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What is it?

The roots and root branches of Gentian, a long-living herb that grows a slender stem to over a meter that produces blue-green leaves and yellow flowers in bowl shaped clusters.

How has it been used?

Gentian is widely used in herbal medicine for people who have chronic health troubles where a weakened digestion is involved.

Traditional uses include :

• Failure to thrive in infants
• Weakness and loss of appetite in adults
• Food allergies and intolerances
• Liver congestion and jaundice
• Gastric acid deficiency
• Diarrhoea with yellow stool
• Chronic fatigue with loss of appetite for food
• Severe exhaustion from post-viral syndrome

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Personal experiences

You can instantly appreciate just how much Gentian stimulates the flow of digestive juices by having some Gentian tincture in your mouth for a second or two. From that moment on you, until you have something to eat, you will produce significantly more saliva that you do usually. Exactly the same thing is happening further down your digestive tract. Gentian is ‘priming the fire of digestion' by activating your digestive organs and causing you to make more of the digestive enzymes that will soon be in contact with the food you are going to eat.

Gentian has an intiguing further action. It is known as a ‘cooling bitter’ because, whilst it feels warming and stimulating to the digestion what happens, paradoxically, is that at the same time it helps take ‘heat’ away from places in the muscles and joints where inflammation has become stuck.

~ Gentian and Ginger combo This is a very old and famous combination of herbs 80mls Gentian                        20mls Ginger       (We also commonly make this up in a 50 ml formula as Gentian 40mls and Ginger 10mls) The dose is generally somewhere between 6 and 20 drops depending on the person. The tincture provides an extremely simple method of getting the dose in regularly because the key to success with Gentian is to use it, at least at first, frequently.

Only very small amounts of the Gentian may be necessary to get its full effects but you have to taste it and to let the sensation of it penetrate in order for it to work. I encourage people to experience the full intensity of Gentian as best as they can. The less you dilute the tincture with water the stronger it will taste.

If a person can even take their drops of Gentian tincture straight, so much the better. If they can let it stay in their mouth for a few moments before swallowing, better still. This is a daunting prospect because the taste is so bitter and penetrating but it is vital to persist past that initial hurdle.

Once people have had Gentian a few times they always find it gets easier to take. Not because it gets any less bitter, in fact as people get used to taking Gentian they tend to dilute it less so it actually tastes stronger! What happens is a rather extraordinary change in consciousness whereby the instinctive repulsion to bitterness is gradually replaced by a deeper experience of what is actually happening within. As food is digested better and the liver, stomach and pancreas all start to purr with a higher level of health the brain starts to get a clear message, 'this stuff helps, give me more!' That may sound unbelievable just reading it but it is a fact that literally hundreds patients have said to me that they have grown to like the taste of their Gentian formula and in many cases they say that they even start to crave the taste of it for a time!

Gentian is not used indefinitely. You are looking to get the digestion fired up and then you decrease and eventually stop the treatment (so long as old problems don't come back when you do).

The initial key to success with Gentian is frequency. You have to be prepared to use a little Gentian before every meal, ideally somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes before you eat.

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Excerpt from Felter & Lloyd's Kings Dispensatory from 1898

Gentian is a powerful tonic, it improves the appetite, strengthens digestion, gives more force to the circulation, and slightly elevates the heat of the body. Used in cases of debility and exhaustion, and in all cases where a tonic is required, as dyspepsia, gout, amenorrhoea, hysteria, scrofula, intermittents, diarrhoea, worms, etc. Tincture of Gentian was prized by Prof. Scudder as one of the most efficient remedies for "atony of the stomach and bowels with feeble or slow digestion" Gentian is valuable to relieve irritation and increase the appetite after protracted fevers, where the powers of life are depressed and recovery depends upon ability to assimilate food.

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