HealingWISE International Database of Healing Herbs

Access Database, 1,17 MB
425 entries
partially published at http://www.soika.com/links/archiv/heilk.htm

Bringing Back the Pieces

HealingWISE is an answer and an expression of sorrow over the violent destruction - obviously out of greed of gain - of the central European tradition of herbal medicine and at the same time the rebellious attempt to create an inter-cultural world-system of healing and make it available on the anarchic and free Internet.

In 1996 I began the healing herb project HealingWISE which in the meantime comprises of 425 entries. Plants and substances are categorized according to:

German Name - Gattung - Art - Family - English Name - Spanish Name - Sanskrit Name - Chinese Name - Mexican Name - Common Use - Homeopathic - Bach Flower Name - Bach Flower Use - Alchemical Porperties - God/Goddess - Chakra - Plant Characteristics - Ingredients - Rasa (Taste) - Energy - PD Effect - Effect on Dosha - Medical Effect - Weed Classification - Tissues - Body System - Indication - Precaution - Parts used - Preparation - Precautions in Pregnancy - Women's Dis-eases - Inflamations/Infections - Soul - Skin, Hair, Nails - Head, Eyes, Ears, Mouth - Respiratory Organs - Circulatory System - Digestive System - Musculoskeletal System - Children - Observations - Plant Number.

whereby the entries - depending on source - appear respectively in German or English.

Out of liability reason HealingWISE is published only in excerpts on the Internet at http://www.soika.com/links/archiv/heilk.htm where herb names can be translated into different languages with a simple search mechanism (version 2000).

I had several motives for this project. On one hand there was the question "Why does a person want to die?", that moved me. Hereby I do not mean a suicidal, incidental, "quick" death, but rather the slow, agonizing "dying-away" we sometimes have to witness. It is the phenomena of a diseased person who somehow has lost a "will for life" and with it the key to recovering health.

On the other hand is my ongoing interest in alternative ways of healing (in contrast to the conventional, allopathic medicine) and its different, holistic view of the human being. In my eyes this different view may prove being an answer to some of the problems our current medical culture is facing, such as serious side-effects, an always sicker and sicker average population, collapse of health insurance systems, medical provision and medicines as a means to make profit.

As to my third motive, I would like to mention the history of the Middle Ages, to be more exact that of witch burnings during the Inquisition. Until then, knowledge related to herbs and healing lay in the hands of the healers: wise women, common women, neighbors, mothers, aunts. "Health" and "healing" were close to the sick person, medicine often growing at the doorstep or in the garden. With the opening of the first occidental medicine schools the freshly graduated physicians saw these traditional healers as serious (commercial) competitors, and over the years, achieved a radical, political victory; in burning the traditional healers as a witches, they were able to monopolize the "power of healing" very profitably.

The tradition of healing with plants has suffered much in central Europe. While other cultures (such as China or India) have millenniums of uninterrupted tradition, the Inquisition and later the liquidation of cloisters and their libraries destroyed, fragmented this knowledge in Europe. Today we stand before a gigantic tangled pile of pieces of a puzzle.

All these were my feeling when I started out on HealingWISE, the database of healing herbs. At that time I studied several books on different traditions of herbal medicine, that were written - to my regret - in different languages: German books on homoeopathic medicine; English books on Ayurveda; Spanish books on native American Indian healing and so on. Each tradition favored specific plants, but due to numberless names for each plant - not just dialects or common names, but also different words in different languages, it was an almost impossible task for me to make connections. Only when I consistently started adding botanical (Latin) names to all herbs did I find order.

In the meantime HealingWISE permits making connections between different traditions. Some herbs only have local meaning while others found entrance into many different medicine systems, possibly even as a extracts as in homoeopathic medicine or Bach Flowers.

This is an ongoing project.