Podcast 082: Common Herbs and Cancer

Episode Transcript

Katja: 00:00:13 Hi, I’m Katja.

Ryn: 00:00:15 and I’m Ryn.

Katja: 00:00:16 And we’re here at the Commonwealth Center for Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ryn: 00:00:20 And on the internet everywhere thanks to the power of podcasts.

Katja: 00:00:25 Woohoo

Ryn: 00:00:25 Yes. All right. So it’s podcast 82.

Katja: 00:00:28 That’s a lot of podcasts.

Ryn: 00:00:29 Here we are on June 10th, 2019

Katja: 00:00:34 Just four days away from our fifth wedding anniversary.

Ryn: 00:00:37 And four days after we thought to have the podcast out this week.

Katja: 00:00:41 Yeah, oops.

Ryn: 00:00:41 Sorry everybody.

Katja: 00:00:42 It turns out the International Herb Symposium was this weekend.

Ryn: 00:00:45 It was. And I went there and I had a good time. I had some cool classes, new things I did not expect. Got to chat with a lot of herbalists, which is always a fun part. So it was really great.

Katja: 00:00:57 Well, this week we want to talk about herbs and cancer because I got an email this week, from Deborah who wrote to say: ‘I heard that Ashwagandha is great for curing cancer. I’d like to know more about that.’ And I thought, well, I’d like to talk more about that.

Ryn: 00:01:13 Yeah.

Katja: 00:01:13 So that was my plan for today.

Ryn: 00:01:15 We can, we’re going to do it. But first we just want to remind everybody that we are not doctors. We are herbalists and holistic health educators and the ideas we discuss on our podcast do not constitute medical advice.

Katja: 00:01:28 No state or federal authority licenses herbalists in the United States. So these discussions are for educational purposes only. Everyone’s body is different. So the things that we’re talking about may or may not apply directly to you, but they will give you some ideas to think about and research more.

Ryn: 00:01:43 And we just want to remind you that good health is your own personal responsibility. The final decision when you’re considering any courses of therapy, whether it’s discussed on the internet or prescribed by your physician, is always yours.

Katja: 00:01:55 All right.

Ryn: 00:01:56 Yeah.

Katja: 00:01:58 Well let me share with you the beginning of the reply that I wrote to this woman. And then we can talk a little bit more about it. So again, she wrote, she said, ‘I heard ashwagandha is great for curing cancer and I’d like to know more about that’. And I said, Ashwagandha is an amazing plant, but it doesn’t cure cancer. Cancer is complicated and there’s not an herb that we can take like a pill to cure it. Well, there’s not a pharmaceutical pill that works that way either. There are some physiological and metabolic factors that encourage cancer such as the consequences of a high sugar diet, for example, and many herbs can help to mitigate those causal factors. There are also many herbs that can make chemotherapy easier to tolerate as well. It’s really important to understand too, that cancer is happening all the time.

Cancer is a Part of Being Alive

Katja: 00:02:52 It’s just a normal part of being alive. Occasionally there’s a cell that doesn’t shut down the way it’s supposed to and the body has mechanisms to manage that. It’s just like the immune system keeping various pathogens in check so that we don’t get sick. The pathogens are all around us, but most of the time the immune system can keep up with them. It’s only when the inbox of the immune system starts to overflow. When there are more pathogens then the immune system can handle all at once that we actually get sick. With cancer the body can handle the occasional cancerous cell. It’s only when a larger group of cells starts to grow beyond the body’s capacity to manage it, that we say that a person gets cancer.

Ryn: 00:03:37 You know, this way of talking about cancer is something that we’ve been drawing on with our advanced students for the past several years. This idea that cancer is actually normal. And that always makes everybody pause and say like, what? What? What? So, that one usually takes a little explaining. And you know, we got here mainly by looking at statistics around what’s called over-treatment. And connected to that sort trend towards redefinition about what’s going to be considered cancer and what’s not. So the basic story here is that we’ve got some really incredible technology right now that we didn’t always have available to us, both in the way of imaging and also in the way of chemical analysis of the blood and of little pieces of DNA that happens to be flooding around in there and can be understood as markers or indicators that there may be cancerous cells in the body. And so as these kinds of technology have become more and more powerful doctors and scientists have been able to identify misbehaving cells, let’s call them long before they actually reach what would have previously been considered to be a cancerous state. So by that I mean nowadays on an imaging, like a mammogram or something like that, you can detect a mass of cells that have started to behave a little strangely and they’re refusing to die and they’re over-producing and over-consuming and behaving in the way that cancer does. But we can detect them now even when they’re in a very small state when they haven’t quite grown into a grape size tumor or a pea size tumor or anything like that yet.

Katja: 00:05:35 Yeah, when we talk about cancer culturally, what we’re really talking about is the tumor, the mass of many cells that are behaving with cancerous habits. We’re really describing a community at that point and the behaviors of that whole community. But any given cell can have that kind of behavior and the body knows how to deal with it when it’s any given cell. The sort of problem is two fold, right? It’s a problem and it’s a benefit that we now can detect that cancerous behavior at such a tiny amount. We can detect it when it’s still at a stage when the body actually could probably take care of it on its own. We have to make the choices about how far along things are.

Over-treatment of Cancer

Ryn: 00:06:33 Right. And that’s one of these big issues with the idea of over-treatment, right? Because it’s basically saying now we’re able to detect these things before they advanced to a stage that’s actually threatening to your current health and potentially even before it’s reached a stage, or it may not ever have been on track to become the kind of thing that would threaten your health down the line. So, as mammograms for instance became more and more the norm here in the United States, then it’s true that more cancers were detected. They were detected earlier. However, it’s worth noting that the rates of women dying from breast cancer were virtually unchanged since that monitoring program went into place. So while the detection of early stage cancers has doubled since mammograms became a thing at all, the incidents or the occurrence rate for late stage cancer really only declined a very small amount over that time frame, which suggests to us that catching and treating tumors early doesn’t automatically eliminate more serious cases of cancer. It’s not necessarily as preventive a medicine as we really thought it was.

Katja: 00:07:46 Yeah. I’m really excited that the medical community is starting to talk about this and I mean that’s where we’re getting this data from. You know, all medical interventions, all herbal interventions, all health interventions are experiments. You try it out, you get the data, you see what’s going on that’s true in your own body. And it’s also true across the whole society. And that’s what’s going on right now. We’re looking at the data that we’ve accumulated since, for example, mammograms have become so common or you know, all the different types of testing. And we’re looking back over that data and saying, okay, great, we did that experiment. Now we’re looking at the data and seeing what does that really mean for us. It’s so easy to get very tied to ‘Oh, this is right. This is the answer that science has given us and it’s static and it is the end and it is the right and only thing to do’, when really there’s rarely any right and only thing to do and science is never static.

Ryn: 00:08:49 Yeah. And there can be big parts of the picture that we’re just missing. Right. Just these concepts around over-treatment, around recognizing that the development of a tumor involves some pre-cancerous changes to cells and also recognizing that we have aspects of our immune system that are specifically tasked with going out there, looking around all of the cells in your body and saying, ‘Hey, are you doing your job? Are you on time here today or are you meeting your quotas, little liver cell or whatever it is, right?

Katja: 00:09:21 Like managers.

Natural Killer Cells

Ryn: 00:09:22 Yeah. So the what are called natural killer cells in the immune system, their job is to check for cells that are doing something they’re not supposed to be doing and that both, has reference to cancer, but it also has reference to virally infected cells. Right. And so between recognizing that there are lots of things that we can detect now and that we could treat, but that it might not actually make much of a difference down the line, or it might actually be a net negative, right? Because if somebody goes in and they have maybe some precancerous changes to some cells in the breast tissue and then they either get a mastectomy or maybe they get some chemo in play, a lot of different things might happen, but the treatment could be worse than the imbalance. And that’s a very common problem actually. And it’s more common with some cancers and others, for instance – and this statistic is from quite a while ago, maybe five or 10 years. But at the time there was a study that concluded 50 to 60% of cases of prostate cancer would have been better off being watched patiently, instead of being aggressively treated.

Ryn: 00:10:32 So that’s kind of a polite way of saying lots of people have had their prostate cut-out or excised or burned or handled with radiation and it wasn’t necessary and didn’t actually save them any pain or suffering. And in fact, because all those procedures have pretty high rates of complications and side effects could have drastically damaged their quality of life. So this is always like, ‘Oh, well you could never really be sure and we must take the precautionary principle’ and there’s an arguments to be made that way. But again, the central idea of over treatment is something that we can recognize.

Katja: 00:11:09 The cool thing about the advances that we’re making in the ability to recognize over treatment is that we are also advancing our technology that allows us to watch patiently. And so it’s becoming much safer to watch patiently and much safer to sort of investigate what the options are at each stage.

Ryn: 00:11:42 So, we’ve been teaching this idea for a while that cancer is actually pretty normal. There are agents in your body whose job it is to watch out for that and take care of that before it gets anywhere. But recently just this past week, there was actually a news item that came around that pretty much confirmed this. This was an article from STAT News and I’m just gonna read a few quotes from the article here. Basically, this was an analysis of a study that showed that mutations are actually normal, even in healthy tissues all throughout the whole body. Here’s a quote.

Of Tabby Cats and Genes

Ryn: 00:12:28 “For years the prevailing wisdom has been that our cells contain genes that are essentially carbon copies of each other. But that notion is being dashed by studies painting a different picture, one in which even normal cells and tissues accumulate mutations over time, including some known to drive cancer. The team took samples from 500 people. They found mutations present in 95% of them.” So when we say normal, we mean yup, basically everything. It’s not that all the DNA in all of your cells is exactly a carbon copy of one to another, but in fact they vary quite a lot. One of the scientists quoted in the article says, “normal tissue is constantly developing and changing. We’re like a puzzle made up of different cells.” This is something that’s been termed mosaicism where an individual has cells that all have different genetic material. And again, what we’re learning here isn’t that this happens, but that this is actually the standard case.

Ryn: 00:13:22 And it’s not like a weird thing reserved for Kymera people and I’m not actually joking. There’s a condition or a state I guess is a better term called Kymerism where you have patches. Actually remember on tabby cats or tortoise shell cats? The thing where the cells at the skin where the hair grows out, the dark colored ones might come from papa cat and the light colored ones from mama cat. And it’s like you literally have a patchwork of parents. And this is, it turns out probably true for every mammal, right? If we were to take a map of your skin to trace the genetic patterns on it, you would probably be a little bit of a Tabby cat.

Katja: 00:14:14 And also this isn’t even new. Our ability to see it might be new, but come on, think about your siblings. Between my brother and I, he has my mom’s teeth and I have my dad’s teeth and it’s really clear because he has 10 million cavities and I have zero. And that exactly tracks and he has these parts of my mom and I have these other parts of my mom and he has these parts of my dad’s, my dad and I have other parts, but the two of us have a shockingly large number of moles in common in exactly the same places at the exact same size. And it’s like if you just think about your own siblings, you realize that even between the two, even between however many of you there are, you are each a different mosaic of your parents. It’s not exactly the same stuff that gets passed out and you don’t get the same percentage of stuff from one parent or the other parent.

Early Detection & Fancy Technology

Ryn: 00:15:15 Right. Yeah. And so again, this does go back into that idea around early detection. And maybe we’ve been detecting things way too early, right? So the challenge is, which of these mutations are actually red flags? Which ones are harmless and normal? And it’s going to be complicated. I’m not sure that this is going to be a matter of: this mutation is always dangerous and this one is always normal, but it’s going to be a matter of what’s the context, right? What’s the individual, what’s their lifestyle, what’s their epigenetic layer looking like? So that’s going to be a long road before we can get anything actionable about it. But for now we can recognize that sometimes you’re going to see this kind of mutated DNA in your blood sample and it’s going to say, “Oh, some of those are known to drive cancer”. But actually that’s coming out of a normal cell. It’s coming out of one that’s just fine right now. So just because we see, this as a quote from one of the scientists in the article, “just because you see a cancer associated mutation, it doesn’t necessarily mean the patient has cancer. That’s something that diagnosticians and clinicians have to take into account.”

Ryn: 00:16:18 And that includes lay people also, right? So recognize that some of these tests and especially the newest, flashiest, shiniest ones, which you would assume would mean most reliable, they have sort of crossed this threshold where it’s telling you something. We thought we knew what it meant. We were really confident about it, but suddenly, like everything’s upended and we’re realizing, Oh wait, that’s not actually the whole story. So, I just found this kind of news piece really fascinating. It came up when you were proposing this as a topic for our podcast. I thought that it all fits together really nicely and just reminds us that our bodies are not sort of slacking off over here. They’re not just like, ‘Oh, I’m doing my thing. Oh, wait, a cancer!’ It doesn’t happen all at once. There’s been some failure of your body’s defense mechanisms. There’s been some failure of the surveillance mechanisms to identify the ones that are actually problematic and stop them before they proceed.

Katja: 00:17:16 Or if not a failure than just an overload, because certain habits in life cause conditions that were really positive for the cancerous cells to be able to exploit. High sugar consumption is one of those that makes life really easy for cancerous cells to say, ‘Oh, now I can grow really fast. I can have a nice big growth spurt.’ And so sometimes when something like that happens, it’s not like our immune system isn’t working as so much as there’s like a sudden influx and you just can’t deal with all of it. Although even as I’m saying this sentence, I want to contradict myself because whenever we consume a ton of sugar, we also are suppressing immune functions. So we’re creating an environment that is beneficial to cancerous cells for them to promote themselves. And we are creating an environment where it’s hard for the immune system to do its work.

Ryn: 00:18:23 Yeah, which kind of brings us more back again towards herbalism, right? Because what herbs do is they support body systems. They provide a nutrient you require, they help your body to keep some inflammation in check. They support what your body was already trying to accomplish in the first place. So when we hear about an herb that fights cancer, typically what that actually means is that the herbs supports the natural processes that your body already has in place to deal with cells that are becoming or would become cancerous. So the cells that are over producing, over consuming and refuse to die. That’s our little slogan about what a cancer is.

Katja: 00:19:04 Yeah. And we think that’s really super appropriate too, because that’s basically our culture right now, right? We overproduce on a societal scale. We just make way too much stuff. And on an individual scale, we try to cram way too much to do in our to do list every day and then we over consume, not to harp on sugar, but I’m gonna, just from the amount of sugar that we eat in a day.

Ryn: 00:19:41 Empty calories.

Katja: 00:19:42 Yeah. But also just junk food or just calories in general. I know that when we do a whole 30, it just cuts my food consumption. Because I realize, I don’t need as much fuel. I’m just not as hungry as I was before and I don’t even try. It just happens. And that really makes me so aware how even the sort of health food junk food kind of hijacks my hunger cycle and it makes me over-consume personally, but then on a societal level, we’re over consuming as well. And then of course, you know, nobody wants to die.

Speaker 2: 00:20:22 Yeah. And the analog for the cancer cell is over-producing, right? So that’s multiplying and growing and all of that. Over consuming is like tumors being super hungry for sugar. They’re gonna really feed on that and get hot and metabolically active and they refuse to die. The normal programmed cell death is called apoptosis.

Katja: 00:20:44 One of my favorite words.

Ryn: 00:20:46 It’s fun, right?

Katja: 00:20:46 Yeah.

Ryn: 00:20:46 Yeah. And apoptosis is that every cell has a kind of a countdown clock. And when that runs out, then it’s time for that cell to get recycled.

Katja: 00:20:56 It’s like their expiration date, the sell by date, freshness date. [chuckles]

Ryn: 00:21:01 One of the characteristics of a cancerous cell is that it ignores the alarm. It hits snooze on the time to die and I guess we might all want to, but you know, it’s not actually sustainable.

Katja: 00:21:15 Yeah. At some point, you do need to go be recycled.

Ryn: 00:21:19 Yeah. So, you know when we talk about herbs and cancer or in the context of cancer, certainly in our practice anyway, the primary thing that we’re thinking of is plants that are going to support your body’s capacity to detect these, your body’s capacity to keep your fluids circulating and moving and bringing in fresh nutrients and clearing away the bad stuff and all of that. Those are the things that we’re going to be focusing on. But it’s worth saying that a lot of herbs have also been studied pharmacologically, which is like, you take an individual chemical out of the plant, you test it in a Petri dish or a cell culture or maybe an animal study. And oftentimes that’s at levels that are way higher than it would naturally be present in the plant. Like you’ve extracted one constituent that occurs at 500 parts per million in the plant, and then you make a remedy where it’s there and it’s like 50% of the content of that substance and that’s a really different proposition. Pharmacologically and qualitatively and everything, as opposed to the actual plant in the form of a tea or a tincture or in food or stuff like that.

Katja: 00:22:34 Yeah. I mean, it might not be bad. It might not be good, but it’s not inherently bad just because it’s been manipulated. It just isn’t an herb anymore.

Ryn: 00:22:45 Right. The thing is that there are lots and lots and lots of plants that have been found to have some anticancer activity or to have some constituents that have some anticancer activity.

Katja: 00:23:01 Yeah, like just nearly all of them.

Ryn: 00:23:02 Right? You know, whenever we teach about herbs and cancer, one of the things that I always want to say and spend some time on is that the fact is: just about any plant you can think of is going to have some anticancer application because just about any plant you can think of is going to have some health benefits for a human body. And it’s going to depend on form and dose. And is it a food plant or is it a drop dose herb or this or that. But I’m kind of hard pressed to think of any that have literally no studies done on them. Let alone could we reason out that this one has a lot of chlorophyll and that’s been shown in these other studies to be beneficial over here. But so many have been studied for fighting cancer and so many things have turned out to be positive. And this is one of the many places where we maybe need to flip our whole frame around a little bit and think, is what’s going on here that this herb is anticancer or is what’s going on here that not having in my life and in my internal environment, the kinds of things this earth provides was allowing cancer to get a foothold? So that’s an important distinction. It’s not just like a language game here. This is a really important thing for the way that we approach a problem, the way we understand it and the way we react to it too.

Katja: 00:24:30 Yeah. I really think that is actually one of the most important fundamental things to think about when you are thinking about holistic health and Herbalism in particular, but we are so factory programmed in this culture with the idea that diseases that happen to us must be cured by some exogenous force.

Ryn: 00:25:02 Right. Yeah. Because it was something that crept into you suddenly probably from outside. And so we need to introduce something suddenly to conquer it.

Katja: 00:25:11 Right. I mean, yes, if you get malaria, okay, that did come from outside you, fine. If you get the flu, fine. But so many of the disease states that are the most common ones today, you didn’t get infected with them. They didn’t creep up on you. They developed and that development was aided by the lack of expected inputs, the lack of things that our bodies expect in order to maintain a state of health. And wow, when you just start thinking about health that way, it really turns things around. There’s been a jillion studies done on literally vegetables and cancer. On people who eat more vegetables, they weren’t even looking at herbs, they were literally just looking at frozen peas. The people who eat more vegetables have less cancer. And when we think about how our plant variety has decreased so much and what we consider to be vegetables and what we consider to be food has changed so much in recent history, and that actually tracks with the overall trend of more and more cancer and more and more inflammatory diseases. And I don’t know, I’m not saying that frozen peas will prevent anything. I’m just saying more vegetables is more better.

Ryn: 00:26:52 Yeah…. Well, with all of that in mind, let’s talk about a few herbs that can be relevant in cancer. And share the way that we think about them and how we’re orienting ourselves when we get into this.

Katja: 00:27:07 You know, since I was just talking about vegetables, we could start off with Parsley.

Ryn: 00:27:11 Yeah. Right.

Parsley & Rosemary

Katja: 00:27:13 So Parsley is really one of the best examples of the way that we can work with herbs every day to help support our body in its work to keep all the cells working appropriately, making sure that everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing and taking a break when it’s time to take a break. And they’ve done a bunch of studies on parsley and when they do studies on plants, they’re often looking at isolated constituents. And so one of the constituents in Parsley that they have done a lot of work on is called Epogen. And that has been shown to prevent what’s called Angiogenesis, which is that when a bunch of cancer cells form a community, that community is going to need roads and water supply and sewer systems, just like any community,. And inside the body that is blood vessels. And so angiogenesis is when a tumor literally begins to build its own blood vessels to supply itself with nutrients and access to all that good stuff.

Katja: 00:28:27 First off, if you didn’t know that that was a thing that happens, just take a minute and ponder that because I do think that is super cool. That literally just like a community, if you’re going to build a subdivision, you’ve got to build the roads and that is literally what a tumor is doing inside your body. Okay. Now that we’ve had a wow factor on that [laughs] So Parsley disrupts the ability for a tumor to do that so that the cancer cells don’t have the blood vessels available to provide them with extra nutrients, which means it’s going to be very much harder for them to grow because they can’t get the supplies that they need to grow. And I think it’s amazing that there are processes in our bodies that are just running around looking for “hold on a second, you’re not authorized to build a road here.” And that there are plants that support doing that work. And parsley is one of them.

Ryn: 00:29:29 Yeah. You know, when it comes to Epogen, that’s actually a pretty common constituent. It turns up in lots and lots of plants. I just pulled up Dr. Duke’s Phytochemical Database here and looked through that. And just in this set, there’s 102 plants that have some detected amounts of Epogen in there. A lot of common ones like ginkgo, garlic, chamomile has a ton, alfalfa, all kinds of different things. So when we talk about the Epogen in Parsley as preventing angiogenesis, again, we’re not trying to say that this means that that’s the reason. That’s the single one reason why parsley is helpful here. Parsley is also a diuretic and we talked a lot about keeping your fluids moving and not letting things get stagnant and all of that. And diuretics are a great way to accomplish that and support kidney health. And then that allows the kidney to function more readily as an endocrine organ and keep tabs on the internal chemistry of the bloodstream and get everything nice and lined up and less likely to set up the environments that encourage cancer. And so it goes all the way back around again. So when you’re learning about plants and cancer, just remember that this is almost always going to be the case, that it’s not going to be one single constituent. There’s very likely to be studies about one constituent and investigations and quantities and minimal inhibitory concentrations and everything else. And that’s great. That’s super useful. But you’re an herbalist and you’re going to be giving the whole plant, right? And you’re going to be sharing the whole plant with somebody.

Katja: 00:31:09 One of the things that I particularly love about parsley is that it’s really accessible. You can buy a whole bunch of parsley usually for less than a dollar at the grocery store. And so if you are on a budget and you’re thinking like, how can I get vegetables into my life in a ‘most bang for the buck’ kind of way, Parsley is one plant that can really help you with that cause it’s affordable and although Parsley isn’t necessarily the most delicious plant to just eat all by itself, it’s not bad, but some people don’t love it. What I find is that if you just take the whole bunch of Parsley, get yourself a pair of scissors and just very finely give that bunch of Parsley a big old haircut right into whatever it is that you’re cooking tonight. Like if you’re making ground meat with some seasoning in it, just snip off all of that Parsley, cut it up fine and let it go in and you won’t even taste it. When you get it cut that small, even if you’re a person who doesn’t love parsley, it’s not going to really be very apparent in the dinner. Especially if you’ve got other spices in there that maybe have a stronger flavor. So for less than a dollar a day here, you get this really amazing plant that is really available. And among other things has this cancer fighting activity. And again, cancer fighting like from the start, cancer inhibition, starting young is what I’m trying to say.

Ryn: 00:32:56 Yeah, absolutely. Cool. You know, there’s another herb that’s more often considered an Herb than an herb. Like a food herb I guess.

Katja: 00:33:10 Yeah, like a Culinary herb.

Ryn: 00:33:10 Yeah culinary, that’s the one. That’s Rosemary. Rosemary is one of the most famous anticancer herbs out there. And there’s tons and tons of studies on this one. In Rosemary, both some of the fatty acid constituents and some of its terpines have been found to encourage the cancer cells in tumors to undergo apoptosis. And remember that’s the programmed or the scheduled cell death that needs to happen. And so with Rosemary, you get the tumor to stop growing, maybe even to shrink. And that’s pretty great. In Petri dish studies, you can get a concentration of a Rosemary extract that’s strong enough to directly kill tumor cells. Whether that can be achieved in the bloodstream of a living human by drinking Rosemary tea or taking tincture in this or that, that’s less certain. There are some herbs that can accomplish that with some constituents for certain purposes and others that can’t. But in this context, it’s kind of a maybe at this point as far as Rosemary goes.

Katja: 00:34:21 But again, if you’re thinking about it in a preventative or super early stage, that’s a lot more reasonable.

Ryn: 00:34:29 Yeah. And another thing you’ll see in the Rosemary science there is that Rosemary extracts or preparations, they can take a tumor cell that has become resistant to a chemotherapy drug, which, yes, that’s a thing, right? It’s not just antibiotic resistance that we’ve got out there in the world. There are lots of kinds of drug resistance that can be at play. And with cancers in particular, this is a common thing because they are rapidly mutating and changing and learning how to evade our chemical weapons. So what can happen is somebody is undergoing treatments, they’re getting chemotherapy treatments for their tumor and at some point the treatment stops being effective. Well, what’s been found is that introducing Rosemary preparation into the mix here, it re- sensitizes the tumor to the chemo drug. And so this is one of those places where herbs have a really high potential to enhance conventional treatments by this sort of synergy.

Katja: 00:35:40 Yeah, we’re going to see that again and again, actually in the examples today. I wanted to make a note about Rosemary because a lot of time you’ll see in the essential oil circles, people talking about essential oils helping with cancer and they will say, just put it in your water and drink it. And that’s of course not ever a safe thing to do. But also because I was very interested in working with Rosemary with a client who had a terminal brain cancer and he wasn’t really able to ingest basically anything at that point. And I really wanted to work with Rosemary in that manner by making a spray bottle that could be sprayed and it can be inhaled. And I was really hoping that the qualities of Rosemary, the constituents that have so far been studied would be found in the essential oils and they’re not. And that doesn’t mean that nothing in the essential oil is going to be beneficial. And we did still use the spray bottle trick because if nothing else, it smells good and that’s pleasant. It couldn’t hurt and it might help. But the constituents of Rosemary that have been most studied for their ability to support the body in cancer monitoring and cancer mitigation are too heavy to be part of the essential oil profile. So, in this case, we really do want a water extract, an alcohol extract or a topical preparation.

Ryn: 00:37:32 Hm, yeah. Like the rosmarinic acid isn’t going to evaporate?

Katja: 00:37:36 Right. That is one of the ones that has been so highly studied.

Ryn: 00:37:42 Yeah. Okay, cool. And you know, again, this isn’t going to be unique to Rosemary, so we can talk about lots of other herbs that have similar kinds of terpenoids or have rosmarinic acid themselves. So often we can get kind of stuck on something that has a name and we recognize where we’re like, ‘Oh, rosmarinic acid that’s in Rosemary.’ Yes it is. But it’s also in Thyme and other related herbs that have similar kinds of flavors. So that’s one of the truths of the plant world: that they all are capable of making many constituents and what we happen to call them has little influence on what they do or do not produce.

Katja: 00:38:23 Yeah, exactly.

Ryn: 00:38:24 Which is probably better for all of us.

Adaptogens & Chemotherapy

Katja: 00:38:25 It’s like the plant was thinking, ‘Oh, you know what I really need is a tool to solve this problem.’ And humans found it for the first time in Rosemary. So we were like, ‘wow, look at this thing Rosemary can do’ and Rosemary’s like, ‘dude, that’s a screwdriver, that’s all.’ Like that’s nothing special. Well, you know, speaking of herbs that can assist or potentiate pharmaceuticals in the fight against cancer, a lot of the adaptogens have that ability, that they can help the chemotherapy drugs be more effective and simultaneously help your body to tolerate that entire process more easily. One in particular that I’m thinking about here is Eleuthero and there have been a ton of studies done on Eleuthero. Especially I’m thinking of a whole battery of studies that were done around breast cancer and chemotherapy and radiation for breast cancer.

Katja: 00:39:31 And one that I am remembering in particular is that David Winston referenced in his book Adaptogens, where an extract of Eleuthero was taken about an hour before the administration of chemotherapy and then again about an hour after the administration of chemotherapy in breast cancer patients. And that made the chemotherapy much more effective and reduced a lot of the side effects for the people who were experiencing that. So that is a really cool way. You know, chemotherapy is not always necessary, sometimes it’s preventative. A lot of times chemotherapy will only work on certain types of cancers, but we don’t yet have the right tests to figure out which is which. So they often recommend chemo for everyone just to be safe. But it’s rough on the body. And so if you’re going through that, anything that’s going to first off make it more effective, cause if you’re going to go through all that, you want it to really do its job, right. So anything that can make it more effective, but then also make it more easy to tolerate, more comfortable to tolerate, that’s really valuable.

Ryn: 00:40:57 Yeah. And these adaptogens, you know, they’re helping the body withstand stress in general in a very generalized way. And that includes the stress of the chemo and includes the stress of the cancer. You’re getting at it from both directions there. So Eleuthero isn’t the only adaptogen that’s been found to have this kind of benefit for folks undergoing chemo. And also really for people dealing with cancer in the broadest possible sense. Because when we say that this helps the chemo to work better, that’s true. It also helps your immune system to work better. It helps those natural killer cells to get where they’re trying to go. It sets up an internal environment that’s better able to self monitor and to detect and eliminate these things when they’re detectable and illimitable in those early stages.

Ryn: 00:41:47 So a couple to think about here, one I might highlight would be Astragalus which is interesting because it boosts the production of both kinds of blood cells, white blood cells and red blood cells. And when you look at the energetic profile of somebody dealing with cancer, what you’ll often find is that you have hot masses, the tumors themselves in a cold environment, a body that is depleted and deficient and worn out and tired and people feel exhausted even before they start going in for the harsher kind of chemo treatments or that sort of thing.

Katja: 00:42:24 Sometimes that’s the way it gets diagnosed, is that a person was dealing with a lot of exhaustion and that’s how they found it.

Ryn: 00:42:30 Yeah, like inexplicable fatigue. You go in and we tried to rule out this and that and the other thing and then they’re like, all right, we run some tests and like, oops, it turns out there’s a tumor in here. Okay. So Astragalus here is a blood builder in an extremely literal sense. Both in kind of the sense of what we would expect that to mean in Western English language, but also in that ancient traditional Chinese medicine sense of a blood builder, right? That capacity of the body to carry and to transport energy and to retain that kind of base vitality and inner strength and everything that’s about having good, good quality blood and Astragalus really helps to build that. So, you know, this is an herb that’s really supportive for people who are going through really any stage of cancer diagnosis or treatment. And it’s easy to work with. With Astragalus you can get some of the tongue depressor looking slices and I’ll just chew on those, if we have a bottle around, I’ll chew on a few of those in a day. And that’s a simple way to work with the herb.

Katja: 00:43:39 It doesn’t taste bad.

Ryn: 00:43:39 Yeah. If you chew on it, it’s kind of sweet and you chew it until all the flavor has come out. And then another couple of minutes after that just to make sure. And you’ve done a type of water extraction in your mouth I suppose.

Katja: 00:43:55 Saliva extraction

Ryn: 00:43:55 Really that’s what’s going on, that works out really nicely. You can also take a handful of those and throw them into some soup that you’re cooking up. That’s really great. You can put them into the rice while you cook it. You can fish out the woody chunks afterwards if you want to. But you’ve cooked it into the water, it gets into the rice, you eat it up later on, it’s all in there good. So that’s the way to go. And you can just make an astragalus decoction you can make a double extraction. So that’s like you would do a tincture and also a decoction and then combine them. Astragalus is kind of like some medicinal mushrooms in that way. A number of the classic rooty adaptogens are like that where you need a double extraction to get all the good stuff they have. But so there’s options, right? You can work with this herb in lots of ways.

Codonopsis, Nettle & Ashwagandha

Katja: 00:44:44 Yeah. I really like Codonopsis in that regard too. Codonopsis is another blood builder. In particular really helps with white blood cell counts, which is something that you’re going to struggle with through chemo.

Ryn: 00:44:58 And those natural killers we’ve been talking about whose job it is to go and find these things, they are kind of white blood cells, right?

Katja: 00:45:03 Right. So your chemo is really impairing that, but then Codonopsis can help put it back. And also Codonopsis is a food herb. It’s a really nourishing plant. And especially when people are going through chemotherapy, often eating is quite difficult. So any herbs that we can work with that have additional nutritional benefit are really, really, really helpful. Any place where we can double that up, you know?

Ryn: 00:45:43 Yeah. Codonopsis has some good iron in there and it helps you to absorb that from the food you eat concurrently. So yeah.

Katja: 00:45:48 It’s good stuff. Nettle is another one that, again, it really helps with chemo in particular because it is nourishment because it just rebuilds everything. Not just blood quality but even hair and energy levels for sure. And again, if somebody has no appetite or if it is really hard for them to eat but they can drink some tea, nettles is like food as tea. It’s just so nourishing.

Ryn: 00:46:28 Yeah. And then in the context of cancer or chemo, nettle seed is also worth considering here cause that’s another adaptogen, right? So nettle leaf is a kidney remedy and a nutritive and it has tons of great stuff to recommend it. But when you get the seeds, they have an action that’s kind of deeper into the endocrine axis there. It’s more on an adrenal level then a kidney level. And it’s very restorative to people who feel like they’ve been burnt out. And a lot of times we’ll recommend that all for people who have worn themselves down, right. They’ve burnt themselves out by pushing and driving and going and going and going and all of that. But in the context of cancer or chemotherapy, it’s these drains on your vitality that have worn you down. But nettle is still really helpful there.

Katja: 00:47:20 Yeah. And I just want to say, don’t run out and get a bunch of nettle seed without the leaf. Like get them both. Because if we’re to try to rebuild that endocrine axis access, we also want to be rebuilding on the kidneys because they’re so closely tied together. So make sure that you have plenty of nettle leaf right along with your nettle seed.

Ryn: 00:47:42 Yeah, you can tincture the nettle seed that works out just great. Crush them up with a mortar and pestle and then go ahead and tincture that, that comes out great. Or you can have a bunch of them around and just like run them through a seed grinder and smuggled that in your food. You can take it that way.

Katja: 00:47:56 It actually tastes really good. They actually do. We had some mixed into a seasoning mix and that was just delicious.

Speaker 2: 00:48:08 Yeah. You can do that. You can do a, what do you call it? Gomazio? Where you have like Sesame seeds and you can put nettle seeds in there and a few other like spices and things.

Katja: 00:48:16 So good.

Ryn: 00:48:17 Yeah. Or even if you mix up your own Za’atar. So normally that’s Sesame seeds and some Wild Thyme and some Sumac Berry powder, maybe some other ingredients.

Katja: 00:48:37 Yeah. And then just put the nettle seed in there. So good.

Ryn: 00:48:40 Yeah, put the nettle seed right in there. No problem.

Katja: 00:48:40 Okay. We’re doing that this year in August

Ryn: 00:48:44 Yeah, definitely. When our nettles go to seed.

Katja: 00:48:45 Yeah, that is going to happen.

Ryn: 00:48:48 Yeah. So you know, that’s pretty great. And then one other adaptogens. We could talk about Ashwagandha.

Katja: 00:48:54 That’s the one I always talk about.

Ryn: 00:48:56 Well no, cause that’s what got this whole episode going. Right? So you know, by this point you’re understanding that when we talk about herbs as being of help in the context of somebody coping with cancer, that we’re not just looking at ‘can this plant kill cancer cells in a Petri dish?’. That’s interesting, but is not really the end of the story. And so when we think about Ashwagandha, we think about it as another adaptogen. It’s going to help with the stress response that’s going to have impacts on your immune surveillance capacities. It’s going to have impacts on your baseline survivability. How likely are you to be able to withstand any kind of stressful experience including these long grinding ones like this? Ashwagandha does that, but is also really fantastic at helping restore circadian rhythm. And so this is, especially when we are thinking about if there are sleep disturbances in the course of the cancer itself or the course of the chemo or other kinds of treatments.

Katja: 00:49:59 Yeah. But I would like to also suggest, I don’t have data to back this one up, so this is merely a suggestion, that a plant that can help restore circadian cycles through the body – and when we say circadian rhythm, very much we are talking about endocrine function. Very much we are talking about timing of all the different processes that have to happen in the body. So if there is an herb that is kind of like a clock tuner who can come in and help restore those cycles and then we think about programmed cell death as a cycle and that is where we’re having problems, like our cells are not respecting that part of the cycle. Well then, doesn’t it stand to reason that Ashwagandha is going to be really effective there? And again, this is something that would be hard to have data on actually because how do you really test that? I don’t think it would be possible to test that in a Petri dish. I don’t even know how you would, but so much of what we’re talking about, especially in the ‘building overall health preventative’ aspect, is in terms of supporting what your body’s doing already and that is hard to test.

Katja: 00:51:24 But as to tangent into that area, if you know now that we can detect things super early and maybe you’re a person who got something detected and you’re in that patiently wait and watching state and you’re being tested regularly to see what is going to happen, Ashwagandha would be a great choice at that point. Also all of the vegetables and lots of different herbs, but because now you’re watching, you’re getting active data on what’s going on and that’s the time to really work with a bunch of these herbs.

Ryn: 00:52:08 Yeah. Nice. Okay. I think there was one other, you wanted to discuss.

Elecampane

Katja: 00:52:12 I did. I wanted to talk about Elecampane actually. So Elecampane is an herb that, you guys, I really think that this is a super underrated herb right now. And I have been on a big old Elecampane soapbox for a while and Ryn brought me a very fancy Elecampane extract as a present back from the marketplace at the IHS, which was really exciting and nice. And that’s so great cause I really wanted to talk about it today. But, Elecampane, you might know it for a respiratory infection and it’s a huge deal for respiratory health but also supports gut health, also is one of our strong quorum sensing inhibitors, which means it can break up what we call bio films when bacteria start to glom together to be able to better protect themselves against our immune system. Well, can a quorum sensing inhibiting herbs also affect a tumor, which is basically our own cells who have glomed together to protect themselves against our immune system? I don’t know, we don’t have data on that yet, but I would like to. And if I had a laboratory that is one of the things I’d be looking at. But they have been doing in vitro studies, okay, that’s a Petri dish, against breast cancer cells and Elecampane is rating really high in efficacy in that regard. And one really good part of that study is that they worked with a reasonably standard tincture actually instead of isolated constituents. And that was very exciting to me because usually when they’re doing this kind of study, they will pull out just the epigenen or just the Rosemarinic acid or just the whatever. And in this case they were not doing that. They were using a method that was a little different than what we would do. But the end result was basically a standard tincture. And so that was very exciting and it was in a Petri dish. So it’s just the first step, but it’s still really good. The drawback on this particular study was that Elecampane was not the only plant studied. They also were looking at some plants that are really endangered, like Trillium root. And that’s really upsetting to me.

Ryn: 00:54:44 Yeah. I mean it’s hard sometimes with these, because certainly ecological considerations are not high on the list of priorities when somebody is doing bio prospecting for potentially patent-able extraction methods for chemicals that we could make a profit on down the line somewhere. And I don’t want to ascribe profit motives to every single researcher in the world, but nobody’s exempt from saying ‘where’s my next grant going to come from?’ But whether it’s active or passive or totally unconscious, this is still a factor. We have to be aware of it.

Katja: 00:55:18 You know, I think a lot of the time it is unconscious. Actually. But Trillium can’t be cultivated. It’s a plant that we could lose. And Elecampane is super easy to grow. You can grow it in your garden right now, you can grow an entire field of it. It’s beautiful, it’s easy, it’s effective. So I really hope that they focus on Elecampane in that study and the results that we’re getting from that and not on some of the way more endangered plants that were in the study that also had really good results, but Elecampane is sustainable. So I’m really interested in the work they could be doing with that.

Ryn: 00:56:13 Yeah. All right. So, we’ve obviously not talked about all of the herbs that could work in the context of cancer. And like we said before, that would kind of be impossible in a roughly hour long podcast format because again, there’s just so many in which a plant can help us in this situation. It could provide antioxidants, it could improve circulation, it could wake up some aspects of the immune system. It could provide basic nutrition that had been lacking. And all of these things could be what makes the difference for a given person. So this does have to be personalized medicine. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we need a DNA analysis before we can choose the right herbs for you. And it’s going to go back to the same thing that we always do. We’re going to match the herbs to your constitution. We’re going to match the herbs to the particular kinds of problems you’re having right now. I know that in the majority of cancer clients that I’ve personally worked with, the bulk of my work for them was coming up with digestive blends and sleep blends. And that was the thing that made them able to stand up or thrive through chemo and other kinds of treatment like that. Or in some cases to make them as comfortable as could be done until they passed.

Katja: 00:57:32 I wanted to add a thing in and the way that you mentioned that just reminded me, that I think it’s really clear how we’ve been talking throughout this discussion that we’re a big proponent of doing what you gotta do, especially in the case of cancer. We’ve had fantastic luck working with oncologists and I’ve almost always been really well received by oncologists either working with them directly or through the client. I find that oncologists are often very interested in anything that can be of help and be of assistance in the situation, then they often are willing to consider holistic methods. But I just want to be overtly explicit that it is not an either or choice. You don’t lose your Herbalism card if you decide to have a cancer surgery and you don’t lose your Herbalism card if you decide to have chemotherapy. These are all things that can work together and whether you do get lots of testing and you find something really early and you say, well, great, we found it early. Let’s try a bunch of holistic methods and see if they work. And if not, we know what to do. There’s a certain threshold at which the doctors will say, okay, more invasive therapies are going to be required at this point. But all parts of the cancer process, there’s a lot of collaboration that can go on. And also at all parts of your life process. It is the right thing to do what seems like the best thing right now. And it doesn’t mean that just because you like plants, you can’t choose the conventional therapy. You absolutely can. And they’re usually plants who will even help that conventional therapy be more effective and more comfortable for you.

Ryn: 00:59:38 Yeah. All right, if you’re looking for some more thoughts on cancer and herbalism, we do have at least one other episodes where we talked about this. Episode 29 back in May, 2018 was half about sore throat herbs and then the second half was about classic cancer cure all formulas. This was like the Hoxsey formula and Essiac and a couple of like that. As you know, we were taking that again as a way to analyze these and say, all right, to the extent that these are helpful, what kind of herbal actions do we have in play here? And again, with those older formulas, it wasn’t so much like plants that had been shown to have high anticancer activity or this or that. It wasn’t really an objective study at the time. Instead it was plants to support fluid movement inside the body, plants to support circulation and eliminative functions and stuff like that.

Katja: 01:00:42 Lymphatic health.

Ryn: 01:00:42 Right. So if you feel like a little more, you can dig in, find that episode and listen to that.

Katja: 01:00:48 Well before we wrap up today, we’ve got some shout outs and we also want to take a minute to talk about our June supporter drive.

Ryn: 01:00:56 Yeah. So you know, you listen to us every week, you take us with you in the car, you have us around while you’re making dinner. Maybe you do other things. I dunno what you guys are up to, but we’re there with you and we like that and you write to us, sometimes you write us messages about how much you liked the pod. And that feels so nice to hear and you mean so much to us.

Katja: 01:01:15 We love to get those.

Ryn: 01:01:15 Yeah.

Katja: 01:01:16 But if we mean that much to you, maybe you would consider becoming a monthly supporter for just five or $10 a month, you would be supporting not just the costs of maintaining the podcast, but also supporting the community work that we do, like our free clinics.

Ryn: 01:01:33 Once a month for several years now it’s been going. It’s nice to be able to give some things away to people.

Katja: 01:01:40 And actually we have a plan right now that we have our fingers crossed, but it looks like we might be able to expand that into another part of town, where the need is even greater. So we might be able to do twice a month and that would be really exciting.

Ryn: 01:01:56 It’s really helpful. Yeah. So there’s that and then there’s scholarships that we make available, like the one for our current blind student of color who’s excited to start working to help combat the rampant diabetes and cardiovascular disease and other kinds of issues that he’s observing in his own community. He’s doing really great work and he really deserves your support too.

Katja: 01:02:15 And there’s so much that Herbalism can do to help support people who are struggling with diabetes or with cardiovascular disease in a- again, in a complimentary way with whatever their conventional therapies are. And he is really digging in and learning a ton so that he can be part of that work. You can support the work that we do with incarcerated students so that we can give them not only the healing power of plants, but also the possibility to make their own work after incarceration because it’s often really difficult and demoralizing to try to get a job after incarceration and to find a sort of normal place in the community again. And that’s what we really want to happen. That’s the whole point of the concept of rehabilitation, which is not always front and center in our current environment.

Ryn: 01:03:08 Yeah. Here in here in the U S we’ve got some serious problems with criminal justice.

Katja: 01:03:13 Yeah. Well anyway, herbalism can help and that program is expanding in the next couple of months to the UK. We have a whole support network that we are partnering up with over there and that is really, really exciting to us too.

Ryn: 01:03:31 Yeah, pretty happy about it. We’re also gearing up to launch a new program this winter. This is going to be community self health and we’re trying to teach people to take action in their own communities to help those around them who don’t have good access to healthcare or reliable access or affordable access or any of the other adjectives that could influence your capacity to get what you need. We get emails every week from people who’ve lost their insurance or can’t get their medications anymore and they want to know what they can do until they can afford their medicine, until they can get signed up again. Until they can get a job that has benefits like this. And sometimes that wait is indefinite. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. So you know, in so many cases, there are things that we can do, that we can teach, that we can share, that we can advise about to help to make that situation less dire.

Katja: 01:04:23 Yeah. This new program will help people to start health support groups that can educate about the ways that individuals can support their bodies to better cope with diseases that they might have and to be more resilient, especially in the face of an uncertain access to healthcare. And I’m really excited to be able to provide something that will be a tool for people and kind of an entry point, again, in collaboration with the conventional assistance that they might be able to get. But especially in situations where that access has been cut off, there’s so much we can do and I’m really excited to be able to put that together and offer that to communities.

Ryn: 01:05:03 Yeah. So if that sounds like something you think might be good in the world or that you might like to support.

Katja: 01:05:09 Yeah. If you’re out there thinking, wow, that’s really cool. I’m really glad you’re doing that.

Ryn: 01:05:14 Then you can help. You can absolutely help. If you just bounce over to Commonwealth herbs.com/support you will see your signup options right there.

Katja: 01:05:23 Yes. And in gratitude we will send you a special video every week about a great easy to implement herbal tip. Like for the month of June, our theme is first aid. So every week in the month of June we’re sending a supporter video out that is a really easy tip to do first aid tip. That should be really helpful in your everyday life.

Ryn: 01:05:46 Yeah. And you can have access to the archives of those ones. Once you become a supporter.

Katja: 01:05:51 Yes. So all the videos we’ve ever sent out, you actually will be able to watch if you want to.

Ryn: 01:05:56 Yeah. So again, go to Commonwealthherbs.com/supports and you too can become a supporting member of our podcast today.

Katja: 01:06:05 Thank you. And we have some shout outs.

Ryn: 01:06:09 We do have some shout outs. Yes. We moved them to the end this time. So I hope nobody out there was disappointed at the beginning.

Katja: 01:06:15 Well, this just gave you something good to wait all the way to the end for.

Ryn: 01:06:19 So there they are. First of all, man, there were so many local and localish listeners who stopped by our table at Herbstalk to say hello. And it was really great to put some faces to some email handles.

Katja: 01:06:35 Yes!

Ryn: 01:06:35 And some of the people we’ve been seeing in the Q&A and everything.

Katja: 01:06:38 It was so exciting to have in-person hugs. It was great. Every time to see like a face and somebody coming up and saying, ‘I love your podcast’ and being like, ‘wow, you are a person who is listening like right now. You’re listening right now.’ I’m so excited about it.

Ryn: 01:06:56 Yeah, it was actually two weekends of that because there was Herbstalk and then just here at the IHS, there were some people who saw me and were like, ‘you’re in from the podcast’. And I was like, ‘I am. Yes.’ [chuckles] I’m still not used to being recognized ever. So, it was really nice actually to meet everybody. So, hi! Thank you for saying hello.

Katja: 01:07:15 And also a shout out to Shelly who loved the natural cleaners episode and to DinosaurNest on Instagram who loves the pod and is really excited about Lemon Balm and St John’s Wort.

Ryn: 01:07:32 That’s completely reasonable, especially this time of.

Katja: 01:07:34 Yeah, especially this time of year.

Ryn: 01:07:35 It’s good to get hyped about St John’s Wort.

Katja: 01:07:37 And Lemon Balm. They’re both like just getting big and bushy right now.

Ryn: 01:07:41 Yeah, we have a shout out for Thea who had a question about raspberry leaf, which we might’ve answered?

Katja: 01:07:45 No we did.

Ryn: 01:07:46 Oh, we did.

Katja: 01:07:46 In fact you did.

Ryn: 01:07:48 I did?

Katja: 01:07:48 Yeah you did. I was just looking at that today.

Ryn: 01:07:50 Hey, good job.

Katja: 01:07:51 Yeah, it was. No, you did a good job. Thea, did he do a good job?

Ryn: 01:07:55 You can chime in on that one.

Katja: 01:07:57 And also to Sherry who shared the migraines episode, which was number 61 with a friend in need. Thank you. And also is super excited to share herby fun with her grandkids this summer, which I also think is the coolest thing ever.

Ryn: 01:08:13 And finally we have a shout out to BrittQuit22 who wrote to say she’s all caught up on the pod and needs some more. Well, here you go.

Katja: 01:08:22 And the next episode, we already have planned.

Ryn: 01:08:26 We do.

Katja: 01:08:26 It’s our special five year wedding anniversary episode. So stay tuned for that one. If you’re really lucky, we will record it. We’re going out to our land on Royalston, where we host student retreats and we’re going to give ourselves a little retreat and if we can get the battery situation to work out, we’re going to record it there. We think that it’s really good to have some audio texture, just like it’s good to have texture when you’re walking around.

Ryn: 01:08:59 Yeah, if we could sit down by the brook, I think that be nice.

Katja: 01:08:59 Yeah, it’d be nice to have the fire and the burbling Brooke in the background. So if we can make the technology work out for it, you guys, than we will.

Ryn: 01:09:08 Yeah, sounds good. All right, well, we hope you have a good week and we’ll be back next time with some more holistic herbalism podcasts.

Katja: 01:09:32 Bye bye

Ryn: 01:09:32 Bye