Healing Benefits Of St. John’s Wort

The healing benefits of St. John’s Wort are incredibly diverse. Many know it as an anti-depressant owing to it’s current popularity in this role. But, it has historically been used for a whole lot more impressive healing powers than just this.

 In This Article

• Healing Benefits Of St. John’s Wort
• What Is St. John’s Wort?
• St. John’s Wort For Nerve Damage
• St. John’s Wort For Depression
• St. John’s Wort For Viral Infections
• St. John’s Wort For Pre-Cancerous Skin Conditions
• St. John’s Wort As An Anti-Oxidant
• St. John’s Wort For Wounds
• St. John’s Wort For Pain Relief

What Is St. John’s Wort?

When I first heard the term St. John’s Wort I thought to myself… Poor St. John, he must have had an appalling affliction!

But, this first notion couldn’t have been further form the truth. St. John’s Wort is a beautiful perennial plant with sunshine coloured flowers. It grows up to a metre in height but certain conditions will dwarf it’s output, leaving it up to a third of it’s potential size.

Far be it from being an affliction, it is actually a bit of an elixir, touting seriously diverse healing capabilities.

There are many different species of St. John’s wort, but the most commonly used variety for healing purposes is Hypericum Perforatum. There are other varieties that also share the same healing properties, all of which will squish red when picked. The varieties that don’t do this are purely ornamental and shouldn’t be use for healing purposes.

Hypericum Perforatum is indigenous to Europe and parts of Asia, but it has, in recent times, also spread throughout the temperate regions of the world.

St. John’s Wort For Nerve Damage

St. John’s Wort makes a great base for nervine tonics owing to it’s ability to heal nerve damage.

This is now one of the more critically important healing benefits of St. John’s Wort…

We have firmly entered the age of RSI, Repetitive Strain Injury, owing to the mass usage of electronic devices. Keyboards, whether virtual or real, are allowing users to continually repeat rapid-fire commands for many hours at a time, resulting in the type of nerve damage that we classify as RSI.

But St. John’s Wort is also often used to treat conditions like sciatica, a complaint that can deliver such excruciating pain that it can be debilitating.

Sciatica is notoriously difficult to treat, so this is another one of the healing benefits of St. John’s Wort that make it so well loved by those who have discovered the healing benefits of St. John’s Wort.

St. John’s Wort For Depression

Sciatica can also rob sufferers of the ability to sleep as well as severely restricting their movements.

All of these restrictions exact a price from the sufferer, who can sometimes get a little low, and in extreme cases, profoundly depressed.

St. John’s Wort also has anti-anxiety and anti-depressant capabilities, and so it goes to work on these problems at the same time as healing the root cause.

St. John’s Wort For Viral Infections

St. John’s Wort possesses antiviral properties, and so it’s not always necessary to go reaching for the Oregano Essential Oil, or the Golden Seal Tincture to treat every viral outbreak.

St. John’s Wort is great for treating viral infections like Herpes Simplex and Warts.

St. John’s Wort For Pre-Cancerous Skin Conditions

St. John’s Wort provides a powerful protection for the skin against sun damage. However, there have been reported cases of people taking St. John’s Wort internally and subsequently experiencing increased photosensitivity, even resulting in blistering of the skin and severe burns.

Nevertheless, taking large amounts of Hypericin, internally, which is an isolated constituent of St. John’s Wort, is what seems to increase the likelihood of experiencing photosensitivity.

Conversely, the regular internal use of St. John’s Wort in the form of a tea or a tincture, which essentially means consuming St. John’s Wort in it’s entirety, doesn’t seem to provoke the same response.

*Owing to the controversy around St. John’s Wort as a viable sunscreen, we do not use it for this purpose. However, you may wish to review the data and decide to use it for yourself. There are recent clinical trials that show St. John’s Wort to be an excellent sunscreen when used in an appropriate manner, which substantiates claims that St. John’s Wort for pre-cancerous skin conditions is a viable option.

St. John’s Wort As An Anti-Oxidant

St. John’s Wort is packed full of natural flavonoids making it an impressive anti-oxidant. There’s more than one way to define an era, and whilst most will persist in calling the present time the Information Age, it could just as easily be called the EMF Era or The Oxidative Stress Century, and both of these statements would be just as accurate. (They’re also both a bit more catchy than the Age of RSI!)

Oxidative stress is what ages us and ultimately makes us sick with life threatening conditions like Cancer.

Oxidative stress is caused by corrosive free radicals running rampant in our bodies. But, anti-oxidants can neutralise them on contact. Anti-oxidants connect to the molecule chain of the free-radicals, thereby disarming them so that they can pass out of the body without causing any harm.

This is why Wild As The Wind include Organic Sweet Orange Essential Oil in our Frankincense & St John’s Wort Preparation. Organic Sweet Orange Essential Oil is chocka-block with anti-oxidants making it highly anti-inflammatory as well as being a potent anti-cancer agent.

We absorb 60% of what we put onto our skin into our bodies, so we don’t have to eat the anti-oxidants necessarily. Rubbing Sweet Orange Essential Oil onto our skin is another great way of delivering anti-oxidants to our body.

There’s certain nutrients that prefer to pass into the body trans-dermally. Magnesium is a good case in point. Magnesium is notoriously difficult for the digestive system to break down, so it’s advantageous to miss out the digestive tract altogether and administering is via the skin.

Another great thing about St. John’s Wort infused oil is that it is very soothing for the skin.

St. John’s Wort For Wounds

St. John’s Wort has traditionally been used for vulnerary, or wound healing, purposes, but we would advocate using it as a carrier for a number of wound healing essential oils, such as Geranium Rose, to further enhance the healing properties of this beautiful red oil.

We are also considering infusing the very wonderful, and abundant, Plantain (Latin: Plantago major, Plantago media and Plantago lanceolata) due to its wound healing and anti-inflammatory properties. This would prove to be a fantastically useful addition to things like our Pain & Inflammation Vanishing Oil as Plantain can assist with all kinds of inflammation including everything from respiratory, digestive, urinary, articular, to cutaneous, meaning that it’s great for surface inflammation.as well as for many other common ailments.

St. John’s Wort For Pain Relief

St. John’s Wort forms the basis of the Wild As The Wind Pain & Inflammation Vanishing Oil for good reason. It is both analgesic and anti-inflammatory in nature and so it has exactly the right action to be used as a base oil in the Pain & Inflammation Vanishing Oil blend.

Make Your Own St. John’s Wort

It is possible to make your own St. John’s Wort infused oil from the fresh or newly wilted plant, but not from dried St. John’s Wort because it doesn’t work. It’s possible to use any base oil, but there are certain oils that are better used for specific applications.

For example, if you are making your St. John’s Wort infusion to treat inflammation you may want to use Organic Sweet Almond Oil as your base as this carrier oil has anti-inflammatory properties of it’s own.

There’s a full description on how to make a St. John’s Wort Infusion on the Learning Herbs website, although the advice is all rounded off with a quick facial oil recipe. I personally don’t think the face oil recipe is a patch on the Wild As The Wind FACIAL OIL No. 2, but I’ll let you be the judge on that one…