Traditional Medicine Quotes

In the early 1700's, two physicians...learned about pinkroot's efficacy from the Indians. The word soon spread to the general public, who praised this worm treatment, particularly against roundworms, for the next 200 years. Pinkroot fell into disuse in the early 1900's, simply because greedy herb dealers adulterated or even substituted shipments of true pinkroot with quantities of other plants.

The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.

Sassafras wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar hath to some a delicacy beyond the China luxury.

The physician heals, Nature makes well.

The destruction of Chinese traditional culture didn't start in 1949. It started long before that, with the succession of revolutions. It was particularly bad during the Cultural Revolution, the destruction of traditional Chinese culture.

The two Christians met on the way many people who were going to their towns, women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, herbs to drink the smoke thereof, as they are accustomed.

Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an apothecary without sugar' meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.

My mother was a midwife and a herbalist, so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.

The marvelous pharmacy that was designed by nature and placed into our being by the universal architect produces most of the medicines we need.

I watched what method Nature might take, with intention of subduing the symptom by treading in her footsteps.

This is a coca leaf. This is not cocaine. This represents the culture of indigenous people of the Andean region.

I use nothing but homeopathic remedies, for my girls as well.

I like the shaman very much, the way he was crying.

A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.

Many years ago doctors would bleed sick patients with leeches. Today, the insurance companies do that.

...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.

No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut and pull your tooth while he was at it.

When I was in Japan with my girlfriend Jessica, she would have had acupuncture every day if she could. I can just about stomach going to a chiropractor and I visited a talented one when I was there, but when he tried a needle on me, it was horrible. My muscles tightened and it didn't work at all.

I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.

The roots and herbes beaten and put into new ale or beer and daily drunk, cleareth, strengtheneth and quickeneth the sight of the eyes.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

Every crazy fad from the 1800s comes back or they never go away. It's like fashion, like everything's already been invented, and somebody stumbles onto it and people will always, always be looking for an answer for some vague illness they can't get a diagnosis for.

We have been using Ayurveda for generations, and it has been a vital part of the family.