Willa Cather, My Antonia
According to which study you believe, coneflower is either one of the most effective disease preventers known to man, or a highly over-hyped remedy. We might consider this disagreement symbolic of the continuing clash between conventional and alternative medicine. Although conventional practitioners have had to accept their patients' preference for gentler herbal remedies, we can sense that many of them do so with the utmost reluctance! And, since echinacea is probably the most used of those remedies, it bears the brunt of the attack.
The herb's name derives from the Greek "echinos" or "hedgehog" (AKA "porcupine"), in reference to the flowers prickly cone. So echinacea has been known as hedgehog coneflower, as well as purple coneflower, purple daisy, and the more racist sampson root-an allusion to the plant's black root.
The wildflower originated in the Plains States and Tennessee, though the Tennessee variety is now endangered. Native Americans used it to treat colds, sore gums, burns, snake and insect bites, etc, and purified themselves in their sweat lodges with echinacea steam. Wiley medicine men numbed their tongues with the plant's chewed leaves before mouthing hot coals-a feat that naturally impressed potential patients!
That tingle, then numbness, that echinacea imparts to the tongue is-according to herbalists-a good sign of the herb's freshness and potency. "Flat" coneflower is supposed to have lost its medicinal effectiveness. (Even that claim is debatable, however. Others believe the element that imparts the tingle decreases the herb's power!)
In the late 1800's, echinacea gained a snake-oil reputation, when it was patented as Meyer's Blood Purifier, supposedly effective against even the bites of rattlers! The plant was able to rise above its unfortunate associations with patent medicine, however, to become exceedingly popular into the 1920's. Once modern antibiotics made their debut, though, the herb was largely forgotten. Now that those antibiotics have been shown to have their drawbacks, echinacea is resurging.
According to Michael Castleman, author of The Healing Herbs, the plant contains a natural antibiotic that fights a wide range of viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Another of its elements stimulates the white blood cells that destroy germs, while yet another resists those germs' tissue-destroying enzymes. Thus, echinacea's strongest reputation is for preventing disease.
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