Today's lesson-wild yam in Chinese medicine

My chosen herb for one of my classes is wild yam. This week we had to discuss how wild yam is used by other cultures, and guess what. It's not really used by other cultures. Wild yam is grown mostly in the U.S and Canada. However, there are others in the yam family that are used in Chinese medicine. Long yam is used for murky urine, stiff joints, and lower back pain. Another yam called Chines yam is used to move and control blood ( a very important part of Chinese medicine) specifically in the lungs and spleen.

Comments

  • amyjacobson6
    amyjacobson6 Posts: 17 ✭✭✭

    Thank you for sharing what you are learning! That is great info and very interesting!

  • merlin44
    merlin44 Posts: 426 ✭✭✭✭

    @bubknzklee Can the wild yam grown is this country be used as Long yam or Chime yam? And what part of the plant would be used? Where does the plant grow?Could you share a photo of the plant?

  • bubknzklee
    bubknzklee Posts: 15 ✭✭✭

    No, wild yam, Chinese yam, and long yam are all 3 different plants in the same family so they do slightly different things. I will be talking about what wild yam does this week and show you a picture of the plant, but here is a picture of Chinese yam. You will notice it is only slightly different.


  • ines871
    ines871 Posts: 1,283 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Hi @bubknzklee - the learning... is that "Long yam is used for murky urine, stiff joints, and lower back pain. Another yam called Chines yam is used to move and control blood ( a very important part of Chinese medicine) specifically in the lungs and spleen."

    so how would a Clinical Herbalist know, for sure, which of those listed problems/Symptoms... would be cured with either Chinese, or Long yam" ?

  • bubknzklee
    bubknzklee Posts: 15 ✭✭✭

    There are many herbs that can help many different conditions. What makes a good herbalist is understanding truly how each herb works so that when a person comes in with a complaint you can look at that person and know which of the herbs available will work for that person. It's like fitting a key into a hole, only certain ones will work. This is why I love the eclectic herbalist they would use things like tight-necked, list maker, who can't ask for help to describe the person blue vervain was created for.

    I will be talking more about the eclectic's in tomorrow's post

  • ines871
    ines871 Posts: 1,283 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Hello,

    Regarding "What makes a good herbalist is understanding truly how each herb works so that when a person comes in with a complaint you can look at that person and know...", and "This is why I love the eclectic herbalist they would use things like tight-necked, list maker, who can't ask for help ... "

    the term Eclectic medicine was coined by Rafinesque (1784–1841), a botanist and Transylvania University (private Liberal arts school in Kentucky) professor who had studied Native American use of medicinal plants. The movement peaked in the 1880s. The schools were not approved by the AMA. --- Eclectic medical schools were criticised because they had poor laboratory facilities. Instead, they practiced local body snatching digging up the dead, for study.

    Now alot of people in this group are more than Awake (re the ama & their numerous bed-partners) so we can just skip them, for the most part. --- However, & this is the important Critical thinking question = Why wait until a person is dead & buried, before they are studied; - WHEN Lab-tests can easily be done while said person is yet Alive, to help them STAY Alive & well.

  • bubknzklee
    bubknzklee Posts: 15 ✭✭✭

    The interesting thing, is while the Eclectic medical schools were said to be closed due to poor hygiene, the true reason was big business. Rockefeller and Carnegie started investing into the AMA and pharmaceutical medicine, and they hired Fletchner to go to all the medical schools and look at their standards with the unspoken task of finding reasons to shut down all of the medical practices that did not use prescription drugs so they would make more money.

  • Torey
    Torey Posts: 5,679 admin

    It wasn't just the Eclectic schools that were shut down by Rockefeller & Carnegie via the Flexner report. The Flexner report found fault with and closed all but one of the Homeopathic schools. It also found fault with many of the other schools including those that taught chiropracty, osteopathy, naturopathy and psychiatry. Flexnor looked at these schools with the express, biased purpose of finding fault to shut them down. They weren't all closed because of poor laboratory facilities and most didn't resort to "body-snatching". I believe we still use donated bodies for medical research today. It was at the revered John Hopkins hospital that a doctor illegally obtained cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks in 1951, which are still being used for research and sold around the world today. There are questionable medical practices going on all the time. Wrong diagnosis' from expert medical practitioners using the latest technology are found all the time. In fact, many times when there has been a diagnosis of an illness that can't be cured or even treated well, and a herb or some other treatment works, then the answer from the medical community is that it must have been a wrong diagnosis in the first place. No thoughts that the "alternative" might have actually worked.

  • Obiora E
    Obiora E Posts: 517 ✭✭✭✭

    @bubknzklee Thank you for sharing. I have seen wild yam in a few of my herb books but I have never read anything on it as I don't believe that I have even seen any of it.

    @torey Thank you for sharing the information. And yes, donated bodies are still used for medical research today in many different fields. I had a professor (industrial engineering who specialized in human factors/ergonomics) in college who had a reputation for throwing corpses out of a window for testing products that he had had helped to design.

  • amyjacobson6
    amyjacobson6 Posts: 17 ✭✭✭

    @bubknzklee Thank you for sharing the information you are learning on the health benefits of wild yam with all of us. Wild yam is an herb that I am not as familiar with, and it is interesting that it is mostly found here and in Canada.

    Also, thank you for the information on our past medical history. How frustrating that the important knowledge of naturopathic healing and alternative medicine was being shut down due to politics and big pharma. Understanding plants and how they can help heal the body is so valuable and is true self-reliance for keeping healthy.