PMS Tincture Experiment Results

Effects of Pre-One and Two Week PMS Tincture

Statement of Problem: Menstrual cramps cause subject severe pain, interfering with work and social life.

Question: Does the Pre-One and Pre-Two Week PMS Tincture reduce the severity of menstrual cramps during menses?

History: Subject has experienced mild to severe menstrual cramps for 4+ years, ranging in pain from 4-9 and causing difficulties at work and home; has normally used ibuprofen or nothing for pain relief

Hypothesis: The tincture will reduce cramp pain to a range of 0-4.

*What I really expect: The tincture will have no noticeable effect.

Materials: Tincture remedy (description of process)

Procedure: 

  Pre-Two Week PMS: Began taking Monday night @ 2 dropperfuls in water. (Taste was strongly herbal and fairly bad; I couldn’t take it plain.) Took 2 dropperfuls morning and night for 4 days.

  Pre-One Week PMS: Began taking Sunday night @ 2 dropperfuls in water, and ended Saturday night; day before period started. 

Results: First day; no cramps, light flow, back ache. Second day; severe pain in morning, scale 7-8, dropping off after a couple hours. Also light-headedness (NB: could have been compounded by stress of first summer camp day, so unsure of results). 

Conclusion: Tincture had no noticeable effect; recommend trying again with fresher herbs and without a stressful event.

                 *The reason I have this part is because I want my hypothesis to be testable and quantifiable so I can keep an accurate account, but in reality, because this particular test batch was so old, I wasn’t expecting great results.

Pre-PMS Tincture Remedy

A long (long) time ago I bought the Pre-1 and Pre-2 Week PMS Tincture remedy from Bulk Herb Store, and never got around to making it. Until now. In a world where cramps are terrible and debilitating, our hero strives to find a way to go to work without dying…

So, anyway, I finally made them. I made both the same day and in the same way, and it was really, really simple. Not easy, but simple. See, I have a very small kitchen, and a very messy style of cooking, and this is sort of like cooking, and…you get the point.

Materials:

Bulk Herb Store Pre-One Week PMS

Bulk Herb Store Pre-Two Week PMS

• Tincture Remedy – Bulk Herb Store*

 

• 1.5L glass airtight jars w plastic lids – Daiso – 3000W (~$2.60)
• Kirkland Original Spiced Rum/92 proof – Costco – 19,490W (~$16.90)
• Bombay Sapphire Gin/94 proof (I think; the bottle didn’t say, but export gin according to Google is 94 proof so…)- Costco – 37,490W (~$32.50)

 

Step 1: 

My tiny kitchen

• Washed jars in boiling water to sterilize
• Removed labels and dried

 

Step 2:

Tincture Mixture

Full 1/2 pound inside

• Filled jar to about an inch below lid-line with mixture (used the whole bag in both jars)

 

Step 3:

Filled with alcohol

Tincture Top view

• Poured alcohol in to just below top

 

Step 4:

Gin Tincture Pre-One Week

Rum Tincture Pre-Two Week

• Put lid on and shook it
• Opened it and put more alcohol in (note – there wasn’t enough gin to fill the bottle, hence the lower level, I ended up adding more and more rum as it settled so it was really full)

Step 5:

All done!

Sitting inside ready to stew…

• Affixed labels to each
• Put in a dry, dark cupboard

It was really, really simple – too simple for me to have waited so long, but hey, laziness knows no bounds.

I let it sit for a little over 6 weeks to steep, and then decanted it into bottles I bought from Mountain Rose Herbs.

 

 

Filtering out the marc – what a mess!

 

Next post will explain how I used it and how it worked out!

*When I went to check the website for pricing and ingredients, I didn’t see it on the site anymore, so I’m not sure if they no longer carry it or if it was sold out. So, unfortunately, I don’t know the cost. You can check the ingredients from the pictures though. Yay!

 

Coming Soon >> Experiment Notes

A Personal Materia Medica

I got interested in natural healing several years ago. Ten? Gosh I’m old (call me half-fifty sis). I think it stemmed from my mom. Since she was interested in natural foods and cooking healthy it was probably in some book or another of hers. Or maybe it was on one of my many library perusals through the nonfiction areas (I was that kid) that I stumbled across it. Or my friend, who studied to be a naturopath (though I wasn’t interested in that at all at the time, as I recall).

Thinking about it, it might have begun with my love of tea. I got interested in that along with Linguistics before natural healing, and I have this favorite memory of sitting one evening with The Story of Language by Mario Pei, drinking my first ever cup of Earl Grey. I think I channeled C.S. Lewis for a good hour.

However it started, I began with natural beauty, getting beeswax and glycerin and witch hazel, among the many essential oils, to make my own products. I didn’t do much, to be honest, because that was the year before I headed to Taiwan on a gap year to teach ESL.

Then the years slowly passed. I went to Taiwan, saw some of the old folk remedies and ways of the nurses (hot water and stomach massage for aches, not pills), went back to America, finished school in two years and came to Korea. That was almost a year ago now. 

And again, at some undefinable point, I got interested in natural healing, this time from the medicinal perspective. I started reading and watching any material I could get my hands on, devouring Rosemary Gladstar, Matthew Wood, Back to Eden, and researching places I could get online certification, since local Korean education is out of the question with my current grasp of the language.

The reason why I’m starting my own Materia Medica is because, as someone who may want to practice one day (not sure about that, but surety be darned), I want to get some idea of how remedies work in reality, and what better way than testing them on myself? Besides, that puts me in mind of bent-backed, grizzled scientists whiling away in apothecaries, and I love that. I’m a sucker for a good aesthetic.

With this year or more long study, I want to see how every remedy I try affects me. I will try different strengths, methods of application, and length of dosage.

I will conduct these experiments ceteris paribus, that is, all else being the same. So the only thing I am actively changing is my methods of handling discomfort or sickness. I will not be drastically changing my diet at this time, as I’m curious what kinds of effects herbal remedies have with an imbalanced diet, and plus….(I’m lazy).

So, how will someone of my age and medical history react to the various remedies? That, my friends, is what we will find out.

And now, a brief word about what a Materia Medica is. If you Wiki it, you good millenial you, you will see this;

Materia medica (English: medical material/substance) is a Latin medical term for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing

From Egyptian god Thoth through Hippocrates, Galen, and all the way to Dioscorides and Culpeper (among many others – talk about name dropping), collections of herbal compendiums and their medical effectiveness have proliferated. You might be surprised to find out then, that even today, scientists don’t agree on what many herbs actually do. We can see benefits in one case and contraindications in another, but no hard and fast ruling for any given herb. This is frustrating for practitioners, and it’s why pharmaceuticals got started isolating chemical compounds out of plants in the first place, since it’s easier to see an effect in isolation than in relation to others. 

However, that isolation comes at a cost. Herbs usually deliver a variety of benefits which can offset an undesired side-effect found in an isolated compound.

In any case, herbal medicine, though practiced for centuries, is still a fairly unspecific science. Practitioners can make recommendations, but lifestyle, individual physiology and medical history, and other factors can influence how a person responds to an herb.

And so, my own Materia Medica. A case study for me, by me, on me, to discover how the remedies work. Based on my own needs and what I can get here in Korea, I’ll make a list of remedies to try, and then go through them systematically and be as rigorously scientific as I can.

Now let’s just pray I don’t blow anything up…

COMING SOON>>Pre-PMS Tincture

Introduction

Come along on a journey…my journey to become a human. Now if that isn’t the start of some super awesome sci-fi thriller fraught with alien soul searching…then it’s a start to this blog.

Of course, not being an alien, the name might sound a little odd. Presumptuous even. Definitely trying a bit hard to stand out. Naturally – I’m a writer and introverted exhibitionist (what). That being so, this is a record of me trying to find my place in the world, free of anyone else’s opinions, free of old ideas of what I am and am not allowed to do and be, and free of my own personality (perfectionist, HSP, creative). If that all sounds a bit edgy to you, don’t worry (Mom), I’m not about to dye my hair blue like I used to want to. Maybe.

My story is short, a little ridiculous, a little lonely, but overall a blistering fever of creativity and desire to learn everything (when I was fourteen I read books on breeding horses so I could own a racehorse farm). But here are the important parts; I grew up in a really amazing family, quite small, with parents who nurtured my love of learning. However, somewhere along the way, I started equating my identity with my intelligence. Everyone praised me in my early years, and I drank it in, determined to always be the shining star and excel in all areas. Eventually, this lack of well-roundedness, of not being able to admit mistakes or accept criticism, drove me into years of stress and depression as I fought two things; one, that I needed to be perfect, and two, that I didn’t. Not a recipe for success by any means.

Honestly, I still struggle. I think perfectionistic people always struggle, but if you can learn to have grace and be gentle, it gets easier. Or at least, it has for me. After graduating Summa Cum Laude in Linguistics, I moved to Korea to teach in an international school. It was at this point I began to break free of my old habits and thought patterns. Being in a totally different country, with a new school, new faces, new friends, new house, new everything…it really helped. So now my journey to becoming a real human with a real independent will has started. I no longer think about what my family and friends would think, what kind of impression I’m leaving, or where it will lead to in my future.

It’s slow, and arduous, but also intensely bright.

What to expect from this blog (in handy list format!):

• Herbal remedies and experiments (I intend to try a variety of natural healing and beauty regimes, with an eye to deducing effectiveness for my individual self)
• Notes on a life in pursuit of an herbal practice (or not, my future is as yet undecided)
• Notes on living as an expat in South Korea, especially as one interested in herbal remedies
• Notes on pursuing a dream, whatever and however often that dream may change
• Book reviews; regarding herbalism, literature, self-help, and basically everything else
• And finally, notes on how to become a human in a world like this one