Learning to use herbs for yourself and your family’s good is a lifelong process. Learning about herbs is a journey that will keep you interested for the rest of your life. It can be rewarding to be able to treat some of your family’s illnesses and to learn a pre­ventive way of living. Prevention should be the first thing that you look at when learning to keep you or your family healthy.

Because there are some illnesses that you are not able to pre­vent, it is good to have a family physician that you can turn to when it becomes necessary. Herbs are not meant to take the place of your family doctor; they are for simple illnesses that you would be able to treat at home.

There are also times in our lives when medical care is not available and we have to deal with certain diseases on our own. By practicing a preventive lifestyle, you will find your family has to cope with less sickness.

Often we need to learn how to handle an emergency situa­tion when our physician is not available. Unfortunately, many of us have also learned to seek a doctor every time we have an-upset stomach or a slight cold. We are placing an unfair burden on the medical doctors and hospitals and pricing ourselves right out of medical insurance. We take prescription drugs and keep our systems full of drugs that are totally unnecessary. We would be able to respond more readily to emergency treatment if we learned to care for simple illnesses by a more natural method.

Herbs are a natural way to treat many such illnesses. Most herbs taken for treatment will pass harmlessly through the sys­tem if not needed by the body. Can you say the same for many prescription drugs? Many prescribed drugs are stored in the liver or other organs, and eventually our bodies stop responding to cer­tain drugs that may have been life-savers if used for emergency treatment only.

A healthy, chemical-free diet and lifestyle helps strengthen your immune system and thus allows the body to heal naturally. Also, by keeping the system chemical-free, your body reacts much more quickly and positively to any emergency treatment that your doctor may deem necessary. This means the treatment time will probably be shorter.

Learning to prepare your own herbal remedies involves much more than mixing together herbs. You must become familiar with the properties of the herbs in order to treat an illness suc­cessfully The easiest way to become familiar with the proper­ties of the herbs is to grow them. If you have decided to use herbal remedies, then you must decide which herbs to grow.

Long ago, most of the herbalists and shamans concentrated on just a few herbs and learned all there was to know about those few. This is just about the best advice I can give you. If you try to learn about too many at once, you will waste much time. Most herbs serve more than one purpose and are useful for more than one remedy. Even if you purchase most of your herbs, you still have to get acquainted with the reasons for using one particular herb over another and even substituting one herb for another.

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