People at our church are enthusing about the merits of 'activated charcoal', a substance you can buy at health food shops or pharmacies.  Some are claiming it cured them of diverticulitis and other digestive disorders.  We just pass this on.  If you have stomach problems, ask your pharmacist if it might help you.  For a few other home cures, read on.

For a sty - rub it with a gold ring (wash the ring first, of course).  Gold is an ingredient in some skin medicines, and it does seem to work if you get a sty.  Also try this with any other skin problem.  If you have a boil (pimple) coming, rub that with gold at bedtime.  One teenager had a sore spot on the chin, and could feel the boil forming below the surface of the skin.  After rubbing it with a ring at bedtime, the boil was gone by morning.  There was no redness, and even the lump beneath the skin was gone.  This was amazing, but it is true.

 More skin problems.  There is a South African plant call the boggie plant (pronounced 'baw-ha') which South African farming families use to cure skin ailments.  A friend of ours told us of this. Her father is a South African farmer, and she went to visit him.  She was suffering from red, sore, itchy patches of skin on both legs. Her Dad told her to pick some leaves from the boggie plant which grew in their back yard, and rub them on her legs. He said all the farmers used this plant for skin problems.  She came back to England three weeks later totally cured.  We have told many people about this plant, hoping that someone will research it or market the leaves.  So far no one has that we know of, but maybe one of our readers will think of a way to get this cure out into the public eye.  So many people suffer from skin complaints, and the boggie plant sounds like a God-given cure.

 For cramps - if you feel a cramp coming, pinch the middle of your upper lip hard between your thumb and index finger.  Keep pinching, and the cramp will subside before it can get a grip on you.  This works; we don't know why; maybe there are nerves in the lip that send a message to the brain or something like that. 

Herbs (culinary herbs).  A pastor's wife who suffered from stomach problems told us she had a little sand pit for grandchildren. She got rid of the sand and put some earth in it and bought half a dozen ordinary herbs.  She planted up the container and didn't know how to cook with herbs, so she just picked a few leaves from each plant and threw them in with whatever she was cooking. To her surprise, her stomach problems disappeared!  We took this to heart, and have some herbs growing most of the year, including mint, oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary hyssop, lovage, lemon balm etc.  A British science program investigating herbs found that while modern medicine might contain a few compounds, some herbs contain hundreds of compounds, and no one knows what they might do for the body.  They did not have the budget to analyze many herbs, but they did find two in particular which worked - gingko (for all sorts of ailments) and St John's Wort (for lifting depression).

 We hope these snippets of information might help someone out there to better health.  But one of the the easiest and  most beneficial changes you can make is to get rid of white bread and switch to really good bread - wholemeal bread, with all the goodness still in it.  People have told us that just that one change has noticeably improved their health.  Tastes a lot better too!