How do you feel about drinking a medicinal herbal tea? Do animal parts bother you? These are the questions that D, my superhero acupuncturist, asked me today. I’m game for the tea (which doesn’t actually have tea in it, but is a bunch of herbs steeped in water), but animal parts?
While some patients may prefer to not know which animals they’re partaking in, all I could think of was fuzzy kittens. Not that I really think kittens are used in Chinese herbs, but it was the worst thing I could think of. So D told me that the “animal parts” are scorpions and centipedes.
Conceptually, I can do bugs. D’s concocting a custom blend to treat my specific ailments, so we’ll see how willing I am when I have the tea in hand.
On to more common foods… I ate a pinto bean burrito with no ill effects! I hope, hope, hope that this is at least one bean that’s not a headache trigger food. Maybe I can be a lacto-ovo-pinto bean vegetarian.
That’s good news about the pinto beans. It’s the only bean I’m aware of that I can safely eat, and I typically do so in the form of a burrito.
As for those herbs…. Many homeopathic remedies also contain “unsual” (to say the least) ingredients. However, since the remedies are typically in pellet form and have little taste, I don’t feel squemish about taking them–unlike the herbs you described.