Herbal medicine offers different option for heath care

Britta Bloedorn is sick. And she’s surrounded by her medicine. She’s surrounded by ginger, echinacea, damiana — all in little glass eyedroppers, their essence percolated to effectively work their magic. But there’s nothing magic about it, really. It’s natural, simple, but, she says, potent.

Bloedorn stands in front of an assembled class of 20, taking up what little space there is left in the small but well-stocked confines of Meadowsweet Herbs, and, while combating a few intermittent sniffles, explains just about everything they’ll need to know about making tinctures.

Function and economy seem to be the underlying themes in Bloedorn’s Thursday night class, meant to serve as an introduction to making natural medicine. Bloedorn is a trained herbologist who runs a private practice and works at Meadowsweet part time. She’s been practicing it for more than a decade. She recognizes a few faces, but most of them are new. Bloedorn isn’t sure where they come from or exactly what drove them there, but she’s excited anyway.
“I think it’s a beautiful thing,” she says.

It shows that there are people out there who are excited to learn about natural medicine, she says. (Alternative medicine isn’t a term she really likes, since it’s the herbal kind that people used first.)

“There’s so much more interest out there,” Bloedorn says.

She thinks it’s because people want to have a better connection with their medicine and “have some say in their health care.”

Meadowsweet’s weekly classes, which are taught by a variety of herbal experts, show people how to have that kind of say. Thursday’s class on tinctures details a process that involves little more than an herb of choice and some strong booze. Bloedorn takes some dried and sifted echinacea powder and mixes it with pure cane alcohol and water until it feels like a moist, crumbly sandbox. She forms a coffee filter into a cone, stuffs it at the bottom of an upside down glass bottle with the bottom cut off, and then tops the powder pile with another filter. She pours the rest of the alcohol and water mixture — the menstrum — into the bottle and lets it soak through the Echinacea until it finally drips into a jar waiting below it.

It takes a couple of hours, but in the end, at the bottom of the jar, it’s a tincture — made from a jar, a glass bottle and some coffee filters.

“It works just as well as pharmaceutical tools,” Bloedorn says. “It might not look as sexy, but it works just as well.”

Bloedorn doesn’t write down any prescriptions or even diagnose, and her take-home message is control. Control over the process of making medicine, control over how much to take, control over what to take and why.

Besides a few guidelines on which plants are suitable for ingestion and how to make the tinctures work at their most potent, the rest is up to you, she says.

“If you want to experiment, that would be great,” she says.

Gabriel MacMurray, one of the first-time attendees, has been taking herbal remedies his whole life, and will swear by their effectiveness.

“I’ve been sick for days less than friends with the same sickness,” he says. “Do they work? Yes.”

Although MacMurray has bought from Meadowsweet before, he wanted a way to be able to make his own medicines as well, and says that people like Bloedorn are the “cream of the crop.”

“Missoula has such an abundance of people that are into this,” he says.

Elaine Sheff, the co-owner of Meadowsweet Herbs, says the attraction in herbal medicine lies in its convenience. The store has been putting on the classes during the entire 14 years it’s been in business and Sheff says the interest grows every year. Herbal medicine is self-administered and has a longer track record of working naturally, she says.

“People want things that they can have control over and things that they can do to help them feel better,” she says.