Fumitory: anti-rheumatic, anti-allergy, digestive

Properties of fumitory

Fumitory (fumaria officinalis) has long been recognised as a great medicinal plant and its name gives indications both about its botanical characteristics and its medicinal virtues.

Fumitory is, indeed, the inhabitant of smoked lands and cultivated fields and thrives when the earth burns during hot and dry summers. Its very bitter flavour like soot and its acrid sap that makes you cry evoke fire and smoke coming out of the ground.

Its medicinal use is very varied and this plant acts on different metabolisms.
Capable of evacuating the waste of an over-nourished earth, fumitory will help us eliminate our bad humours and suppress their effects notably on the skin. To do this, it will stimulate the entire digestive system. For example, it can be used in a cure of 10 to 20 days after dietary excesses or following a liver blockage.
By purging our blood of toxins, a fumitory cure will have an effect on our skin and can be associated with calendula, wild pansy or burdock.
A plant with a bitter flavour, fumitory is a liver stimulant, also useful in cases of urticaria, digestive migraine, jaundice and biliary problems.

Endowed with anti-allergic properties, fumitory will also be used against hay fever and other pollen allergies.

Nature has endowed it with an alkaloid with antispasmodic activity leading to a calming action which can become hypnotic over time.
But fumitory can also help us manage stress through a modulating effect on the neurotransmitters of the nervous system.
As a precaution, it will be used in a one-month cure with breaks of 8 days between two intakes.
This plant can be used as an infusion or as a tincture. The ancients made syrups from it or consumed the fresh sap.

Externally, fumitory can be used as a poultice of crushed fresh plant, as a lotion from the sap or as a cosmetic water for the face.
Capturing the impure humours of the earth damaged by man, fumitory, consumed a few days per month, has gained the reputation of "herb of centenarians" on the same level as ash or angelica.