(Part 3)
Justine: So you’ve also written
about some of the ways that we attract cancer. Is that right?
Susun: Well, I’ve written Breast
Cancer? Breast Health! Which is roughly divided into three
sections. The first section is for keeping your breasts
healthy. What kinds of things can you do to keep your breasts
healthy? And this of course is also true for women who have
been diagnosed and treated and then don’t want a recurrence.
The second section is well, what do you do if you find a
lump? And that includes ways to get through surgery, chemotherapy,
radiation and taking Tomoxofin. And then the third section
is a section of recipes and a materia medica of the most
important herbs for maintaining breast health. So a long
book. I put over 5,000 hours into it, and my editors put
another 5,000 hours into it, and we’re just really
pleased the tremendous reception that it’s gotten.
One of my distributors when it came out refused to pick
the book up. Said, “Oh, you know, breast cancer’s
an awful topic”, and I said, “I tell you what,
I’ll give you the first case free.” They now
order 3,000 at a time of this book.
Justine: So I know that you start off
in your anti-cancer lifestyle, staying in touch with your
own seasonal rhythms and then you follow that up with sleep
in total darkness, and things like that. So this would be
advice for a very good sort of living and that’s really
what you’re talking about.
Susun: That’s what I’m talking
about. In the Wise Woman Tradition when I say that we heal
through nourishing, part of that of course is preventative
medicine.
Justine: Right.
Susun: Right. So as a wise woman, if I
have the care of a hundred pregnant women and I tell them
to eat these certain foods or to drink for instance, stinging
nettle infusion, and they do that, build up the iron in
their blood, become very healthy, and have no problem giving
birth and have no hemorrhage during the birth, then basically
I’ve done nothing. But if I don’t tell them
that and then they have a problem or hemorrhage, then I
could come in as the hero and save the day. So you don’t
often see the healing that wise women do, because we do
our best to stay behind the scenes and to promote such tremendous
health. And this is true in so many different ways. And
again as you were saying before, it’s just becoming
more and more obvious to more and more people that sitting
around and eating salty, oily, refined sugar, refined flour
foods, is not a way to build health and that it causes actually
fairly severe chronic problems down the line. But amazingly
enough what I’ve seen is that once we, you know, get
people to start drinking nourishing herbal infusions, which
most people really like, and to eat a whole foods diet,
many of those problems seem to really change. I’ll
tell you a funny story. I was teaching in Germany. I was
teaching a three-week workshop for health care professionals,
and I was teaching at a workshop center where I’ve
taught at many times before. And the cook there is very
good friends with me. And so we were talking beforehand,
and I said, “Look, what I want to do is I want to
serve them nourishing herbal infusion and not give them
coffee or tea”. He said, “You’re gonna
cause a riot.” He says, “They have to have their
coffee. They have to have their tea.” I said, “We’re
just, you and I, we’re going to do this as an experiment
and we’re going to tell ‘em they don’t
get coffee or tea for three weeks. That they drink these
nourishing herbal infusions”. Well there were some
complaints at the beginning, but after two or three days
those died down. And about two weeks later the students
in the class again who were MDs and ?? practicas and midwives
and osteopaths and so on, started - without any prompting
from me - talking about their minor and some of the major
health problems that they had had – some of them for
many, many years – which were completely gone.
Justine: What is an herbal infusion?
Susun: Good question. A nourishing herbal
infusion is a very strong brew of an herb that is loaded
with vitamins, minerals, proteins and often phytoestrogens.
So let’s contrast infusion to tea. A tea uses a small
amount of herb. An infusion uses a large amount of herb.
A tea is brewed for a short amount of time. An infusion
is brewed for a long amount of time. In a tea we could use
a fresh herb or a dried herb, and often the preference is
the fresh herb. In an infusion we want to use only the dried
herb. So very simply, and again at my website there are
good instructions as well as in all my books, for making
an infusion, so you don’t have to run and grab a pencil
here. You can just let it go in one ear and out the other.
We take one ounce by weight of our dried herb, like stinging
nettle, put it in a jar, pour boiling water to the top of
that quart jar – so we have about four cups of boiling
water – screw the lid on it and let it steep for four
hours or overnight, and when we come back I’ll tell
you what we do with it.
Justine: Great. I’m speaking with
Susun Weed, the author of New Menopausal Years the Wise
Woman Way – Alternative Approaches for Women 30 to
90. And that website that she mentioned is susunweed dot
com. My name is Justine Willis Toms. You’re listening
to New Dimensions.
[break]
Justine: I’m speaking with Susun
Weed, author of New Menopausal Years the Wise Woman Way
– Alternative Approaches for Women 30 to 90. And we’re
talking about herbal infusions, and you were giving us a
slight recipe. You said you boil it, or simmer it for how
long?
Susun: We take a quart jar and put our
one ounce by weight of dried herb into the quart jar and
then pour boiling water over that, so in fact the herb is
never really simmered or boiled itself at all. I stopped
doing that because I kept burning the pan, so I took to
doing it in a jar and I found that that works much better
for me, and everyone else. As a matter of fact, to tell
you the truth, I do this last thing at night. You know,
I go in the kitchen, I measure my herb into the jar –
and if you don’t have a scale and you’re buying
cut and sift bulk herb it’s about one cup by volume
– so you fill a quart jar about one cup with your
dried herb.
Justine: And it doesn’t matter if
it’s that accurate or does it?
Susun: It doesn’t matter if it’s
that accurate, exactly.
Justine: OK.
Susun: But just make sure to get enough
in there. People tend to --
Justine: I mean you can’t get too
much – or you can?
Susun: Well you don’t wanna fill
your jar up. You won’t be able to get any water in
it. So you could say that that might be too much. And then
I just put the teapot up to boil and I go in the bathroom
and I brush my teeth. And it’s great because when
the teapot whistles I should be done brushing my teeth right.
It’s a good timer for how long to brush those teeth.
Go back in the kitchen, turn off the fire, pour the water
over the herb, put a tight lid on the jar – in other
words I’m filling the jar right to the top with boiling
water. So we have one ounce by weight of herb and approximately
four cups of boiling water. Put a tight lid on the jar;
turn off the light and go to sleep. I just let it infuse
overnight. In the morning then, I strain it out, squeezing
the plant material, and Maouri elders in New Zealand that
I work with put it very bluntly. They say, “Don’t
expect any herb to help you that you throw in the trash”.
Yeah. Justine’s eyebrows have just gone up. And most
people’s do. It’s like, “Wow, we don't
think about it so much here”. But they really do.
They say you must take that spent herb materially and reverently
give it back to the earth. And people say to me, “Can
I reverently put it in my compost?” I say, “Absolutely.
That counts too.” So you can reverently put it into
the compost. And you don’t even have to strain it
but once you have, then you will drink the resulting liquid
hot, cold, you can sweeten it, you can put salt in it, you
can put milk in, it you could put instant coffee in it,
you could put whisky in it. Whatever you want. Whatever
you don’t drink right then, refrigerate and drink
up within the next 36 hours. Now let me tell you just briefly
about the four herbs that I use one at a time as my favorite
nourishing herbal infusions. One of the most important ones
is stinging nettle. And I talk about stinging nettle in
my book Healing Wise the 2nd Wise Woman Herbal. Stinging
nettle is a powerhouse of nutrition. It contains lavish
amounts of minerals, for instance a cup of stinging nettle
infusion contains 500mg of calcium.
Justine: I mean we always associate milk
with calcium.
Susun: And milk has lots of good calcium.
And I find that a diet that includes calcium from both green
and white sources is definitely the best. But let’s
look at a study that was done in Australia. They followed
10,000 post-menopausal women for 6_ years and they found
that those who took calcium supplements were twice as likely
to break a bone.
Justine: Now that goes against --
Susun: Science.
Justine: Science.
Susun: Which says that the whole is only
one active part. Is bone made only of calcium?
Justine: No.
Susun: It’s made out of many, many,
many minerals. And so we talk about the calcium in nettle,
but in fact the nettle contains all of those other minerals
that make bones healthy and strong. Calcium, especially
calcium carbonate, well what’s another name for calcium
carbonate? Chalk. And it makes your bones as strong as chalk.
Justine: Well that breaks pretty easily.
Susun: Indeed it does.
Justine: I know you have a reference in
your book talking about it’s not whether it’s
a thin bone or a thick bone.
Susun: It’s whether it’s a
flexible bone.
Justine: Now we don’t think of bones
as being flexible or bendable, but are you saying that they
actually have an ability to be springy?
Susun: That’s exactly what I’m
saying is that a bone that is springy can take an impact
without breaking, and a bone that’s brittle, even
if it’s thick, will break. So we’re not looking
for thick bones. As a matter of fact bone density is one
of the strongest indicators of breast cancer risk that we
know. If we look at a hundred women and measure their bone
density, those in the top 25% of bone density will have
a breast cancer risk that is 400% greater than those in
the lowest 25% of bone density.
Justine: What’s the correlation?
Susun: We’re not exactly sure. It
may be that either the drugs or the natural hormones that
are produced that make very thick bones after menopause
also promote breast cancer.
Justine: Now what about women who are
doing pressure kind of exercises?
Susun: That makes the bones more flexible.
Justine: Oh that makes them more flexible
but not necessarily thicker?
Susun: Exactly.
Justine: Oh, OK.
Susun: And that’s what we want in
women. Not in men, but in women. Muscle flexibility is exactly
the same as bone flexibility. So as your muscles become
stronger and more flexible, so do your bones become stronger
and more flexible. This is one of the reasons why any kind
of exercise is so critical for women. And women who exercise
regularly are 70% less likely to be diagnosed with breast
cancer.
Justine: I imagine that part of this is
just that it flushes out the system if you work up a sweat.
Susun: Ah, the Heroic Tradition.
Justine: Oh, OK.
Susun: The Heroic Tradition wants to flush
toxins out of the body and you know what Justine? Your body
is not a toilet. It doesn’t need to be flushed. There
are no toxins in sweat. You may sweat if you wish to but
what you will lose is minerals. You lose your bones when
you sweat. You’re sweating your bones right out through
your pores. So it’s especially important, if you’re
going to exercise to the point where you’re really
copiously sweating, or if you’re having hot flashes
to the point where you’re copiously sweating, that
you maintain mineral balance. It’s one of the reasons
why most women, even those who eat really well, will lose
some bone mass during menopause because menopause itself
is a time when we have enormous mineral needs. I have you’ve
noticed, pretty long strong fingernails, even though I work
really actively outside. As a matter of fact I once slammed
a car door on my fingernail and it didn’t break. During
menopause I would look at them and they would break, even
though I have a tremendous amount of minerals in my diet.
It’s just difficult because interestingly enough menopause
is a time when we produce more hormones than at any other
time in our life. If you go to an MD and say, “Am
I in menopause?” and they do a blood test, they’re
going to look for elevated levels of hormones, not lowered
levels of hormones. And those hormones need minerals. And
if we don’t eat ‘em we’re going to take
it out of our bones. So stinging nettle tremendous source
of these minerals, as well as every vitamin that we need.
Red clover.
WOMEN'S HEALTH:THE WISE AND
NATURAL WAY
Audio tape , 1 hr.
Today, Susun Weed is one of America's foremost
authorities on herbal medicine and natural approaches to
women's health. Susun engages in a fascinating, candid and
controversial dialogue about women's health, natural healing
and the "wise woman" tradition. Susun exposes
the illusion about menopause and hormones, addresses the
HRT/cancer connection and shares information about bone
density. She reveals her knowledge about powerful anti-cancer
herbs, and how to prepare herbal infusions with reverence.
(Interview hosted by Justine Toms). Topics explored in this
dialogue include: seeing yourself as a hologram keeps you
healthy; herbal infusions, how they fully nourish your body;
and, the six steps to personal healing.
Susun Weed's complete interview is available from Ash
Tree Publishing
Mail $12 to Susun Weed PO Box 64 Woodstock, NY 12498
or order online at http://www.wisewomanbookshop.com/