by Sue Baldwin

Created on: July 13, 2007   Last Updated: March 21, 2011

Growing a medicinal garden with plants you can include in your diet to improve your general health is a wonderful and fulfilling hobby, but there are some very serious warnings to be taken in to consideration.

Some have already been mentioned, such as the strength of the chemicals in the plants you are growing, and the dangers of over medicating, so I would like to talk about falling into the self diagnostic trap.

For instance, it is easy to wake up in the morning with a headache and think to yourself "I shouldn't have had that glass of wine/beer last night." But is the headache really the result of one or two bevies the night before? Possibly, but you should also take in to consideration many other causes, say like constipation, sleeping in a stuffy room, stress and have you checked that boiler recently?

Another example could be you are gaining weight, and feel the need to drink all the time; many people fail to recognize the classic symptoms of diabetes and assume they have water retention. Taking dandelion leaves for water retention when you have diabetes which is untreated can have really grave consequences.

Get a professional to tell you what is wrong with you. Don't say to yourself, "Well I have this, this and this symptom so it means I have that!" The human body is a complex and wonderful machine, but as with any intricately built machine things can go wrong and it only has a limited number of symptoms to explain itself to you, even if you have seen the exact same symptoms before in someone else, it doesn't mean you have what they had, so you need an expert who can understand what your body is trying to tell you.

Take that good old headache again. Earlier I mentioned it might be caused by constipation, did you laugh when you read that? Did you think to yourself how do you get a headache from a blocked up bowel (or words to that effect?).

It's easy! All that waste matter has been sitting inside you for a day or two, slowly leaching its poisons that your body has so carefully removed, back into your blood stream! Those nasty toxins overload the organs that clean them from the blood and get to your brain and hey presto! One real stinker of a headache! Have a good old sit down and within half an hour that headache has gone as the body manages to catch up with clearing out all those nasty poisons again.

A couple of successes can make you cocky too, "That Calendula cream worked miracles on that rash on my hand! Perhaps I'll grow some Raspberries for the wife

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