Workshop: Finding medicinal herbs growing in sidewalk cracks

I'm really sorry I'm going to miss this Machine Project workshop on Wednesday, Dec 9th, in Los Angeles.

An after dark exploration of the sidewalk cracks around Machine Project for local medicinal plants, led by Nance Klehm. Get ready for the long winter dry, cold haul with simple knowledge on how to identify common wild plants that can be used in herbal remedies.
Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria. More information on Nance can be found at her website.

Echo Park Medicinal Forage with Nance Klehm

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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dougr650

So, this is going to be a gathering of people who would willingly put something into their bodies that they found growing on a sidewalk in LA? That certainly qualifies as “radical” ecology. I applaud her courage, but I’m guessing this is kind of a self-perpetuating pursuit. She’s going to need a lot more medicinal herbs tomorrow to recover from the herbs she ingests today.

I’m not a big believer in self-medicating with herbal “remedies.” But then again, I also don’t scrape up stuff off an urban street and swallow it, so what do I know?
nillin

Not sure what she considers “medicinal,” but I’m sensing this is just new-age nonsense.

Her composting projects look really interesting, however. I wish she had more pictures on her site.
Rider

“when in fact it’s one of the few ways to invigorate one’s immune system and maintain a bodily balance.”

I love it when people string together words that mean nothing. “Maintain a bodily balance”, that’s a great one.
CANTFIGHTTHEDITE

I hope those herbs weren’t growing in soils contaminated with heavy metals.

Also, composting your own waste outdoors within city limits may be illegal, depending on where you live.

Finally, @stevennatural what’s this “invigorate one’s immune system and maintain a bodily balance” mean exactly? Could you redo that sentence with some non-woo words, also known as “plain english” ?
Snig

She has willow, the original source of an aspirin like compound, in her hands. I’m not big on eating plants from an urban environment, partly out of fear of heavy metals. Then again, I’m also not big on big urban environments in general.
Snig

I live on the east coast, so my plants may be a little different, and I don’t do this on my day job. If you can find willow, you can make an aspirin like compound, not acetylsalic acid, but one similar. If you can find plantain (plantago, not the banana), the seeds of a similar species is used to make metamucil, other fiber products. Peppermint/spearmint is pretty benign, it’s not that rare to find it escabed in an urban environment, it’s had a couple studies suggest it’s oil can help with IBS. I think the method of activity has been suggested to be a decreased contraction of the smooth muscles (which line the gi tract), so they may be less spastic and hence decrease IBS symptoms. This is off the top of my head. Ginkgo is easy to spot, some mild benefit has been seen in some studies on dementia.
Hawthorn extracts have been shown to have some cardiac benefit.

Use at one risk, these statements will likely be labelled woo woo.
Anonymous

Interesting that someone who “only uses a flush toilet when no other option exists” and who picks plants found growing in a big-city sidewalk would be telling other people about health. (I realize that the two are probably not directly connected, but it’s hard not to think about it!)

Physician, heal thyself, indeed.

disclaimer: I’m a regular user of herbal medicine — I go to a Western physician, too.

(ReCaptcha: another defraud. snerk.)
Anonymous

Am I the only one struck by the fact that she “only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available”?

What are the “other” options? The shrubs in the park? Behind Taco Bell? I don’t know…
- Snig
  
  Anon who asked “Am I the only one struck by the fact that she “only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available”?”
  
  Composting toilet. Yes, it seems literally anal retentive in a green way, but the article did label her as a radical environmentalist.
Anonymous

Everything needs to be taken with a good dose of scepticism – on the one hand there are traditional remedies that do work but there’s also alot of junk sold to unwitting and desperate people.

On the other hand you’ve got prescribed and OTC pharmaceutical drugs that have been (for the most part) rigorously tested and studied. Of course sometimes drugs aren’t as awesome as we’re told (Thalidomide for example).

My take on all this is to research using interweb sources, libraries and health care workers if you want more information but take nothing as gospel.
- Snig
  
  Agree w/ anon #11.
  Especially as the story is always changing as new research changes the picture.
  
  Thalidomide is an interesting one especially as ginger was already available a natural alternative for extreme nausea during pregnancy. It was not pursued in research at the time, partly because herbal meds were not considered legit, partly because their was no money as you can’t patent something that’s been around forever.
  Why push an opensource freeware med when there’s a promising copyrighted one that might bring in a bazillion bucks for some lucky CEO?
  
  And of course some oldies but goodies that have been around forever, like opium and tobacco, are not neccesarily wholesome and helpful for whatever ails you.
johnlancia

Lol, Vegetarianism and Veganism in particular are totally unnatural. We evolved eating meat. Our distant ancestors at as much meat as they could scavenge whenever they could. They eventually domesticated animals so that they could eat it all the time. Meat eating is seen as one of the main forces behind what fueled our larger brains, which propelled us to where we are today. Not like those thick headed Australopithecus robustus vegetarian idiots. History put a dot on end of them.
Vegetarians, in my experience, (dating actresses and all those other hot skinny types, as well as putting up with miserable customers at the health food store I used to work at) are sickly, moody, ill-tempered and often develop chronic conditions due to lack of minerals and vitamins in their diets. (The smugness and self-satisfied piety apparently isn’t brought on by the diet but is a mental thing.)
You have to eat a tonne of vegetables in order to make up for a lack of meat in your diet. It doesn’t make any sense at all when you work it out by the numbers.
- monkey_pirate
  
  “You have to eat a tonne of vegetables in order to make up for a lack of meat in your diet.”
  
  Wrong.
  
  If you’re talking about protein, you can get all the protein you need from eating a varied, balanced, vegetarian diet. My wife (who has been veg for over 20 years) was completely veg during her pregnancy, and underwent extensive blood testing and monitoring, and was repeatedly told she was one of the healthiest pregnant women her doctors had ever seen. She was 38 at the time, and hasn’t been in a gym for years.
  
  Call it anecdotal evidence at best, but your insinuation that humans must gorge themselves like elephants to “make up for” not eating meat is total uneducated bullshit.
Anonymous

Humans are onivores, nuff said.

http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm
Anonymous

I watched a show on bbc called ‘grow your own drugs’.
He had some good ideas there and often got results from his plant derivitives.
Snig

We actually we have steadily increasing numbers of woo Cochrane studies available to help sort out the foolishness, though more studies will of course be needed. From the wiki on EBM:

A 2001 review of 160 Cochrane systematic reviews (excluding complementary treatments) in the 1998 database revealed that, according to two readers, 41.3% concluded positive or possibly positive effect, 20% concluded evidence of no effect, 8.1% concluded net harmful effects, and 21.3% of the reviews concluded insufficient evidence.[7] A review of 145 alternative medicine Cochrane reviews using the more up-to-date 2004 database revealed that 38.4% concluded positive effect or possibly positive (12.4%) effect, 4.8% concluded no effect, 0.69% concluded harmful effect, and 56.6% concluded insufficient evidence.[8]:135-136
Beelzebuddy

herbal remedies have histories that go back thousands of years.

So does trepanation and bloodletting. Older is not always better.
Snig

Trepanation is still used for some subdural hematomas.
Blood donation has been suggested to show some health benefit.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/314/7083/793
What goes around, comes around. Older is not neccessarily worse.
Antinous / Moderator

Most of our drugs come from plants originally or are engineered to improve on existing drugs that came from plants originally.
CANTFIGHTTHEDITE

Herbs, plants, vegetables, organic items that grow out of the heavy-metal contaminated ground (when eaten) can hurt the body.

This is why you have to be careful where you get your compost from when you don’t have the option of using your own. It’s also why you don’t eat plants that have been growing in who knows what, especially in cities where industry was moved further out of town before soil contamination was fully understood.

“Plain Language” would be less discriminatory, I guess.
Beelzebuddy

Quite. Modern medicine has proven remarkably capable of recognizing when ancient remedies have some medicinal value and when they do not. As the posters above retort we do still use leeches and trepanation, but not to balance our humors or release the demons within our skulls. That’s the problem with ancient wisdom: so often it turns up right next to damn foolishness, and so rarely does new age woo offer any way for you to tell the difference.