immunity 119
but professional practitioners have proved time and again that it is
actually vitally important. Echinacea angustifolia is the preferred species,
rather than the garden perennial Echinacea purpurea. The tingling and
numbing of the tongue should be the deciding factor when buying the
tincture or root. Alternatively, you could make your own.
As with all herbs, the quality of the tincture is of the utmost
importance; some echinacea tinctures on the market are weak and
ineffectual. Some people have told me that echinacea has made no
difference to the way they felt; however, further investigation has revealed
that they had bought poor-quality tincture. Tinctures are relatively easy
to make if you have a quality benchmark to be guided by; otherwise you
can buy them from reliable suppliers. You can also consume teas and
decoctions or simply chew on the crude root.
Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, Pawnee, and other tribes all over
America traditionally used echinacea in many ways, from stimulating
energy or soothing toothache to treating deadly rattlesnake bites.
Echinacea can be put directly onto bites, stings, and cuts, and enters the
bloodstream that way. If the white blood count is very low and general
immunity is severely depleted, echinacea cannot work fully unless vitality-
building herbs and foods (and other immunity stimulants) are used
alongside it to build up the bone marrow reserve. It was thought for a
decade (the 1990s) that echinacea should never be used by people with
autoimmune diseases; it was felt that it would only exacerbate the out-of-
balance immune response, provoking it to “eat itself ” and thus lower
immune levels even more. These warnings were theoretical and as there is
no convincing empirical evidence to support these ideas and as many
autoimmune patients fl ourish on echinacea, the ban is lifted.
It was a hard battle to get echinacea accepted by the medical
profession. They viewed it as a type of quack medicine; yet by 1914 it was
scientifi cally proved to activate phagocytes. Recognized in Germany
during the 1930s, it has been welcomed back in a new wave of interest
there and is now being used more than ever. Germany is the largest
producer and importer of echinacea in Europe, using the superior fresh
tincture from wild organic plants from America. More recently Germans
have been growing their own and making fresh tincture. They also
produce hundreds of medicinal products with echinacea as one of the
ingredients. Up-to-date scientifi c data shows that echinacea broadly acts
by doubling or tripling the number of T cells in the body (although some
tests have shown that it can increase available T cells tenfold, and some
research has shown an increase by a factor of up to fi fteen thousand). It
also activates areas of the immune system that mobilize only for serious
conditions (macrophage production); and it vastly increases the amounts
of interferon, interleukin, immunoglobulin, and other important natural
119 The Complete Home Guide to Herbs, Natural Healing, and Nutrition