Got pain?
Did you know you can ease pain with natural compresses and poultices. Is your pain from a sprained ankle, painful neck, wrist, knee or elbow? Do you have pain because of constipation or diarrhea? From time to time, the affects of nursing, menstruating, anxiety, stress, and insomnia contribute to pain and decrease your quality of life.
See the details for mitigating the pain of 70 ailments covered in the new book, Natural Compresses & Poultices. You might recognize yours! Then take a few moments’ time out of your busy day to prepare a compress or poultice and relax into its healing therapy. It’s that easy!
Natural Compresses & Poultices: Safe and Simple Folk Medicine Treatments for 70 Common Conditions by Christopher Vasey. Published by Inner Traditions Bear & Company, 2019. Black and white illustrations. 136 p. includes index.
I’d always thought of a compress as the way to apply medicinal tea to your skin, period. I had no idea that compresses and poultices can be prepared with just plain water!
For sure, you could customize a compress with medicinal material to help the body get rid of the causes of pain. To do that, you can add an essential oil, herb, or vegetable or fruit to a compress. A poultice is made from mashed fruit, vegetable or herbs and applied to the skin neat, or wrapped in a thin cloth, either hot or cold.
This can be especially good if added vitamins and minerals are your goal. And you’d want to know how much to apply and for how long. Author Vasey gives detailed instructions for each condition.
How the skin discourages pain
Author Christopher Vasey, N.D. clearly explains the functions of heat and cold, and how your skin communicates with your nerves, tissues and deeper organs. You’ll have new appreciation for the power of your skin to keep your body running smoothly.
Skin is a conductor of energy and information.
Our skin is such an amazing organ! It orchestrates the best healing strategies for our bodies to use! For example, if subjected to intense cold, the skin instantly closes off communication between its top layers and the blood supplied there. This way the skin takes care of the body’s interior organs, keeping them warm. Subsequently, skin summons a fresh supply of warm blood and nutrients to its surface. In an otherwise healthy body, such an exchange happens quickly. Then, blood supplied with nutrients can deliver warmth to the exterior, and the body can resume smooth functioning on its own.
Conversely, when a body is depleted of energy (from ageing, overwork, illness and other specific instances), the application of heat is preferred to cold.
Two Causes of Pain
What I like best about the book is its explanation of how important the skin is for body ecology. Author Vasey describes this as the body’s terrain. He says in the terrain, there are two causes of pain. One is an “overload” of material to be processed. The other is a deficiency of nutrients. One of skin’s functions is to metabolize nutrients. It also gets rid of all types of wastes, sweat and toxins. Therefore, skin is a constantly changing terrain, and our first line of defense!
Cool temperature or other reactions.
Compresses and poultices can create conditions for warming or cooling. And not only by temperature, but also with chemical and revulsive actions provided by the materials on specific compresses and poultices.
You might first think of chemical actions, as I did. In most herbals, you find one or more recipes for compresses or poultices. They highlight herbs that have certain actions on the skin. You can appreciate how applying ingredients we usually have in our kitchens anyway might benefit and assuage pain. Some of these are cooked onions, potatoes, bentonite clay, essential oils, herbal infusions and cottage cheese or Greek yogurt.
Also, you might be familiar with herbs that elicit skin reddening, or irritation. That would be revulsion, forcing the body to try to get rid of the irritating substance by calling attention to it, or creating inflammation. This is explained with special tips about cabbage, mustard, St. John’s Wort, lemon, etc.
What’s so helpful about these explanations is that when reading them, I could better imagine the magnificent ability of the skin to communicate with our nerves, enervating all functions of the body.
A Swiss Doctor of Naturopathy, Vasey’s aim is to provide readers with information about the body’s functions that we can easily use. He then writes about many types of cures for common conditions. See eight other books by Christopher Vasey, N.D. at Inner Traditions Bear & Company.
