ALLERGIES, HERBS AND CONNECTING THE DOTS

Valerie Blankenship, RH, AHG
Apr 17, 2016
4 min read

Everything I know about allergies is personal. I’ve spent much of my life surrounded by boxes of billowy tissues, preventatively stashed in pockets, bed-side tables and cars. I’ve woken to full-body sneezes in the middle of the night and I’ve greeted each day with rounds of nose blowing evolving into frequent sniffling. I’ve used various sprays and vapors in, around, and up my nose, all with predictable rebound effects. Over the counter pills have dried and shrunken mucus membranes, rendering them temporarily functional for a handful of hours at a time. My nose was a faucet, and postnasal drip was my condition. My lifelong struggle has been to relieve swollen, inflamed membranes in order to open up important breathing orifices.

Raised by loving parents who, as heavy smokers liberated from society’s judgment in the 1960s, filled our living rooms, kitchens and cars with plumes of blue smoke. This lasted until I left home and established me as a permanent sniffer, sneezer, and mouth breather. Later, as a young adult, I carelessly damaged my liver through poor lifestyle choices and my respiratory issues worsened. The combination of events settled my respiratory health into a rut, where I was forced to accept a constant state of wheezing and struggling to breath through my sinuses. Early on, I developed chronic sinusitis, an ongoing infection that was my unwelcome companion for over 35 years.

In the 1990s, I stumbled onto the field of herbal medicine. Without a physical mentor, and only a handful of meaningful herbal books at the time, I began to experiment with a variety of sinus-opening, membrane-drying, infection-killing herbs in an attempt to clear up the respiratory state that plagued me.

Choosing herbs using this Western Medicine Model had limited results. Cayenne, recommended by the more dramatic herbalists, was taken as a capsule and nasal spray. It burned like crazy but it seemed to blast open my sinuses, giving me temporary relief from the stuffiness. Unfortunately, it was only a matter of hours before the swelling returned, and the infection retreated for only a day or two. And take it from me, the blowback was hell!

Goldenseal was the answer to all sorts of infections at the time, and my sinus infection seemed to respond beautifully to the capsules and snuffs that I tried, but the snuffs dried out my nose and mouth and I soon discovered that too many caps caused a splitting migraine that took hours to wear off. As soon as I cut down on the capsules, the infection would return immediately. Ephedra sinensis, one of the Chinese herbs that was in mode in the US at the time, also seemed to help somewhat, but taken at a sufficient dose to dry out my my sinuses, it made me jittery.

Eventually I came to understand that my SAD diet, consisting of cold, sticky foods that clogged up my digestive system, had caused my body’s mucus to become thick, and this in turn caused my allergies to become chronic. I changed my diet, which helped lessen the symptoms, but although not as severe, the sinus infections remained chronic, and the seasonal allergies continued to worsen in the Spring and Summer.

One day I woke up as if out of a trance, and all of the bits and pieces of my holistic healing self study started to come together. I began to look at my body as a whole organism, with working parts all relying on each other to function smoothly. I realized that all of my organs and glands and mucus membranes and lymph system and even my musculoskeletal system were effected by the chronic weakness within my respiratory system. Any weakness in a single link, would weaken all of the other links. I began to realize that besides my sinuses, mucus membranes and lungs, all the other organs and systems in my body had been seriously taxed by a lifetime of chronic respiratory irritations and infections. My body was working overtime to help me on a million different levels, and all I offered it was symptom relief. The overall weakened state of my body had caused my adrenal glands and my thyroid to exhaust themselves trying to attune to my energy needs. My immune system was struggling to address the constant irritation and infections. My liver was sorely stressed, trying to deal with the ongoing breakdown of biochemical rubbish from the continual inflammatory response of my sinuses. As my liver was taxed, my digestive system became clogged and added to the overall imbalance.

Did I eventually find relief from allergies? Yes, and I used some great bioregional herbs as healing allies on my journey. But this is not the story of which herbs and at what dose. First I had to make the connection to my body. My mind had to understand the epic journey that my body had taken in order to get where I was. And my mind had to respect my body as an exquisite, intricate organism with lots of moving parts. Only then could I choose just the right herbs and foods that complimented what my body was already trying to do. The moral of this story is: always connect the dots between the mind and body, even when you are dealing with something as simple as allergies.

To learn more about herbs for allergies, be sure to attend Valerie's class at the Mountain West Herb Gathering this year, 2016!