Healing With Comfrey: Natures Secret Remedy | Herbal Jedi

Hey there plant people! Welcome back to the Herbal Jedi channel. Today we're gonna get our hands dirty and talk about one of nature's powerhouse herbs. This is comfrey or symphytum officinale. It goes beyond bruising, bones, skin health, digestive health and so much more. So let's look at ID, look at harvesting, talk about safety of the root and leaf of this powerful herbal medicine. Comfrey or symphytum officinale is a deep-rooted perennial plant in the barrage family. Now there are some plants that look similar like foxglove and barrage and yellow dog so let's do a bit of botany to make sure we have the right plant. Comfrey's leaves are oval to oblong with a pointed end but the big identifier is that it has these hairs on the back. You can see that it has a lot of hairs along the midrib, the leaf and even the stem. This is one of the key identifiers. Comfrey also has a purple to blue bell-shaped hanging flower. This is another easy identifier of this plant. Comfrey is often found in moist soils near stream beds but also along the edges of the garden. It does like full sun but it can handle shade and it has this really deep taproot. So I'm going to dig one up here for you and we'll have a kind of a look. It's a dark black kind of root. Oh that was easy. You see that it has this deep black taproot and when you snap these they're white on the inside and have a lot of moisture and mucilaginous compounds. When it comes to harvesting Comfrey we want to do that in the spring just as these flowers are coming on or before they do. You can chop this one down to the ground if you're just getting the leaves and it'll grow back multiple times. The root is quite a bit more potent than the leaf so if you're looking to harvest the root it is ideal in the early spring or the late fall after the foliage dies down. Although you can harvest the whole plant like I've done here and just separate out the parts at any time. So I'll cut off these roots. When it comes to the root we want to obviously clean them up before we start to process them in the medicine. All you need is a scrub brush and a bucket of water. This plant is super easy to propagate and loves to grow so even if you snap off a little piece of root like this it will regrow back. In fact I've seen people rototill this plant and it turns into hundreds of Comfrey so be careful. If you don't want a lot of this don't break it up and put it everywhere but if you do you can easily propagate it. I've also seen people with trees and farms that want to stop weeds coming up will grow the Comfrey all around the wells of their trees to help one as a deep-rooted nitrogen fixer and to stop weeds from being in that area. You can see all these mucilaginous compounds in these roots. They cut up easy but because they're quite thick and ropey we want to make sure for drying them out for medicine that we do a really good job of this but there may be some moisture left inside. Comfrey has a rich history of use as medicine. It's traditionally grown in Asia and Europe but it's now cultivated all over the world because of its benefits. Most of the traditional names of this plant have to do with its medicinal benefits in repairing tissues so names like knit bone, bone set, bruise wart, slippery root, all these have to do with its use for repairing damaged tissues and cellular regeneration. However there's a lot of controversy to using this plant internally due to the paralyzating alkaloids that are found in it. But let's talk about the other chemistry first. The most medicinally active compound in Comfrey is allantoin. Now this is a deep cellular regenerative compound. It can speed up the recovery of cells and rebuild them up to two times their normal rate. Comfrey also contains rosmarinic acid which is an antioxidant anti-inflammatory compound that really helps with its healing properties for the skin. There's also a good amount of tannins in Comfrey which is an astringent that help to constrict blood vessels, stop bleeding and swelling as well as work with the mucous membranes of the digestive tract. Another one of the active compounds in Comfrey are its mucilaginous ones. These help to moisten the tissues, soothe irritation and inflammation and really reduce swelling in the skin and mucous membranes. There's a lot of vitamins and minerals in Comfrey but also one of the more unique aspects of this plant is it's super high in protein meaning it can be used for all kinds of things to build up the tissues and strengthen vitality in animals, plants and people. Now let's talk about these paralyzating alkaloids which are considered highly toxic and potentially dangerous in this plant. Paralyzating alkaloids are found in many toxic plants and Comfrey contains them. This has put it on the radar for not being used internally although herbalists have used this for hundreds of years so let's break into how we might want to use this safely internally and what we might want to think about before choosing this. The fully mature leaves have the least amount of paralyzating alkaloids in them. The young leaves have a little bit more whereas the root has up to 10 times as much of this compound. Every patch of Comfrey has a different amount of these compounds so it can be very confusing when we're trying to buy this commercially. If we've used Comfrey in the past from one patch and has low levels then we can easily use that again and again. Now the challenge here is that this has been used for hundreds of years without any issues around liver damage although because these compounds have been seen to do that and lab tests with rats where they've been injected with them have shown to cause liver damage now it's been commercially banned to use Comfrey internally as food or medicine. Because of Comfrey's ability to help work with the mucous membranes of the digestive tract as well as heal bones when drinking as a tea a lot of herbalists still like to use it this way although there's a big caution around this as we've explored with the paralyzing alkaloids and the potential of liver toxicity there are some ways to use this traditionally and with more safety in place. Firstly if we are choosing to use Comfrey internally it should be done for short periods of time. Secondly anybody who has liver damage or a history of liver issues in their family should not use this. Thirdly if you're on different medications you probably should avoid this one and fourth if you're pregnant or breastfeeding this is a definite no-no. Lastly it's best to work with a qualified practitioner if you do want to do this internally so you can monitor the dosage make sure it's short and do your own research before starting to consume herbs like Comfrey internally. Due to all these precautions Comfrey is most commonly used externally and there's a lot of ways that it can work with healing the body. All those tannins and mucilaginous compounds and that allantoin really help with deep cellular repair so that means skin damage whether it's inflammation or any kind of wound. Being careful though that it will help to regenerate the cells quite a bit faster than normal so if you've got dirt in the wound you might get abscesses or infections as the healing of the skin goes over top and then dirt gets stuck underneath. So make sure you only use this on clean clean wounds if you're using it externally that way and make sure you don't use this on deep wounds or open infections where the skin may heal over too fast. To use this externally we can either make it into an oil or a salve or a cream or just as a poultice or compress. I've found this really invaluable as a poultice and compress for sprains or strains or broken bones. In this way we either just mash it up and all those allantoin and mucilaginous and tannin compounds turn into a bit of a juice and that can just go externally right onto the skin or as a compress we can do something similar where we wrap this with tissue and this again is not just good for bruises and strains it's also good for arteriosclerosis and any kind of other type of inflammation on the skin. So obviously because of the cellular repair qualities of this this is a great one to use in acute situations but it can also be used in old injuries so if you have some kind of sports injury from the past or arthritis or back pain you might want to try a comfrey salve or a comfrey compress to really help to work with easing some of that pain and help build back those tissues. Compresses and poultices are great but I find for longer term use making an oil out of this and then turning into a salve or a cream is the ideal way but we don't want to use fresh comfrey because there's a lot of moisture in this as you see when you open it up it's all juicy. So the best thing to do is chop up the leaves or the roots into small pieces and dry them out before making an oil. I've also found it really useful to double boil or use a crock pot where you heat the oil when making a comfrey oil. This is because it really helps pull out more of those active compounds. Today I'm harvesting the leaves I'm going to dry these out and make them into an oil to use externally and probably into a salve eventually but I've also made this into a tincture and taken it internally myself as well as drank it as a tea. Now we're going to do this again with precautions do your own research but you might want to mix this with other herbs that are going to help to gently move out toxins so you don't have any stagnation and things that stay there as well as for very short periods of time. As an external remedy for healing the skin and inflammation I tend to mix comfrey with herbs like calendula or St. John's wort or plantain or arnica or even lavender. There's something really unique about this plant in all of these moist compounds in it as I pull away the hairy parts you can see the internal part is so moist and mucilaginous. I'm going to have a little nibble of this to tune into it energetically. You can really taste those mucilaginous compounds it's got a nice sort of thickness to it which I know is healing for hot inflamed tissue so this is a plant that you're going to want to think about when it comes to cooling down that hot inflammation in the body so any of the itis's right bronchitis you might make it externally or inflammation of arthritis right or eczema or psoriasis these kind of things we might use this to cool down the heat if there's a hot tissue state. Now you notice I'm chewing on this a little bit I'm not too worried about small amounts of this plant at all I know that for thousands of years it's been used internally and to me this is just one of those things where you have to be cautious of and for long-term use this is a no-go but a cute I'm going to chew on it a little bit myself. I kind of like peeling back these big stems and exposing all of this kind of moist mucilaginous tissue inside and giving a little nibble. I chewed up some of this comfrey and you can see how gelatinous it is all those mucilaginous compounds have come together this is part of the reason it's called bone knit because this plant really helps knit together tissues and cellular repair and just really as you activate it by squishing it or macerating it you get this kind of compound. This would be amazing for the digestive tract especially if there's colitis or any of these kind of inflammatory conditions if you're doing it safely. A lot of people like to take comfrey and use it as a root stimulator for their garden so they'll make a tea with this let it lightly ferment sometimes adding things like horsetails and nettles to add more nutrition but really this one being high in protein stimulates the root growth and strengthens the immune system of the plants so it's a common one used that way or a similar thing can be done for feeding chickens giving them comfrey leaf to help to stimulate better egg production or just really bulking up the birds and increasing their immune system in general. So not only is comfrey invaluable for us externally and possibly internally as a medicine it also has great benefits for using in a permaculture farm design for either plant growth or animals. I want to get a couple more roots so I'm just going to dig a few up here kind of get around the plant see if I can get you a nice big one kind of give you a little bit of a show kind of see some of these long tap roots oh yeah look at that oh they just have such a nice snap kind of a doctrine of correspondence this root snaps so easily and also helps rebuild bones easily this little piece will regenerate and grow a whole new plant. Just off one little plant I got that many roots now I'm going to wash these up and then chop them and dry them to be used later as medicine. All right my friends thanks for hanging out with me and learning a bit about comfrey an invaluable medicine for external use and potentially internal. Let us know in the comments if you've worked with this plant how you like to work with it do you grow it have you found different benefits from it are you worried about the paralyzing alkaloids or any other such thing. Don't forget to subscribe and check out some of my other videos here for more plant wisdom. Until next time stay grounded, stay green, and stay wild my friends. May the forest be with you.