Yesterday and today have both been a bit hectic, with yesterday's regular visit to Loughborough and today's impromptu sally to Sapcote, which in fact i found quite picturesque, or as Liz would say, "pictureskew". As a result i produced two videos rather fast, one of which didn't even get uploaded yesterday due to running out of time. Here's the first:
I got YouTube to reframe this but i'm not sure i can tell the difference. I was very self-conscious when i made this in case i did anything "wrong". I feel confident that dispensing this way is fine but there are little finicky details about my dispensing which are not good to emulate and others which are not 100% perfect. The camera also made me less accurate than usual.
Specific mistakes in this video include the fact that the measuring cylinder is not a regulation one (i.e. it lacks the Crown stamp) and i put the caps down unhygienically. The measurements were also way out, although none of the doses were crucial for that prescription.
Here's the other, made today partly as a demo to Liz about how to do videos (though i'm very inexpert myself):
This one is OK but revealed that the actual plants we grow are exotic and unusual compared to the average weeds or even garden plants which most people grow. The herbs in the front yard are mainly like others' but not many people grow black horehound or bistort.
As of tomorrow, Liz is going to start vlogging. I think it may be wise to split the channels at this point. I'm also thinking of putting links to this channel from videos on the other one.
Also, my new glasses may turn up tomorrow, which'd be good.
Just to give away the ending, i didn't do the cinnamon challenge, partly because i'm not a teenage boy any more, partly because it's no longer as popular and i'd look really out of date, and partly because, as i explain in the video, it's a fourfold overdose of cinnamon. Anyway, here's today's video (whose framing is better than the thumbnail suggests!):
The point of this is basically that the cinnamon challenge acknowledges that herbs can have a profound effect on the body. There's also a bit of a panic associated with it. It is true that it's a risky thing to do, but that's because of the physical effect of any powder - it will irritate the throat, it can be harmful if inhaled and so forth, but the same is true of flour. In larger doses, cinnamon may have direct adverse toxicological actions and the cinnamon challenge is something like a fourfold overdose compared to the maximum recommended dose of 1.2 grammes of the powder. From this very fact though, it can be seen how safe herbalism often is: you wouldn't want to take four times the maximum recommended dose of quite a few over-the-counter drugs for a start.
Cinnamon is also relevant to 'Here Be Dragons'. In ancient and mediaeval Europe, there was an idea that spices, including cinnamon, came from a vaguely defined area called Arabia Felix, which in contradiction to current climatological beliefs was thought to be a warm, humid place with tropical rainforests. In this environment lived, among many other species, the cinnamon tree with its cinnamon fruits and in its branches nested the Cinnamologus:
This was a bird whose nest was made from cinnamon and therefore could be fetched by throwing stuff at it. The cinnamon tree itself was too difficult to climb due to fragile branches.
Clearly i need to insert the Cinnamologus into 'Here Be Dragons'. As it happens, there's a happy coincidence (Coincidencia Felix?) in 'Here Be Dragons' regarding Arabia Felix. Here's a map of Eurasia in the 'Here Be Dragons' "Ancient World":
In order to accommodate the legend of Hyperborea as a warm continent in the Arctic regions, i decided to flip the planet round so that the land concerned was still "north" but largely tropical, while mainly preserving the climate of western Europe. It so happened that doing this makes Arabia a tropical rainforest. Therefore, a serendipitous coincidence enables Arabia Felix to exist as well as Hyperborea in Ancient World.
A few technical comments on the video. The framing is somewhat off because i needed to include the plate of cinnamon in the picture. I am still umming too much but am working on this. Finally, although i am now using a tripod, i have yet to take the plunge and do much proper video editing. I now have a version of Linux called AVLinux, which is specialised for multimedia applications, and am trying to pluck up the courage to use it properly. This will somewhat improve the quality of my videos but i don't want to do the excessive thing which i know i'd be tempted to do and add loads of flashy effects which do too much. Sadly, AVLinux seems to have been discontinued and this version, which was released last month, will probably be the last.
Herbalism - the maintenance and improvement of health through the use of plants. Some things are covered by this which shouldn't be, for instance you might improve health by using plants to clear the atmosphere of formaldehyde, benzene and ammonia, by creating a landscape garden or using a park as a city's "green lung", but this is specifically to do with herbalism as a narrowly medically defined approach to health.
Incidentally, this is the first video i've done using a tripod and i had endless trouble with it. Whereas the tripod itself was very useful, the batteries ran out towards the end and on editing it, Avidemux and Windows Movie Maker both screwed it up several times. Therefore, there are rather more um's and er's in this than i would ideally like, but i'm working to a tight schedule and ended up posting it as is.
My points are threefold really. One is that research has shown that most of the general public do not know that herbalists exist or what we do, in spite of strenuous efforts to remedy this, so i thought it would be helpful to do a video which went through this in detail. Another is the major discrepancy between the scepticism shown towards herbalism along with the research apparently showing that it doesn't work and my own measurable findings which occur after people consult me and i give them herbs. That's an ethical red herring and in fact there's even an argument for herbalism being a good thing if it doesn't work. Finally, there are two real ethical problems associated with herbalism which are rarely mentioned. One is that seeing someone who hoards information about health doesn't ultimately help the client, and the other is that given the fact, widely known among herbalists, that it is nearly always impossible to make a living as a herbalist, the tacit pretence that it is cannot be justified. Candidates of herbal medicine courses need to be told, before they start the course, that the chances of them being able to use their degrees professionally rather than as general degrees like English or History, are practically zero. a
