Alternative Treatments
What is Alternative Medicine
Today more and more people are looking at alternatives to pharmaceutical treatments for their various ailments, and they have a wide range of choices available to them.
Some of the more mainstream and accepted forms of therapy are acupuncture, homeopathy, and Chinese or Oriental herbal medicines. These therapies have been practiced for centuries worldwide but over these same centuries , humans have gone from a simple diet consisting of meats, fruits and vegetables to a diet that often consists of foods rich in fats, oils, and complex carbohydrates as well as relying more and more on modern medicines.
Nutritional excess and deficiency have become problems in today's society, both leading to chronic diseases. For this reason many herbal treatments attempt to bring balance to the body's nutritional well-being as well help heal any of the affected area/s.
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Herbal products have been used and studied for many years and for many medical problems, including stroke, heart disease, mental disorders, and respiratory diseases.
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GratefulMeds will be concentrating on the herbal side of the alternative medicine movement.
As we all know a good diet can help keep you in good health, it can give you more energy and can improve your general mood, but it doesn't have to be difficult to eat healthfully.
It’s not about going on some diet, whether it be the new fad diet that helps for this and that, it’s about eating a good range of foods in the proper amounts. We all require a diet that has a balance of protein, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Instead of removing a whole food group from your diet, just choose the healthiest options available to you in each group, and don’t discount natural food supplements to help boost what you may be lacking in the most.
Real food should always be preferred above processed food, eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and these can include juices and smoothies, eat fish and oily fish that are high in omega-3, eat high fiber starchy carbohydrates like wholewheat pasta, brown rice or potatoes with their skins on, drink plenty of water and cut out as much sugar as possible. With these simple rules you will notice the difference.
Find out more about what is available and how it can help.
The cannabis plant has a multitude of medicinal applications. The oils made from it offer benefits to a wide range of symptoms.
The reason it works is because of a molecule group called “cannabinoids” which we have receptors for all over our bodies and in our brains. The cannabinoids, such as THC, CBD, CBN and 110 others, link up with the receptors and this in turn helps boost our immune system and also helps block certain signs in the brain, which can help with neurological problems and pain relief.
In particular THC affects the cancer cells and causes them to die without killing healthy cells around them. But for any cancer treatment to work the best it is also a good idea to go on a diet of no white sugar, fatty food, no alcohol and alkaline foods and drinks, as cancer favors an acidic environment.
This is a quick guide to what is available;
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Vapor/Smoking
Cannabis can be vaporized or smoked for some pain relief, stress and depression; Vaporizing is said to be healthier than smoking but recent studies show this not to be true.
RSO (Rick Simpson Oil)
This is a full plant alcohol extraction (Buds, leafs and stalks). Once the alcohol is purged/recovered, the remaining oil must be consumed. There are many ways of doing this, but care must be taken if working with the pure oil. If too much is ingested the high effect can be very strong and long lasting. So milligram dosed oils are the best and safest way to consume it.
Creams
Also there are infused creams that can help with skin problems and joint pain.
Mushrooms have been used medically for hundreds of years to combat inflammation, infections and as an addition to everyday diet for general health benefits, such as boosting the immune system. More recently they have been recognized and approved for the use with pulmonary diseases and cancers, and there have been extensive trials in the usage of certain mushrooms for cancers as a single treatment as well as alongside radiation therapy or chemotherapy, with positive results.
Mushrooms are used in cooking around the world for their great taste, but many don’t know about the health benefits that even the most common of mushrooms, ie; the button mushroom, hold. All thanks to the fact that they are packed full of essential vitamins and minerals and antioxidants.
All mushrooms are low in calories and full of nutritional goodness. Each different variety of mushroom holds different health benefits depending on how and where they have grown for example; the Chaga mushroom grows mostly on birch trees and because of this they absorb betulin and betulinic acids from the tree, which is beneficial for skin problems.
Zinc that is found in the Agaricus mushroom (the button mushroom) is a vital nutrient for the immune system. As well as the anti-inflammatory benefits that most mushrooms give which greatly aid the immune system.
They can even help with weight loss and management as they are a very good alternative to high energy foods, which unless you are an athlete, most of us don’t need in the amounts that we eat today. Mushrooms are a low energy food that limits fat intake whilst fill you up.
There has been a newfound interest in magic mushrooms and how they can help with depression and other mental disorders.
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Magic mushrooms have been used for thousands of years in ceremonies by tribes and sherman, for accessing knowledge, the unlocking of your unconscious mind and healing.
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The two main active ingredients are Psilocybin and Psilocin which are known for their hallucinogenic properties, but now also for their therapeutic benefit, and are believed that this mushroom could help with depression, anxiety-related disorders, bipolar disorder, autism, psychoses such as schizophrenia, and substance-dependence disorders.
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The effects of a magic mushroom vary depending on the mushroom species and the dosage, as a ruff rule of thumb, a micro-dose is between 0.1g to 1g, from 2g to 20g would be a moderate to high dose. but an individual’s mindset and body type (particularly weight, metabolism) and an individual’s level of tolerance, which of course can only be determined with experimentation, must also be taken into account. An effect can normally be felt within the first hour of consumption and can last from as short as 1 hour to as long as 8 hours for the higher doses. The mushroom can be eaten raw or cooked in a meal, but the too much heating of the mushroom will affect the strength, it can also be ground up to make tea or powdered for capsules and taken in tablet form.