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Don't Fight the Dandelions, Use Them as Medicine

© Traute Klein, biogardener

Dandelions heal and cleanse, but their milky juice also attacks cells which are foreign to the body, thus getting get rid of warts and calluses. Third article in the series on dandelions.

Series on Dandelions

This is the last article in a series of three on the benefits of dandelions. The first one explains how I eat them, and the second one encourages you to drink them. Both articles are linked below along with other articles on plants with health benefits.

Known Medicinal Benefit

Eating and drinking dandelions certainly has medicinal benefits. I have been told all my life that dandelion stimulates the liver to help the body to clean itself out. That is why it is popular in the spring, because that is the time when Europeans think of going through their annual "spring tonic." Whereas North Americans think of shedding pounds every spring, Europeans prefer to clean the toxins out of their system. Evidently, dandelion stimulates more than just the liver. When I told my family physician what article I was working on, he reminded me of the meaning of its French name. Obviously, the word "dandelion" is derived from the French "dent de lion" meaning "tooth of the lion" because of the shape of the leaves. The French, however, prefer a more earthy name for the plant, "pissenlit" which literally means "piss in bed." Obviously, the French people have discovered that the plant is a diuretic, i.e. it stimulates the urinary system.

Warts, Calluses, etc.

I have, however, discovered that dandelion can be used as an external remedy to remove abnormal skin formations. A few years ago, just to experiment, I started dabbing dandelion juice on a little wart which I had on a finger of the left hand. Every time I picked a lonely flower off a plant, I would dab before I popped the flower into my mouth. By the time all the plants were asleep under a blanket of snow, I started wondering what had happened to my wart, because it was nowhere to be found. As a matter of fact, to this day, I can't remember on which finger it had been. When I told this story to a friend in the sauna of the swimming pool, he had an even better story to tell me. He was plagued by several painful plantar warts on the bottom of his feet. A herbalist told him how to get rid of them. He packed his socks full of juicy dandelion plants and walked on them. I don't remember how long it took, but he did get rid of the warts.

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