People's Gathering and Steet Medic Herbalism

[Guest guest]

Here's a horror story to feed the AMA advocates on why muggles aren't

allowed to practice medicine: just as I was arriving at a week long people's

gathering a marine corp trained exmedic was treating a foot that had a 3 " long

sliver of wood broken off inside of it. He borrowed a hunting knife, sliced the

foot open, cleaned the wound out, then stitched it back up with dental floss and

a sewing needle giving the poor kid a stick to bite on for the pain. Later in

the evening he was bragging about the stitching and using the hunting knife. He

never sterilized any of the instruments, the floss, or the area.

I would have chosen a much less invasive methodology. I did damage control

with the injured one telling him what signs of infection were, what to watch

for, and if he wanted to make sure that didn't happen to eat lots of garlic (5-8

cloves per day) for the next week or two until the floss was removed. He said

" That's the easiest prescription I ever had. I eat garlic cloves all the time

anyway. " Hope he made it.

Fortunately there were others there that did have a clue and a healer's

circle was formed and various people who were willing to be of service met and

introduced each other and shared what they did. A health tent provided a space

for people to come to where we had a variety of health care products. Someone

had the foresight to bring a massage table for doing reiki also. It was funny,

when everyone sat in the circle the energetic modality healers ended up on one

side and the nursing student/emt trained type folks were on the other. The term

herbalist flowed through both sides of the circle, there were a bunch of people

with amazing knowledge.

So over the course of the next few days there were foot injuries, infected

fingertips, questions about longer term health problems, a Bell's palsy facial

paralysis person, a strained ankle, and a bunch of skin rashes and poison ivy to

deal with. Nothing too serious thank goodness. Lots of opportunities to be of

service turning book knowledge into experience.

Some Lessons:

-plastic bandaids and cheap medical adhesive tape are useless in an outdoor

setting. Duct tape and fabric bandaids are the way to go

-keep tincture bottles in some sort of padded container. They break when thrown

ontop of each other and are jostled around.

-Large groups of people require a large pot for making external skin washes.

One of the nursing students went home and made a big vat of jewelweed goop for

the vast numbers of poison ivy problems.

-Blend modalities:a nursing student knows when to use a sterile saline solution

to do an eyewash while the herbalist knows to give that person APIS homeopathic

remedy to treat the allergic swelling in the area. That same herbalist doesn't

know jack on how to treat bell's palsy (but the medico's don't have a clue about

that either) but within a few hours after the reiki circle people got their paws

on it the face started loosening up and relaxing, the girl was able to blink and

get some face control back.

-Make sure in a kit one has some type of wound irrigation device. Foot injuries

(and others) were full of dirt and needed to be cleaned out. We had betadine

solution on hand and I had myrhh tincture: the tincture was pretty stingy and a

myrhh vinegar would have been much more appropriate.