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| "I was bitten by a poisonous copperhead snake 20 years ago when living on a farm in the Ozarks in a tepee. I immediately ran into the tepee yelling, 'I got bit by a copperhead! I got bit by a copperhead!' and grabbed all my books to look for a snake bite remedy. The sensible thing to do would have been to go to the hospital, but it was an arduous trip in a four-wheel drive that would have taken an hour and we needed to do something right then. |
| "My husband, Tom, bless his heart, almost immediately turned on a little shop vacuum we had and pressed it right up against the bite to try to suck the venom out. I riffled through the pages of several books and read in one of them that echinacea was used by Native Americans for snake bite. It was like magic since it was growing right outside the tepee! I don't know what species it was. Tom yelled to our friends up the hill and people came running down. Someone dug up some roots and I began chewing on the fresh root while the water boiled for tea. We mashed up some more fresh root and made a poultice and applied it right to the bite. I then drank several cups of the tea. I remember the most significant thing I experienced was a tremendous amount of anxiety but I tried to remain calm, thinking that I couldn't give in to the fear. I didn't get sick at allno symptoms other than the anxiety. That experience really changed my life. Living in the wilderness with two children, I realized that I didn't know enough to deal with emergencies, that I depended on my books too much. The very next day I began studying herbs in a whole different way, trying to internalize my knowledge of herbal medicine rather than depending on information in books, I began writing little easy-to-use index cards, something I have been doing ever |
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