Alternative Medicine & What to do if Your Medicine Isn’t Available

Hey Pioneers. Welcome to episode number 324. Today's episode, we're going to be talking about what if you couldn't get any medicine at the store? And we're going to be coming at this a little bit at two different angles. One, talking about supply and supply issues when we look at our modern medicinal system. And then secondly, talking about our health and growing our own medicine, which is from a herbalistic viewpoint. I am really excited to dive into this podcast because this is actually something that we experienced last month and something I've really been pondering and thinking about. My name is Melissa K. Norris. I am a fifth generation homesteader, author of multiple books, including the best-selling book, The Family Garden Plan. I help people learn how to use simple, modern homesteading to lead a more self-sufficient and healthier life, and I am very excited to help you do that exact same thing.

I just got back at the time of this recording from the fall October 2021 Homesteaders of America's conference and it was amazing. There was over 5,000 attendees. I got to visit and talk with a number of you, but I also, throughout the years of having this online platform and teaching courses, having my membership in all those different avenues, where many of you have reached out to me with your own stories of coming to homesteading, growing your own food, getting clean sources of food like grass fed, organic, pasture-raised meat sources, vegetables that are vine ripened that you have complete control over the way that they're growing and eating whole foods. Learning how to do shared foods and fermented foods and that by doing that, many of you have experienced truly remarkable healing from a variety of different things.

Many of you guys are familiar with my own story, so I will just share it here briefly. If you're not, but when I really turned to homesteading hardcore, as I said, I was raised in a homesteading environment, meaning we raised our own beef from the time I was born. We had a vegetable garden every year. My mom cooked predominantly from scratch, mainly because we couldn't afford to go out to eat or buy convenience foods. We grew what we were able to. She canned and we didn't have store bought things like Oreo cookies or... Every now and then she would buy crackers, but that wasn't like a... Chips and crackers, soda pop, nothing like that. Almost everything that we had my mom made from scratch out of necessity, which is really good. It set me up with a firm foundation that I didn't even know I needed to appreciate until I was older in life, as most of us probably, looking back on our childhood, there was things that once we got older, we were like, oh, I'm so glad my parents did that at the time. Might not have appreciated it quite so much.

However, my health story as some of you know is I had really bad stomach ulcers and GERD, to the point that I was taking max dose of prescription medications up to six times a day. I was on the maximum dose of proton pump inhibitors. You have little proton pumps in your stomach that pump out acid, and we need a certain amount of acid in order to digest food and to move things through our stomach system. And the thought is you take a proton pump inhibitor if those pumps are producing too much acid, and then that helps reduce the GERD and heartburn, et cetera, things that people are going through when they have stomach issues.

Well, I was on those max doses, but I still had so much breakthrough heartburn that I was also taking a prescription medication that worked like a chemical bandaid. You have to take it on an empty stomach before you want to eat, and it coats the stomach essentially so that you eat and then the stomach lining is coated so that where you do have erosion, ulcers, et cetera, that it's not being burned so that you can eat. And I went in and had my upper stomach and esophagus endoscope done. They thought maybe I had Barrett's disease or some other things, and so they needed to see what was going on because these medications, they weren't quelling the acid and my quality of life was really bad. I was very, very thin. I was over 20 pounds lighter than I am now. I just basically I could not eat and was always in constant pain.

So they did a scope. When they were in there they ended up seeing some suspicious areas and so they did a biopsy of both my upper stomach and my esophagus. Now, luckily both of those came back benign, meaning I did not have cancer, but the specialist at the time told me you have erosion and your cellular change, and those are precursors, the cellular change especially, to developing cancer, so you have to figure out one, how to get off these medications. You should not have been on them this long and at these doses. And the only way you're going to be able to control this is by the food that you are eating. So this was when I was in my late twenties, I am now 40. And he gave me a big stack of papers and sent me home. And let me tell you, it was motivation.

I had two small children and my husband at home, and I wanted to be around for them when they grew up. So that is when I really began to revamp our entire way that we were eating, the ingredients I was cooking with. We started growing more of our own food, and it took six months, because there are specific medications, proton pump inhibitors are one of them, that you should never quit cold turkey. The doses I was on were so high that I had to gradually, with the help of the pharmacist, we had to gradually dose down. And so it took me six months to completely come off of everything, but since then, it's now been over a decade, I have never had to go back on any medications for, I should specifically say for heartburn, stomach ulcers, digestive issues, et cetera. Been off of them since then and have experienced complete healing.

And that was all done by the foods that I ate. It was all done by food and lifestyle. And many of you, though it's been different diseases or different conditions, different health issues, have shared the same findings we with me. That when you were able to switch your diet to a whole foods, nutritionally based, clean, unprocessed as possible way of eating, that your health was transformed.

So I wanted to start with that story because with our modern medicine and the title of this episode, what would you do if you couldn't get medicine from the store? So many of us would not need certain medicines and/or prescriptions if we simply could change the way that we eat.

Now don't throw tomatoes right now at me. Don't send me hate mail. There are some conditions that it doesn't matter how clean you eat or what you eat, you are going to need prescriptions for. And I am very grateful to live in a time when we have access to both. I've shared this before that my daughter has a blood clotting disorder and there are some certain medicines only at time of injury that she has to have for like bleeding things or severe cuts, et cetera, and I am very grateful to modern medicine for that, and being able to have that. And just because you eat a really clean, healthy diet does not mean that you're never going to get sick, or you're never going to get a disease, or something like that. That's a falsehood. So I don't want anybody to misinterpret what I'm sharing or what I'm saying or thinking that if somebody gets sick or develops a disease, well, they just weren't eating clean enough. That's not what I'm saying at all and that's absolutely not true.

However, there are a lot of things that people have found if not complete healing, a much better, less symptoms, and a much better quality of life by switching out their foods and changing their lifestyle for better health. And so I wanted to lead with that because when I worked in the pharmacy, I was a pharmacy technician for 18 years. And so many of the prescriptions that we were filling, if people understood, truly understood that by changing their nutrition alone, they wouldn't have, have to take those medications because they were taking medications for symptoms, but they could actually eliminate those symptoms if they could change their lifestyle and change certain things about what they were eating and consuming for their health. And now I'm not a licensed medical professional in any way and just cause I was a pharmacy tech does not make me a licensed medical professional.

So know that there're exceptions to everything, right? So please just take this at how it's meant. And don't try to read more into it or think that I'm picking on anyone or making claims that I'm not, as I just tried to explain here, but with that being said, it's very interesting because this was way before everything that we're seeing now with supply issues and demand and all those different things. This was years ago, our supply chain, even then, especially in the realm of pharmaceuticals is very fragile. It was fragile then it's even more fragile now I'm sure. I don't actually work as a pharmacy tech in anymore. I stopped working at the pharmacy about three or four years ago at this point, but we would go to order medications and these were not like new medications or anything like that.

They were generic medications that had been on the market for decades and had never had supply issues before. And we would go to order them because we would have patients obviously on the medications and would need to get in more stock. And it would just say from our distributor, our wholesaler, not available. So you'd go to look for a different brand because when you have generics they're made by multiple companies, they're like, oh, well, we'll go find another manufacturer. And none of them, it was not available for any of them. We literally just could not get it, no notification. And in some instances those medications never came back in stock, meaning we had to contact the patient's doctor and get them transferred to a completely different medication and there was no warning. It just was no longer available for whatever reason.

Sometimes it would be months. Sometimes it would be weeks. Sometimes it would just be a few days and it would come back in, but my point is, is that we never actually knew. And I had this discussion multiple times with workers at that time, wow, it actually is a pretty fragile supply chain. Now this is not meant to cause any type of panic, please don't start panicking thinking you need to stockpile, but it's something to be aware with. And the reason that I want to bring this part up first is because there are a lot of things that if we are able to do sometimes it's gut healing. This obviously depends on what type of medication you're on, but there are a lot of things that in my own personal experience, because that's all I can talk to, right, is my own experience getting off of the stomach acid medication.

And then I actually was on low thyroid medication for a number of years and was also able to come off of that. Now that doesn't mean that you will be able to, because I was able to, there's varying degrees. There's lots of factors that come into all of this. So I am not advocating or telling you to come off of your prescription medications because that is something that needs to be done between you and your medical provider and not everybody will ever be able to do that. There are some people who will never be able to come off of some of the things that they are on. So I just want to make that really clear. I am not giving you medical advice and I am not telling you to come off of your prescription medications in any way, shape or form. You can cause a lot of damage by coming off of things if your body has not reached a level where it can produce whatever it needs to on its own.

So therefore got that covered. But as I said, I don't take any prescription medications at this time and I haven't for several years. And I didn't realize how rare that can be, I guess, because I was talking with someone and they're like, most pharmacies will deliver medications now. A lot of pharmacies have a delivery program and they're like, well, what pharmacy do you use to have all your guys' prescriptions delivered? And I just looked at them and I'm like, well, I'm not on any prescriptions. We don't have any prescriptions delivered because I don't take any of them. And their mouth dropped open. In my head I'm like, is that a rarity? Judging from this person's reaction, that must be a rarity. And because I haven't worked in pharmacy in, like I said, a number of years now, I was like, wow.

So obviously if you have a health condition that can be improved by changing lifestyle and looking into that further and seeing are there things that I can do and protocols that I can follow and implement that can help me heal to a point where I don't need these medications and then actually do them. And I know that that sounds like such simple, almost a silly thing to say, but it's often overlooked. And honestly, I didn't know. If I had known back then, sometimes you just don't know what you don't know. If I had known that I could honestly control and heal my stomach acid issues by changing the foods that I ate, I could have eliminated so many years of so many issues, but I didn't know that. You know if you have stomach acid. It's like, oh, well you probably shouldn't eat a lot of times people say tomato products.

Honestly homegrown heirloom, my tomato products have never bothered my stomach acid and they still don't. There were other foods that certainly contributed to it. And I have a whole episode on that which will link to the blog post for today's episode, you can go to melissaknorris.com/324, because this is episode number 324. Melissaknorris.com/324, just the numbers. 324. And we'll have in the show notes, links to the episodes where I talk about in depth about how, what foods I cut out and how I went about healing and all of that in more depth. So you can go and check those out if you haven't listened to them, but I just didn't know that. And so that's why I put that out there because sometimes it can feel obvious once you've went through something, but for someone who's at the beginning or who just doesn't know, it doesn't matter how obvious it seems if they don't know that. Now the other, this is the more recent part of it where I want to get to, is if you aren't able to go to the store or you can't find the medicine.

And this is really talking about herbal medicinal remedies because my husband and I both came down with a cold. This has been about, oh gosh, probably a good six weeks ago now. It was in September. We both came down with cold. It doesn't matter how good you are at being healthy or keeping that immune system up. There's lots of things that you can do, but you still will come down with something at some point in time. So we both came down with the same cold. We had the same symptoms that hit identical times. We're quite sure it was the exact same thing. And what's interesting though, is even though you can assume you're coming down with the same cold because you both got symptoms at the same time and most of them are very, very similar in the beginning is how it can affect you differently.

My husband, when he gets a cold, generally it will settle in his chest. Whereas mine tends to settle more in my throat and vocal cords, and I'm talking light cold, common cold symptoms here. And so I will use different herbal remedies for me based on specific symptoms and obviously, and then for him, and then we both still... I'm not on thyroid medication now, but I know that I have had a tendency in the past for it to be low and so I will avoid putting things like horseradish into fire cider, which I have a fire cider episode as well as a recipe. So all of these things will be as I said in the show notes if you want to check them out, but however fire cider is excellent for my husband when he is dealing with respiratory issues. However, he was dealing with a lot of congestion, really, really bad, and it was on a Sunday and it was so early.

I don't really consider the first part of September cold and flu season yet. And so it kind of took us by surprise and I had not went through all of my herbal supplies for this year's cold and flu season. And so I was going through what I had on hand from last year and then what we grow ourselves and realized that I was out of eucalyptus and I was also out of Mullen. Now, eucalyptus, I actually did not know you could grow here, but I did find a variety. It's a test. I just got it. I'm going to see how it goes through our winter and I'm going to be attempting to grow eucalyptus here in our Northern seven A climate. I really, really hope that it is successful. So I just got my plant and we'll see how it goes through the winter if it makes it through till spring.

So I'm very excited about that. However, it's not something that doesn't grow around here natively. I've never seen anybody grow it. We're going to see how it goes. So it's not something I was able to grow and source myself and I am growing Mullen here, but I didn't have any. I had just put some in this year. And so it didn't get big enough for me to harvest yet. It will flower and grow stocks next year biannually. So I wasn't able to harvest from the plants that I had put in this year here. So it was on a Sunday and I really needed to create some herbal steams for him. We needed really to get his sinuses opened and going through the stocks of herbs that I had on hand, I realized that I did not have, we had used up all of the herbal supply that I did have, and I didn't have any back stock.

And so he's like, well, can you get some in town? Could you get some after church today, because I was better at that point, but he was still suffering with stuff. So I was going to church and he was not. And I'm like, no, the herbal supplies that I need, no, they're not available. Not only are they not available at our local grocery store, they're not even available down at our local co-op, especially on a Sunday. Literally there was nowhere that I could get those supplies because they simply weren't available in our area. Now I could order them online, but that's not immediate, right, and what if shipping things, we're seeing we're being warned of at the time of this recording that there's to expect even longer shipping delays as we move into the holidays and workforce issues, hiring issues, having enough people to work jobs and to unload shipments if it's coming in from other countries, just a lot of factors at play with supply and demand right now.

And so I had to sit down and I had to really think. I'm like, okay, what are things that will grow here that I'm not growing and what are things that I can't source from here that we need to use? And it was very eye opening quite honestly, because I realized that though we raise a lot of our own food source and we're upping our herbal production and they have a good herb garden at home. And there's still really a lot of things that we rely on just to treat things that are quite common, right, cold and flu, that I don't have a source of. And not only do I not have a source of it for us, but there's no way that other people in my community have a source for these things.

It's not locally where I can go and get them that day. So I started looking them up, all of the herbs that I rely on that were not growing and if I can't get them locally here, will they grow here? Maybe it's just something I haven't planted yet. Will they grow here? And if so, putting them in and not only putting in enough for us, but I know that there's a need for that in our local community. So we just broke ground and are transforming our front yard. We're not going to have much yard left I have a feeling as the months go by and we're putting in a larger medicinal herb garden with more perennials, more varieties, more of these plants, anything that I'm finding that will grow in our area, we're putting them in. So one that we will have the stock for ourselves, but two, I want to have enough extra to be able to supply local communities.

So we're going to be doing some live workshops this coming spring and summer where we'll be sharing how to grow them, teaching how to use them and then actually having people be able to come and learn how to harvest them and make remedies or come and buy supplies if they don't have those herbs growing themselves, so we actually have a local source. So why am I sharing all of that with you? Because I think it's something that each one of us really need to evaluate. I think there's never been a time like the present and look at one, if you don't know how to use herbal remedies begin learning because it is medicine that we can grow that we don't have to go to the store for. Learning about what will grow in your area and like I said, how to use those herbal remedies with safety and dosing and effectiveness and all those different things, which you could go to, I'm doing a herb course that dives into specifically for during cold and flu season, but you can go to melissaknorris.com/herbclass.

Depending on when you are listening to this if it is open from enrollment, you will get to see that and you can join. Or if not, you'll see getting on a wait list, but you can go and check that out. I've got a lot of resources on herbs as well and past podcast episodes. So I'll link to those again in the blog post and then lots of articles and recipes as well with videos up on the website. So lots of resources there for you to get started, but something that I really want you to consider, because that was something that it really took us not being able to get supplies and needing them for me to move and to truly do an evaluation and then begin getting those plants in and coming up with a plan so that we do have them and we have them here on our homestead.

I'm not relying on outside sources. Now there's some herbal medicines that aren't going to grow in my climate. I should say plants and spices that are used medicinally that I am not going to be able to grow here. And so I absolutely will be using sources, but I'm also going to make sure and do a better job that I have them on hand before I need them, because if there is a longer delay in getting supplies because of shipping and just all the different issues that we're seeing right now, as I can't even say as a country, as a world quite honestly, then I need to make sure that I have got my stock. And so evaluating those things, making a list, getting those orders in place and or for plants that I'm going to be bringing in. Some of them you can start from seed.

Some of them need to be cutting. Some of them need to be live plants. There's so many different plants to go through that I can't cover them in this episode, but begin researching that finding which plants you want to have on hand and the ones that will grow in your area, if at all possible, start getting them in the ground now, because some of those herbal medicines, if you're harvesting the root, especially with things like echinacea, which is a phenomenal one. Marshmallow, liquorish, those were using the root and the plant has to be three years old before you can harvest the root and then you need to make you have extra, right? So because if you harvest the root from the entire plant, then you're not going to have a plant to harvest from next year. So making sure that you have enough planted, that they will keep growing and then you can harvest part of the root, but you've always got more to harvest the following year or that it will grow and you'll be dividing some out, et cetera.

Then there's some that are biennial, like I mentioned, Mullen is a biennial and before it puts up that flowering stock and then things with elderberry, elderberry usually has to be about three years old and requires a cross pollinator in order to get the elder berries. However, you can use the elder flower. Now the plant has to be old enough to flower. Oftentimes it'll start at two years, sometimes three, but even if you don't have a pollinating variety, you won't get the berries from the flower, but you can harvest the flowers and use those medicinally as well. Elder flower also has medicinal properties and then of course, so does the berry. So there're some things like that, that you'll have to plan because they simply aren't going to produce is the part of the plant that you need or it's not at harvestable size, et cetera, for several years, but then there's other plants, like yarrow and peppermint and Sage and feverfew that you can harvest the blossoms off them and they will blossom that very first year.

And actually even with echinacea, I have a full in depth video and article on how to make echinacea tincture out of the fresh flower part. So that you can harvest the first year. It's just the root that we're not able to harvest until it's so many years old. So I am not a doom and gloomer, and this was not meant to make you panic in any way, shape or form, but just to make you aware and hopefully something that you can then sit and think about and then implement a plan and put it into action. For our verse of the week, I'm going to be showing from Romans three verse 22 through 23 and this is the amplified translation. Namely the righteousness of God, which comes by believing with personal trust and confident reliance on Jesus Christ, the Messiah, and it is meant for all who believe for there is no distinction since all has sinned and are falling short of the honor and glory, which God bestows and receives.

And I wanted to share this first because oftentimes we can feel like, or at least I should say myself, that even though I know that I am saved by grace and not by works, oftentimes I still put conditions on my salvation or conditions in my mind that if I mess up or if I do something that I know God wouldn't be proud of, which I would love to think that I never do that, but let's just be real. I still do things all the time that later I'm like, why did you do that? Or why did you say that? Or why did you have that thought? And know that it's not something that God would be proud of, that it's sin. And then it can be really easy for me to slip into that negative thought pattern that you're not worthy.

You're not all of these things. And that is just the enemy, Satan's way of trying to separate us from God instead of, or even sometimes could be prideful if it's the opposite, right? Well, at least I don't do blah, blah, blah, or at least I don't do that and that's wrong too, but it can kind of go both ways and so it's easy for us to get caught on that. So it's really important for me to remember that we have all sinned and we are all falling short of the glory of God, but as long as I believe in God, come to him, ask him for forgiveness, that his mercy and grace and his sacrifice on the cross covers all of that. And so it all brings us to the exact same place falling upon the mercy of God. And none of us are any better or any worse than the other in those regards.

I don't know about you, but I am very grateful for his grace and mercy and that it renews every single morning. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. Please do share with me if any of you have experienced growing eucalyptus in a cold climate and have been successful, please let me know and I will, of course, keep you guys updated on how it goes. I hope it is a success story come springtime, but let me know if you are growing herbs, if you have noticed supply issues with medicinal products, and I would love to hear your stories and experiences regarding that and what you guys are doing to take control of your own health.

Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. Next week's episode, I'm actually really excited about. Many of you have reached out and asked me to talk about this. So we're going to be talking about preparedness with a generator, the different generators we've had over the years, the different systems we've put in place and you need to know about if you are looking about getting a generator to run your homestead as a backup, or maybe even your main source. So we're going to be talking all about that on next week's episode. For now, blessings in mason jars, my friend.