Grow Your Own Drugs: Easy Recipes for Natural Remedies and Beauty Fixes by James Wong.
In his book, James share many homemade and economical recipes for both health and beauty fixes.
James Wong likes to think of herbs as your very own pharmacy (although few would think this). As mentioned by Wong from The Times Online:
“The problem, Wong believes, is that there’s a big cultural dividing line between conventional medicine, which is thought of as effective, proven and serious, and herbal medicine, which has the reputation of being a bit flaky.”
James also goes to explain that up to 50 per cent of over-the-counter medicines are based on chemicals that are extracted from plants. Aspirin, though now synthetic, was originally derived from willow, meadowsweet and the shrub spirea. Morphine-based painkillers are based on opium from poppies. And the birth control pill was originally isolated from the Mexican wild yam. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 per cent of the world’s population still rely on plant-based medicine as their way of health care.
Traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda is also gaining more popularity in the west as more people look into alternative therapy.
Photo from Amazon.
