If you don’t know already, a sitz bath is a bath you can sit in, so it’s typically used for healing the perineum, anal area, and vulva. It can clean, soothe, and reduce inflammation or irritation of these areas in cases of hemorrhoids, perineal swelling, irritation or the anus or vulva, general uterine health, and postpartum recovery.

You can do a simple sitz bath with plain water, or some people add epsom salt, sea salt, and/or essential oils. I tend to prefer using brewed herbs to boost healing and gain the benefits of whichever botanicals are used.

If you’ve never used a sitz bath before there can be a bit of a learning curve to getting it right, especially when adding herbs into the mix, but it’s actually not that complicated. I’ll explain exactly how.

Herbal MedicineJacqueline GabardyOctober 11, 2018hemorrhoids, perineal healing, postpartum, sitz bath, herbs

Herbs for Anxiety

Anxiety is one of the most common reasons people turn to herbal medicine. Both because herbal remedies can provide fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals and a milder effect on the body. But I find the topic is often oversimplified.

We can't simply use herbs symptomatically for anxiety, it's important to have a full understanding of what the herbs do, how they work in the body, as well as who they work best for. So I'm going to explain how sedative, adpatogenic, and nervine herbs work to improve anxiety, which herbs to look for, and who they're most appropriate for.

Herbal MedicineJacqueline GabardySeptember 3, 2018anxiety, adaptogen, nervine, sedative

The Benefits of Raspberry Leaf Tea

Raspberry leaf, aka Rubus idaeus or Fu Pen Zi in Chinese medicine, happens to be one of the most common herbs I use myself and prescribe to my patients. It is a gentle yet powerful uterine tonic, it is safe in pregnancy, and when brewed as tea or an herbal infusion it's a good source of dissolved minerals.

And, you don't have to be pregnant or even a woman to benefit from this amazing herb. It also has benefits for digestion, skin, lungs, and gums. In fact, for many of it's benefits you don't even have to drink it, you can use it as a soak or add it to your bath. I'll explain how.

3 Immune Boosting Herbs

If you're slogging through cold and flu season with an endless cough, runny nose, or nasal congestion, if you seem to keep catching cold after cold, or even if you manage to stay well but everyone around you is constantly sick, it's important to treat the immune system with care and support it every way we know how.

Getting plenty of sleep, reducing or avoiding stress, eating a clean diet with bone broth and lots of vegetables all help to improve immunity, but what else? Well, herbal medicine offers up lots of options for boosting immunity. Let's take a look at which ones will help you to be a lot healthier this winter.

Herbal MedicineJacqueline GabardyJanuary 16, 2018immunity, herbs, elderberry, astragalus, reishi

Holistic Health during Cold & Flu Season

It’s the season for getting sick and it seems to be hitting everyone but me. Friends, family, and almost every patient that I treat are complaining of symptoms, from common colds to stomach flus to sinus infections, plus everything in between. Even when I seem to be interacting with mostly sick people, I don’t get sick myself. How?

Well I have never had a flu shot, I don’t take a multivitamin, and I’m not slathering antibacterial gel on my hands all day. Nope, I'm boosting my immunity naturally with holistic methods. I find that many of the things that work best for keeping me and my patients healthy are the things that have worked for generation after generation. These are the tried and true methods that we know to be effective, so why fix what’s not broken?

Herbal MedicineJacqueline GabardyNovember 2, 2017immunity, cold & flu season, allergies

Can you use Pumpkin Spice Medicinally?

This is a serious question! Many culinary herbs and spices are used in Chinese medicine and Western herbalism, so the popular seasonal spice mix might just help with a thing or two.

Let's first look at what's in pumpkin spice, aka pumpkin pie spice.

To be clear, pumpkin spice is just baking spices meant to be added into pumpkin pie, it contains no actual pumpkin. It's often added into recipes with pumpkin and sugar, but the spice blend on it's own has no other ingredients besides cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and sometimes allspice. These are all warming spices that improve digestion, but they all have slightly different functions.

Food + Nutrition, Herbal MedicineJacqueline GabardyOctober 18, 2017pumpkin spice, nutrition, autumn, herbs

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