Natural Remedies in Your Kitchen Cabinet
Learn how to make home remedies for cold and flu using kitchen cabinet herbs. We make fire cider and also cover herbs for arthritis and more!
Jennifer Capestany is a contributing expert writer, for GardensAll.com. An avid gardener, growing as much of her own food as possible, Jennifer is also an herbalist, health coach and natural health consultant.
After healing her own chronic illness, Jennifer’s specialty is consulting with clients on herbal remedies and healing for rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disease, digestive disorders and other chronic illnesses.
Herbal remedies for gentle healing rooted in nature.
~Jennifer Capestany, herbalist, writer
Interview with Health Coach and Herbalist Jennifer Capestany
In this interview, Jennifer shows us how to use everyday kitchen cabinet herbs to make herbal home remedies for cold and flu, fire cider and so much more!
Editor’s Note: If you watch the video instead of reading the edited transcript and recipe at bottom, Jennifer said to be sure to tell you that she forgot a very important ingredient in the fire cider: Onions! So dice 1/2 an onion or so (depending on the size and your preference) and add that to your fire cider jar.
LeAura:
Hi this is LeAura Alderson with GardensAll, here today with one of our favorite herbalists Jennifer Capestany. Welcome Jennifer!
Jennifer:
Thank you! Happy to be here.
LeAura:
Jennifer:
Yes!
LeAura:
That’s excellent! Your website is really beautiful too. That’s PrairieHawkBotanica.com[1]https://www.PrairieHawkBotanica.com and Jennifer’s Facebook page is also Prairie Hawk Botanica so you can find her that way as well.
LeAura:
Jennifer is just a wealth of knowledge and she’s one of those people who lives what she teaches because she had to, in fact that began her journey. Let me just share with folks what we are going to talk about and we’ll get back to you sharing how you get involved and then we will get on to the nitty gritty of the subject.
So today we are going to talk about easy remedies you can make at home.
Kitchen Cabinet Cold and Flu remedies
- Cold and flu herbs most people already have on hand in their spice cabinet
- Cold and flu herbs that grow well indoors
- How to make ‘Fire Cider’ (it’s easy!)
- How to make a quick facial stream for stuffy noses
- How to deal with the chronic cough or chest congestion that can come from colds and flu
Jennifer’s Story of Healing Through Herbs
LeAura:
So those are the things we plan to touch on but let’s first learn a little bit about who Jennifer is. Jennifer lives in, a homeschooling mom and an avid gardener, in addition to being an herbalist. So tell us a little bit about your background, where you are, your parenting and also how you got started?
Jennifer:
Ok well, as you know I’m in North Texas, so that’s close to Dallas, the upper north-eastern corner of it. A very temperate region with a long growing season, I once had a growing season of seven on the map and it’s more like growing season eight these days.
Let me see, my journey to being an herbalist and finding my calling probably started about thirteen years ago when my second child, my daughter, was born. I didn’t know it at the time what was on the horizon but I started to have little aches and pains especially in my hands and my elbows and just started to have a little bit of digestive issues. Which I really at the time, like most of us, deep into a full time job, trying to parent, trying to home school and so thought it was just because I was burning the candle at both ends as they say. And I had a very typing job so as the pain increased over the years I thought I had carpal tunnel syndrome, I didn’t really connect anything. I began to have stomach pains which I thought at the time was heartburn, I didn’t suffer from heartburn much (laughter) so I didn’t recognise what it was. I found excuses and tried to ignore it. As the years went on and we moved to Texas, about a decade ago, it started getting really bad. I would wake up in the morning and be so stiff that I would have to hobble up out of bed.
LeAura:
So let me ask, so where were you when it started? You weren’t in Texas yet?
Jennifer:
At the time I was living in Connecticut and about a decade ago a job transfer had us coming out to Texas and we love it here so much.
LeAura:
So the story you’re unfolding is like, it’s one of those things where it was getting worse and worse, but because you were living in it, it was a little bit harder perhaps to recognise exactly how bad it was getting.
JC:
Yeah, you recognise the pain of childbirth because it happens kind of all of a sudden (laughter) but this kind of pain, when it comes to chronic illness and such, you rationalise, you find excuses and you justify it in a way because you get used to it as you go on. That’s definitely what happened to me, I got used to unbelievable amounts of pain.
I just got used to unbelievable amounts of pain.
LeAura:
Wow! Again, it’s hard to know what you’re missing and how bad you feel when you forget how good it feels to feel great. Were you checking in with regular doctors?
Medical Misdiagnosis
Jennifer:
At the time I did. When the pain began to get really bad, especially in my hands, I went to my regular doctor and they sent me to a sports doctor. The sports doctor said ‘you have trigger finger’. I didn’t have trigger finger but this is what I thought at the time and so I’m rubbing sports cream into my hands and trying to just control the pain. No one had very good answers and then the pain was kind of just where your liver is—you know where I’m going with this—it started to get very severe. It started to get to a point where I could hardly eat anything without these pains coming.
Ailments Jennifer Experienced Before Herbal Healing
- Stomach Pain
- Digestive Issues
- Aching hands
- Aching elbows
- Aching feet
- Pain from eating in the area of the liver
Jennifer:
So back to the doctor. By this time I was in my mid thirties and I had been living with this increasingly growing pain for some years and only then when they finally did some more testing and had to remove my gall bladder which turned out to be full of stones.
LeAura:
Wow!
Jennifer:
Which was causing the pain and making it so that I could hardly digest the food that I was eating.
LeAura:
Right.
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Jennifer:
And the diagnosis for rheumatoid arthritis came through and like I said, I had to be about thirty-five at the time, my hands were engaged in pain, by that time my elbows, my knees, my toes. I remember being nearly in tears in the doctor’s office, asking, “Who’s toes hurt?” It was just dreadful.
LeAura:
Especially in the early days, were you tempted to attribute any part of it to, ‘I’m getting older, you know now I’m in my mid-30s, maybe this is what it means’.
Jennifer:
Oh yeah. Between the two children I had put on some weight and so I was very fond of blaming any health problems that I had to the extra weight that I was carrying around. Of course that can lead to many health problems but it wasn’t an adequate excuse but absolutely yeah. Anything I could grab as an excuse I did. “I’m getting older”, certainly played into that. Although when you’re in your 30s that only works so far, as it’s hard to justify.
Then I visited a rheumatologist and found out some of the medications I would have to take in order to control the rheumatoid arthritis. They test your blood and they test your—what they call RH factor—and it was through the roof for me. I believe normal levels are between 14 and 15, mine was 177.
LeAura:
What does that mean? Did you say RA factor?
Jennifer:
Yes, the test for rheumatoid arthritis factor in your bloodstream, which since it’s an autoimmune disease in nature they can test for these things. They can test for these things by testing your blood and I was just severely ill. It was just nuts and when I found out the medications that I would have to take, it was pretty terrifying to me. Immunosuppressants, western medicine doesn’t have a good answer for these chronic auto immune disorders, all they really know how to do is to tap down the reaction by suppressing your immune system.
Terrified and Helpless
I learned I would have to take what’s known as a cancer drug, in much smaller amounts than an oncologist would give to a cancer patient, but I would have to take it regularly. Also the anti-inflammatories, to try and drive down the pain, occasional steroids when the pain got too bad and the cancer methotrexate, is what it’s known, that’s where you first start, your first immune suppressant you get. It would absolutely damage my liver, they would have to monitor my liver to ensure that the damage wasn’t so much that my liver couldn’t keep up with it and I was just terrified by that.
LeAura:
And is that is such a feeling as helplessness!
I didn’t want to live a life on pills.
Jennifer:
It really is. You feel like you’re at the top of a very slippery slope and once you take that slope there’s not anyway to get back up again. That is truly how I felt, it was terrifying. So right around then all the love of plant medicine that I had put aside… had let life interfere with, kicked in. I started thinking there has to be a better way there has to be something that I did to cause this and therefore something that I can do to try and dial it back.
From Traditional to Naturopathic Doctors to Herbs
Rheumatologists, didn’t really want to work with me at all, they just said ‘nope’ the only thing you can do is take these drugs but it’s a good idea to eat more fruit and vegetables. That was insulting and that’s when we left the Rheumatologist’s office and instead chose to see a naturopathic doctor and that lead me onto my journey.
That was insulting. we left the rheumatologist’s office and sought out a naturopath.
To learn about how to eat properly, mistakes that I had made and symptoms that I had ignored like leaky gut. How to restore those things and how to return to a more traditional way of eating. And it was in that journey somewhere along the way that I realised I really could use someone like a ‘me’ now, when I was going through that process.
LeAura:
Exactly.
Jennifer:
Someone who was willing to coach me through all of the pain, the anxiety, trying to balance the allopathic medicines with the natural interventions as you try to taper off of one. It was very, very confusing.