One of the Best Plants for Your Skin. Its Twin Sells for $400 a Pound. Why Is This One Free?

📖 The Nature’s Lost Vault Book Is Now Available. Learn more: https://naturelostvault.com/book.html German pharmacies standardized this plant into a skin ointment and put it in front of dermatology patients. American garden centers sell the identical shrub for 29 dollars as parking lot decoration, priced on the fact that deer will not eat it. In this episode of Nature's Lost Vault we follow Oregon grape, Mahonia aquifolium, the spiny evergreen planted outside banks and suburban front walls across North America. Cut its root and it bleeds bright chrome yellow. That yellow is berberine, the same alkaloid that made goldenseal the most trusted root in the American frontier medicine chest. Meriwether Lewis collected the shrub on the lower Columbia in the spring of 1806. Frederick Pursh named it in 1814. Oregon made it the state flower in 1899. Along that coast the Salish nations, the Nlaka'pamux and the Squamish had used the root for generations as a yellow dye for basketry and wool, as a bitter digestive tonic, and as a wash for irritated skin and sore eyes. The berries were food, tart and blue and heavy with pectin. Then American medicine reorganized itself around manufactured drugs and the plant went quiet here. It did not go quiet in Germany, where the extract was standardized into a topical ointment and put in front of dermatology patients. In 2005 the American Journal of Therapeutics published a report by dermatologists Wayne Gulliver and Howard Donsky covering three trials of a 10 percent Oregon grape topical cream in plaque psoriasis, concluding that Mahonia aquifolium is a safe and effective treatment for mild to moderate psoriasis. So why has almost nobody heard of it? The answer is not a conspiracy. It is arithmetic. Nobody can own this plant. Pursh put it in the public record in 1814 and berberine has been sitting in the chemical literature for over a century, so there is no patent at the end of the road and no reason for anyone to fund the large trials. The research thinned out and the shrub drifted to the one market that could still make money from it, the ornamental nursery trade, where the margin lives in the pot and the tag rather than in the root. There is a second irony here. Goldenseal, which carries the same headline alkaloid, is listed on Appendix Two of the international endangered species convention and has sold for as much as 400 dollars a pound as diggers strip it out of Appalachian forest soil. Oregon grape spreads by underground runners, thrives on neglect, and sits on a garden center shelf for the price of a large pizza. 📚 Sources: - Gulliver, Wayne P., and Howard Donsky. "A Report on Three Recent Clinical Trials Using Mahonia aquifolium 10% Topical Cream and a Review of the Worldwide Clinical Experience with Mahonia aquifolium for the Treatment of Plaque Psoriasis." American Journal of Therapeutics 12, no. 5 (2005): 398-406. - Bernstein, Steven, Howard Donsky, Wayne Gulliver, et al. "Treatment of Mild to Moderate Psoriasis with Relieva, a Mahonia aquifolium Extract. A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study." American Journal of Therapeutics 13, no. 2 (2006): 121-126. - Wiesenauer, Markus, and Rainer Ludtke. "Mahonia aquifolium in Patients with Psoriasis vulgaris. An Intraindividual Study." Phytomedicine 3, no. 3 (1996): 231-235. - Fan, Yuhan, et al. "Effect of Oregon Grape Root Extracts on P-glycoprotein Function and Expression." 2024. - Pursh, Frederick. Flora Americae Septentrionalis. London: White, Cochrane, and Co., 1814. - Turner, Nancy J. Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995. - Moerman, Daniel E. Native American Ethnobotany. Portland: Timber Press, 1998. - Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Appendix II listing of Hydrastis canadensis, 1997. - United Plant Savers. Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis. Species At-Risk Assessment. Rutland, OH. #Foraging #MedicinalPlants #ForgottenRemedies #naturalhealing