Traditional remedy for spinal thorns: easy to find, cost-effective

Spinal thorn pain is a common condition in menopausal and elderly individuals. It typically presents as discomfort in the neck and lower back. Here, PasGo shares a healing journey for spinal thorns with a simple remedy for readers to explore.

I have a colleague whose mother suffers from spinal thorns. She described how her mother's condition worsened, experiencing constant pain and numbness in the neck, extending to the hands and down the spine. Despite massages and pain-relief medications, there was no improvement.

After a medical examination, her mother's condition was severe, with excessive nerve compression. It was only a matter of time before she would face issues like spinal stenosis, urinary dysfunction, and loss of sensation throughout the body.

One day, by chance, she met a university friend and heard the story of her mother. The friend shared an effective remedy for spinal spurs using three simple herbs: lime, grapefruit, and mugwort.

The ingredients are easy to find, and the remedy is straightforward. Prepare 2 grapefruits, 1 kg of seedless dried lime, and 200g of dried mugwort. Roast all these ingredients until golden, ground them, and soak in 2 liters of alcohol with 200g of rock sugar for a week. Stir occasionally, and after 3 to 4 weeks, it's ready for use.

For this remedy, take a small cup (about 5-10ml) daily after meals. In the beginning, there might be some discomfort, but if you endure it, you'll feel relief from the 7th day onward.

She bought the ingredients and prepared the remedy for her mother. She said, 'After 7 days of use, my mother felt significantly better. She had a better appetite, moved more easily, and slept almost 5 hours straight without feeling any pain. She continued taking it for a month.'

Because my friend's mother had been suffering for a long time, she consistently took it for 2-3 months, then repeated the cycle every six months, taking it continuously for one month. In the following years, she took it once a year for a month. She cured spinal spurs at home with just that remedy!

Through the story of my friend and further research, I learned that in folk medicine, there are many ways to treat spinal spurs using readily available herbs with no side effects but practical effectiveness. The mentioned remedy combines ingredients with logical benefits:

- Grapefruit, a fruit with phytochemicals that inhibit prostaglandins, reducing bone inflammation. In Eastern medicine, grapefruit has a sweet, sour taste, a cool nature, and is used to relieve coughs, dissolve phlegm, treat digestive disorders, abdominal pain, indigestion, and joint pain. Grapefruit peel, warm and slightly bitter, helps dissolve phlegm, reduce coughs, regulate blood circulation, and alleviate pain.

- Mugwort, with warm properties and a spicy taste, has a soothing effect on blood circulation and is often used to treat headaches, eye pain, joint pain, and sciatic nerve pain.

- Lemon functions to detoxify, protect blood vessels, enhance the immune system, and limit the harmful effects of free radicals, slowing aging and boosting the spine's self-healing ability. In traditional Chinese medicine, lemon leaves, roots, and peel have a sour and bitter taste with a fragrant smell, having the properties of dispelling wind, promoting blood circulation, opening meridians, resolving phlegm, promoting digestion, reducing coughs, and regulating vital energy.

Lemon trees belong to the group of 54 medicinal plants with the highest medicinal value among over 7,300 plant species classified and ranked by Plants For a Future in the UK based on nutritional and medicinal values.

According to Dr. Hoang Khanh Toan, Head of Traditional Medicine Department at Military Hospital 108, the herbs in the recipe have warm properties, and soaking them in corn liquor adds a spicy and warm taste, making them suitable for treating spinal spurs. Additionally, both grapefruit peel and lemon have gas-expelling functions, contributing to pain relief.

In traditional medicine, pain ('thống') is caused by 'bất thông' (stagnation, blockage). Herbs that promote smooth meridians and normal blood circulation alleviate chronic pain and treat spinal degeneration.