Use This PLANT to HEAL Broken Bones, Sprains & Strains! | Comfrey Poultice

this is one of the best plants and remedies to use anytime you have a sprain strain muscle issue or broken bones and this is comfrey so comfrey is a amazing plant it can be grown for a lot of different reasons we're going to be using this medicinally today but I actually have comfrey growing underneath my fruit trees here as part as a of a fruit tree Guild they actually can have a great benefit as a companion plant to other plants so we'll link to that video if you want to learn more about using this with your plants and creating a fruit tree Guild but today I actually need to make a medicinal we're going to be doing a comfrey poultice and that is because my daughter hurt her ankle pretty bad actually just two nights ago so I'm going to be harvesting the flour and the stems and we're going to be taking about the top third of the plant here go ahead and take that one and the great thing is this will just continue to spread hey it's not for you you need to get hurt the great thing is this will send up a lot more stocks with flowers and leaves and produce more all throughout the season so we're going to go ahead and take this I'm going to grab just a couple more leaves off of the other plant that I have there and then we're gonna head in the house and I'm going to show you how to make an amazing comfrey poultice and where why and when you want to use this [Music] laughs [Music] so I am going to be making this comfrey compress up so that I have it on hand when my daughter gets home two nights ago we were playing volleyball in the front yard and she went to dive after the ball which she will tell you is completely my fault that she got hurt because I'm the one that hit the ball that she had to die for it and she stepped in a hole and you we could see that her ankle was starting to roll it was almost like you see it happening in slow motion but my husband and I were both outside playing volleyball with her and as it rolled you could audibly hear a slapping sound and it wasn't like there was any limbs or any contact that was creating that when she rolled her ankle we heard this slapping noise and honestly we weren't sure if it was broke or just a bad sprain if it was like a ligament snapping that made that sound so got her inside the house and immediately put ice to it and I actually ran out and grabbed some of the comfrey leaves and just did a really quick mashup and put it on with the ice pack so that we could get immediate treatment assessed if she could move it you know all of those first aid things that you do when you're not sure if it's been broke or sprained but we couldn't tell the following morning I still wasn't sure if maybe there was a fracture or not so I ended up taking her in and we did get X-rays and thankfully it's not broken it's just a really really good sprained if there is such a thing it's a very bad sprain how do we how do we go about that so today's her first day back at school we have it wrapped up she went to school on crutches but I know from being upright all day not being able to lay down and have it elevated like she did yesterday by the time she gets home she's definitely going to need to ice it and it's probably going to be pretty sore so I want to make sure that one I have some of these in reserve so that she can use them while she's home but also just to have these on the hand because a poultice version of this when it's frozen is going to be really really good when you have cases of inflammation but you can use these just at room temperature or you can put them in the fridge you don't have to freeze them but I'm going to freeze up the excess so we're going to take our comfrey leaves here I'm going to go ahead use the stems and the blossoms now comfrey is also known as bone knit is another common name that you'll hear for comfrey and that's because it's known historically as being an incredible healer so using comfrey for broken bones or sprains strains bruises it can help with pain and inflammation it can also help with a skeletal system which is why it's been known for bone knit however comfrey is something that you primarily should only be using externally and not if you have a really large open wound and part of for that is if when you have a really deep wound our wounds actually heal from the inside out so as that wound is healing if there's any type of infection or pus or anything that needs to be moved out it can get out and then the very last part obviously whenever you have I cut my thumb a couple weeks ago and the surface is the very very last thing to heal well the reason that you don't want to use comfrey on a deep wound like that is because it promotes healing so fast it can actually have that top layer of a wound heal faster than it should and then it can create an abscess situation because it's healed over on top before the Deep part of the wound can actually heal and keep up with that so not recommended to use on deep wounds and you also don't want to use it internally now historically you'll see different uses of where comfrey may have been used internally but we know now that it actually has a alkaloid it's one of the PA alkaloids and that in high doses can cause liver damage now Tylenol or acetaminophen can also cause liver damage and in fact causes lots of liver damage all throughout the US so it's just knowing how to appropriately use something um you don't see nearly as much issues with comfrey as we do with Tylenol but proceed with caution and don't be using it internally so I'm going to put this into the blender here and then I've got about 12 probably 12 to 14 leaves some larger than others obviously in the blossoms and stems so I'm going to go ahead and add a cup of water to this and then we're going to get this Blended up into a rough puree okay now this is still going to be pretty runny so this is where we're going to add in a binder you can add if you have something like bentonite clay um or arrowroot powder different things like that you can add that in you can also just use regular flour so I have got some flour here and I'm just going to do about a quarter cup or four tablespoons of flour and this is just to help make this more as a paste and thick so this is just a thickening agent there we go it almost looks like a soup right okay so now you've got several different options for actually creating your poultice if you have a 100 cotton sock you could actually put this poultice down into the sock and then use that and put it on the skin as a wound or you can use gauze so here I just have some of the these are three by three inch gauze and I've separated them out and this is the portion that I'm going to actually put against the skin you can see that this this has more weave and there's going to be more availability for this to seep through and have skin to skin contact and then this part is going to go on top of it so I am just going to spoon out some of my comfrey poultice paste here and then I need this to go over the top and then around and down the side of her ankle so I'm going to be putting spreading this out into kind of a larger area just because I know the size of the bruise and where she has a lot of swelling on her ankle there we go and then I'm just going to put this right on top and then I'm going to put this into the freezer you could put this simply into the fridge you could use this just at room temperature too of course when you combine the comfrey with it being cold especially if you have a lot of inflammation and pain it's going to do double duty to help reduce that inflammation as well as the pain and my daughter has von Willebrand's disease which is a blood clotting disorder so when it comes to pain management or anti-inflammatories or anything like that the only thing that she can take over the counter is Tylenol and honestly I feel like Tylenol at least for me is basically like a placebo and not a good one at that it doesn't do anything for me as far as pain management wise I don't even bother ever taking Tylenol but it is the only thing that I can give her as far as over-the-counter medicine but it doesn't seem to be very effective though I did give her some when she did it the night she did this because it hurt so much but once we were able to add the comfrey compress it was pretty amazing because when she first did it her bruising was very apparent it was like immediately you saw purple Rising on the top of her ankle and with someone who has a blood clotting disorder they bruise very easily anyways and so we put the comfrey compress on and then I wrapped it in an Ace bandage and actually left it on overnight and it was amazing because the next morning there was very little surface bruising compared to the night before so pretty incredible of course I don't have a way of doing like where I've only wrapped part of it to truly see like what would part of it look like without um but it was pretty impressive so I'm going to go ahead and do I think one more of these now you could use something like cheesecloth or muslin if you didn't have the little sterile bandages here you didn't want to use these and just wash them out rinse them out in between uses as I said you could definitely use the sock and if you don't have comfrey you might not have comfrey growing you can use dried comfrey so I will link to beneath this video my favorite source for herbs if it's not something that I'm growing myself and so if you're going to use dried herbs dried herbs of course are more concentrated right anything that's dried is more in a concentration so you actually use use less of the dried herb than you do when you are using fresh so kind of the rule of thumb is and we will have this in a printed version on the website so you'll be able to go and print out the exact measurements for both fresh and dried to make the poultice here but usually if a recipe is calling for dried herbs and you're going to use fresh you're going to double or triple because you can guesstimate that that's about the concentration in dried so if you're buying dried comfrey you'll actually be using less than you would be as we are here with this fresh version so so these I am just going to flash freeze in the freezer and then once these are frozen you can put them in a Ziploc bag and then just pull them out as needed and have them on hand as an ice pack or you could put them in the fridge if you're going to put them in the fridge without being flash frozen so they don't stick together you're going to want to put like wax paper between them if you want to stack them on top of each other and just keep them in the fridge but of course in the freezer is going to keep them the longest and then this last one I'm going to go ahead and put into it is clean I promise but it is a well used sock we're going to go ahead and put into the sock and this one I'm just going to throw into the fridge so that she can use it as soon as she gets home from school so to use the comfrey poultice here it's something you're going to want to apply for a minimum of at least 10 minutes and then ideally being able to leave it on for several hours and then applying it about three times a day and then you can graduate that down obviously as it begins to heal and because I'm going to get a little bit of moisture of this out you can see there or that's starting to seep through which is just fine and I'm gonna kind of even that out so I have a larger surface area and then I'm just going to stick this in here just so it doesn't drip and this will go directly into the fridge so that she can use this as soon as she gets home apply the poultice just like you would an ice pack have a towel nearby because as this starts to thaw you will get the comfrey juices and we want them directly on the skin on the area that has been injured but you don't want them to also leak all over any type of bedding also make sure to go to Melissa K norris.com forward slash mini herb if you want to join our summer free herb series so this is just one of the ways to use comfrey you can also make a compress with it or Infuse it into oil to make a topical Salve or ointment and if you want to have more herbal remedies on hand I actually have one of my favorite wound healing Salve recipes on the website we'll link to that below you can go and check that out and if you're interested in learning how to use more herbs medicinally I'm going to be doing a deep dive class on that this fall so keep your eye out on the channel or if you're on my newsletter I will send more information about that out as we get a little bit closer

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 54,851

Keywords: Melissa K Norris, Pioneering Today, Homesteading, Homestead Living, Pioneer Lifestyle

Id: s2_ojvtka-M

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023