Early, Often & After!

I have nine daughters. My six sons were outnumbered early on and never really had a chance. Have a look.

Cute no?

That picture was taken about 10 years ago. All of the kids are adults now…mostly married and producing some particularly cute grandbabies.

As you might imagine, my home is regularly full of visiting kids and grandkids. Recently one of my daughters was visiting from Utah. While she was here she started getting sick…really sick. My wife grabbed some tinctures and started giving them to her every couple of hours.

She felt better almost immediately. By the next day all evidence of illness was gone.

So what did Mom do?

She kept giving her tinctures for a couple of days.

This is a scenario I’ve seen countless times in my home as well as in my practices and it illustrates one of the foundational principles of my herbal practice and teaching. To whit, Herbs should be taken Early, Often and After.

Engaging herbal remedies at the earliest signs of illness will have a profoundly superior effect compared to starting them after you’ve been sick for a week. This is particularly true of infectious disease cases or anything involving inflammation.

The next leg of this three-legged stool for healing is to take the herbs Often. Once or twice a day isn’t enough in cases of acute illness. Your immune system needs regular support to function at its best. Taking a dose of herbs every three or four hours will be much more effective than taking them twice or, worse yet, once a day.

So, you took your herbs early in the course of your illness and you took them several times a day and now, a day or two later, you’re feeling better.

Now what?

Now you take some more herbs.

Taking herbs After you feel better for a few days gives the body the continued support it needs to return to health and helps to prevent a relapse. Once a person is on the mend, I usually back the frequency down to two or three times daily and continue for a few days.

So what herbs did Mom give our daughter? These ones:

Immunity Support

INFXN-Shoo Floo

Chaga

The Immunity Support and INFXN-Shoo Floo formulas are part of our Respiratory Preparedness Kit.  Chaga is immune stimulating, packed with nutrients and anti-oxidants and, research shows, has some very interesting activity against a number of coronaviruses…so yeah…I like it these days.

Using these herbs Early, Often & After made all the difference in my daughter’s fight against the respiratory bug that was trying to take hold. Understanding and applying this principle is a keystone to successful herbal therapy. Master it, and your success using herbs will increase significantly. Ignore it, and you’ll find that herbs don’t do you as much good as you think you should.

6 thoughts on “Early, Often & After!

  1. Mike says:

    My wife and I are both in our 60’s. We have been taking immunity support twice a day since April during the pandemic. Should we continue taking it daily or give it a rest for a while. We also have shoo-flu, cold away and cytokine balance in case we begin to have symptoms.
    We are very grateful for all we have learned from you about herbs. We are growing our own herbs and continually expanding. We look forward to hearing from you and appreciate your advice.
    Mike & Judy

    • Patrick Jones says:

      For acute, infectious disease issues I often go 3-4 times daily. For chronic maintenance types of conditions, I usually do twice daily.

  2. Vivian Sclafani says:

    My cat just developed a lump o. The back of his neck on the left side. I d rather not bring him to the vet if it can be helped naturally. Ive heard good things about tumeric and wondered what you’d suggest. My cat otherwise is himself feeling fine. Thanks for your advice ahead of time! Vivian

    • Patrick Jones says:

      I’d take the cat to your vet for two reasons:

      1. The first step in any healing intervention is to know what you’re dealing with. Taking the kitty to a vet will get you a diagnosis.
      2. Cats are pretty resistant to taking herbs.

      I don’t know of anything that would cause a lump on a cat that turmeric alone would be likely to resolve.

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