The Doctor-Botanist Couple Improving A Community In The Rural South.
Before the pandemic, black rural dwellers grappled with high rates of chronic health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and high blood pressure. Noe, many of these same conditions have placed them at increased risk of difficult illness from COVID-19.
What COVID-19 did was especially reveal the underlying health problems of people in Black belt counties and exhibited the great health disparities between black and white. Those disparities exist partly because about 40percent of the population is uninsured because lawmakers in Alabama like other southern states chose not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
These socioeconomic and health variations have inspired the Pauls to work for change. And their farm has become a transport for much-needed healing in the region. The pauls grow surrounding 30 herbs on the field, some start of roots in the greenhouses, and others are perennials that permanently begin on the feature.
Instead of using herbicides and pesticides, they keep 50 sheep, 10 cows, and 30 goats, and use the manure to fertilize the soil. They source drip fertilization from rainwater. To develop their line of herbaceous supplements, the Pauls mixed their medical and plant biology abilities to search for effective plant-derived ingredients that power conventional medication.
They also rely broadly on plants considered medicinal around the world, with scientific analysis backing, including moringa oleifera, broadly used in Southeast Asia to remedy diabetes, and other maladies, joint pain, hibiscus, popular with healers opposite the globe for its antibacterial, anti-diabetic and ligustrum plants, anti-hypertensive effects, used in Chinese medicine to prevent, chronic bronchitis and cure hepatitis.
The mimosa plant, contracted in Indian ayurvedic medicine to treat everything of diarrhoea to bleeding and dysentery. They have assembled an all-volunteer medical team to make house calls, including nurses, medical assistants, and volunteer missionary school students.