Working with Turmeric
This semester my goal for herbalism is I would like to study how plants can be used for medicine, how the properties of the plant affect your health i.e interact with your body and improve health. As I look back on my blog I can see that I have been following this goal pretty closely. In the first quarter, I studied the craft of making herbal medicine I made an assortment of oils, tinctures and teas and this quarter I started to see how the medicine works inside your body. At the beginning of the quarter, I made 2 salves, bottled the tinctures I made in the first quarter then started researching how the different systems of the body work. I watched a lot of crash courses and got a book from my herbalism mentor called the Holistic Herbal which talked about how to take care of the different body systems with herbs. The book speaks about the herbs in a scientific manner describing the actions of certain herbs and what chemical it sparks the production of, etc.
Meetings With Herbalists
I have a herbalist mentor, her name is Sasha and she is really nice, we meet every other Saturday or Sunday for about 2 hours in which we discuss different things in herbalism, one time they went over how to make herbal remedies (I wasn’t there that meeting my dog passed away a couple days before that and I was too down to be around anybody), another time we discussed action terms and the digestive system. She usually assigns some light reading for us to do before the next meeting and a mystery herbal tincture for us to determine the actions of.
Study of Curcumin
PreziAt the moment I am making a Prezi with all the information I learned on it, it will hopefully be done by the 17th of January 2018.
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Meetings with Aanika and MarkI research turmeric in a more scientific sense this quarter and found that the main chemical in turmeric is Curcumin, a phyto polyphenol. From talking with my mentors and reading multiple sources on the internet Curcumin is antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and has anti-cancer agents, being a teenager I was like yeah I know what those are but the truth is I’ve just heard them a lot but I had no idea what they meant. I spent a lot of time on the NCBI website finding an abundance of great sources the only problem is that I am not a Chemist so I don't understand just about every other word in these articles. When I started getting confused about all of the chemistry language in these articles I was reading I set up meetings with Aanika more frequently so we could work through different pages together which has been really helpful thank you Aanika. More recently I went up to talk to Mark Chaplin the Chemistry teacher about radical molecules and how this phyto polyphenol is an antioxidant.
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