I am a chiropractor and former Recon Marine 3rd Recon Battalion, writing this article as a little ray of hope to help those who at some point find they have been thrust into TEOTWAWKI and have either lost access to the stores or didn’t prep well or maybe did everything right but when the SHTF they lost all of their prep work or access to it because of some unforeseen circumstance. “Never give up” should be one of your mottos. This comes with a little bit of knowledge and experience. I have been in survival situations as a Recon Marine, and I currently work in my chiropractic practice with four different health degrees in an attempt to get patients to stop poisoning themselves with unnecessary drugs and surgeries. There are better ways to heal your body without hurting your body. The medical industry is not it. They make money on you being sick.
Are you ready for a survival situation? Can you ever be ready enough? I don’t think anyone can ever be ready enough. The best a person can do is try to prepare by learning as much as you can. I tell my patients to take one step at a time. When the SHTF, nobody knows what is going to happen or who they will be able to count on. When I was in the Marines and stuff started to happen, the people who you think are going to be the reliable ones aren’t always reliable or trustworthy. In TEOTWAWKI there is always going to be that surprising situation that you didn’t prepare for, that you don’t know how to handle. I know you are prepping, but there are always questions; for example, “Are you going to be able to access what you have prepared?” You can never know for sure.
If you can’t get medicine, food, and all of the other necessary supplies, because there is no more store, pharmacy, or cache you stored, are you going to be able to make it? Aside from that, are you going to be able to deal with the stress of killing someone or something to protect yourself or others? Are you ready to handle the hopelessness, death, loss, disease, or other stresses that may come?
A doctor I worked with was brilliant, driven, in shape, and had everything going for her. She was the one to turn to if you needed help. She was in a restaurant when someone started choking. That’s no big deal, right? You just do the Heimlich and no one gets hurt; you maybe even earn a citizens award or something. A few days later she started getting depressed and couldn’t function. She didn’t want to get up in the morning or even care if she went to work. She quite literally lost the will to live. This went on for weeks and she became totally not herself. Someone that cared for her finally dragged her in to a doctor to get some help. She was diagnosed with PTSD. Post traumatic stress disorder, just because she had saved someone’s life who had been choking on a piece of steak? They put her on some medicine and she fully recovered. She just needed a push in the right direction. The stress of the situation had thrown all of the chemicals in her body off. She couldn’t get back on track and get control of her life. She didn’t even care to. Situations you are trying to prepare for will certainly get much worse than someone choking on a piece of steak. What if this happens to you? Are you prepared? I don’t believe anyone is, but what can you do to be the best prepared you can be?
Another big thing to think about is are you on a medication for anything? Let’s take a heart condition, for example. Maybe you are being told by a doctor that your body has an aspirin shortage and you need to take an aspirin a day. Where are you going to get the aspirin during a survival situation when nobody is delivering to the stores? Maybe you have some stored up, but what if your cache gets compromised or destroyed? Every medication that is out there has been designed by taking a plant, leaf, root, stem, fruit, seed, and extracting a chemical out of the plant; “bingo”, the drug company can now market a new drug. Did you know you can take the same plant and have the same effect as the drug? The brilliance of taking the plant is that God made the plant with the chemicals in it to help the plant be assimilated and used as it goes through the body without hurting you. White willow bark– acetylsalicylic acid, or you may have heard it called aspirin– is one of those. I will talk a little about it in this paper.
All willow trees have some salicylic acid in the bark. People all over the world used to chew the bark or make a tea to help with pain and other ailments, until Bayer Company in the late 1800’s produced aspirin, making it convenient to pop a pill. When aspirin came out, too many people were getting hurt with aspirin. It seems it was causing severe intestinal bleeding, so Bufferin was developed. Bufferin is aspirin with a chemical coating to make it not burn you until it got further into your system. Common sense says chemicals are not good for you. I’m getting off track. The history can be read in books or on the Internet. The point is that you can find the willow tree, or if you have to take the pill I recommend storing up bottles of white willow bark. They look almost exactly the same. They cost the same. They have less side effects than Aspirin, which I think the research shows a negative reaction with every 1000 times an aspirin is taken. If you are taking a medication, do a little bit of research to find an alternative now. I guarantee there is one out there. I have seen patients surviving without the drugs or surgery many times. Find someone that is knowledgeable on the subject now and learn from them, before you are in a desperate situation and it becomes literally life or death and you become a statistic. What are some awesome plants that can be used for multiple uses nutritionally, medicinally, or practically to help you survive until things get back to tolerable? This is my short list. My criteria for this paper was that you had to be able to easily find and identify them, and do so almost anywhere in the world. Another thing I want you to think of is the very real life scenario that you may have no access to the store and buying what you want, when you want. I wanted to keep the list short so you will remember this article; the memory will help you with fighting all the possible hardships you are likely to encounter, like disease, radiation, injury, thirst, or hunger. As with all advice on plants or anything you put on or in your body, they can be dangerous if taken with anything else or by a person that is allergic. You will find many less side effects, if any, with a plant than with an acid, like medication, that is extracted from a plant. It is better to figure it out now, when things are what you would call normal than when SHTF and you are forced to go back to the way things used to be. This advice is given by a medical professional whose wife, family, and patients have used it for years. When trying anything new, always go slow when introducing it to your system and stop if you have complications. Your body can handle almost any toxin, if exposed to it slow enough and helped through the process. God designed your body to be pretty amazing. He also gave you tools to help you survive.
Dandelion
My first choice may make you change your mind about spraying chemicals on your lawn, if you are the kind of person that likes a green grassy lawn. It’s dandelion. Maybe you have heard of it or blown the little paratrooper seed in the spring time and watched them float all over. Come on, who doesn’t know what dandelion looks like? It is easy to find and located almost anywhere in the world. You can’t mistake it for another poisonous plant. It grows in all soil types. The dandelion is a plant that was designed to help pull other minerals, like phosphorous, calcium, and others, up to the top of the ground to help fertilize your soil and make it healthier. It was rated in the top five most nutritious vegetables from the USDA. It is rated in the top 10 for medicinal plants of Chinese medicine. All parts of the dandelion can be used as a water purifier, to fight bacteria, and help heal wounds. Dandelion has many uses internally or externally. It can be used for most digestive problems and to detoxify the whole body. It is more nutritious than most fruits or vegetables. It can be dried and saved for later, eaten raw, or cooked. It can be used as a bartering tool. It will help ripen your fruit faster too so that you can eat the fruit sooner, which could be especially useful for when you are on the move and have to pick fruit too early. Dandelion is anti-biotic and can be used against a host of bacteria, like perhaps staph infections, pneumonia, dysentery, typhoid, diphtheria– the diseases you are likely to face in a survival situation. Dandelion is great for removing toxins and poisons out of the body because it acts like a diuretic (makes you pee a lot). What makes dandelion better than diuretics is that it doesn’t push much needed potassium out of the system. The truth is it is loaded with potassium, and it replenishes the bodies’ supply of it. Just to make a long story short, it helps with just about everything in the body because of how nutritious it is.
Eat dandelion all the time and you may never get something. Your body will be so strong it will laugh at sickness. Try not to think of dandelion as a medicine. Think of it more like a once-a-day vitamin. Dandelion is currently being studied and has been used for years for liver problems like jaundice and hepatitis, heart problems like high blood pressure, all kinds of inflammatory skin problems, including getting rid of freckles, zits, and warts. Seriously! It has also been used for problems like soothing the skin from burn, bite, or itch, for kidney and urinary problems, intestinal disorders, and digestive problems. It can be used, as I have tried, as a weaker version of coffee, for all you coffeeholics out there that can’t live without coffee. It’s “okay” in a pinch. You know coffee will be in short supply. I believe people will kill for it. Have you ever seen the barista at Starbucks get an order wrong? People go ballistic. I believe you could almost live off of dandelion, if you could find a source of protein and fat. This is one you should be eating right now to strengthen your body so it will handle the stress of what might be coming. There is research all over the world on dandelion.