Cheap and Easy Aches and Pain Balm

 

 

When people move from the city to a farm one of the first things they learn to let go of is perfectionism.  There is simply no room for it in a place where we may have 300 things to do in a day and if we spent the time to one of those things perfectly, the other 299 things would never get done.  I have seen many a hobby farm fail because the people who lived there couldn't find enough time in the day to get everything done yet they could spend hours painting the bee hives just the right color.  Out here we follow the rule of "Good Enough".  Get the job done good enough and move on.

 

So you may see many of my recipes are that way.  They work just as well as those recipes that take forever to make and you need to be aware of every last detail, but they don't take as much money or effort as the more perfect recipe that may be seen elsewhere.

 

This is one of those recipes.  You make it to work for you; with what you have, what you want to use it for, and how much time and money you have to spend.

 

Pain is a part of life.  I know in this world of run to the doctor for every hangnail people often consider pain to be this horrible thing that they try to avoid, but by avoiding pain, we often avoid living life.  From physical pain where we refuse to try something new because it might hurt, to emotional pain where we lock ourselves off from the rest of the world because they might hurt us.  If you truly live your life, you are going to have some days (or nights) filled with racking sobs and mornings where it hurts to roll out of bed.  We can actually celebrate those moment by telling ourselves this proves we didn't just sit on the sidelines, too afraid to get into the game.

 

This balm is not going to mend your broken heart, but it may help with those times where you swear you can hear your bones creaking.

 

 

 

Cayenne

It starts with this plant, which is the main ingredient, cayenne peppers (or chillies if you prefer).  Cayenne has been in my family's gardens for generations and we are not a big "pepper" fan.  In fact I don't eat cayenne for anything besides medicinal reasons.  I just can't stand heat in my mouth.  I know some of you are gasping at that, but it's true.;-)

Cayenne has this wonderful chemical in it called capsaicin that has been studied world wide as a pain relieving compound.  It works in two ways; first it is the more commonly understood analgesic properties that have been shown in study after study, after study.  It takes down swelling and relaxes muscles.

 In fact many doctors are now studying if cayenne is more affective than aspirin at preventing a heart attack.  I know around here most people has a container of ground cayenne just in case they believe they are having a heart attack, then they begin eating it by the spoonful.  I was talking with a man who did this when his heart attack started and he said that his body actually told him he was having a heart attack because he started craving the cayenne in the cupboard.  He went to get the cayenne and it was THEN that he noticed the tightness in his chest.  His body knew how to save itself and he (his wife actually) had the magic ingredient right there waiting for him.  The heart is just another muscle in the body.  If  capsaicin works for it, it can work for the other muscles as well.

The second way capsaicin works is by making the body release its own painkillers to a site.  This painkilling substance is know simply as P.  It is what gives you that warm or icy feeling when you rub a commercial topical pain reliever on your skin.  So by rubbing something with capsaicin on an area of your body, you are asking your body to send the P chemical to the site to numb the pain temporarily.

You do not need to grow cayenne in the garden though. You can buy them from the store, they work fine dried, and even Walmart sells ground cayenne capsules that can be used. And cayenne isn't the only pepper that contains capsaicin.  Look it up to see if your favorite pepper or chili of choice has it.  I would go with the freshest I could afford, but all of these work fine for this balm.  So I just gathered up a couple handfuls of cayenne peppers from the garden as my first ingredient.

 

Wintergreen

 

The next ingredient is one you do not need to add.  Cayenne can be the only pain relieving ingredient in your balm and it will work just fine.  I add wintergreen for two reasons; first because it has a wonderful smell that has been shown to work in the brain in a way that makes the mind heal itself.  This is often called "The Placebo Effect" and many people often think of it as a bad thing.  But really, if your mind can take away your pain, why not let it?  Placebo or not, if you are hurting one minute and not hurting the next, that is a good thing and it shouldn't matter how it happened.  The scent of wintergreen has been proven to be calming and that helps your muscles become less tense.  Less tense muscles tend to not hurt as much. 

 

The power of the mind, baby, we modern day people should use it more often.

 

The other way wintergreen works is because it contains methyl salicylate, and salicylate or salicylic acid is the forerunner of aspirin.  Aspirin was discovered by working with the meadowsweet plant and isolating the chemical compound that was the pain reliever in that plant.  Then we learned how to make that chemical in a lab and, walla, we have aspirin.  Many plants contain salicylic acid, birch trees, poplar trees, aspen, the catkins from cottonwoods, willow, meadowsweet, and, of course, wintergreen.  Any of these plants could be used as a substitute for the wintergreen, though besides sweet birch down south, they won't give you that scent. 

 

If you are allergic to aspirin, you can and should skip this ingredient all together.  Don't worry, cayenne is a wonderful healer all by itself.  I picked a handful of wintergreen leaves and even a couple berries simply because they were in season.

The next ingredient is some kind of fat.  I used olive oil here but if you want to get fancy you can use pumpkin seed oil or if all you have in the cupboard is vegetable oil, that works fine too.  This is a good combination for an oil, a liniment, and for the balm that we are going to make, so the kind of fat you use doesn't matter.  You can even use lard, suet, or even Crisco from the tub and skip (or use less of...) the next ingredient.

Beeswax is a healer in itself.  Mixed with an oil it makes poor man's petroleum jelly and in this case the poor man has the better product.  Petroleum jelly is made from...well...petroleum or oil.  You know that black gunk we pull out of the ground, kill each other over, and put in our cars to run their internal combustion engines.  Yep, you're smearing a petroleum product on your skin when you use that stuff, while with beeswax you are using an all natural product.

Beeswax is what we use to thicken the oil and make this a balm.  You don't need to make this into a balm though, an infused oil works just as well, though it is usually messier to apply.  That's the main reason we make balms instead of oils, the mess factor.

So the next step, and the longest, is to throw your handfuls of cayenne and wintergreen into your cauldron (or sauce pan) and just cover them with your oil.  No measuring needed at this point.  Heat this on VERY low heat.  What I do is heat it slowly until I just see the oil starting to bubble.  Then I turn it off and let it sit an hour, then come back and do this again.  This is the time consuming part.  It's easy, it just takes a long time.  You're wanting to drawn the medicinal value out of the plant without destroying it with the heat.  So slow and easy is the way to go.  I have let this go for as little as 6 hours and as long as 24, depending on what I am doing that day.

You will know when it is done because your plant material will lose most if not all of its color and look like this:

Then I strain out the plant material (making sure I compost it) and somewhat measure what oil I have left.  This does not have to be precise, a rough estimate is fine.

 

 

I then measure out roughly the same amount of grated beeswax.  If you are buying beeswax, getting it in pellets is the easiest way to go.  It is cheaper to buy it by the chunk though and grate it yourself.  Grating beeswax is not like grating cheese though.  You will need to put a little effort into it.  My beeswax comes from my own bees though and I store it in molded form, so I must grate.

I put them back into the the cauldron (sauce pan) and again slowly heat the mixture up.  All I am wanting to do now is melt the beeswax into the oil.  I do NOT want lose too much of the medicinal value of the oil so I heat it as low and as little as possible.  It would be good to have the containers you are going to use as your balm containers ready so that the moment the wax is all melted into the oil you can pour it into those containers.

Here I use two wide mouth jelly jars.  Yes, canning jars work fine, even if they are less than fancy.    I have over 10,000 canning jars stored either full or waiting to be filled so I don't have room for all the different fancy balm containers that many have.  Any container that is heat proof (no plastic) works fine.  Clean it well and sterilize it if you can (scalding in boiling water works well, but most dishwashers sterilize their dishes).

Pour the balm into your containers the moment you see the last wax shaving disappear.  It will seem to be taking forever for that wax to melt and then suddenly it will go almost all at once.  Keep an eye out for that because it will be in less that ten minutes total.

Let it cool and there you have it, a PROVEN pain relieving balm that was easy to make and fits into almost everyone's budget.   Use the ingredient you have, you can go do other things after you turn off the heat (we have been building a summer kitchen while I was doing this), and most importantly IT WORKS.  Nothing fancy, just good enough.  In fact in this case, good enough is better than fancy.  You are using thousands of years and hundreds of generations of herbalist's knowledge as well as modern scientific studies right there in your kitchen. 

Now, if we could only find a balm to mend a broken heart.  Oh well, I guess we'll have to stick with chocolate and throwing darts at his (or her) picture until we do.:-)