An Experiment With Cabbage

I've had psoriasis on my hand since Tommy was born. It has been inconvenient, unsightly, and painful. Sometimes it gets so bad that my fingers lock up and can hardly move because the skin gets so dry, tight, and cracked. I wet my hands so many times throughout the day--doing dishes; washing faces and hands after meals; washing my hands after changing diapers and wiping butts; cooking; bath time; etc, etc, etc--I've never been able to keep up with lotions or creams. Prescription creams are even more inconvenient. They're greasy and never really absorb, and they only seem to work so long as I strictly use them 3 times daily, keep my hands dry, and use lotion 50 times a day. Impossible! For my lifestyle, anyway. I've gone through my own extensive series of holistic experiments and they've seemed to help...a little, anyway. After all, this has been nearly FIVE years of my life.

Enter CABBAGE.

I credit President Harry S. Truman for this. Seriously, if I could thank the guy, I would. Last summer I was listening to the biography, Truman, by David McCullough, and it mentioned that Harry studied the medicinal properties of cabbage. That piqued my interest, so I did my own little bit of research. Something I read stated that cabbage has healing properties for skin. When I mentioned that to my mother-in-law, Pris, she said that when her husband, Vern, was growing up on a farm, they worked a lot with cabbage and his dad told him that the reason they always had soft hands was from all the cabbage juice. My first thought was to try to make a lotion with juiced cabbage, but the juice didn't mix with the oil and wax. I have yet to try a goat milk lotion with cabbage juice. I was also making an effort to eat more cabbage, but all the salad in the world didn't seem to be making any difference.

Shad started cooking what we call Cabbage Fry. It's a stir-fry with a bunch of veggies and meat, whatever sauce and seasonings he wants to use that day, and a whole head of cabbage. It started in February, I think, and earlier this month, I noticed that I hadn't had any issues. I wasn't sure if it was a direct cause and effect, or simply a correlation. Then in the past 3 weeks with my parents visiting, and then Shad and I were sick, and then being out of town for 10 days, I developed a rash last week. So I'm pretty sure that cabbage has been saving my hands, and we're going to continue our weekly Cabbage Fry dinners. I also try once a week to cook cabbage for a side dish with dinner.