Now that the colder weather has come upon us in the northern hemisphere, it's time for viruses to make their rounds! Colds and flus can be pretty problematic for people with CF and other respiratory diseases as they can tax our immune systems and cause excessive mucus production, which can then lead to increased vulnerability to bacterial infections and exacerbations.

​Although there are very few tools that conventional technomedicine has for fighting viruses like colds and flus, there are many, many medicinal herbs that have antiviral activity and many more that stimulate the immune system to fight the infections ourselves. In this article, I will discuss medicinal herbs and foods that can help us prevent viral infections and hasten our recovery when they do come. 

This post is a continuation of my series focusing on individual herbs. In herbalism, we call in-depth documentation of individual herbs "monographs", and we call a compendium of monographs a "materia medica". My personal materia medica is over 300 pages long by now, so I'd like to provide some of the information I've gleaned about specific herbs that I think the CF community will greatly benefit from. So far we've covered astragalus and elecampane. Today I'd like to discuss one of the most revered medicinal herbs in Chinese Medicine: reishi mushroom. 

Hi friends. I recently taught a class on using herbs in acute and chronic respiratory infections. Here is the class description: 

Prepare for winter by enhancing your understanding of how respiratory infections develop and how herbal, nutritional, and lifestyle interventions can make a big difference regarding prevention and recovery. In this class we will discuss how to use herbs to address a wide variety of respiratory complaints including colds and flus, acute and chronic lung infections (bacterial, fungal, and viral), bronchitis, as well as chronic sinus irritation and infection. Our focus will be on moderate to severe respiratory illnesses. Students will gain deeper knowledge of how to use natural means to combat infections in order to minimize the need for use of antibiotics, steroids, and other pharmaceuticals.

Below is the lecture, which is split in two parts. I've also added a slide show of my power point slides. Enjoy! Let me know if you have any questions or would like to share your own experiences. 

Hey there friends! I have been meaning to do some more in-depth monographs on some of my favorite herbs, particularly ones that are beneficial for most people with CF. I mention a few helpful herbs in the section called Herbs for CF, but there are several herbs that are so helpful that they deserve a more lengthy discussion. 

Let me explain: a "monograph" is a lengthy description of a particular herb (there are also drug monographs, but I will not concern myself with those) that usually includes Latin name and botanical family, common name(s), parts used, how to identify them and grow them, where/how to source or buy them, their energetic profile (according to organoleptic analysis and traditional healing practices), physiological actions, clinical uses, key constituents, relevant scientific literature, safety concerns, preparation methods, and dose. A "Materia Medica" is a compendium of medicinal herbal monographs. There are many materia medicas from different herbal and traditional medical modalities, such as Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Eclectic Medicine, Tibetan Medicine, Modern Western Herbalism, and so on. I will not post my entire collected materia medica (mine is over 300 pages long so far and growing), but I will post a few herbs that I think everyone with CF (and many other people, too) will benefit from knowing. 

1. Cinnamon
I've been experimenting with taking cinnamon to control my blood sugar for years. And yet, I never really did enough controlled experimentation to get to the bottom of how it could help me, especially with my reactive hypoglycemia in the morning, until now. 

I have discovered that if I eat more than 25 grams of carbs for breakfast, I will have a reactive hypoglycemic reaction about 1-2 hrs afterward. I contemplate why this might be happening in a previous blog post. But regardless of why it was happening, I was not able to prevent a reactive hypoglycemic reaction unless I ate less than 25 g of carbs for my first meal of the day. Carb restriction is a reasonable approach, but sometimes carbs (like an apple with nut butter or a fruit-nut bar) are the most convenient thing to eat quickly before I start my morning treatments. So recently I've been experimenting with eating about 30 g of carbs for breakfast and taking different combinations of cinnamon and insulin to see what happens. 

I have some wonderful things to report after several weeks of self-experimentation. I've been inhaling essential oils since late February, and after seven weeks I feel like I have enough of  consistent results to report my findings (I am a scientist, after all). 

First of all, before I started inhaling essential oils I had just gotten off of oral antibiotics (minocycline and bactrim) and was planning on going into the hospital for some IV vancomycin to treat my MRSA infection. Fate brought me a snow storm that prevented me from getting to the hospital, and instead I decided to test out the eucalyptus essential oil I had bought the day before. I am so glad things worked out the way they did, or I would never had made these radical discoveries!

Why Use Essential Oils?
It's been on my mind for many months now that I should begin inhaling essential oils. In herbalism school we talk a lot about plant constituents, and that those herbs that are the most antimicrobial (antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, etc.) contain a high amount of volatile oils.