Judy Foreman Author & Journalist

If your doctor suggested that you take two different sleeping pills that have never been tested in combination, would you do it? If she recommended an energy-booster, but you couldn’t tell from the label what was in the bottle, would you take that? What if she told you to ingest a medication normally used on…

Like many others at midlife or beyond, Wendy Fink, a health educator in her 50s, was appalled at the way her memory kept conking out. “I was having trouble getting words,” says Fink, who lives in Royalston. “I was feeling very stressed about this.” So she tried ginkgo, an herbal memory-booster that’s getting new respect…

Arthur Borneman, a 74-year-old Quincy man, had a pain in the neck. He tried painkillers, months of therapy at a rehab hospital, massage, exercise, even a dental specialist in case the problem was jaw pain.  To his surprise, the dentist urged him to see a chiropractor, but Borneman said he “had no faith in chiropractors.”…

Dr. Margaret Slater, a veterinarian and epidemiologist at Texas A & M University, gives the stuff to all her loved ones, two-footed and four-footed, who suffer from arthritis. “My dog, my horse, my mother and her dog are all benefitting from it,” she says with a chuckle. Dr. David Hungerford, chief of orthopedics at the…

The Cheyenne used it for sore gums, the Comanches, for toothaches and sore throats. Other Native Americans kept it on hand for snakebites or syphilis. Modern Americans seem to love the stuff, too, even if we can’t pronounce it. In fact, echinacea – that’s eck-in-EH-shia – is now the top selling herbal remedy in health…