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July 2014 | Read this issue and more at www.healthandwellnessmagazine.net |
Horse Chestnut
By Charles Sebastian,
Staff Writer
Usually when you start talking
about herbal remedies and the healing techniques grandma used, you get
a few harrumphs from some of the
people in the crowd. It’s not long after
that the word “placebo” creeps into
the conversation, and everyone looks
at you like you’re a five-time loser
who still believes in the Easter Bunny.
When any of us feel sick, the endgame
is that we want to feel better. If it’s a
placebo that gets us there, who cares?
Obviously, what was happening before
was not working.
I open with this idea because most
herbal remedies do not have doubleblind studies that back their efficacy,
nor do they have stories from people
claiming they work 100 percent of the
time. For that matter, most synthetic
drugs cannot claim to work all the
time and the side effects may be worse,
sometimes fatal.
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One case in point is the herbal
supplement “horse chestnut,” which is
the layman’s name for Aesculus hippocastanum. This is also the name of the
deciduous tree from which the herb
originates. It was found that horses
with chest pains, when they ate the
fruit of this tree, felt better, and so the
name was given. Ironically, the flowers
of the horse chestnut tree are poisonous to horses, so once again we see the
wisdom of animals, knowing what to
eat and not to eat in nature for their
health and wellness.
The Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) classifies leaf, seed, and bark
of raw horse chestnut as toxic, due to
the presence of esculin. Ingestion of
esculin can lead to illness, acute renal
failure in extreme cases. The storebought form has been purified for
public consumption and the likelihood
of any health backlash is minimal.
Horse chestnut is used primarily
for vein strengthening. The claim is
that the herb bolsters the vein walls,
tightening pores and thereby allowing for better blood flow. It is also
said that free radicals in the body are
purged by using horse chestnut. Free
radicals are groups of atoms with oddnumber electrons, which are often
cited as the cause for aging, disease,
and the breakdown of the body over
time. Senescence, or the breakdown
of organisms, is the main focus of biogerontology. Ideally, there would be no
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senescence over time, according to this
proposal, and the use of antioxidants
is thought to slow down the process.
Antioxidants are those agents, like
horse chestnut, that have properties
which halt or retard the increase of free
radicals in the body.
Let’s say, however, you’re not as
interested in slowing down aging,
as you are in just getting rid of some
unpleasant varicose veins. Horse chestnut is often sought for this purpose,
with mixed results. Once again, if
horse chestnut is taken and veins disappear, was it indeed the herb, or was
it the mind of someone changing the
body chemically because a belief system that the veins need to strengthen
came about? Maybe for said veins,
surgery was not an option, or a last
resort, perhaps horse chestnut could
offer a no-risk alternative, which cannot be said for any surgery or synthetic
drugs with known and unknown side
effects. One can begin to understand
how old and new medicine continue
to coexist and probably will for a long
time to come.
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