Hi Moz,To answer your deleted post, although I have in the past...

Hi Moz,

To answer your deleted post, although I have in the past made an infusion from the bark of the willow trees that I planted around the dam on my little farm, it was quite bitter and tannic, so nowadays I just buy the tablets online. My wife says they gave her really good pain relief from her OA, before we got onto the PPS.

As an aside, when we were living in Italy several years ago, I gave my ankle a bad sprain while I was out foraging for the local porcini mushrooms. I staggered in to the town pharmacist who sold me a tube of an oitment called Fibrase, the active ingredient of which is PPS, and this worked very well in reducing the swelling, and alleviating the pain. I recall her telling me that her grandparents back in a little village somewhere used to make up something similar using lardo as a base, but, rather annoyingly, I didn't take much notice of what she was saying, however I'm wondering now if Nonna wasn't mixing herself up some sort of beech bark home brew - it certainly wouldn't surprise me.

These natural remedies can be quite potent, and they're not always well understood. For example most of the spices that you showed in your deleted pics have a very strong anti-bacterial and anti-microbial action; useful in countries where, in the past, temperatures were high, toilets were few, flies were numerous, and refrigeration was non-existent. Watch out for nutmeg though - highly toxic stuff.

No medical advice intended here, nor any other sort of advice