Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria)

Available either as a dried herb or herbal tincture.

Please note this is a nutritional, functional horse food supplement and not veterinary medicine. See Dr Kellon's Horse Sense - 'Nutrition is not 'Alternative' Therapy.

Tincture

Our human-grade, certified organic tinctures give you a ready-to-absorb potent source of phytonutrients at the highest-strength available, for immediate absorption straight into the bloodstream and to the body’s cells.

100% certified organic pure tincture: Filipendula ulmaria (Meadowsweet) Flowering Tops, Infused 1:3 35%, Organically Cultivated

Feed Guide

• Horse - 30-40ml / Pony - 15-20ml, daily in feed.
• Always shake the bottle to disperse any sediment.
• 3-year shelf-life.

Dried Herb

Produced to ecological standards and free from agro-chemicals.

Certified organic dried herb: Filipendula ulmaria (Meadowsweet) Flowering Tops, Origin UK, Organically/Biodynamically Cultivated*

* Grown especially for us organically and biodynamically by Organic Herb Trading Co. https://www.biodynamics.com/what-is-biodynamics

Feed Guide

• 5g/100kg bodyweight per day, thus for an average 500kg horse add 25g daily to feed.
• 1-year shelf-life.

Functional Nutritional Value

Constituents: Volatile oil, glycosides of salicylaldehyde, methylsalicylate, and salicyl alcohol (spiraein, monotropin, gaultherin); flavonoids (flavonols, flavones, flavonones and chalcone derivatives), up to 6% in flowers and 3-4% in aerial parts; polyphenolics and hydrolyzable tannins, including ellagitannins; phenylcarboxylic acids; coumarin; vitamin C; a heparin-like substance also concentrated in the flowers.

NB. Our range of botanicals are all grown, harvested and dried without the use of agri-chemicals, non-irradiated and GMO free - see our Quality page for Quality Management & Certification Documents. Laboratory tested for identification and compliance to the British and European Pharmacopoeia standards, and are human grade. Please be aware that if you're purchasing our dried botanicals for human use, our dried range is cut to appropriate sizes for feeding to horses.

More ...

Meadowsweet has been used for millennia in its native Europe, with traces having been discovered in the remains of a Neolithic-era drink in the Scottish Hebrides and a Neolithic burial site near Perth, dating back to at least 4000 years old. Along with vervain and water-mint, it was one of three of the most sacred herbs among the Druids and much-celebrated in the British Isles for both its aromatic and medicinal qualities before being brought to the New World.

Traditionally used in wedding ceremonies in wreaths, posies, and strewing, plus many other traditional celebrations and rites including births and funerals, it was also used in medieval times as the fragrance of both flowers and leaves were useful for covering up stinky stenches. I personally love the perfume of meadowsweet – to me it’s a beautiful aroma.

Meadowsweet was also used traditionally to flavour meads, wines, and beers - in 14 ^th -century England it was called meadwort, and it’s still used in brewing to this day.

These days meadowsweet is renowned as a pain-reliever and anti-inflammatory, with particular indication as a beneficial gastroprotector. Traditionally, the aerial parts of meadowsweet were used to relieve stomach upset, stanch bleeding, heal wounds and gastric ulcers, and as Culpeper wrote, “fluxes of the bowels of all sorts”.

In later years physicians on both sides of the Atlantic continued to turn to meadowsweet as a powerful gastroprotective agent. Felter and Lloyd (1898) describe in the King’s Dispensatory similar uses for the herb that mirror those of their predecessors, including digestive upset, diarrhea, dysentery, and passive hemorrhage. Modern herbalists have continued using meadowsweet primarily as a GI-specific astringent and pain-relieving herb.

Writing in the 1950s, the English herbalist Frank Roberts, lectured that meadowsweet is a “true normaliser of a badly functioning stomach. It regulates acidity and it rectifies alkalinity. This is the remedy which should replace all the alkalis now on the market”. Anne McIntyre, writing about meadowsweet from an Ayurvedic perspective, noted that meadowsweet was ”one of the best antacid remedies, used for symptoms including acid indigestion, heartburn, gastritis, gastro-oesophageal reflux, and peptic ulcers”. In addition, it’s also said to protect the gut from a broad spectrum of pathogens.

Felter and Lloyd noted long ago that meadowsweet is less irritating to the GI tract than other herbal agents intended for the same use, this observation being very much aligned with similar ones comparing meadowsweet with its pharmaceutical offspring, aspirin. In the mid-19th century, a number of European chemists and pharmacists (including the Italian Raffaele Piria, Charles-Frederic Gerhardt from Strasbourg, and the German Hermann Kolbe) played important roles in synthesizing salicylic acid - and eventually acetyl-salicylic acid - from meadowsweet. Because of its unpalatable bitterness, it was initially discarded from being used, yet some 40-years later Bayer rediscovered it in a search for a salicylic acid substitute with fewer side-effects. They named their resultant pain-relief medication ‘aspirin’, after meadowsweet’s old botanical name, spiraea .

As a pain reliever, meadowsweet is used most effectively in specific instances, particularly headache, pain from rheumatoid or osteoarthritis, gout, and sciatica. Herbalist Rosalee de la Forêt recommends the use of meadowsweet in hot conditions with stagnant pain in a fixed location, i.e. headaches in which the head feels hot and is pounding. In this situation, meadowsweet both cools and promotes circulation, which moves the stagnation and brings relief.

Regarding arthritis and joint pain, meadowsweet is said to be more effective in treating acute pain; this may be because in addition to its anti-inflammatory abilities, meadowsweet’s salicylic glycosides contribute to its action as a diuretic, which may help to remove uric acid from the system. At the same time, there is some evidence that meadowsweet, as a trophorestorative, supports connective tissue health.

Meadowsweet is also a cooling diaphoretic, bringing blood to the body’s surface, and exhibits a similar movement in eruptive infections such as measles and chicken pox, where its anti-inflammatory properties are also helpful in relieving the discomfort from the associated rashes.

Herbalists today tend to focus their use of this herb on the digestive and musculoskeletal systems; this is certainly how we use it. Generally, it’s most commonly taken as an infusion or a tincture of the aerial parts, or as powdered root.

We use meadowsweet in our DuoBute and Tribute pain/anti-inflammatory blends, our EyeTonic, MellowMare, OptimaCARE, PollenTonic, SiboCARE and UlsaTonic.

Safety

• Salicylates may affect metabolism of iron, so should be taken a few hours apart from taking iron supplements.
• Meadowsweet (flowers in particular) may interact with coumadin or other blood thinners.