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Cheap Wild Medicine from a Common Plant Spanish Needle or Bidens pilosa
By ras | February 12, 2009
Family: Asteraceae
Botanical name: Bidens pilosa
Common names:
English: Farmers friend, Black Jack, Beggarsticks, Spanish needles,devils needles, pitchforks, broom stick, broom stuff
Filipino: pisau-pisau
Hawaiian: Ki, Ki nehe, ki pipili, nehe
Japanese: ko-sendangusa
Maori (
Spanish: acetillo, amor seco, arponcito, asta de cabra, bidente piloso, cacho de cabra, cadillo, hierba amarilla, masquia,mazote, papung chipaca, pega-pega, perca, rosella, sirvulaca.
Tahitian: piripiri
Having read in a Chinese Newspaper in 2006, about the uses of Bidens pilosa in treating Cancer I became intrigued and began to do some research and a few experiments of my own. I read somewhere that whatever the active ingredient in Bidens pilosa was that healed infections, it was activated by sunlight, so I decided to give it a go. My friend had a terrible infection on her arm, it was not healing and she had tried all her home remedies, golden seal, turmeric, ginger. To her anti-biotics was a dirty word, not only for the cost in money but also in the cost for her intestinal tract, creating an imbalance that would take months to rectify and so she was trying everything else first. One day I was sitting in her garden and we picked a handful of this weed, that incidentally grows in just about every garden. We made a tea and let it sit and cool down, then we washed and bathed the wound in sunlight. I left her and a few months later when I saw her it had healed. I then tried it on my own nasty infection, I felt sure it required a doctors attention. I found a patch, picked a handful of leaves and poured boiling water over them. Left them to cool and bathed the infection in the sunlight for a while. Within an hour it looked different, two days later it was gone.
Rastas use Spanish Needles on their animals ulcers and sores. They cleaned the wound with lemon juice and then stuffed the wound with a poultice of Bidens pilosa leaves.
A single plant can produce up to 6000 seeds, permitting three or four generations a year in some regions. Its native range is temperate and tropical American, but it was introduced to the Pacific and parts of
Erect annual or perennial herb , branching habit to one metre. Individual flowers are yellow but are tiny and held in dense terminal clusters in a widely flowering branching flowering head. Each flower cluster has four or five short, broad white petals but these drop off. Seeds are black, about 1 cm long with 2 or 3 barbed awns at the tip. Hence they stick to clothing animals etc and spread rapidly.
It is a weed in both field and plantation crops and is reported as troublesome in about thirty crops in more than forty countries. It is considered one of the most noxious annual weeds in
In
Bidens pilosa is common plant used as a medicine in many regions of Africa, Asia and tropical
Read more about the remarkable healing properties of this Common Weed Bidens Pilosa at Black Herbals
Topics: Medicinal Plants |
February 15th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
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