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In the Pacific Northwest, fall means rain, and rain means mushrooms. The fungi family offers us an amazing and colorful array of foods and medicines. Today, we’ll talk about which mushrooms and lichens make good medicine and how you can make use of them at home. Our guest herbalist is “Dandy” Alese Colehour, joins us to guide the conversation about the wonders of medicinal mushrooms and and lichen.
Herbs we mentioned
- Chaga
- Turkey Tail
- Maitake
- Cordyceps
- Shiitake
- Chanterelle
- Oyster
- Artist Conk
- Reishi
- Usnea lichen
- Lungwort lichen
Techniques we mentioned
- Tincturing
- Making a Mother Extract
- Harvesting and Identification
- Canning
Further Reading
- Fungi Medicine: Mushrooms Offer Real Therapeutic Value“
- “Add Usnea to Your Herbal Medicine Chest to Fight Bacteria, Fungus, and Infection“
- The Fungal Pharmacy: The Complete Guide to Medicinal Mushrooms and Lichens of North America by Robert Rogers and Solomon P. Wasser (affiliate link)
- Medicinal Mushrooms: The Essential Guide by Martin Powell
- Medicinal Mushrooms: A Clinical Guide by Martin Powell
- Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets (affiliate link)
- Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets (affiliate link)
- Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora (affiliate link)
Herbs in the News
The Journal of America Medical Association, also known as JAMA Internal Medicine, published an article entitled, “Medical Cannabis Laws and Opioid Analgesic Overdose Mortality in the United States, 1999-2010,” on August 25, 2014. We discussed the results of the study as well as the statistics on opioid analgesic use and overdose cited on the Center for Disease Control website.
Herbal 101
Herbalists use a variety of terms to describe the properties of herbs. We discussed the term analgesic, how it’s used on the pharmaceutical world and in the herbal world.
Analgesic herbs we discussed:
- Meadowsweet
- Willow
- Ginger
- Cayenne
- Turmeric
- California Poppy
- Medicinal Marijuana, aka Cannabis
Alese “Dandy” Colehour
Alese Colehour (“Dandy”) is an ethnobotanist and herbalist with training from the University of Oregon and the Academy of Scottish Herbalism. She is a clinical herbalist with Occupy Medical and creates goodies for patients out of her apothecary, “Dandy’s Pantry.” While she tries to spend most of her time with plants, she is also active with local organizations including Radical Mycology, Cascadia Forest Defenders, and the Rewild Cascadia Collective. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Biological Anthropology at the University of Oregon, specializing in microbial dynamics of wild fermentation. Contact: [email protected]