Podcast 255: Herbalists’ Views on the Top-Selling Herbs (Part 6): Saw Palmetto, Cinnamon, Echinacea

4 July, 2025

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On the top-selling herbs list for 2023 (the most recent data), the herbs in places #16-18 were saw palmetto, cinnamon, and echinacea. In today’s installment of our best-sellers series, we share our views as herbalists on the actions, benefits, and applications of these herbs. All three are long-term residents on the market report’s top 40 chart, and there’s no reason to expect that to change in the coming years.

In this series of episodes, we’re working to present you with the perspective of a practicing clinical herbalist on these very popular plants. In the form of supplements, they’re among the most-taken and most-asked-about herbal remedies for the modern population. Their presentation in the marketplace, though, is generally quite restricted and limited in comparision to both historical and contemporary herbal practices!

These herbs are “good for” more than just what’s on their packaging. Let’s break them out of their pigeon-holes and appreciate their depth & complexity together!

If you’re new to studying herbs, these episodes will armor you with protection against “herban legends” and misinformation about these plants, which is sadly very common throughout the internet of today.

If you’re already a practitioner, well, you know how valuable materia medica study has been, is, and will ever be! Because these supplements are so popular, you can expect many of your clients to be taking them already, and to ask you about them when they come to see you. Best to be prepared.

16. Saw Palmetto – Serenoa repens

17. Cinnamon – Cinnamomum spp.

18. Echinacea – Echinacea spp.

Find the previous episode of this series here:

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Episode Transcript

Ryn (00:14):
Hi, I’m Ryn. And I’m here at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Boston, Massachusetts and on the internet everywhere, thanks to the power of the podcast. So, it’s episode 255 of the Holistic Herbalism podcast, and today I’m continuing the series on the herbalists’ views on top-selling herbs. This is part six in the series. So, if you’re just joining in right now, you may want to check out the earlier ones because we start at the top of the bestsellers list and work our way down. Today we’ve gotten to items number 13. Nope, I’m sorry, numbers 16, 17, and 18 on the list. That’s saw palmetto, cinnamon, and echinacea. So, that’s going to be fun. But hey, I wanted to let you know that our semi-annual – that’s twice a year – sale of 20% off everything we offer is active right now. For the entire month of July you can use the code hawthorn at checkout to get 20% off everything we offer. All of our online courses, programs, things that have payment plans, things that have a one-time fee, all of it, 20% off anything and everything. You can use the code multiple times. You can share it with your friends. Please do. This is a great opportunity. So, again, the code is hawthorn. That’s H-A-W-T-H-O-R-N. That’s right. There is no e at the end of hawthorn unless you’re talking about Nathaniel, the author. And you can use that for 20% off of anything when you put it in during the checkout process. Don’t forget to do that. Okay. We’ve got a link to all of our course offerings in the show notes. Please chase it down and please make use of that code. All right.

Ryn (01:58):
So like I said, this episode, saw palmetto, cinnamon, echinacea. These, all three of them, are herbs that have been on the top 40 since it first came into being. And honestly, before that happened, these were still top-selling herbs. There’s no reason to expect that to change in the coming years. These are perennial favorites reaching back a very, very long time throughout history. So, we’re going to expect them to continue to be relevant today. I won’t reiterate the basics of this series, just to say that we’re doing this because these are top sellers. Because many people are taking these plants, working with these as supplements. And if you’re brand new to herbs, we want to guard you with some knowledge before you hear some misinformation or some herban legends about these. And we also want to talk to practitioners, people who may be working with these regularly and having clients, because you’re likely to get questions about these. And it’s good to be able to speak intelligently and helpfully to the people you work with.

#16: Saw Palmetto, Reproductive Organs, & Secretory Tissues

Ryn (03:02):
So, with all that said, let’s get into saw palmetto. So, this is Serenoa repens. This is sort of a small palm tree looking thing or a palm frondy plant that grows down Florida way and that part of the country. So, this is a plant that has been interesting to see the way its applications, and the way it’s understood, and the way people talk about it, the way they’ve evolved throughout history. I want to say up front I have a link to a really excellent article all about the history of saw palmetto. It was written by Steven Foster shortly before he passed away. And it’s the historical interplay of plant biology, trade, and human interactions with saw palmetto. It’s a really excellent writeup of what’s going on with that and the way some of the knowledge about that herb evolved over time. So, let’s look at today though, right? So, the commercial presentation of saw palmetto in the marketplace is almost entirely dominated by, like the label says, prostate support. And there will be claims like that, and there will be formulae that saw palmetto gets into, or single herb products that are oriented towards that part of the body and problems that occur there. So, the thing underlying that prostate support is that saw palmetto is famously and has been investigated deeply for its capacity to reduce the severity of a problem called BPH. That’s benign prostatic hyperplasia. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re probably young. But it’s a problem that affects a lot of older men, a lot of older people who have a prostate. And there can be swelling, and it’s just a really common urinary issue, right? And saw palmetto is really reliable as a recommendation for that problem. It can help to reduce symptoms, which include a frequent need to urinate, waking up in the middle of the night to go pee, difficulty emptying the bladder, a bit of dribbling and leaking and that kind of stuff. And so saw palmetto is a classic herb for that specific problem.

Ryn (05:18):
When you look at the mechanism or the way it does that job, in modern investigations the attribution is always going to be to an action of saw palmetto to reduce the conversion of testosterone into another form called DHT or dihydrotestosterone. The effectiveness is to actually reduce the overall degree of androgenic activity that’s at present in the body. Because you can think of DHT as kind of like testosterone, testosterone on steroids. That’s kind of a funny thing to say, but testosterone that’s been amped up. And that the effects of elevated amounts of DHT are often problematic. There can be issues of prostate swelling. There can also be issues of hair loss. Depending on your gender and your baseline hormonal pattern, elevated levels of DHT can also contribute to what’s called hirsutism or male pattern hair growth, quote unquote around that phrase, right? So, it’s a hormone like any other. It serves useful functions in the body. But when there’s an excessive amount of it, we can get problems. And the interaction of or the effect of saw palmetto is to basically reduce the conversion of normal testosterone into that amped up form. And so when you do that, when you do that over some time, you can reduce the symptoms that come from excess DHT. So, all of that is true. All of that is accurate. It is real. It makes a lot of sense to recommend saw palmetto to somebody dealing with a swollen prostate or any of the symptoms I mentioned earlier. And we often will make that recommendation right alongside nettle root and maybe also some other herbs with an anti-inflammatory effect on the genito-urinary system. So, I often find myself including yarrow or fireweed in recommendations like that as well.

Ryn (07:20):
But historically the herb saw palmetto has had a much broader range of applications than just the prostate or just this specific prostate problem. So, we and other herbalists have argued that this herb isn’t best understood as a male herb or an herb for men, but rather as an herb that has a lot of affinity and action on the reproductive organs and tissues. And we can see that that plays out in different ways, right? So, saw palmetto can be helpful for somebody who doesn’t have a prostate, but they have problems of swelling, stagnation of fluid and retention of fluid, and a loss of tone and proper function in the pelvic organs, regardless of which ones they may be. So, it actually can be applied in a really broad array of presentations. It’s really noteworthy about saw palmetto that it has this capacity both to tonify, to tone up or even to tighten up but within bounds. To tighten things up just to a proper degree of tension. But at the same time it can provide a particular kind of a moistening effect. Which is really based on its oil content, its fatty acid content, and some related chemistry that kind of circles around lipids. And that provides, like I say, like a moistening effect or even a kind of plumping sort of an effect to them. At the same time, it’s a little bit warming and mildly stimulating to those same organs, organs of the pelvic region. So, that makes it a good remedy for depression of those organs or tissues and also laxity. So, remember I’m using depression there in the herbalists’ sense. The sense of the energetic cold pattern where something has lower than usual levels of activity on a metabolic level or in terms of what the organ does in the body, its function. Depression and laxity, those states when they’re manifesting in the pelvic organs, that can show up as physical discomfort. Like I can’t sit comfortably. I feel like a weight, a pressure down in my pelvis. It’s uncomfortable there. It can also show up as visceral pain, like pain in your guts. There can also be imbalances – and we have some caveats around that term but see other episodes for discussion – but like troubles with reproductive hormone levels. Whether that’s about the production of them or the elimination of ones that have already kind of done their job, clearance. And saw palmetto can really help out with all of these aspects simultaneously. So, you can see that, again, this applies more than just the BPH problem.

Ryn (10:12):
Historically this plant has been considered as a galactagogue and even an aphrodisiac. You can see a connection there to sexual health, reproductive health coming through. But the herb has a number of actions that are totally separate from the reproductive system. So, it acts as a diuretic. Okay, it’s not that far separate. It’s just the next couple inches over, right? Get into the urinary tract. But yeah, a diuretic, a urinary disinfectant, and a urinary anti-inflammatory. So, yes, this herb does have some benefit for a UTI and other problems like that. Also you might think about a chronic inflammatory issue in the urinary system like interstitial cystitis. That’s a time when saw palmetto might be helpful. But it’s also an expectorant, and it even has some capacity to tone up the digestive system as well. So, if you pause for a moment and think all right. Well, we’ve got actions in reproductive tissues, respiratory tissues, urinary tissues, digestive organs. What do they all share in common? Secretory tissues. Secretory, or secretory, or however you pronounce that word out loud, right? You see it written more often than you say it, but it means tissue cells that secrete something, right? In the lungs we’ve got a little mucus. In the GI tract there’s mucus, there’s digestive juices, all that stuff. In the urinary tract there’s protective mucus that’s being secreted in the linings there and so on all the way through, right? So, you could instead of naming organ systems or locations in the body, we could talk about types of tissue. Saw palmetto has a beneficial effect on secretory tissues. Pretty good. All right.

Ways to Take Saw Palmetto & Safety Profile

Ryn (11:52):
A couple of things to note about saw palmetto as a remedy, right? So, it is very traditional to work with this in a decoction or even to eat the berries as a food. I have come to believe that the fresh saw palmetto berries must be more appealing than the dried ones. I’ve only ever encountered them dry. If any of our listeners are down in that part of the country or that part of the world, and you’ve got fresh saw palmetto berries, I would love to hear from you. What do they smell like? What do they taste like when they’re right off of the plant? Because when you get the dried ones, whew, it is not the most pleasant smell. It is not the most pleasant flavor. You don’t really want to take that decoction. They’re really unappealing. You know, a large portion of the plant’s chemistry is comprised of fatty acids. And I’ll talk about those more in a moment. But the issue here is that there are enough of those fatty acid constituents, those lipid constituents for the scent of rancidity, oxidized fatty acids, to become kind of like the top note or the most prevalent scent that you get from these things. So, it’s not very pleasant to take that in the formats that we as herbalists are most often going to be working with for other plants. For burdock, for turmeric or whatever we might default to decoction. For these ones that’s a valid method. And if you like the taste, or you drink it down, or it doesn’t bother you, great. Go for it. You can get your dose that way. Historically, people would take it that way.

Ryn (13:25):
Fortunately for most of us, the relevant active or medicinal constituents in this plant are able to be extracted and also concentrated. Not every plant constituent can effectively be subjected to those processes. But it’s actually very standard in commercial preparations of saw palmetto. It’s very common for them to be standardized to a concentration that’s like 80% or higher in the finished product of these compounds called sterols, or phytosterols, or liposterols. These are all compounds that are either traveling together with or are bound up directly to the fatty acid content of the plant. So, these are, again, considered the most active elements of the plant, especially for those hormonal effects. And again, you can concentrate those easily into a capsule or another supplement form. And that’s done very frequently. It’s the easiest way to take it. It’s an effective way to take it. And so it is our primary suggestion to clients.

Ryn (14:37):
Yep. Other nice thing about this is that supplements of saw palmetto don’t have any known drug interactions. And they have a very, very good safety profile, like a low rate of any kind of negative effect from taking them at all. It is better not to give this supplement to children for long periods of time. There are a couple of case reports in the literature about kids who were consuming saw palmetto not one time, but multiple doses for extended periods of time, and having some alterations in their own hormonal balances in their body. When somebody is developing, it’s better when possible to let things unfold as long as we’re nourishing them effectively and other things like that. Rather than to incorporate herbs that alter hormonal patterns or for that matter, patterns of neurotransmitters, or endocannabinoids, or other things like that. We kind of want to let the system develop and bake in before we introduce agents like that. Normally, there’s no real reason to introduce them before puberty anyway, so it’s kind of a niche application for this plant. Yeah. All right. In the show notes you’ll see that link to the Stephen Foster article I mentioned. It’s really worth reading all the way through. It’s extensive, but it’s got a lot of detail in there. And then also a previous episode of our own, episode 158 of this podcast, called Saw Palmetto Doesn’t Discriminate on Gender, where we go deeper into that aspect of it and give some more clarifying examples for that piece. If that’s news to you or something you’ve never heard before, I really encourage you to listen to that episode or read through the transcript. All right.

#17: Cinnamon, Blood Sugar Regulation, & Coumarin

Ryn (16:11):
But for now, let’s go ahead and move on to cinnamon. So, cinnamon is one of these spice herbs that has been part of international and even global trade for centuries. And I think it’s always worth establishing that about any such plant, garlic, ginger, things like this. It tells us about their importance to people. It tells us about their potency as medicines. It often tells us about their flexibility and their agility when it comes to medicinal attributes. So, cinnamon has been revered as a powerful and effective agent for a long time. Nowadays, if you go and you look at products in the market, Amazon or whatever else, you’re going to see that cinnamon supplements tend to be advertised for benefits around blood sugar regulation. And that has rapidly become nearly the only market claim or product claim that you’re going to see about a cinnamon extract or a cinnamon supplement. These actions are real, and they are significant. It doesn’t actually require a concentrated, potentized supplement to achieve this effect. One teaspoon of cinnamon powder taken daily can exert a significant effect on blood sugar levels. There’s a classic study that we’ve referred to often. Those of you who have taken our Herb-Drug Interactions and Herb Safety course know exactly the one I’m talking about because we analyze it in some detail in there. But yeah, even a teaspoon a day of basic cinnamon powder can exert a significant beneficial effect on blood sugar levels and insulin sensitivity. In fact, it can even require monitoring of your blood sugar levels for at least the first week if you are going to take cinnamon, and you’re already medicated for diabetes, insulin resistance. And diabetes Type I or II, by the way, right?

Ryn (18:10):
If somebody is taking insulin, taking metformin, taking a GLP-1 agonist drug or any other medication to manage their diabetes, their blood sugar problems, then you may still be able to introduce cinnamon into your life. It’s not a hard contraindication, like you should never, ever combine them. It is an if you do this, you should expect a significant effect from the herb. You should expect that it’s going to bring your blood sugar down further. And it may mean that your blood sugar was too high. You took the drug, and it brought it down, but it could still get lower, right? You might take the cinnamon, and it might get lower than you actually want it to be, okay? So, that could mean that you can go and get your drug dose adjusted. You’ve got to talk to your doctor, your prescriber about this. Your herbalist can’t do it for you, right? Me talking to you through the internet cannot do that for you. But you can go, and you can say hey, I’ve been taking my blood sugar every day a couple of times a day or three times a day. And since I started taking cinnamon, I’ve noticed that my numbers are down here. So, I’m wondering if this means that I can reduce my dose of the metformin, or the GLP-1, or whatever it was, right? It might be beneficial because those things always come with side effects. All right. So yeah, if somebody is on one of those meds, and they want to introduce cinnamon. A teaspoon of powder a day. They’re taking tincture. They’re including it in a decoction they drink a lot of each day. Or they’re taking supplements, any of those modalities, then you should monitor. You should ideally be checking your blood sugar three or more times per day during that period just to see what your cycles look like and what your patterns look like as you move through your life.

Ryn (19:49):
Okay. There’s an important distinction to be made in our discussion of cinnamon, any discussion of cinnamon, between various species and types. So, there are a bunch of species of cinnamon. We generally categorize them into two major groups. And we call them the verum or the true cinnamon on the one hand, and then the cassia type. So, species-wise, the verum group has Cinnamomum verum and Cinnamomum zeylanicum. Some people consider those the exact same species. Some people argue and say that there are ways to differentiate them, whatever. So, that’s the verum type. In the cassia type, you’ve got Cinnamomum cassia, and burmannii, and loureiroi I think is how you say that one out loud. A few can go into there. The big differentiation is that the verum types of cinnamon have low to no coumarin content, while the cassia types tend to be a little bit higher. It is worth saying that within that group, cassia tends to have higher levels than burmannii. And I believe that one’s higher than the loureiroi. But just to say that within these groups there is variants from species to species, and there can also be variants from harvest to harvest or district to district where they are grown and harvested. But the basic rule is that you’ve got your cassia type over here. You’ve got your verum type over here. There’s this constituent of concern called coumarin. And there’s significantly more of it in cassia types, any of them, than there are in any of the verum species. This constituent is worth noting, because it can be a little bit taxing on the liver if you’re getting a lot of it and especially – and this is where we get clinically significant issues – if you’ve already got liver pathology of some other kind going on. You already have hepatitis. You’ve had liver damage in the past, something like that is happening. You are better to be cautious about coumarin exposure and to reduce it wherever you can.

Ryn (21:46):
If you’re a relatively young, healthy person, and you’re just trying to make sure you keep your blood sugar under control. You want to introduce cinnamon to help your body to do that. It’s not particularly dangerous for you to work with a cassia type. It’s going to be cheaper. It’s going to be significantly less expensive to work with cassia cinnamon than true cinnamon. To the extent that adulteration of so-called true cinnamon products with cassia cinnamon is very common. So, this is another call to know your brand, to trust your source. And to remember that when you look at a product that is organically certified, that adds an important layer of trust for you. Because earning that certification requires traceability throughout all steps of the process, from the plant growing wherever it grows to the finished product. So, when you’ve got organic true Cinnamomum verum supplements, you can feel confident that that is the species right there, right? If it’s not certified organic, there are many more spaces for a bad actor or an uninformed one to insert the wrong kind of cinnamon into the process and into what you ultimately buy. Yes. This can also be an issue for bulk herb, and for powdered cinnamon, and things like that as well. And so the same thing applies there. If it’s organically certified, you have much more confidence. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible for somebody to cheat, or to adulterate, or things like that. It just means it’s significantly harder for that to occur, and it’s much, much, much less likely to happen, right? So, this is why we go to that as a way to feel more certain about what we’re getting and to feel better about it.

Demulcent-Astringent, Stimulating, Diffusive

Ryn (23:35):
All right. So, those are some thoughts around the commercial presentation of cinnamon today. Like I said, cinnamon as a traditional remedy is much more complex and multifaceted in the way that we understand it. One thing I want to bring out today is that cinnamon has both demulcent qualities to it. Which you can see if you take some cinnamon powder, mix it into some water, just room temperature, let it set for a while. You’ll see the thickening. You’ll be able to stir and to feel the mucilage expressed in that preparation in particular. But at the same time, the herb has an astringent capacity to it. And so when we combine demulcents and astringents in one herb, that’s always very interesting, and it often magnifies the kinds of benefits that it can apply to irritated mucous membranes. Another herb that’s kind of similar to this is purple loosestrife. And purple loosestrife is one of our favorites for inflamed eye problems. Because you can apply it in a compress to closed eyes, right? Just lay back with a cloth soaked in the tea of this. And it will both tonify the mucous membranes and reduce laxity in them that’s leading to weepiness or a lot of fluid passing through. But also gently soothe them and kind of coat them and protect them with the demulcent element. Now, I would definitely not advise doing that with cinnamon. Because cinnamon has so much essential oil content, so much volatile content that the heating elements in it are going to really dominate. But it is interesting in terms of the way that it acts on digestive mucosa, right? And so when you work with cinnamon in a tea blend, a water extract of it, you get a neat complex of effects. That dominant warming element from all those aromatics stimulating activity and helping things to effectively digest and move along. You get a bit of tonification, and you get a bit of that demulcent, soothing effect all contained in that one herb. Yeah. And it’s a familiar taste, right? So, that’s often quite appealing to include in your formulations.

Ryn (25:41):
Those volatiles in cinnamon, they also give it a diffusive action, right? That stirring up the circulation, moving the blood upward towards the skin from the core up to the skin, right? Moving it outward to your periphery, your fingers and toes. So, it’s a really excellent herb to work with for people with deficiencies in circulation. And I found like sometimes it’s under – I don’t know – underappreciated for that. Like a lot of times when people are talking, herbalists together are talking about moving the blood around. It’s like oh, cayenne, cayenne, the best diffusive ever, the most powerful blood moving herb around. And then ginger gets a mention and some others, but I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a western thing, but cinnamon may not come up as often as it really should. So, think about that one. Cinnamon also has a number of interesting topical activities to it. And you know from previous episodes in this series that those are like deeply underrepresented or underappreciated when it comes to commercialized herbalism. So, cinnamon poultices, or compresses, or soaks, like a foot soak or whatever can be really helpful when there are fungal skin infections, fungal toenail or I suppose fingernail infections as well. Yeah, really worth trying on that. We’ve got some more thoughts on cinnamon. This was one that we included in our A-to-Z herbs list. So, if you go back to episode 182, you’ll find a discussion there of cinnamon alongside one about citrus peels. But you know, they’re both interesting. We also highlighted cinnamon in some previous episodes. We did one really towards the beginning, number 35, where we talked about cinnamon, vanilla and cacao. Kind of talking there about how delightful herbs that people associate with baked goods and stuff like that can also have medicinal attributes. And then we further explored that same idea in episode 48, where we talked about how pumpkin spice qualifies as herbalism. So, those links are in the notes, and I encourage you to check those out as well.

Echinacea, Immune Stimulation, & Species Varieties

Ryn (27:41):
Okay. So, moving on to number 18 on the top selling list. It’s echinacea, echinacea species. And there’s a few that we’re talking about here. We’ll come to species differentiation in a minute. But let’s talk about echinacea. You probably already know that this is a plant that is popularized and categorized in the market as an immune support herb. A good question to ask whenever you see something labeled immune support is what kind of support? Okay, actually, that’s a good question to ask whenever you see any kind of blank support on a label. Cardiovascular support. Oh, what kind? Digestive support. Oh, what kind? It’s good to ask. In the realm of immune herbs and supplements, and echinacea would be included here, we’re often looking at two major categories. One of them is the immune stimulant, and the other is the immune modulator. So, the distinction there is primarily one about, you could call it directionality and about the outcome of working with that remedy. So, if an herb is an exclusively immune stimulating plant, then those point in one direction, right? They stimulate immunity. And they may, as a result, have the possibility or the potential to overstimulate immune function. That could look like an excessive inflammatory response. That could look like autoimmunity, okay? So, those are the immune stimulants. They have the potential. It doesn’t always happen, but they have the potential to lead to those issues. Immune modulators, on the other hand, are capable of adjusting immune responses in kind of a more nuanced and, well, responsive way. They can raise up immune responses where they’re deficient or inadequate. But they can also cool down excessive immune heat and activity when it is excessive or when it is misdirected. So, there you’re often thinking about immunomodulatory adaptogen plants, including things like codonopsis, and astragalus, and the medicinal mushrooms. They tend to be categorized as your immunomodulators.

Ryn (29:53):
In our practice here, we do treat echinacea as an immune stimulant. So, I want to admit that there is some evidence of complex effects of echinacea and all of its constituents on immune expression. That’s true. But it also at the same time seems clear to me that the dominant effect of the plant is a matter of stimulation. And on top of that, we’ve received reports from other herbalists who’ve documented cases of immune overstimulation and autoimmune flareups in people who are taking echinacea. This doesn’t mean that a dangerous reaction occurs in all cases of somebody with autoimmunity taking an echinacea remedy, okay? And in general, it’s very, very safe for most people to work with this herb. But because it can happen, even if it’s quite rare, that does for me mentally shift echinacea over into that immune stimulant category. And I like to just keep it over there. There may be some more nuance we can dig into there around dose, and around the pattern of how you take it, and especially, especially around formulation, right? So, I’m open to there being methods, and doses, and styles of working with echinacea that are creeping over into immunomodulatory territory. But I would say that the way most people take it, and certainly the way most people think about it and market it, is in that realm of the immune stimulant. Okay?

Ryn (31:25):
So, species issues, yes, I’ve got a nice article on this for you to share from the folks over at Herbal Reality. But for basic here, the primary species you’re going to encounter in products of echinacea are going to be Echinacea angustifolia and Echinacea purpurea. And then sometimes you’ll find products made with echinacea pallida also. So, there are distinctions between them. There are some identified distinctions in the chemistry in one species versus another. There’s a lot of overlap. There’s a lot of places where the Venn diagrams touch each other there for those three. But there are some distinctions between them. What seems to be a good takeaway though, is that for best results, and especially if you’re oriented towards that immune stimulant activity, for best results, if you combine roots and aerial parts together, you get a better effect. And it also seems that if you combine multiple species together, you get a better effect. I think in that case, it’s pretty clear that that would be because you are now calling on constituent groups from the entire Venn diagram, rather than just one circle that’s a piece of it, right? You’re kind of covering in the gaps. This herb has the acetylenes. This herb has the alkamides. When you get both of them, you bring them together, and now you get a more comprehensive remedy. So, if I’m looking at a commercial product, I like to see that it has both Echinacea angustifolia and purpurea. Again, those are the most common. I like to see that it has both root and aerial parts, or like root and flower if they express it that way. Those give me confidence that this is going to actually be more effective for those purposes. Yeah.

When & How to Take Echinacea

Ryn (33:12):
Okay, so let’s talk about those purposes. Why do most people seek out an echinacea remedy? What do they think it’s going to do? What are they trying to do? What are they hoping for? So, when most people see the phrase immune support on the label, complying with the DSHEA requirements, or they see that idea immune stimulant, right? Most people think first about a cold, or the flu, or maybe nowadays acute COVID, right? They think about respiratory infections. And while it’s true that you can take echinacea to help with these, there are a couple caveats, right? There’s a couple things that you need to know to do it right. So, the first one is about timing. Okay? So, echinacea is most helpful early on in the course of the illness. If it’s day one, and you’re starting to get a little scratch in the throat, a little congestion, a little earache, something like that. Maybe it’s just one symptom so far. It hasn’t kind of diversified and manifested all around. That’s the best time to be taking echinacea. Get it early and while taking it early, also take it often, right? If full-blown symptoms, fever, cough, phlegm, snot, sweating, pain in the ears, all of that stuff is already present, it’s not the best time for echinacea anymore. It’s not exactly too late, but it’s no longer going to give you the benefit that you’re really hoping for. The only time I might recommend it in the later course of an illness would be for somebody who just has really depleted immunity, and it’s clear that they’re unable to mount a solid defense on their own. Maybe it’s been like low-level but lingering symptoms. They’re clearly sick, but their body’s not mounting a strong offense. Okay, that might make sense. But for a lot of people, if you’re already fevering, if you’re already coughing and sweating, and there’s goop coming out of you everywhere. Then echinacea is not able to help you much more than what’s already going on in the body. You can think of the role of echinacea as trying to get you from that initial response to the stronger immune reaction. That’s what it’s good at. That’s what immune stimulation means.

Ryn (35:18):
All right. So, the other thing is dose, like I said, take it early. Also take it often. If you buy a tincture of echinacea, you’ll see varying suggested doses on those bottles, or capsule, or whatever. Sometimes I look at them, and I’m like 20 drops of tincture twice a day? That’s not enough. That’s not going to do the job, you know, the job people are buying it for, the job most people are interested in. If you’re taking this to cope with the early stages of an infectious illness, you’re going to want a serious dose, maybe a teaspoon every one to two hours for that whole first day or the first couple of days, right? Or if we’re working with home remedies, let’s make a quart of a strong decoction of echinacea and consume that over the course of a day. And repeat that for the first three or four days of your illness, something like this. These are effective doses, right? And they’re significantly larger than most products are going to recommend. Yeah. So, just make sure you’re taking enough. That’s the key thing there. One other note on dose. It’s not really a great habit to take echinacea as, hear me, as your first and only response to an infection or to repeated infections. The issue here or the concern we have here is that this could mask a problem that runs deeper. Or it could allow you to kind of overextend yourself and then to burn out, especially if it’s a repeated problem, right? You got a one-off thing, you take a bunch of echinacea. You ramp up your immune response. You sleep six extra hours, and that’s kind of a lot. You sleep some extra hours. You do what you can, right? And you feel better in a few days. That’s fine. But if this is happening every couple of weeks, you know, then it’s really worth investigating and saying okay. What deeper issues are allowing my immunity to be overtaken in this way so regularly, so repeatedly? We get worried about people who are not sleeping enough for their body to work well and then taking echinacea whenever they feel sick. We’re worried about people who are not nourishing themselves sufficiently to build a good immune defense system. And then taking echinacea to stimulate the sort of bedraggled and half assembled group that they’ve got to work with, right?

Ryn (37:36):
So, really we’re talking about long-term habits here, not a one-off thing. You’ve got a wedding to go to tomorrow, and you’re starting to get some sniffles. Drown yourself in echinacea. You might feel fine. You might totally recover by that time, okay? That’s a reasonable thing to do when necessary, not every single time you get sick. Okay. So, let’s look at some other traditional ideas around echinacea. The most traditional, the most ancient ways of working with this plant primarily came in the form of topical preparations. So, poultices, compresses, soaks in the decoction of the plant, that kind of thing. These preparations, these applications of it will reliably stimulate the wound healing process while they prevent and fight infection. And, I mean, pretty serious stuff. I’ve got a link for you. I’ll put it in the show notes. This is a note of interest here, okay? But historically folks have even worked on such severe issues as gangrene with the help of echinacea, right? And the particular case that’s reported in this link I’m going to share to you, it’s somebody who was like this person got hurt. He was exposed to soil and manure and stuff on the farm. He didn’t get the wound taken care of for several days. Other people wanted to amputate it. He refused, and he trusted me. And I basically wrapped up the wound and this whole side of the body in some gauze cloth. And I saturated it with echinacea decoction. And we repeated that for two weeks, and he was totally cured, totally healed, right? So, this is not Ryn saying that if you’ve got gangrene, just go ahead and soak it in echinacea for a week, and you’ll be fine. This is not me saying that. If somebody has gangrene today, this is a great reason to go to the hospital and take advantage of the miracle medicines that exist. We want to reserve our miracle medicines for when we actually need a miracle, okay? On the other hand, I do want to take this as evidence of the potency of echinacea in these preparations, okay?

Ryn (39:40):
And that’s true also for some ingested versions of this as well. I’ve heard a number of case reports of extremely serious infections being resolved by someone taking echinacea and making a very strong, boiled down, concentrated quart of a decoction of it. Drinking that or more every day and resolving some really extreme problems, right? Things that could be life threatening otherwise. So, this is a great herb to get to know for those of you who are concerned about oh, you know, the collapse of society and that whole kind of thing. Or just about localized disaster and limited access to life-saving care in certain circumstances. Echinacea is a powerful plant. It is definitely something you should have around and be able to work with well. Just recognize that these kinds of preparations and doses are what’s required when things are very serious. Okay. It also doesn’t mean that we have to be all herbs or all antibiotics, right? There is potential for us to allow those things to intersect, especially when we’re talking about topical echinacea. Yeah.

Other Topical Applications, Energetics, & Sourcing

Ryn (40:43):
Other thoughts about echinacea topical preps, they are extremely helpful – and this is another ancient, traditional practice for the herb – to deal with a venomous bite or a venomous sting. So, we could be talking there about a rattlesnake, a copperhead, a pit viper, a scorpion, a black widow, a brown recluse, any of those things. A lot of those venoms actually share some actions in common and even some chemistry. And they have these components that can basically eat through layers of tissue. And that causes the poison to get deeper into your system and further out into circulation. It can also cause problems where fluids can flow into an area but not get out again. And things get swollen and real bad and dangerous, right? So, the thing here is that echinacea helps to deactivate those venom components that are causing that damage to the layers of tissue and that breakdown in between them. At the same time, these constituents in the echinacea are going to help to accelerate the remodeling process and the healing process in the wound. They’re working alongside some elements that are stimulating local immunity and some elements that are directly fighting infectious microbes that are present there. So, it’s like a multi-layered effect for these kinds of problems, and you can see why it’s such a favorite for them.

Ryn (42:02):
You can also look at this energetically, right? This is a cooling, drying, tonifying herb. And it’s most effective for tissues that are hot, and red, and damp, and lax, right? Swollen, and oozy, and all of that kind of thing. Those are great places to apply echinacea to. And that could also describe other things than a serious wound and a gangrenous problem, right? That can describe acne. Hey, if it’s on your face, if it’s on your back, if it’s wherever. That kind of thing, let’s put some echinacea on it. We’ve seen really great results with that over and over again. Echinacea is also amazing for toothaches. And if you get a really good echinacea preparation, it has a tingly quality to it. That’s coming from these alkamides or alkylamides that are found in some but not all of the species and some but not all of the parts of echinacea. But they give it that tingly quality to it. And that tingliness speaks to us of a dispersive quality, right? You can compare this because the constituents are similar if not identical in echinacea, prickly ash, and spilanthes, and also Szechuan pepper, right? All of those together, they share these alkylamide constituents that cause that tingly pattern and that movement of blood, that dispersal of it. And so that makes it helpful for things like a toothache. This can be a good one to put onto a tick bite. Any issues like that that you can address topically. And yes, I do include stuff in the mouth as topical whenever I talk about these things. Yeah.

Ryn (43:38):
One more completely unsurprising vote for sourcing organic supplements and remedies here. And in this case, it’s less of an issue of adulteration, although that probably happens here and there. It’s more about the ecological status of the plant. Echinacea is at risk, or threatened, or even endangered in its native habitat. And I’m naming those three levels of concern because there are different species, right? The ones that we’ve mentioned here, the angustifolia, purpurea, and pallida. There’s other species of echinacea out there like tenneseensis and a few others. But those in their wild habitat are really threatened. And I’ve actually got an article for you about sustainability of echinacea here. It goes into some more detail if you want to dig in. But the short version is this is largely due to habitat destruction. The prairie is the ecosystem that echinacea is native to. And the prairie is also one of the most destroyed types of habitat on the planet. You know, when you think about human activity and climate change, you might think about rainforests as things that have been deeply damaged by humans. And they are. But by percentage of landmass that’s been converted, prairie is up there. Lots of things that used to be polyculture prairie have become monoculture industrial agriculture fields. And so echinacea’s not going to disappear from the planet because there is so much cultivation of it, both organic and not. But it is worth being cognizant of the wild status of these plants and joining efforts to protect these ecosystems so that some more wild echinacea could grow.

Ryn (45:24):
And you know, even if we look at this from purely selfish perspectives, having medicinal plants growing and thriving in the wild is good for us because it’s a source of genetic diversity for them. And who even knows. There could always be a blight or a pathogen of some kind that comes and attacks a cultivated version of one of our favorite medicinal plants. And then there’s a wild version that can resist that. This kind of thing has happened with critical agricultural crops in the past. I mean, we can point to the Irish potato famine as a big example of that. But it has happened before. It could happen again. And not just for commodity food crops, but even for medicinals. So, having wild versions of all of our domesticated officinalis species is a good thing. And it’s something that we as herbalists should care about and get involved in to the extent we can. So, I encourage you to do that too.

Ryn (46:20):
Okay, well, that’s it for this episode. One last reminder before we go. Our twice-a-year sale is on. We do this in July and December each year. It’s July today. So, you can get 20% off of any course, program, or series that we offer using the code hawthorn, H-A-W-T-H-O-R-N, during the checkout process. You’ll get 20% off. All right. That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll have some more Holistic Herbalism podcasts for you soon. Until then take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Drink some tea, and get organic. Bye.

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