Simply Mother

I am an extremely skeptical person. I think I’m getting worse with age too. I’m especially skeptical of anything that is claimed to be some kind of miracle cure. I don’t care if it is “natural” or not either. I just find myself rolling my eyes an awful lot rather than jump right on the bandwagon of some new thing or another.

This stuff? It is called Grape Fruit Seed Extract. It claims to be “Nature’s Antibiotic” and a whole slew of other things. I still don’t know, and won’t say 100% that it is as amazing as everybody says it is, but I will say this: Every time I’ve used it (and it has only been a handful of times, because I’m hesitant about the overuse of any drug or supplement, natural or not, but the list includes: mastitis, and eye infection, and the weird, random illness that caused a 103.7 degree temperature in my two-year-old thte other day), I have seen complete recovery within hours, sometimes even minutes of use.

The critic in me keeps saying it could have been a coincidence. Yes, every time. It is possible. I don’t know for sure. But with every success, my confidence grows, and I think I’ll be sure to keep a bottle of this in my medicine chest from now on.

Click below to read my stories and you can draw your own conclusions.

Mastitis

This was my first experience with GSE, and the most convincing, as even “natural people” pretty much say you have to get antibiotics for mastitis. But, miserable as I was, I arrived at the Urgent Care clinic 5 minutes after it closed and couldn’t bring myself to pay the exorbitant ER cost just to get a prescription for an antibiotic, so I opted to live in pain all night and go to the doctor in the morning.

In the morning, feeling too horrible to go anywhere, even if it meant relief, I let my mom bring over her bottle of GSE and, with full intentions of going to the doctor in an hour or so (as soon as I could get myself up out of bed) because I was sure this couldn’t help me in my agonizing state (mastitis, it is agonizing, I tell you), I took a few drops of the bitter concoction with some orange juice.

An hour later, I began feeling better and so put off the doctor’s visit for a bit longer. Within a few hours, all signs of infection had disappeared completely. High fever, chills, delirium–vanished. I still had a terribly plugged duct and a lot of pain when nursing, but the infection was cured. I never ended up going to the doctor, despite a nurse telling me I would probably still need to come in and get a prescription for “real antibiotics.”

Eye Infection

It seems like I must have used this in between my mastitis episode two years ago, and Sarah’s recent eye infection–somewhere in there I actually bought my own bottle–but I can’t remember what it was for! But I know I’ve never had an experience using this where the problem did NOT clear up instantly.

Anyway, my five-year-old developed an infection in her eye shortly after getting glasses (don’t know if that was related or not, but we’ve never dealt with these before.) The first day I went with the “watch and wait” approach but when she woke up the next morning with two swollen, puffy, itchy, gooey eyes, I called a doctor. Who of course said we’d need to come in and get antibiotics.

Again I decided to try the GSE first, just for kicks. Within an hour we saw significant improvement, and by the end of the day, you’d never know she’d had a problem at all. We didn’t do anything else, other than apply warm compresses a couple times a day (which I had done the day before too).

Weird Skin Infection

One day, Sarah poked herself in the wrist with a needle. It hurt, but then it was over and we thought nothing of it until the next morning when that spot was swollen, red, and puffy. I figured it was infected and worried about what was on the needle, but, at the advice of the health-food-store-guy, put a drop of GSE on the spot. This is the time we saw results within minutes. Literally, the signs of infection just disappeared before our eyes.

Whatever Jade Had

And now we come to why I’m bothering to write this all out now. After church Sunday, I noticed Jade felt warm. We took her temperature and were shocked to find the thermometer read 102.7. Suddenly she got kind of sluggish and then fell right to sleep in Matt’s arms while I was making lunch.

When I checked on her an hour or so later she seemed to be burning up. The thermometer confirmed her temp had risen to 103.7. At this point, we started wondering if we should take her in to the Urgent Care, but Matt pointed out that they would probably just give her antibiotics, and I figured if that was the case, I would want to try the GSE first anyway.

The stuff is really, really bitter. You can taste a few teeny droplets in a full glass of orange juice. But this two-year-old managed to get it down in three bites of green smoothie (spinach, pineapple, banana, apple, and lime). She was sure a trooper, not wanting to eat anything at all as it was.

I was worried about her fever going up too high too quickly, but I’m also not a fever-reducer–I think it is there for a reason–to fight the infection, and since she wasn’t too uncomfortable, I felt okay letting it do it’s job, and using the watch-and-wait approach until we could get in with our regular doctor in the morning.

But it wasn’t needed. Within minutes of taking it, she started to cool off. She cuddled or slept in someone’s arms the rest of the evening and by the time Matt and I were going to bed, her temperature was completely normal. The next morning, it was as if she was never sick at all.

Now, it would be easy for me to say, well, maybe she would have just gotten better anyway. She did last time. (Although her fever wasn’t as high that time, and we never considered taking her to the doctor.) It’s totally possible that she would have gotten better on her own. I think that’s highly likely, actually.

Then again, if we had gone to the doctor, and given her antibiotics, I don’t think anyone would have questioned it was the antibiotics that healed her.

I question everything though. I’m not saying absolutely that the Grapefruit Seed Extract was the cure for any of these (although my mastitis experience was pretty convincing). But it hasn’t caused any problems, it’s inexpensive ($10 for a bottle that will surely last us years and years. You literally only use a few teensy tiny drops each time), and I like the idea of having it around to try before going in for “real” antibiotics.

So, if you’re wary of antibiotics like I am, or if you’ve just wanted to collect a few natural remedies to keep on hand to try before using allopathic medicine, this might be one to pick up.

Filed in: family • health | March 17, 2009