeopathy to herbal remedies — were "unscientific quackery." Flexner also concluded that America needed a standardized medical education. Abraham Flexner's findings were used in establishing the American Medical Association. The result of the push launched by John D Rockefeller via Flexner, to clear the landscape of "under-regulated" healers and physicians, was that only the AMA could license physicians in America.
Thomas P Duffy MD, in "The Flexner Report — 100 Years Later", in The Yale Journal of Biological Medicine, of course puts it rapturously:
"The Flexner Report of 1910 transformed the nature and process of medical education in America with a resulting elimination of proprietary schools and the establishment of the biomedical model as the gold standard of medical training. This transformation occurred in the aftermath of the report, which embraced scientific knowledge and its advancement as the defining ethos of a modern physician. Such an orientation had its origins in the enchantment with German medical education that was spurred by the exposure of American educators and physicians at the turn of the century to the university medical schools of Europe. American medicine profited immeasurably from the scientific advances that this system allowed […]"
When Flexner died, The New York Times noted that Flexner had spent $600,000,000 via Rockefeller's General Education Board (and, notably, had also helped to found Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, with its branch focusing on natural sciences). Thus, head-spinning masses of Rockefeller money altered the American medical, and scientific scholarly, landscapes.
The bottom line for us, is that in the 114 years that followed, great treasures of effective modalities of natural healing, underneath this flow of money and this pressure from institutions, were systematically derided, marginalized, or erased from memory altogether.
"Herbal remedies" in particular have been assigned the cultural role of well-meaning Woodstock-era hippies in Birkenstocks, pleasant enough, but not to be taken seriously.
Natural skin and hair care practices around the world too have been wiped out of living memory or marginalized, as pharma-based skin and hair products became a massive megalith globally: "The global beauty and personal care products market size was estimated at USD 518.6 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 557.24 billion in 2023."
Who makes the skin and hair care products you have in your shower caddy? Indeed, who manufactures the over-the-counter remedies or medications, for which you reach when you are ill? In many cases, it is the same companies, or the same kinds of companies, that have been perfectly happy to injure or kill us all with various ill-tested, heavy-on-the-side-effects pharmaceutical products.
So — given all of this — I started to look back in history at what women used to use on their skin and hair, and at the history of what people reached for before modern medicine, when they were ill.
I realized that horrific, hormone-disrupting parabens, and drying sulphates and alcohols, were in many if not most commercial hair and skin care products, including expensive ones. (Thanks to Charlene Bollinger, anti-cancer pioneer, a sponsor of DailyClout's, and founder of natural skin care line Charlis, for educating me about much of this).
I threw these commercial pharma-based products out.
I researched lanolin, glycerin, rosewater, tallow — the materials that women used to use to care for their skin. As I experimented on myself with these and other nontoxic products, I found — (not showing off here) that my skin had never looked or felt better. I researched what women had done in the past, or in traditional societies, to care for their hair. I found records of natural bristle hairbrushing of 100 strokes a day, and the use of amla (Indian gooseberry) oil, used by Indian and Middle Eastern women to care for their often, smooth, silky, thick locks. Once I threw out my commercial shampoos and started using these practices and treatments, again (not showing off) my hair became silky, thick and manageable.
But when I got to researching herbal remedies for illness, I was stunned; and the benefits of my findings were much more than skin deep.
I found that tiger nuts, moringa tonic and black seed oil ramped up energy levels unbelievably; I looked at Jamaican sorrel, mauby bark, sassafras, Irish sea moss, fennel seed, lemongrass, avocado leaf, guava leaf, soursop, pleurisy root, Jamaican dogwood ("fishfuddle"), false unicorn root, and more.
These, I learned, are not just popular folk remedies; I looked at the peer-reviewed studies about them, and found astonishing levels of documented effectiveness for many of these herbs, roots and tonics.
Variously, these herbs, roots and tonics stabilized blood sugar; cleansed blood and deterred blood clots; killed cancer cells in vitro and in vivo — in the lab and in mammals' bodies; shrank tumors; quickly and dramatically dropped hypertension levels; lowered anxiety levels; had antihistamine effects on asthma and allergies; eased menstrual pain and smoothed menopausal symptoms; were anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, antibacterial, antifungal. The effectiveness of these cheap, easily available substances was often astonishing, at times more than rivaling their pharmaceutically-based competitors, and without the many side effects of prescription pharmaceuticals.
I had a recurring dream throughout my life — that I had inherited or owned a home with a hill behind it - and that buried in that hillside, was a treasure.
The way I felt in that dream, was how I often felt as I researched the extraordinary peer-reviewed results of lab tests on many of these herbs, roots and tonics; and I realized that the same herb, root or leaf — for instance, guava leaves - are used in the same ways for the same illnesses, in unrelated cultures around the world; and have been used thus for centuries.
It was incredible to me to read the peer-reviewed studies showing measurable drops in high blood pressure in human subjects within weeks, upon drinking mauby bark tea and coconut water; or showing again and again that a given herb or root killed cancer cells or shrank tumors. It was unreal to consider that these studies, had these results been achieved in a pharmaceutical company's lab, would be front page news around the world; but that no one had really heard of the incredible results that had been found by researchers working on humble leaves, herbs, roots and barks, that cannot be patented and thus can make no one very much money.
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