Five Element Nutrition: Food Poisoning Entering the Blood Level

My 6-year old son ate a boxed lunch at summer camp. Soon after, he started vomiting, had to come home, and continued to vomit intermittently through the night. He was able to drink fluids and keep it down for a while, so I let his body do its thing. I gave him a little clay water (Sonne’s #7) but he was stubborn about drinking it (kids!). It’s one of the best remedies for food poisoning I know of.

2 days later he started to get a mild fever. I used an essential oil blend (Ravintsara, Lemon, Frankincense) on his stomach, chest, back, and feet several times throughout the day. When he finally started to sweat I covered him with a light blanket to help it.

After sweating, he felt much improved but the sides of his ribs hurt (sign of wood/liver disharmony) and around his eyes started to get very dark (toxic blood – liver manifests at the eyes). Toxins can get into the blood directly from the stomach, so the bad food most likely started this. According to Chinese medicine the liver stores the blood, so toxic blood will produce signs of liver disharmony.

I gave him a homeopathic dose of an internal essential oil blend that detoxifies and balances the liver, once an hour for 4 hours (“Liver Balance”, available at The Oriental Healing Arts Center). After the 4th dose he showed improvement – got up and wanted to play.

At that point I went to the store and bought a large tub of organic strawberries (detoxifies and builds blood). I washed them off and let him eat as much as he wanted. I also gave him several drops of Dang Gui herb tincture (to help build his blood back). He received this tincture 2 times the 1st day and 1 time the next day, each time with strawberries.

I like to use food along with herbs in many cases. Here, the strawberries build blood and kids like them, so the Dang Gui has something to work with, thus enhancing the action of the herb. It worked very quickly to re-balance him.

Note: Had he not improved significantly with my treatment I would have taken him to his doctor for conventional assistance.

Five Element Nutrition: Clearing Heat

Background Story: My sister is queen of the hot peppers. She loves them so much she even went to New York to do this crazy contest at an Indian food restaurant where they dare you to eat an entire serving of some insanely hot food and if you win you get your name on the wall, a certificate, and a free beer. She won – no problem, barely broke a sweat. (By the way, I adore Indian food.)

So here in Anchorage, her friends told her that one of the restaurants downtown was making chicken wings with Ghost Peppers – outrageously HOT! Of course, she had to go. So she comes home later and I ask how they were. She says they made her sweat, burned her lips, and were the hottest thing she ever ate. I remark that you can’t tell her lips are burnt through the lipstick she’s wearing. Only, she tells me, she’s not wearing any lipstick. Oh…. The dark maroon lipstick was the burn. I saw that and almost cringed at what her stomach/spleen must be doing inside to manifest this way through the lips. I had work to do.

Experiencing extreme digestive heat, she drank clay water (Sonne’s #7) for the next day. It was the only thing she could handle taking into her system. It helped enough that she could get some decent sleep through the internal volcanic activity taking place.

I made her a cooling soup to eat for the next 3 days: very light broth base (flavor and nutrition), juiced celery bunch with ½ lemon including the peel (she won’t eat celery but it’s so nice and cooling I juiced it and added that to the broth – lemon was for coolness and flavor), small amount of white rice (soothing and easy on digestion), very small amount of mung beans (cooling, detoxifies). Once this had cooked together, I removed it from the heat and added a tub of cold plain yogurt (cooling, soothing), 1 finely chopped fresh cucumber (cooling), and sprinkled some dill on top for flavor.

It was simple to make, tasted great, soothed her digestion, and cleared the heat. She started to feel much better after the first bowl.