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White Willow Bark

The second widely available and brilliant plant God made that will be useful in a SHTF situation is one I recommend my patients use instead of aspirin, which according to research can damage and weaken the body. It is white willow bark, which has been used in medicine for 6000 years, since the time of the Egyptians, and has been used effectively for reducing pain and as an:

• anti-inflammatory,
• antipyretic,
• antiseptic,
• anti-oxidant, and
• analgesic.

It also has immune boosting capability to keep your body from getting sick. It has been used on a wide range of problems, such as headaches, including migraines, and for dental problems, like disinfecting infections, bad breath, and toothache. My patients use it for backaches, other soreness, and rheumatic and arthritic problems. My female patients use it for lady things like the time of the month and cramping. It is used for almost everything having to do with the heart and cardiovascular. It is also used externally for wounds, burn healing, disinfecting, and skin conditions. Let’s not forget general sicknesses, like the cold, flu, or general fever.

Research is showing it may help reduce the risk of certain types of cancer, cataracts, and age-related eye degeneration, multiple sclerosis, and stroke. There are more benefits, but my point is white willow bark has been a go-to for a great deal of health-related problems for many people for millenia. My wife always carries a bottle with her. White willow is the very plant that aspirin or acetylsalicylic acid comes from. The white willow tree has a large range all over the world. In a pinch any willow tree has salicylic acid in the bark. You can boil and drink it in a tea or you can literally just chew it and get the effects. Slightly bitter and sour is the best way I could describe it. My daughter would disagree. She described it as horrible, as she made a face and spit it on the ground.

Chia, Mint, and Sage

I can not say enough about chia seeds. Chia was used by different Indian groups as a staple to keep them alive. Chia seeds are much more potent and nutritious than corn. The seed is where all the nutrition is, but you can also eat the plant. Chia is a very hardy plant not prone to disease, drought, bugs, or animals eating them. It grows all year long. It is self pollinating. This is great in case all the birds, bees, and ants are killed off by something. Indians would take a teaspoon full of it to sustain themselves for a day on a journey such as a hunting expedition. Yes, I did say teaspoon. It has been used for 5000 years. I had a hard time including this one because of one problem, which is the range where it is found. Chia has only been grown, until recently, in places like Mexico and Central America, so it is harder to find. It was banned by the Spanish due to its association with Aztec gods. It has just recently been reintroduced as a cash crop into the United States because people are starting to discover its benefits and demand it. Chia is awesome to include in your diet for a multitude of reasons. One of them being it contains good amounts of minerals, such as magnesium, calcium, potassium, phosphorous, iron, and zinc. Another reason is that it is a great source of proteins, carbohydrates, and a good healthy fat substitute when you can’t find another source. So, what is the solution to not being able to find Chia everywhere? Chia is of the sage and mint families, such as spearmint, peppermint, lemon balm, basil, rosemary, sage, oregano, and catnip. So, I decided to include all of them, because the nutrition value of the sage and the mint seeds is slightly less but comparable to chia. Familiarize yourself with mint and sage, if chia does not grow in your area. You will know you have it when you grab a leaf and crush it; the smell of the plant will overwhelm you a little with minty, lemony, and other strong smells. They are all thought of as weeds and grow heartily and quickly. Most people will not be looking for these, and they should be easy to find. They produce all year until hard frosts.

Different forms of mint, sage, and chia can be used for antiseptics and bug repellents for mosquitoes and ticks. They can also be used successfully to repel other pests, like mice and moles, so they don’t get in your cache. I have used them successfully in my trailer for mice. They can be used as bug killers including wasps, hornets, ants, and cockroaches. More pleasant uses are mouthwash, air fresheners, and flavorings. Believe me when I tell you that you are going to miss spices. MREs get awful dull, and they make you have body odor. Whew! I can still smell the tent I shared with ten other Marines in Desert Storm. Medicinally they have been used as a sedative, and also to increase brain alertness, for digestive problems, chest pains, and nausea. Really, there are so many things they do that I can’t put them all in this paper.

Grapes

My third selection for all you wine connoisseurs is grapes. Almost everyone likes some form of grapes. Grapes are healthy and taste good. Grapes will be a go-to for everyone that is thrust into a survival situation. In other words, there will probably not be any cultured grapes to eat. What will be left over will be the leaves and you will probably be able to find wild ones. Grapes are found wild and cultured in most places all over the world. There is even a farmer in Alaska, U.S.A. trying to be the first to produce wine from grapes he has been growing there. The actual grape may be hard to find, but the vines and leaves will not be. You get 93 calories from a 100g of leaves according to the USDA. This is about 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup. You also get almost 6 g of protein, 2 g of fat, 17 g of carbs, plus vitamins A, E, C, which are all good for cleaning up radiation, and all the B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, and more. The grape leaves are mineral and vitamin store houses.

Grape leaves can be cooked, dried, pickled, stored, and eaten as a salad. I have stored them for two years dried and then re-hydrated them; they still taste the same. They’re awesome as pickles. Grapes are easy to find all over the world. In all climates and soil types, they are easy to identify and use. All grapes are edible. However, I have one word of warning when identifying grapes: Do not eat them if they have only a single seed, as this may be a poisonous moon seed and some poison ivy can look similar to wild grapes as well. Familiarize yourself now before SHTF. Grape plants are your friend in the survival situation. In a pinch, the vines can be used for many different things, such as rope and weaving containers, and they can be used to collect fresh drinking water. Simply cut the vine a few feet above the ground and put the cut end into a container. It will continue to draw water like a hose; just make sure you keep the soil wet.

Nuts

My final suggestion is nuts. Nuts are found everywhere in the world. Peanuts don’t count, but coconuts do. It’s not that peanuts are not a great survival food, if you can find them; it is just that they are a legume rather than a nut. The nuts I am talking about are Acorns, Macadamia, Beechnuts, Chestnuts and Chinquapins, Coconuts, Walnuts, Butternuts, Hickory nuts, Pecans, and Pinenuts, Pistachios, Hazel, Brazil, Buckeyes, and so forth. They are always a great source of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Most of the time, nuts are a source of minerals needed for healing, unless you have an allergy to them. One of my patients is being treated for an allergy right now. Do you know what she is doing? She is being slowly exposed to nuts. They are feeding them to her and slowly increasing the amount she eats. You need to know a little about preparing some of them. For instance, you need to learn how to take the bitter out of the acorns or the toxins out of buckeyes. I probably would leave buckeyes alone, unless desperate or turning them into jewelry or art to trade. You will have to know when to pick nuts to beat the squirrels, mice, and deer. You may have to raid the squirrels’ stash to get the pine nuts. Squirrels hoard and steal pine nuts before you get to them. Most nuts can be made into flour, bread, and mush. You can use the tree as a bait pile. When the nuts drop off the deer always seem to know. You can use the hulls for smoking meats to preserve them longer. The hulls can be ground up and used as slug repellent around plants or put into water to purify it. Some nuts, like walnut, can be used as permanent ink or dye for cloth, wood, or hair (your wife will appreciate it or think camouflage). Nuts are good for a time but not long term; the oils in them turn rancid. If they go rancid and you can no longer eat them (they will start to taste bitter), you can burn them for heat or as a light source. Start them on fire right in the shell and you have a candle. Hulls of walnuts can be mixed with alcohol and water and used as a tincture for digestion. The tincture can be used internally and externally, and it is anti-parasitic, antiseptic, and anti-fungal. Walnut oil can be used on the skin as oil or made into a soap for eczema, ringworm, inflamed tonsils, and thyroid. I have watched scars disappear in three weeks that had been on a lady for more than three years. I started recommending all nut oils to my patients. The American Cancer Society says it is thought that nuts help shrink tumors. One study by Yu-bin Ji showed it promoted the die off of digestive cancer cells. Most nut trees, like walnut, are strong wood for building and making rifle stocks, furniture, or other tools. I have never tried, but it is said the sap can be collected and turned into a sugar source like the maple tree.

An extra little piece of advice. Almost any fruit, vegetable, or plant, even if it is not edible, can be turned to vinegar just by letting it sit. Vinegar can be used for thousands of things externally that will help you to live, including disinfecting wounds and foods that you eat, cleaning and disinfecting surfaces so you don’t spread sicknesses, and more. If it is something that is edible, such as apples or grapes, it can be taken internally to help with digestion. It has probiotics in it to prevent other bad things, like bacteria, from growing and hurting you. Go to this website for 1000 ideas http://vinegartips.com/. Any one can make vinegar; just let a watered down, mashed up plant sit for a week or two. The vinegar makes itself with no help. You can still use that spoiled fruit that you find and can’t or won’t eat.

Remember: Never stop learning. Never give up. Just when you think you are at the end of your rope, God will provide a solution. I hope this is a start. One thing at a time.

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.