Defiant Dandelions!

Why enjoying this common herb is so empowering to your health

I used to go by the business name ‘Dandelion Herbs’ and I still feel some loyalty to it. I picked it because I wanted to be connected to something native, familiar and abundant, as a statement of how accessible and easy it can be to use herbal medicine in everyday life.

As much as I love doctoring, (i.e. listening to health issues, carrying out physical examinations to aid a diagnosis, then prescribing effective medicines), to me it is incredibly important not to hold or to be given all the responsibility for recovery. Even if it does work to ’just take the medicine’, real, sustainable health involve you taking an active role in your wellness.

This is why it works best to create a partnership; I can listen with care to your needs and create a personalised herbal prescription that provides the body with what it needs chemically to bring it back into balance, and together we can work out lifestyle changes that will not only be treating the issue, but also creating bodily strength and daily rhythms that prevent progression or recurrence.

And then because I don’t want you to be reliant upon my prescriptions, I help you to learn how to stay in good health by sourcing your own natural medicines and foods. I am keen to help you tune into your health needs and act with gentle steps at the first sign of something amiss. Because years of ignoring the little things can end up progressing to something more serious and harder to treat. That’s why I work with preventative medicine.

What I’m saying is I want to help you to treat minor health issues, rather than carrying on regardless, because nipping it in the bud really is the best form of medicine. Empowering personal health awareness and action, with knowledge on what to reach for at the first signs of something out of kilter. This is coaching. This is knowing that responsibility for your own health lies with you. This is empowerment. You own the power. I just help you to access it.

Dandelion the Resilient

This brings me back to dandelion because the humble dandelion is all about resilience. Think about it. It is literally everywhere! I even just saw a seed float by my window. No matter how much attack, adversity and mistreatment it receives, it just keeps coming back, and it does so with big joyous blossoms of bright yellow sunshine!

This resilience is what I want to foster in your health. No matter how much our modern lifestyles send our way, we can keep doing our best to keep ourselves in good health. Because good health means doing all the things we love doing as much as we can.

Having a basic knowledge of some really useful herbs means that we don’t have to rely on the doctor or harmful over-the-counter synthetic drugs. Drugs that often have undesirable side-effects and even serious negative consequences when used in the long term, many of which we don’t yet understand.

Conversely, herbs have been used for millennia as food and medicine. They are a synergy of micronutrients neatly packaged in a way that aids its own absorption, providing the body with what it needs to do its job properly. And these perfectly packaged natural medicines are so familiar to our body, it knows exactly what to do with them.

In fact, the dietary deficiencies of our modern-day living means that the contents of these nutrient dense herbs are eagerly lapped up by tissues that may have been starved of certain health promoting substances for an age.

Dandelion the Nutritious

Again, thinking of dandelion, despite being a diuretic, it results in a net gain of potassium. Isn’t that amazing! It is such a rich source of minerals due to its long roots accessing the deep soil nutrients. It also contains calcium and boron to support bone strength and the flowers even contain lecithin and choline for nerve health.

Dandelion the Detoxifier

Looking at the nutrient content and seeing the interchangeability of ‘food as medicine and medicine as food’ is one way to value its contribution to health. However, as a well-known liver herb, particularly the root, it is also able to rectify us of our excesses of modern living. i.e. liver clearance of toxins (alcohol, drugs, pollution), plus excess stress hormones and sex hormones.

It’s also a gentle diuretic which means that it improves waste removal via the kidneys as well as the liver and gut. This means that skin doesn’t need to be used as an excretory organ which happens when the liver and bowel are overburdened causing skin issues. It also means that waste accumulation around the joints get cleared reducing joint issues.

Dandelion the Digestive

It corrects poor bowel transit by providing inulin, to soothe, soak up toxins, soften stools and treat constipation. It aids digestion by providing the bitter, (that all important of the 5 tastes that is so often absent in the western diet, at the great cost of effective digestion), to cause stimulation of stomach and pancreatic juices, as well as bile from the gall bladder to ensure digestion of fats essential to every living cell of our body, including our brain and immune cells.

Dandelion the Versatile

Anyone without serious medical conditions can self-prescribe freely and experiment with dandelion, in salads, in tea, the root coffee, as juice and blossom wine. If you have digestive, skin or joint issues you will benefit, and if stronger preparations, (i.e. tinctures), of the bitter root are required, I can create a personalised prescription which may include dandelion along with other herbs to best suit your needs.

I like to see my herbal prescriptions as providing the short-term support needed to treat an issue, whilst at the same time, allowing us time in which to understand how the issue may have come about in the first place. You can then tweak some daily habits so that it is less likely to re-occur. Health coaching is a great route to making necessary lifestyle changes to avoid reliance on OTC drugs or even prescription herbs!

Dandelion the Commoner

Building up our common knowledge of common herbs is a mission close to my heart. It is an empowered way to boost your health everyday with ease. Minor ailments can be treated naturally before they progress into something more challenging.

The ‘officinale’ part of the Latin name ‘Taraxacum officinale’ means that it was once valued as an official medicine, and I hope to encourage its positive regard by the people once again.

Dandelion the True

Dandelion is nutritious, detoxifying, fortifying and resilient. It shows us that we are better when in alignment with our true self. Lesley Gordon, (1977) writes in Flowers, Plants & Herbs In Love & Legend;

“Although it blossoms heroically when and where almost every other plant with give up, when it is arranged in vases and out of its true element, it sulks and closes”

What I take from dandelion is a reminder that we blossom fully when we are well grounded and living according to our true nature.

My lawn is full of tasty dandelions after years of asking the children to blow the clocks all over it! I’m proud to say, ‘my dandelions are doing well this year’, just as you would with your roses!

Dandelion the Inviting

So, if you haven’t already this spring, pick a dandelion leaf and really savour its bitterness, let it stimulate your taste buds and awaken your liver. Think of its resilience, how it just keeps on coming, set-back after set-back, and realise how sick, sad and bilious we become when we aren’t living in alignment with our own will, in accordance with the values in which we thrive.

Remember this when you pass the bright sunny blossoms that just love to bring sunshine into our life!

Celebrate the abundance on our doorstep and pop it in your teacup!