Herbal remedies, alternative medicine keep these few Detroit stores busier than ever

The usual serenity inside the herb shop was interrupted once again by the ringing of the phone. “Natures Products!” said Gary Wanttaja, the store’s 62-year-old owner, pausing to hear the request on the other end.

“I have a little bit,” he replied, “but I have a limit of 2 ounces.”

The caller wanted some elderberry, popular against viruses like the flu. "It's the Swiss Army knife of anti-virals," he said. But there’s been such a sudden demand for it that Wanttaja had been forced to ration it. Because these are strange times.

The phone rang again, just as another customer walked in the door of his store, in a century-old building on Conant on Detroit’s east side. “It’s been like this the past 10, 14 days,” he said. “I’ve never seen it this busy in 40 years. It’s all day long.”

As grocery stores saw a rush on staples after the first case of the coronavirus was reported in the state, there’s been a parallel scramble at health food and herbal stores all over town. “My customers were laughing about it — ‘You’re going for the toilet paper, I’m going for the herbs,' ” Wanttaja said.

There’s no known cure for this coronavirus, no vaccine, no real way to treat it. Not so fast, say his customers.

For many Detroiters, home remedies have long been the first resort for cures and treatments, particularly among those who have had less access to doctors, less money to pay for health care and less trust of the whole system. For years, many of them relied on folk medicine passed down through families for generations. And as this pandemic sweeps through the state, many of them are flocking to the few stores in town that specialize in the remedies they swear by.

“I have a scientific mind, so I’m trying to understand how it works. But the stories that I’ve heard from people, the different things they use, I scratch my head,” Wanttaja said. “Stuff where people weren’t supposed to walk, weren’t supposed to talk, and they go back to the doctor and doctor scratches his head, because they’re better.”

***

Folk medicine is essentially the use of plants, foods and herbs to prevent or treat an illness or disease, often instead of visits to a doctor. It’s part of every culture in the world, especially among rural and lower-income people, usually preserved through oral tradition.

“If you’re poor and you’re sick, you’re going to have to figure something out,” Wanttaja said. “What we call medicine has been around for only about 100 years really. There was no CVS, so if you wanted to get well you either sat there with your flu or your mother would go outside and get stuff and try and take care of it. If you had kids, you weren’t going to sit there and watch them burn up with fever or something. You’re going to try to find something.”

In America, folk medicine has traditionally been associated with Native Americans, Appalachian whites and Southern blacks, among whom it perseveres not just because of price and convenience, but also thanks to a long-standing, well-documented and understandable distrust of mainstream medicine. Incidents like the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which federal government doctors deliberately deceived test subjects and infected black men in Alabama with syphilis between 1932 and 1972 to see what it does if left untreated, linger in many people’s minds. The federal government was eventually forced to acknowledge the scam and apologize. But hard feelings and mistrust still linger. Say the word ‘Tuskegee’ today, and many people know exactly what it’s shorthand for.

“You mention that, you see people’s eyes get big. They react,” Wanttaja said. “They know about it, especially the older people, but even the younger people — I’m surprised — are afraid to go into the doctor. ‘Remember Tuskegee.’ And that information gets passed around.”

Much of America’s folk medicine tradition has roots in the years before the Civil War, when enslaved blacks and impoverished whites had to make do with what they found outside their door, or what they learned from American Indian tribes.

“The black people, being down South, there was a lot of intermarriage with the Native Americans, so I get a lot of people that come in saying, ‘My grandma was Indian.' And that knowledge would stay in the family along with the other things,” Wanttaja said.

His interest in alternative healing began with severe childhood allergies that his doctors were unable to alleviate. But herbs and a change of diet did, and that sparked a lifelong interest. He opened his store in 1978 in an old building that was once the neighborhood grocer. “When I opened this door I thought I would have all these hippies coming in,” he said. But to his surprise, most customers were older black people from the neighborhood who came from the South, and whose medicine cabinet had always been their backyard garden and the woods behind the house.

“My biggest teachers have always been my customers; all these old people. And they were always happy to share what they knew,” Wanttaja said.

But as those folks have aged and passed on, a lot of those traditions are dying with them. His store is one of a few places in town where the old ways of healing are practiced and preserved, a conscious effort on his part.

“That’s part of the reason I’ve hung on here is I feel like I’m a bridge,” he said. “You know, there’s so much knowledge that was lost from the Native Americans, if you have a verbal knowledge base instead of a written knowledge base, if that person dies, then that’s it — it’s gone. If they didn’t teach their kids or teach somebody else, that’s it. It’s like taking a library and torching it, like the Library at Alexandria — it’s gone.”

The walls inside his old, tin-ceilinged store are lined with long wood shelves holding hundreds of large glass jars full of colorful powders and coarse leaves, all lined up in neat rows, with each jar featuring a small, handwritten label on it spelling out what it contains.

Here you can get your motherwort, your pennyroyal, all the lavender flowers you might need, all the eyebright you could want. There’s lemon balm, goldenseal, hawthorn berries, parsley root and a hundred other herbs more obscure than the last, which he weighs out for customers on a massive old iron scale, like the apothecary of a pharmacy from the days before prescriptions and pills.

“People talk about old school,” he said. “Well, this is ancient school.”

***

Vernice Danna-Coleman had drifted away from the old ways. She grew up sipping apple cider vinegar for its health properties; lining up with her six brothers and sisters every morning so her mother could feed them a spoonful of castor oil with a lemon chaser; drinking the pot liquor from the cooked greens because, her mother told them, that’s where all the nutrients settled. And using herbs to treat ailments.

“I just let life pull me away from what I know is right,” she said. “For years, I knew it worked, but you get comfortable, you get convenient.”

She sat inside Energy 4 Life on Detroit’s east side, holding two bags of Irish sea moss, which is said to have anti-viral properties. It was her third visit to this herbal store this week. “As soon as they started talking about the coronavirus, I knew I needed to boost my immune system,” said the 65-year-old Southfield resident.

She was one of many people suddenly showing up here with urgency. “This is my first experience like this,” said owner Denise Elam, whose store had been mobbed since the first coronavirus case. “They’re not panicking, but they want to do something.”

Elam opened the store 14 years ago on Mack Avenue, just across the street from the large homes of Grosse Pointe Park, where it’s an oddity with its old-timey signs with their old-fashioned fonts making brash pronouncements to its neighbors like “DISEASE STARTS IN THE COLON.”

“I always believed in the holistic approach and that’s what got me into it,” said Elam, 66, a longtime employee of the city’s water department. ‘I’ve never been a prescription person. Always herbs and natural things. They seem to work.”

She, too, draws people who mistrust modern medicine and prefer to treat their own illnesses.

“I’ve had people come in just out of the hospital and they say, ‘I don’t want to do what they said’ and they’ll try the alternative and it works for them,” she said. “It seems like people are becoming more conscious of that, ‘cause they’ve done the medical and pharmaceutical, and they don’t like what’s happening with their bodies, and people are wising up to that. So they want to try an alternative method, and people are kind of waking up to the fact that they have an alternative.”

Three coffeepots were gurgling as they brewed tea. That day’s special was alfalfa with lemon. “Good for your joints and inflammation,” Elam said. There’s tea offered every day, $2 a cup, to be sipped at one of the store’s tables or taken to go in a plastic coffee cup, with honey or raw sugar to sweeten it. Coleman drank from one as she talked.

“It all came from the South,” she said. “My mother grew up in Mississippi. They didn’t have medications. They had to learn how to use stuff from the earth, and so naturally you get those type of remedies, what this plant does, just by having no choice.”

A man and woman walked in to fill up on alkaline water, a staple of health food stores in Detroit, said by advocates to help prevent cancer, boost immunity, slow bone loss. There are some stores in Detroit that sell nothing but alkaline water. Coleman told her story as they looked around.

“My mother told me when she was a young girl she said she had one blind eye, and something that her mother got out of the woods — ‘cause they had farmland — they put that on her eye; I wish she was here to validate this story because I'll never forget it, because she says when she was done, she was seeing. And just to know that story from down South was amazing. I wish I was smarter or had the wisdom then that I have now to understand just how important that was. How did she know how to put that on her? Did that come from her mama? Was that an old Indian remedy? Was that something they made? I don’t know. Those are lost arts.”

Elam rang up the couple for their water, who were quiet and businesslike, except when the woman told Elam she was having sinus issues lately. Elam put some peppermint oil on the woman’s hands, which she rubbed together, put to her face and breathed deeply. Her eyes opened wide.

“Ooh!” she said. “Oh yes sir, I can breathe!”

***

The Old Man with the Scarf looked over the herbs on the shelves at Loving Life Health Store on West 7 Mile in Detroit. It was a rare trip outside his house the past couple weeks. “My sister said you can use a handkerchief,” he said, explaining the pattered cloth he’d wrapped around his face. “I mostly stay home now, anyway. I said one thing last night, I said 'Damn, where the hell can I go to get away from this?' Nowhere. They got us messed up, man. The only people probably safe are the mountain men.”

He was here to get elderberry. But like every herbal place in town, they were out. They, too, had been inundated since the first coronavirus case in the state was announced the week before, and there were now some gaps on the shelves where there had never been gaps before — the spots where herbal products had been snatched up.

“Everybody got hit at the same time,” said owner Ma’at Seba, 61. “While Walmart and everybody was getting it, we were getting a rush, too. The problem is the wholesalers are out of stock, everywhere. So when there’s a run like this, they run out, too. There’s nothing I can do but wait.”

The store was started 35 years ago by her mother, and Seba took over after she retired. There aren’t that many people left, she said, willing to work to carry on the tradition. “The problem is the knowledge is what the elders had, and we’re letting them die out without getting that knowledge from them,” she said.

They sell herbal teas, colon cleansers, prebiotics, probiotics and herbs — lots of herbs. Some vegetables are offered in a cooler. And alkaline water goes for $1 a gallon.

Like a lot of health stores in Detroit, she and her sister have had to know their folk cures and herbs. Some people come here to self-medicate and need to be pointed in the right direction, because they refuse to go to a doctor except for emergencies.

“That’s because of their experiences, either directly or from family members,” Seba said. “They have a big issue with the medical. Some people are like, ‘I’ll die before I go.’ They’re that distrustful — ‘I don’t care what they say, I won’t do it.’ ”

The best part about natural medicine, she said, is that it’s easy to use and available to everyone. People just need to know where to look.

“There’s herbs that grow alongside the freeway,” she said. “Those yellow ones are goldenrod, you can eat those. They have health properties, too. And those kind of paisley-colored flowers growing up the freeway fences, just wherever? Those are chicory and they have healing properties. Dandelions is one of the most powerful herbs that we have, and that’s everywhere. Psyllium grows in the cracks. Mullein grows just upside buildings, that breaks down mucus. Burdock root, you make a tea out of it, excellent blood cleanser. To me, Mother Nature has the cure for everything.”

When this pandemic finally passes, she hopes this renewed interest in self-care might lead to a greater awareness of those home remedies and folk cures that many people have forsaken.

“We’re being forced to go back to the old ways, which is good, you know? People are forced to be more health conscious now than they were before. They’re not taking things for granted, so that’s the flip side. So now, when this goes over, they’ll be more conscious about what they’re eating. But had they done that before, they might not be worried about all of this now.”

***

Back at Nature’s Products, Wanttaja was so busy between visitors and callers his cup of coffee had grown cold in his hands.

The phone rang yet again. “Nature’s Products!” he said. The caller wanted couchgrass, known for antibiotic properties. There was a little left, he was told. See you soon.

In walked Curt Yarbough of Detroit. “You’re back!” Wanttaja said to his longtime customer, who was here the day before. “The virus don’t bother me, but I’m not going to be ignorant,” said the 72-year-old. "I’m not going to tempt God.” He was stocking up on herbs, and today wanted oil of oregano. All out, though.

In walked Detroiter Fred Eady, and soon he was leaving with a large bag of powdered ginger, long used to fight flu and other viruses. “There’s not a lot of places like this,” said the 24-year-old. He asked whether there was any astragalus left. Out, though.

In walked 33-year-old Farren Clay. Twice in her short life, she said, she’d been diagnosed with cancer. And twice, she declared, she beat it with natural medicine using diet and herbs. “My grandmother was raised on a reservation,” she said, explaining her Cherokee roots. “I’m just like her — old-fashioned. I don’t go to medical doctors unless I really need to. You know, here in Detroit we’re right on the cusp of Canada and Up North, and a lot of people stay in those roots.” She too was stocking up — burdock root, bladder wrack, Irish sea moss.

Wanttaja said her story brought to mind another regular customer who came in one day with a cancer diagnosis.

“I didn’t see her for a year after that,” he said. “I thought, God she passed. One day she comes in, I said, ‘How are you doing?’ She said, ‘I’m OK, that’s gone.’ I said, ‘How?’ She said, ‘Oh honey, that wasn’t going to get me.’ That was her strength of mind. Some people are like that. They do the impossible, like something out of the movies.”

Customers like that, he said, come here not so much because they distrust modern medicine. Some do and some don’t. But all of them come here because they believe there’s something else that can make them feel better.

“There’s many different levels of healing,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a physical thing, sometimes it’s a spiritual thing, sometimes it’s your mind. The human spirit has possibilities that science will never know. You can’t write a script for that.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep