HERBAL REMEDIES: Herbal Steams for Cold and Flu with Cat Ellis

Good evening, everyone, and welcome back to Herbal Prepper Live, where we discuss herbal and natural medicine for emergency preparedness, because your health deserves a plan B. I'm your host, Kat, the Herbal Prepper. My goal is to help you and your family be better prepared for life's emergencies, especially when there are no doctors or pharmacies available. Before I kick off tonight's show, however, I need to satisfy the legal department here with a few quick disclaimers. I am not a doctor. I do not prescribe or practice medicine. I do not diagnose, treat, or claim to cure any disease or illness. If you need medical advice or treatment, please seek out a licensed physician. All listeners are strongly encouraged to learn and research the safety and efficacy of herbal remedies for themselves and to develop their own opinions. The topics discussed are hypothetical and provided for informational purposes only. Use at your own risk and with a heavy dose of common sense. With that said, Herbal Prepper Live is one herbalist's opinion on alternatives to modern medicine during a total collapse of our way of life. In this hypothetical scenario, there are no doctors, no EMTs, no hospitals, and no pharmacies. Professional medical help is simply not an option. If you or your loved ones need health care, the buck stops with you. So I ask you, if we were faced with the end of the world as we know it tomorrow, such as an economic collapse, an EMP, or other attack on our electrical grid, civil unrest, martial law, the suspension of the Constitution, the zombie apocalypse itself? Could you care for your and your loved one's health care needs? If you answered no and you'd like to change that, please keep listening because this show is for you. All right, with that out of the way, welcome everyone back to another episode of Herbal Pepper Live. Our show airs live every Sunday evening at 7 p.m. Eastern and 4 p.m. Pacific, and today is Sunday, November 20th, 2016. Welcome to everyone who's tuning in live this evening and everyone in the chat room. Hello, and to all those folks. We're going to be listening to this on the download later. Tonight I am talking about herbal steams and respiratory infections and things like a cold and flu season and so on. There's going to be... a number of shows that deal with respiratory infections because we are in cold and flu season now. And there are really a lot of ways that herbs are very, very effective for helping the symptoms associated with this time of year. And I think that this is, this is one of those things is respiratory complaints is one of those areas where herbal medicine really does shine through. And it's able to do a number of things that, your standard biomedicine is not able to do. And, you know, it, you can get a lot of release from, uh, the very common complaints of this time of year, um, that, I mean, I mean, when I say you get released, I mean, like you actually get real release and I, and as opposed to like the medicine head sort of like fake release that you get, um, by fake relief, what on earth do I mean by that? Um, you know, where they artificially, you know, dry you out so that you can kind of sort of breathe, but you still feel really sick. I mean, you still have that weird kind of, I mean, everybody's a little different. For me, if I come down with a respiratory infection, I can taste it. Like, I can taste that. And it's just, oh, it's horrible. And as long as I've got that taste, I'm just absolutely miserable. For other people, you know, it's a tickle in the throat or they might have earaches or whatever it is, but Everybody's got that little thing that, you know, signals that, you know, you're not feeling well. And herbs can offer a lot to provide some real comfort and some real relief as opposed to just minimizing certain symptoms, suppressing. That's the word I was looking for, suppressing symptoms and just kind of sort of getting through it. I have to ask a little personal moment here. My daughter just handed me this. I guess she got from school. She's been going through this basket of stuff that she got from Halloween at her school. And I guess one of her friends gave her this, I guess it's some kind of a slime. And this is the most bizarre thing that I have ever seen. It is just truly odd. And she made me open this up here while I was just doing the intro here. And this, this is a truly bizarre substance. So if you're a parent and you've ever seen this stuff, you know what I'm talking about? That is just so weird, but it's in this, you know, the reason I mentioned it other than just as blowing my mind at how bizarre this is, is that, you know, um, this is a little container. And if you're prepping with kids, I can only imagine that this would give them, um, tiny could fit in a little backpack, um, When you're in an emergency, you need to keep kids distracted. I can only imagine the things that small kids would do with a slime. So anyway, keep in mind when you're prepping for kids, you don't necessarily need the slime, but you've got to pack some little things in their bug-out bags. You've got to pack some little things in their emergency supplies to keep their minds occupied and distracted and off of whatever is going on around them. Okay, so anyway, for those who are listening live, if you have something that you would like to share, you have a nagging question, please join us here in the chat room on PrepperBroadcasting.com and type your question in here. Or better yet, take advantage of this being a live broadcast call into the show. The phone number to do so is 347-2020-228. Again, that number is 347-2020-228. And when you call in, you must press 1 to let go. to let them know that you want to actually be on the show live here. So before we get started, I have a couple of little bits of housekeeping to get out of the way, a little bit of business that I've got to get done here. If you are listening over at Blog Talk, come on over and join us here at Prepper Broadcast and join the chat room here. This is where I'm paying attention. This is where– If you type your questions in here, I will actually see it. If you're over blog talk, I won't have any clue that's where you are. Also, while you're here, please check out all the other hosts and their shows, their archived episodes. You are really shortchanging yourself if you don't take advantage of that. Also, as a quick reminder, please check out both of my books, Prepper's Natural Medicines, and Prepping for a Pandemic. Both of these can be found in the Prepper Broadcasting Bookshop as well as your local bookstore. And if they don't have it, you can ask them to order it, either one of them. Prepper's National Medicine, if you have ever wanted a really good book that'll get you started in learning how to make your own herbal medicine, this is really like an herbal medicine crafting book. That's the purpose of it. I spent quite a bit of time On the herbal skills section, it's got also, the descriptions here are based on all the questions that I had when I first started. All the, I mean, all the books I used to be able to get my hands on, you know, the various questions I would ask other people practicing and so on when I didn't understand something and I finally figured it out or I finally got a good explanation. I put all these things in writing and this is sort of like the book that I wished I'd had when I started. So there's a lot of information in a very short space. Materia Medica gives a lot of very good information on about 50 different herbs that will grow pretty much anywhere. So if you're planting your medicinal herbal garden, there's some very good options there for you. It's not a foraging book. It's not a wildcrafting book, so it doesn't deal with wild plants and seeking them out in your area. But if you are planning out your garden, you could certainly do so with the herbs that are here, or you can look up in other sources where to find them and do plant ID and that kind of a thing. I wanted to focus mostly on Prepper's Natural Medicine on herbal skills, and I think it does a pretty good job of that. There's also some recipes in there. You can use those as a good starting point for your own formulas. Prepping for a pandemic. You know, I mean, we've had the threat of Ebola. There's Zika going on. We don't know exactly what's going to be next. But what I did in that book was I took a nice look at, a good long look at, you know, what we could learn from the Ebola crisis. There were a lot of lessons that we could learn. from that, just from observing what happened, how people reacted, how medical facilities reacted, how governments reacted, how the media reacted. And what can we take from all of that to be better prepared? And, you know, I think that there's a lot going for this book that, you know, you might not have thought of when you're thinking about long-term preparedness. I strongly recommend that you check that out. You know, we're getting into the holiday season here. I think either one of these would make really wonderful gifts for the prepper that you're not exactly sure what to get for them. But, of course, if you don't have them, please put that on your Christmas list. So a couple of other things here before we get into tonight's topic. Classes. The Herbal Skills Incentive is... filling up. You only have until the end of this month to take advantage of the early registration, which is $ 25 less on the cost of the course. The cutoff for that is December 1st. After that, tuition goes back up to its normal rate of $ 100. Right now you can get that for $ 75. This is a two-month class covering a boatload of herbal skills. I send you the herbs that are involved with that. There are homework assignments that you will do with the herbs that I send you. There will be video and some articles on my website that you need to go through. There's going to be a weekly meeting. If you can't attend the weekly meeting online, you can always just watch the video at your own leisure afterwards. But this is sort of like a beginner's verbal skills class and an intermediate skills class sort of mashed together to give you sort of the– this was designed to give you the most information in the shortest period of time possible. And from there, it's going to be the launching– it's going to be the launch pad to go into a number of other online courses on my site this year. I've got a couple of other courses. I had wanted to get them up. For this week, unfortunately, I wasn't able to be here last weekend. My son really needed me to attend to him. And, of course, throughout the rest of this week, my daughter attended, too. That's the way of contagious, you know, contagions between children. Always a good lesson for kids to learn proper hand-washing techniques, a little bit of isolation, that kind of a thing. It can be very difficult when you're in the same household, though. However, I am going to be having, within the next week, two weeks, if you were thinking of signing up for the herbal skills intensive, but you're not sure, you know, you're not sure about, you know, what are these online classes like, I'm going to have two smaller classes available. One of them is strictly on cold and flu and respiratory infections, and then another is going to be on herbal antibiotics. So, you know, if you want to check those out, you can do so. I don't have the registration information up yet, but you can go to my website, herbalprepper.com, sign up for the newsletter, and that information will be going out to everybody. All right. All the babbling I'm going to be doing right now, but there are classes coming, and the Herbal Skills Intensive is filling up. So if you were interested in doing so, or if you were interested in getting it for a friend of yours, that's doable as well. Just go to my site. You should be able to check that out. And if you have any questions, just send me a message. I've got a little contact form. You have to get past the landing page, click enter site, and then go to the bottom and I've got a little contact form there. So if you've got any questions, just get in touch with me that way. All right. So what I'm going to do is we're going to take a break here. And when we get back, we're going to be talking about the cold and flu season, the respiratory system a little bit here, and some of the herbs that you can use to make an herbal steam and why it's really so wonderful. And it's a wonderful remedy for, you know, especially for this time of year. So thank, We're going to take a quick break, and we will be right back. What prepper doesn't want their own bat cave? Safe House Group LLC builds fortified spaces throughout homes, and they want to give you a complimentary initial consultation. Safe House evolved from my father's architecture firm, which I've been working at for over 20 years now myself. We did panic rooms, safe rooms, hidden spaces, hidden compartments for clients over those years. And as time has gone on, the demand has grown to a point where we decided to make its own entity, which is Safe House Group. It started out with panic rooms and safe rooms and converting our clients' primary walk-in closets and bedrooms into fortified spaces. Have you had this on your mind? Have you had a plan for a space, for a closet, for a safe room? For an arsenal. But it has also evolved. We also do fortification and other spaces, such as clients' wine collections or watch collections, car collections, for gun rooms, gun safes, and display rooms. Visit safehousegroupllc.com for your complimentary initial consultation. We are back. Okay, and we're back. So just as a reminder, if you have questions, please call into the show. The phone number to do so is 347-202-0228. And then, of course, once you're there and you hear that little recorded message, just press 1. All right, so we have this thing, this cold and flu season, goes from roughly October through November. actually can go through until May, but the peak is around February. You know, if you've got kids that go to school, you know, they, I'm sure they're sharing and, you know, all kinds of cold and flu germs. So just a very quick little synopsis. I mean, I've got a lot more of this in the, the cold and flu classes that I've been working on getting onto my site should be up. Well, gosh, less than a week or so. And, You know, this is one of those times of the year where, you know, everybody seems to be sniffling, coughing, and just sort of miserable. This is sort of my– I have a soft spot for herbs for respiratory issues because this is how I got interested in herbal medicine. Prior to this, I used to make, like, lotions and, you know, linen sprays and things that smelled nice and lots of– like non-toxic house cleaners with herbs. And that was what I did. But I really became very interested in the medicinal side of things when I had this horrible flu and I was just absolutely miserable. And the respiratory system had always sort of been my weak point anyway. I didn't do very well with fighting off respiratory infections at all. And, you know, it was one of those things where, you know, if somebody else were going to get a little cold, I would be like down for like three weeks with bronchitis. It was just one of those things that just kind of new. And yeah, this one time I was just absolutely miserable. I did not have health insurance at the time. I was, I had just taken on a new job and I was in the, the 30 day like enrollment period. I mean, I had to wait 30 days before it qualified for insurance. So I really didn't want to go to the doctor and pay out of pocket for anything. I, you know, I sort of was a, taking a little bit of a chance that I really wouldn't need health insurance for that month, and I didn't want to pay for COBRA payments because they're frighteningly expensive, and they've only gotten worse since then. This is going back, oh, maybe about 20 years now. And I ended up calling a friend who owned a herb shop nearby, and, you know, we put together this concoction of things, and I know that a number of my clients listeners here have heard the story before so I'm just going to wrap this up this tea that she kind of helped walk me through making over the phone really made a world of difference and it opened my eyes to just how powerful and effective very simple herbal medicines can be so throughout this whole cold and flu season I'm going to be talking a little bit about some very simple things that you can do at Home with Herbs to help relieve these symptoms. Because if you don't take care of yourself during cold and flu season, you get a little infection, doesn't seem to be all that big of a deal. If it doesn't go away or if you don't take care of yourself when you're sick, it can actually become quite a serious infection, especially if you have any kind of a compromised immune system and, you know, you're prone to, you know, you're prone to getting sick. So a compromised immune system can be, um, anything from someone who has been under chronic stress, um, or it could be someone who has, um, you know, like a serious infection like HIV, um, or someone who's been through cancer, uh, they, or someone with cancer has been through chemo treatments, all kinds of reasons why someone might have lowered immune function. So, um, With modern biomedicine, the standard response is maybe some antibiotics, although that's sort of changing now because antibiotic resistance is finally getting the recognition that it's due for the risk that it is. Antibiotic resistance is something that I just don't think enough people really grasp how serious this is. Without modern antibiotics, you can pretty much kiss most most of your surgeries goodbye. I mean, you could still have a surgery done, but you are really at risk for infections, you know, after you have the surgery. And then what do you do? What do you do if antibiotics don't work in those situations? You know, you can still have the surgery, but it's not going to be, you know, safe like a lot of surgeries are now. If you do get an infection, you're going to take antibiotics, and they'll deal with it in the hospital. Yes, hi, Cindy. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the class, too. I'm thrilled that you're going to be in it. This is like my favorite thing to do is teach. I mean, I could do that all day long. I just absolutely love it. I'm very happy to have you there, and it looks like a nice big group. So I'm hoping that people are also going to be able to learn from each other and be able to support each other moving forward through the class. But to get back to herbal schemes, this is one of these very simple ways of getting herbal medicine into the body and directly to the affected tissue. You know, as opposed to like, you know, we're accustomed to medication, you know, from standard biomedicine where you pop a pill and then it goes through the stomach, goes through the digestive system, and then it becomes systemic and gets into the bloodstream. And you have to wait maybe about 20, 30 minutes to get some kind of relief. And that's fine. But in this case, what we're doing with this particular method, and I'm going to talk about other things you can do throughout the cold and flu season, but for tonight it's just herbal steams. This is so simple. You're taking some herbs and you're putting them in a container and pouring steaming water over them. You let it steep for a little while and then you can tent your head with a towel over it and you're breathing in the steam. And what's happening is you're breathing in a lot of the aromatic oils. You're breathing in a lot of the therapeutic chemical constituents that are in the herbs that are in the steam and And you're breathing it directly to these affected tissues. And the steam itself, I mean, even if you didn't have the herbs involved and it was just the steam, you are rehydrating these very irritated tissues. You are rehydrating these mucosal lining, you know, where they're very, very irritated. And they're inflamed. And a lot of congestion sometimes happens. especially if you've got any kind of an allergy or you have body-wide inflammation. There are all kinds of conditions that can cause that. But let's say you do have that, or for whatever reason you have some nasal congestion that's based on inflammation and irritation. But you can blow your nose, and it relieves some of the pressure for a little while, but there's really nothing that you're producing from that. And it's just a lot of inflammation that's closing in The nasal passages, you know, if you can just calm that inflammation, then the nose begins to open up and the nasal passages begin to open up. And as they get soothed, it becomes a little easier to breathe. And that's even just with steam by itself, but you can add herbs to this that helps speed this along. So what I do, I have... a mix of herbs that I use. And a lot of this, if you don't have these, you can get them, almost all of them from your grocery store. And that's another sort of soft spot that I have is this grocery store herbalism. Because when I was first getting into the medicinal side of things, that story I was telling you about before, I didn't have a whole lot of herbs that would help. on hand. I mean, I had tons of herbs. Like if you wanted to put these herbs in, let's say lotions and make personal care products, or if you wanted to make something that you could wipe your counter down with, you know, if you wanted to make like a rug freshener, I had those kinds of herbs. So I didn't really have anything appropriate for, you know, influenza. So, but I was able to get it all at the grocery store. And this is very similar to that. You could get almost all of these, not all of them, but almost all of them at your grocery store. And if you didn't have all of them, you could certainly just leave that out of this recipe, and you'd still be perfectly fine. And you could certainly add more of some other herbs to make up for the ones that aren't in there. So something that I would do is... use a lot of time. Time is probably... Oh, hi, Melinda. Hello. I'm just seeing a couple of people in the chat room there. Time is probably your respiratory system's best friend. This is a wonderful antimicrobial herb. It's antibiotic, it's antiviral, and it's effective. It's very effective for respiratory complaints. You know, you can get thyme oil, the essential oil, but it's a harsh oil. It's very difficult to inhale a whole lot of thyme oil. I'm not recommending anyone try it, but, I mean, I have. And if, you know, especially if you're dealing with children, which a lot of us are, that's just not something that I would do. But where you may not be able to use the essential oil– Although I do use that in a formula that I have in my book, Prepper's Natural Medicine, for an essential oil blend that I have used with individuals who've had pneumonia, and it was part of the protocol for that. But when we're just talking about having something like bronchitis or some kind of a respiratory infection, and it's someone like a child, you may not want to go with your heaviest hitting product. options like thyme oil or something like that. But if you put it in steam, now it's still very antimicrobial, but it's now in a much gentler form, and absolutely you can use that with a child. And, you know, you also don't have to worry about taking too much. You're just inhaling it. There is no, like, maximum dosage here with that. So you can certainly use thyme oil. in there with people of any age. And I added in here specifically for its ability to deal with the infection directly. And you're bringing that. Thyme has a lot of the volatile oils in it. There are some plants that you can harvest, I mean, literally pounds and pounds and pounds and pounds of it, and you get these, you know, little drop of essential oil out of them. Thyme is one of those that has plenty of the essential oil in it. That's why it's not a terribly expensive essential oil because it's easy to extract from the plant. It's still in there. So especially if you've got fresh thyme that you can add to this, that's wonderful. But it's not the dry thyme is still fine, but maybe you add a little bit more. And I put that in there specifically to deal with whatever is triggering or causing this infection. Something else that I add to my herbal themes is citrus peels. I'm a fan of lemon, but in these, I have little indoor lemon trees. And when I get the fruits from them, I know that they're not laden with pesticides and so on. I take the peel and I will just, I mean, I'll take the fruit and I'll just get the peel from the outside of it and you can dehydrate that. But you can also, yes, Highlander, yes, strong doses of vitamin C is really good for cold. You know, and I'd like to be able to say something like, well, you know, in order for that, just have some rosehip tea. But the problem is, is that vitamin C is heat sensitive and I'm unconvinced that by the time you have made tea from rose hips, that the vitamin C hasn't largely already been destroyed, but you can certainly get vitamin C from a number of different vegetables and so on and up that. Let me see, what were they saying? So time, I was talking about time and I got a little derailed there. I'm pretty sure, I'll come back to that in a moment. I'm sure that... The train of thought will come back into the station there. But those lemons, that's what I was talking about. See, all right, the lemons. You'd be very surprised at the effect. It's not one of those herbs like eucalyptus, you know, it's going to open up your nasal passages. Or something like rosemary that's going to open you up. you'd be very surprised that lemon peel in a little bit more of a gentle way when you put this into an herbal steam has this way of helping to open up the nasal passages and helps to decongest you another one that you can add is sage And especially if you've got, if you're producing a whole, if you've got a very runny nose, I mean, if it's just so much or you just can't quite take it, I like to use sage because it is a little drying, but it's not going to dry you out the way something like Sudafed. Oh, I can't handle that stuff. I just cannot take that stuff. I'll take it. And next thing I know, I'm like drinking a gallon of water because I can't, I just can't. I just feel so completely dried out all through. But sage doesn't seem to have that kind of an impact. So you could certainly add some sage leaves to this. Something else that you can add to your seams would be juniper. Now, it doesn't matter. You can add juniper berries or you can add juniper leaves. If you're purchasing them, you might be able to find juniper berries easier than the leaf. But juniper berries, again, this is a part of the plant that, well, that and the leaves, they're both very antibacterial, very wonderful to be breathing in and bringing the medicine from the juniper directly to those infected tissues. So an herbal steam is a perfect vehicle for that kind of effect. Something else that I like to put in herbal steams, and you've got to be very careful with this, it's just a touch, but I put red pepper flakes. I mean, it's cayenne. You could put cayenne powder if you wanted to, but I just use the flakes. And you don't want to put too much. I mean, it's not like black pepper that automatically is going to cause you to sneeze uncontrollably. But a little bit of red pepper will just open you right up. And the more open you can make those nasal passages, the more you can soothe those nasal passages so that any inflammation just sort of decreases. And red pepper flakes, which is from cayenne, is very effective at reducing that inflammation. You know, the more you can do that, the easier it's going to be to breathe. So I like to put in a little bit of that as well. Not much, otherwise, you know, I mean, at some point it is still pepper. It is still going to trigger, you know, that sneezing reaction that most of us have with black pepper. Oh, gosh, there are so many different herbs that you could use. Mint, any kind of mint, but peppermint would be what I would think of as the strongest. This has a lot of menthol. It has a high menthol content. And because of that, you know, if you haven't done this, it's kind of a neat little test. There is no actual taste to peppermint. Everyone thinks they kind of know what peppermint tastes like. Peppermint doesn't have a taste unless you can smell it. So the next time you have anything with peppermint, I want you to try this. It's kind of mind-blowing if you've never done this before. But hold your nose and don't smell it. And then taste it. It won't taste like anything. It's the weirdest thing in the world. But in order to taste peppermint or spearmint or any of the mints, you need to be able to smell it. And certainly if all you had was, let's say, peppermint tea, like you can go to any grocery store and find peppermint tea. Excuse me one minute. You can go to any grocery store, you can find peppermint tea bags. And if that's all you had, and let's say you just don't have the cash to spend on, you know, a ton of herbs there, and you wanted to get one thing, you could certainly go and get yourself a box of peppermint tea, and you make the tea, and you can inhale the steam. It's perfectly fine to do that, too. However, if you were actually going to sit down and do an herbal steam, you could take several of those tea bags from there. and put it in there. Or if you're ordering herbs in bulk, you put in a handful and into some water, and then you tent a towel over your head to breathe in the steam from it. If you have fresh mint, even better. Another herb that I want to stress here is rosemary. Rosemary is another high menthol herb, but It works so well. I cannot impress upon you how well, especially fresh rosemary is in something like an herbal steam. And a lot of grocery stores will carry fresh herbs in the produce section. Rosemary is difficult to grow. There's no way around that. It's kind of temperamental. If you live anywhere where you have to bring the plant in inside during the winter, it's tough because not only do you have to bring them inside, you've got to make sure they've got enough light and enough water. They really like a very specific kind of environment, and indoors is generally not very– rosemary plant friendly but there are still some tricks and what not to it but it's certainly not for the beginner herbal gardener but if you can get fresh rosemary and if you can grow it outside or maybe you've got cold frames you can put around something that's outside when you're willing to kind of baby your rosemary plants in that case you have this wonderful source herbal medicine. This wonderful aromatic plant that when you put that in your herbal steam and the steam comes up and into the nose, this is an excellent decongestant. And the more you can open up these nasal passages, the more of the steam you can get directly into the nasal passages, into your lungs, into your respiratory system. directly to the infected tissue where it needs to be. Peppermint is probably one of the most versatile and easy to grow herbs that you can possibly have. I would just suggest that unless you have lots of land and you don't mind this going wild because peppermint absolutely will and it'll take over everything around it. It's, Probably a better idea to grow it in an extremely large container if you're growing it for yourself and you don't want it to take over. However, the essential oil of peppermint is also very beneficial, also has a thousand different uses. And the essential oil is in great abundance in this plant, which is another reason why peppermint is not exactly a very expensive oil. Because there's no scarcity. It's got tons of it. But it's because it's got tons of its volatile oil in there. Because it has that, when you add the steam, that volatile and aromatic oil, it's not really true oil. I mean, I always kind of get a little tripped up saying that. I mean, we call it an oil, but they're not really oils. They're not true lipids. They're actually plant metabolites. So it's sort of the byproducts of the plant here. But when you do breathe in the essential oil of it, it's extremely potent. It's very, very potent. But because there's so much of that essential volatile oil in mint, if you were interested in learning how to make your own essential oils, Mint is one of those plants that will certainly give you quite a bit compared to something like a rose. You'd have to have a whole lot more of that. So peppermint, very cooling. It's a refrigerant. It's a wonderful decongestant. Kids like it. So definitely I would add that. But it has a very high menthol content. So what on earth do you do with all of these? herbs. So this is what I would do. First of all, let me tell you what you do not do before we even get into what to do with it. What I don't want to see anybody doing, because this is for your own safety, don't just put like a pot on the stove and put a bunch of herbs in it and let it boil away. That can be wonderful if you're trying to get germs out of the air. That'll work fine for that in many, many cases. So will burning herbs and making herbal smokes. That can also help to clear the air as well. But I've known a number of people who, while they were brewing something, and I may be one of those people that I'm talking about. about here, maybe, slight admission, but I've known people, myself included, where we've got like some tea that's brewing on the stove or a decoction where I'm trying to, a diastereotic decoction where I'm trying to make myself sweat and I'm trying to open up the detoxification channels in the body to produce this sweat and to help fight this infection and also to help bring a fever down because, you know, certainly the sweat is cooling to the body, but it's doing so in a way that works with the body's natural detoxification channels and its natural immune response and so on, as opposed to, taking a pill that just suppresses a symptom. You haven't made anything go away. When you take some kind of a cold remedy and all you're doing is just taking away the symptom, you've done absolutely nothing to affect the cause. And sometimes you can make yourself more sick by doing so. It's happened to me a number of times. You know, you take something that's over the counter, but you actually end up, making that infection go deeper into the tissues and taking a cold of you, and it becomes more difficult to fight. So anyway, what I would do is you can mix almost even amounts of all the various herbs that I've said. If you wanted to weight any of them, I would probably put more thyme and more lemon peel and more peppermint in, or maybe more rosemary if I had that on hand. Um, and, you know, certainly with something like the red chili, uh, the, uh, the, um, red pepper flakes, you just want to, I mean, a pinch or, I mean, if you, if you know that you can tolerate that, maybe a teaspoon into a much larger, um, uh, a much larger blend. And as those herbs are in contact with each other, um, those oils are going to, it's Let me see here. So what you would do is take all of these, maybe all in equal amounts except for the red pepper flakes. Let's just keep it simple. You know, so you've got some juniper berries or maybe some juniper leaves. And juniper grows in some form all over this country. So you should be able to find it, although you may not be able to find it, you know, in a manner that you can harvest durable medicine supplies easily. at all different times of the year, but it does grow everywhere. So, but if you were to order it, you'll probably find some dried juniper berries, in which case I like to crush them. I don't mean bring them to a powder, but just crush them up a little bit so that when you do your steam, it's just a little bit more potent. So you would take all of these together and, you know, after you mix all these up together, take a portion of it out, maybe something that's like a half a cup to a cup, put it in a bowl, and then pour hot water on them. What you don't want to do, like things that I did, was, you know, you're making something to one side, you've got it going on the stove, and I would put a second pot on, and I'd toss in some thyme and red pepper flakes, and I would just inhale that, like bending over the stove while I've got this decoction brewing, you know, to my right when I'm over here on the left. of the other burner breathing in the steam, that's all well and good unless you lean too close to the flame or unless you lean too close to the electric burner and you burn yourself. I will admit I've done something rather dumb like that. Very intelligent people can do very dumb things, so please nobody take offense if I sound like I'm harping on the safety thing here. Anybody can make a mistake like that at any point. So you don't want to accidentally burn yourself or scorch your hair because that smell is just awful. So it's better to do this off of the stove. And also be careful because steam can burn. Steam absolutely can leave some serious burns on you. So be careful around steam in general. But what you should do is get a nice heat-safe bowl. put in like a half a cup to a cup of this blend of herbs that you've put together. Or maybe it's just one. Maybe that's all you could do. You have one of these on hand. You don't feel like going out to the grocery store. It's just miserable out there. You don't want to go. That's fine. Just pick one of them. Maybe you have, um, you know, like three ounces of one and only one ounce of another. I don't care. Put that one ounce in. So what if it's not there and it's big of a quantity is the rest. Um, you know, it, I mean, it's not necessarily my ideal, you know, formula, but, you know, it's still going to be just fine. It's going to work. It doesn't all have to be perfect in order for it to work. So you put maybe a half a cup to a cup in a bowl, pour, you know, enough of the water in to fill the bowl. And, you know, what you can do is you can take a plate, a much larger plate, and just put it directly on top of that bowl. And let it steep covered. Because if you let it steep uncovered, all those aromatic oils that would be released by the steam, they're all going to fly away. And you don't want that. You want your head to be right over that bowl to inhale that when you take that plate off of it. You don't want to be losing any of those aromatic oils off into the ether. So take it off. And, I mean, you can use a tent, like a towel as a tent over your head, or you don't have to. It really just depends on how hot things are. You know, but you get to play with that just a little bit. And then just keep breathing it in until the steam, you know, until it's no longer steaming, until the temperature has come down where there just isn't steam being produced. But just stay there with it and let that warm steam out. Soothe the insides of your nose and your throat and let it help to loosen up that phlegm to get it out. And as that steam comes in, let all that herbal medicine that you're bringing directly to these tissues, just let it do its work. It's really simple. I mean, there is no precise recipe. You must have this recipe. And you must have that in these specific amounts. This is very easy. This is folk medicine. This is grab some of these things that have, you know, either like the citrus or the mint, you know, something with menthol in it or the rosemary or something like that. And, you know, add it to some steaming water and just breathe it in. The handful of this, the handful of that. You know, it's kind of like This week I felt this intense urge to put more food away. And I just could not be stopped. And I put up this, I don't even, I think it was like 24 jars of Portuguese kale soup. Some of my grandmother used to make all the time. And I also put some chicken stock away and I got some beef stew and a bunch of other things. But people had asked how to make that Portuguese kale soup. And I found it really hard to give a recipe for it because, it's a little of this and a little of that. You know, my grandma, she would have a big bunch of kale that would go in or she would have like, maybe there was one link of Cherise. Maybe there's two links of Cherise. Um, unless you've got a lot of Portuguese people in your area, you're not going to find Cherise. But if you've got, um, you know, Cherizo, that's a fairly comparable sausage to it. It's not exact, but, um, you know, it, but either way, those have worked. Um, But maybe you have one link, maybe you have two, you know, whatever. I ended up putting in like maybe a handful of chopped chicken that went in there too. Some people put potatoes, some people put onions, some people put kidney beans, some people put white beans. And so there was a whole lot of, hey, you could put this in, you could put that in and so on. But the only real important parts was the shiriz and the kale. And beyond that, you could kind of do what you wanted. There was a number of things that were traditional. But as far as measurements, it really couldn't give you any. It's just a handful of this and a handful of that. And you can approach a lot of herbalism the very same way. It's a handful of this and a handful of that. As long as you're not selling it to anyone, because then the FDA wants you to be ridiculously precise about what you're putting in each formula. But if you're making this for yourself at home, let your intuition guide you. Maybe you want more lemon peel. Maybe you want orange peel. Maybe you want lime in there. Maybe you want Maybe you want all thyme. Maybe you want thyme, sage, and oregano. Maybe you want mint and rosemary. Maybe you want something entirely different in there. It is up to you, but just put it into a bowl and cover it with steaming water. Let it steep. Put a plate on top. Cover it up. Let it steep. Keep all those aromatic oils in there. Don't let it escape until you're ready. take it off, put a towel over your head, be careful The steam can burn. Make sure that, you know, when you approach it, you know, it's not that hot. By that point, it should not be, but always test it. And then just inhale that steam and just let it make you more comfortable. You know, this is something that, you know, it just brings some real comfort. comfort and real relief. And it brings the herbal medicine directly to the tissues where it's needed most. So the herbal scenes have become a favorite of mine. And of course, you know, we can talk about essential oils at another time and how to properly use those for, you know, to administer a respiratory treatment using essential oils, which are a little different. But let's say, you know, if you're a prepper, you know, you may end up, you know, not being able to reorder your favorite essential oil. But you can certainly grow any number of herbs indoors, outdoors, in small spaces, in containers, in big spaces and so on. They're much easier to do. And these herbal themes are very easy to execute. So with that, I'm going to close out the show here. Next week, you know, I kind of vacillated on what, I wanted to talk about next week because there's so much craziness going on, you know, after the election and politics and so on. I kind of want to do a light show. I want to talk about holiday gifts that you can make with herbs. So herbal holiday gifts, some DIY things, some frugal things, some things like that. to help you get ready for the holidays. So if you like what you've heard, please connect with me by following me on Facebook, Twitter, G +, Pinterest. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Check out both HerbalPrepper.com and HomesteadingMom.com. Thank you, everyone, for spending your time with me. I hope you got something out of it. This has been Kat, the Herbal Prepper, with Herbal Prepper Live. We'll see you again next week. Thank you. Thank you.