Charlotte Tenney
Charlotte Tenney's Latest Posts
Tree Envy
Walking the neighborhood is a chance to review landscape plants that I know to have healing uses. Most are imports from other parts of the world that have become popular in our gardens due to beauty and survival in our climate. This time of year, one of the treats is to see a pau d’arco […]
Under My Flakey Skin
Recently I was contacted by a friend for advice on dealing with Psoriasis. She, like many people requesting herbal treatment, was looking for a magic elixir that could be applied topically to solve her skin problems. After getting frustrated with the pharmaceutical approach, she was turning to natural remedies in hopes that she could simply […]
New Kid in Town
Along with the arrival of Bastyr University to San Diego, we have enjoyed the addition of some dedicated herbalists to our community. One of them, a naturopathic doctor and herbalist from Perth, Australia has chosen to volunteer to help in the Trees for Health Arboretum in Balboa Park. Classically trained in functional health and […]
Losing Luna
Why is it that when an herbalist gets sick, he/she is expected to use only herbal remedies and to refuse conventional medicine options or treatments? Why is it that the event becomes cause for discrediting herbal healing? If a cardiologist suffers from gallstones or a gynecologist has a heart attack, you don’t hear anyone […]
Metals, Medicines and Quackery
For Halloween and Day of the Dead, we like to access scary scenarios to entertain ourselves. Here is a one that gives me chills: “quackery.” But first, let’s get some context. Metals are not all bad medicine. Minerals and metals have a long history of use for health. The classic recommendation for eating “deep […]
Yellow is for Depression
The news on health benefits of ingesting turmeric (Curcuma longa) just keeps accumulating. Using the original research that validated this root crop as an effective anti-inflammatory, many researches are building from there to test whether the anti-inflammatory properties will affect a wide range of conditions from heart disease to diabetes, from cancer to skin […]
Little Known Secrets of Lantana
Like the potato, tomato, chile pepper and pinto bean, Lantana is a native of the Americas that has found its way around the world and into the common use in many cultures. Lantana, a relative of Verbena, is native to the more tropical areas of the American continents, especially the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Ecuador […]
Celebrate Wisdom from the Past
In the course of recovering from “the big C,” I have done a huge amount of reading about the history of health disorders. And I have discovered that much was known and proven seventy five and even a hundred years ago that has been lost along the way. In the late eighteen hundreds and early […]
Courting the Trees
By Charlotte Tenney, MA Integrative Health Selecting new trees for the Trees for Health Garden in Balboa Park is somewhat like dating. Friends make introductions in hopes of a good match; some are encountered by accident in the course of daily life; and then, (being a modern woman) there is a lot of online searching. […]