Natural Herbs For Wildfire Smoke & Lung Health

With wildfire season in full swing, it’s important to protect your lungs and respiratory health now more than ever. It’s time to discover herbs like marshmallow root, lungwort, and licorice root, and some other practical tips to soothe and shield your body from harmful smoke.  When you’re dealing with dry, irritated throats, these simple herbal remedies can make a world of difference. 

If you're ready to take control of your health with natural remedies, join me for a free class on making herbal remedies that really work right here: https://www.theherbalistspath.com/herbal-remedies-that-work

00:45 Impact of Wildfire Smoke on Your Health
04:10 Aniseed for Sore Throats/Cough Relief
06:30 Marshmallow Root & Its Cooling Benefits
09:15 Using Lungwort to Support Lungs
11:55 Licorice Root: for Respiratory Health
14:20 Creating Herbal Blends Lung Support
16:40 Safe & Effective Herbs for All Ages

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Chapters

• 1:44 Herbal Remedies for Wildfire Relief
• 13:12 Healing Herbs for Respiratory Relief

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:45

Hello and welcome to the Herbalist Path, a podcast where you'll discover how to make your own herbal remedies at home so that you can take better care of yourself, better care of your family and better care of our planet. I'm Mel. I'm a clinical herbalist, environmental educator and mountain-l living mama with this crazy passion for teaching more mamas and their little loves how to use plants as medicine in a safe, effective and tasty way, so that there can be an herbalist in every home. Again, it's an absolute honor to have you on the journey down the herbalist path with me so that together we can make herbalism Hashtag spread like wildflowers. Hello and welcome back to another episode here on the herbalist path. I am so happy that you are here, even if today's topic doesn't exactly make me happy. But being able to spread the information that's coming out in today's topic does make me happy, and the fact that you are listening to this right now also makes me super, duper happy. So thank you for that. And yeah, so today's topic we are going to be talking about using herbs to get a little bit of relief during what is now wildfire season, and the reason this is happening is one.

Speaker 1: 3:19

I live in the state of Oregon, which is incredibly beautiful and totally on fire all over the place. It was really really bad back in July. Here we are in August and two days ago I had a fire pop up about three miles from my house, directly across the street from where my daughter goes to school, on the mountain there it's called Hunchback Mountain. And then a few others popped up about 20 miles or so down the road and now there's a raging one across the Columbia River Gorge in Washington, very near some dear friends of mine's home. And if you look at the fire maps, there's just fire everywhere. The sky colors are kind of orange and that's due to the smoke. I will say, you know, on the fires near me, they're out, I'm safe, like that's all good. Um, and I've been really, really fortunate throughout the month of July to have very mild temperatures and very clear skies where I live. Thank you beautiful, luscious trees for helping to filter all of that out and just being really fortunate. But I also know that was July, things were burning so hot already, and here we are going into August and then September and what has been happening is that these months are just insane with smoke, and it's crazy. It makes me want to cry. It's really, really heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking, so mad and it's showing in all the ways.

Speaker 1: 5:10

And, yes, I know that these forests can make certain iterations of a comeback and all of these things, but I can remember, just not even 10 years ago, when my daughter was just young like two years old and we would be able to have campfires in our backyard all of the time. There might be like a one to two week window where they're like, oh, please don't burn, there's a burn ban. But now that burn ban begins in June and we don't get to have campfires. And yeah, of course, like I'd rather have my forest than the campfires. But I think my point here is just how rapidly and how dramatically these shifts have come about. It's frightening and it's really sad. I know many people that have lost their homes, and not necessarily this year yet, but I would not be surprised if that happens. I've definitely had to evacuate before myself and actually, like a little fun ish twist on it I don't know if you listen to the show a lot or you see some of my hashtags or whatever on social media. I'm always saying spread like wildflowers. And that came to me in 2020, september 2020.

Speaker 1: 6:28

We were evacuating from our area had such intense smoke and there is fire pretty close to us but not like oh my gosh close to us, but the smoke factor was enough for us to leave. And anyways, during that time I love our firefighters. What heroic beings they are. They're so amazing. And back then I still ran Mountain Mel's and one of the teas that I made was called Respiratory Rescue and it was a blend that I formulated for people dealing with respiratory health conditions and it happened to be really fantastic for more dry kind of smoke inhalation kind of conditions.

Speaker 1: 7:08

So I remember evacuating like packing up all of our stuff and going out on the road and stopping by my shop so that I could pick up. I got like five pounds of this tea and I took it to the fire station and was just like thank you, thank you, thank you so much for all the work you do. And it was such an emotional time. There was so much emotion going on. And yes, as I packed up, I will tell you that I packed up my herb books to go with me. Some people grab special documents and other keepsakes and I'm like my herb books oh my gosh, like I'm not even joking. I did that. That's how important those things are to me. But anyways, as I was driving down the beautiful mountain highways and looking at all the smoke and thinking about all these precious trees burning and the condition of our planet, it broke my heart and I wanted to make a shift on it, and instead of having things spread like wildfire, I wanted to have things spread like wildflowers. So that's kind of where that came from.

Speaker 1: 8:16

Anyways, I'm getting really rambly. So what happens when you're breathing in smoke all the time? You get really miserable. It feels gross on your skin, it hurts the respiratory tract and it burns, and I know that so many people are dealing with this right now. So I thought it could be helpful to talk about some pretty simple and easy to find herbs that you can use, like one that is probably in your kitchen right now.

Speaker 1: 8:47

You might cook with aniseed, make some different foods or things like that, and this is a really, really fantastic one to help with dry, irritating coughs, so you can make like a simple tea with it. It's really got a lot going on for people that are normally dealing with, like bronchitis or asthma or whooping cough or smoker's cough those really like dry, irritated coughs. So I like to use aniseed also because it's very tasty and you can add it to a different blend and it'll just really enhance the flavor and bring about a bit of sweetness. Usually you're not going to get too much trouble getting your kiddos to take it and you can add some aniseed to honey and that honey is going to add some cooling, coating, mucilaginous property Not mucilaginous necessary, but definitely cooling and coating properties to the respiratory tract along with the aniseed. Or you could take that honey and aniseed and put it in water and let it like dissolve in there and drink that tea. It would be delicious and you'll feel it just kind of cool and coat.

Speaker 1: 10:05

And if you're, you know if excuse me, if anise seed isn't your jam so much you could, or you don't have it, you could also use fennel seeds. Use fennel seeds. So they have very similar actions, though not quite as strong as aniseed is in this department. It's really really amazing for respiratory conditions. But fennel can be brought into a combination of a tea specific for that really dry, irritated cough or sore throat that comes from dealing with smoke and inhalation of smoke so often.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Another one that I love so much, and you probably hear me talk about this herb quite often here on this show, but it's Althea or Marshmallow, and you can use a lot of the Mallow family plants, the Malvaceae family plants, but the Marshmallow, the Althea officinalis herself, has the most amount of the mucilaginous polysaccharides in the root and it's those mucilaginous polysaccharides, that the root, and it's those mucilaginous polysaccharides that are going to be so cooling and coating, like you can almost feel it just kind of slide down the respiratory tract and just like hug it with coolness and love and relief, which is super duper wonderful. But if you don't have access to straight Althea officinalis, you could get by with using like hollyhocks or the root. The malva root would be really fantastic as well. Excuse me, you could also use leaves and flowers of all of those plants as well. I do.

Speaker 1: 11:57

When it comes to marshmallow, I love to do a cold infusion and this can be a really fun science project if you're like a homeschool mom or just a mom, or you're curious about plants and you want to see how it goes and you're a grownup and you don't care about the kids learning Though obviously I hope you care about the kids learning but it could be a really fun project to do. So just take some of that marshmallow root the Althea officinalis, the one with large amounts of mucilaginous polysaccharides and you're going to put a little bit of it into a cup of cold water and place it in the refrigerator overnight. And when you go to that marshmallow root and cold water the next morning, it is going to be very, very slimy and very clear and it's going to look a lot like snot dripping out of somebody's nose and it may make you want to feel nauseous. Sliminess is the medicine. That is the cooling, coating, soothing goodness for your respiratory tract and it is absolutely fantastic. It is such an amazing remedy for sore, dry throats or anything along those lines.

Speaker 1: 13:12

But if you don't have access to roots right now maybe you have a plant growing by you you could certainly gather some leaves or again the flowers, and you could make yourself a nice herbal tea with that as well. It's really really, really a fantastic helper. You could mix it like marshmallow has. The root has a very mild flavor, so you could add in some of that anise seed. You could add in some of the fennel seed if you want.

Speaker 1: 13:46

Another thing that you could consider is slippery elm. So slippery elm and marshmallow have a lot of very, very similar medicinal properties. And I don't talk about slippery elm a lot because, while it is great medicine, it has been completely over harvested in the wild. So if you are using slippery elm instead of the marshmallow, please, please, please, please, I beg of you, make sure that you're getting it from a source that is cultivating it organically, not wild crafted slippery elm, because, again, it is a plant that has been over harvested in the wild and that's heartbreaking.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Another thing I love to use and it's kind of funny because I get it in the fall, when it's raining and storms start to happen and it gets windy. I will go for a walk in the woods and I will see one of my favorite lichen ever all over the ground and be able to pick up amazing medicine that has just fallen from the forest sky and that is lungwort, and it's not a plant, it is a lichen. So lichen are basically fungi and algae that come together and take a lichen to each other. And, yes, I've used that one since way back in the days when I used to do environmental ed tours with young kids. But I really love lungwort and it's really cool when you look at it, because in herbalism there's this thing called the doctrine of signatures, or like treats like, and what that means is oftentimes you will notice that a plant, or in this case lichen, may look like a part of the body that it happens to be good for, just, for instance. This is much broader than that. This is a very short, short demonstration, but with lungwort it looks very much like lung tissue and when it is wet it is very pliable and rubbery, like I imagine lung tissue would feel. I have yet to feel lung tissue. Maybe someday I will Only due to studying, of course. But yeah, lungwort is amazing and it's one of the first things that really yelled at me hey, mel, I am here for you and you should be using me.

Speaker 1: 19:02

So way back in my early herbal days, one of my herbal elders I was on a walk with. Her name is Jane Bothwell. She runs I want to call it the dandelion school of herbalism down in California. I'm not sure if she still does these days, but anyways, I was out on a walk with her and it was simply lovely, and she had mentioned to me that the plants will speak to you, they'll tell you when they you need them, and I left that particular conference just so fascinated and blown away and was like, oh my gosh, this is what I want to be when I grow up. These are my people. Oh my gosh, this is amazing.

Speaker 1: 19:45

And so I enrolled myself in my first in-person herb school back then, which was fantastic, and a few months later I got my first case of bronchitis. I had never had anything like that and I sure as heck don't want it again, but I was really sick and for like three weeks I wasn't able to go outside and leave the house and I love to go outside, like I am a person whose soul must be connected to nature or I hurt, literally like hurt. My soul is like, hey, what are you doing to me? Take me outside. Um, so after about three weeks, if not going anywhere, I'm, like I said to my partner, like we need, you need to take me outside, like I need to go for a walk and like I lived in the middle of the woods at that point but I needed like to be on a trail or something, and so we went to the beautiful, luscious, old growth salmon river forest and um or salmon river trail and I was trying to walk and I would only get like 10, maybe 15 steps before I had to stop and catch my breath or I would hack a bunch of my lungs out, it seemed like, and I would be be hurled over. And as I was hurled over, I would look down and there would be lungwort. And I'd get up and I'd start walking my 10 to 15 steps again and then I'd stop to catch my breath and hurl over and there's more lungwort. And it took me five times of looking over at lungwort directly at my feet, as I'm just like trying to catch my breath and also coughing like crazy, and that lungwort is just like hey, lady, I am here for you, like I can help heal you.

Speaker 1: 21:31

And so I took the lungwort home and I only took a tiny, tiny little piece, because that's all you need to do Again. It was already fallen down to the ground. Please do not go out and harvest lungwort off of tree branches that are still up in the trees. And you don't need a lot, I promise you. I took a tiny, tiny, maybe two by two inch piece and made a cup of tea with it when I got home and I took a sip of that tea and within 30 seconds I took my first deep breath that I had taken in over three weeks. It was amazing. And ever since then I have had a mad love for lungwort, and I definitely do when it comes to fire season, and that's one of the interesting things is that lungwort does not like to grow in polluted forests. It will only grow in very healthy forests, and I'm so blessed to be in a forest that is so abundant with lungwort. Um, but now here we need it so bad because of the fires, which obviously is not good for the trees. So, yeah, nature, she's so fascinating, so darn fascinating.

Speaker 1: 22:44

Okay, off of my lungwort story, let's chat a little bit about my other. Like I love, love, love to have this herb in my repertoire, to have this herb in my repertoire and that is licorice. And I am not talking about Twizzlers or black licorice or anything along those lines. I'm talking about licorice root, which is glycerisic labra, and it is a fantastic demulcent herb, so cooling and coating and soothing, fantastic for easing that inflammation, like that is straight inflammation going on in the respiratory tract, and it also helps, like prevent the cough spasm from happening. It can get any excess like mucus out of there as well if you need to do that, and it's really really delicious Like. I love the taste of licorice root way more than I would ever like a Twizzlers, and it really comes together and harmonizes a whole other blend, so you could even take like plantain Plantain. The wild weed that I talk about a lot as well is also great for the respiratory tract and its mucilaginous properties really shine there. But if you took maybe some marshmallow leaves and some plantain leaves and maybe a little lungwort lichen and a little bit of licorice root in there, that would be a phenomenal medicinal blend for somebody dealing with wildfire smoke or inhalation. You could even consider using mullein. Mullein definitely could be used in there. You could use some alicampane root maybe. Yeah, you could use a lot of things in there.

Speaker 1: 24:30

I'm really so grateful that these herbs are available for us and usually fairly easy to find. I am really, really grateful for the amazing superhero beings that are out there fighting forest fires for all of us and doing such hard work to try and save as much as they can. Obviously, there's a lot more to it than that, but I don't know where we'd be without those amazing, brave people. I have so much love and respect for them and I have so much love and respect for you and I am so grateful that you have you're listening to me right now and you are hearing this podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Please share this information, share this episode with anybody that you know that needs some help because they are breathing in wildfire smoke. It's so, so, so important. Yeah, please, please, please do, because we need to make herbalism spread like wildflowers. Gosh darn it. I am determined to help make this happen in life. So, yeah, if you want to join me for anything else. Oh, speaking of something exciting that's coming up Before I go into that, this coming next week, august 14th, we are having Brittany from Eudaimonia Herbs as our guest teacher inside of the Apothecary Mama Herbal Mentorship which, by the way, we are kind of shifting what Apothecary Mama is, and all of that is unfolding on the back end.

Speaker 1: 26:17

I'm not ready to tell you about it yet, but there's some really exciting things happening in the herbalist path. Anyways, brittany is coming to speak about herbs for smoking, like not herbs to ease smoke inhalation, but how you can use herbs as medicine and smoking. So I'm really excited to have her as a guest teacher inside of the program and glean some more insights from her, and I think there's something so beautiful about being able to learn from so many different herbalists right, about being able to learn from so many different herbalists right, there's so many different ways to practice herbalism and there's so many different people that do it. It's really, really beautiful, I feel like when I got my herbal education, that's probably one of the coolest things that I had going. For me is that the school I went to when I was going to clinical studies, they brought in a teacher each month a new teacher each month to speak on what they were an expert in, and it was so darn cool. So that's what I do for my students too, and it's really beautiful. And it's great for me too, because I'm always learning about herbalism as well. That's the beauty of this practice, right? This is forever learning.

Speaker 1: 27:40

If you would have asked me in the 1999, when I was like starting to discover that plants were more than what I knew they were, that I would still today be absolutely infatuated with herbal medicine or be where I am today, like teaching people about herbal medicine, or that I would run an herbal apothecary or help people heal themselves or run a product line, like if you would have told me any of that I would have been like you're right, you're crazy. But here we are. The plants chose me and said hey, let's go for a journey, and it sounds like if you're still here listening to me babble, even though I started to close out this episode that the plants are calling you on this journey too. So I'm really honored and excited to be on this path with you. Thank you again. You are an absolute imperative part of making herbalism spread like wildflowers. Let's do this, and I wish you and yours fresh, free, clear air, no flooding, no other major tragedies that are happening all over, nothing but love and peace and happiness and lots and lots of hugs. All right, thanks so much and have yourself a great day. Bye.

Speaker 1: 29:02

Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the Herbalist Path. Being on this journey with you is absolutely incredible. If you dig this episode, please leave me a review on your favorite podcast player and share it with your friends so that together we can make herbalism. If you dig this episode, please leave me a review on your favorite podcast player and share it with your friends so that together we can make herbalism hashtag spread like wildflowers.

Speaker 1: 29:23

On another note, I must mention that, while I know you're getting some good info here. It's important to remember that this podcast is purely for entertainment and educational purposes and is not intended to be a substitute for medical treatment. While the information in this podcast is absolutely relevant, herbs work differently for each person and each condition. That's why I recommend you work with a qualified practitioner, whether that be another herbalist, a naturopath or your doctor. So thank you again. I am truly honored that you're tuning into these episodes and on the path with me to make sure that there's an herbalist in every home. Again, don't forget to share this episode with your friends so that we can make herbalism Hashtag spread like wildflowers.