Mistletoe

Mistletoe is best known as the plant under which people kiss at Christmas, a custom with an ironically gruesome origin.  As a healing herb, mistletoe is also fraught with irony.  One scientific authority calls it "gentle...and nontoxic."  Others call it "poisonous," and insist "all parts of the plant should be regarded as toxic." The truth lies somewhere in between.  Mistletoe is potentially hazardous, but Europeans have used it extensively - and apparently safely - to help treat high blood pressure and cancer.

We owe the herb's association with kissing to Norse mythology.  Balder, god of peace, was slain by an arrow made of mistletoe.  When his parents, god-king Odin and goddess-queen Frigga, restored him to life, they gave the plant to the goddess of love and decreed that anyone who passed under it should receive a kiss.

Early Christians believed mistletoe was a freestanding tree during Jesus's time and that its wood was used to make the cross.  God punished the plant for its role in the crucifixion by turning it into a parasite.  This story gave mistletoe its Latin name, lignum crucis, wood of the cross, and its French name herbe de la croix.

Mistletoe is a parasitic shrub that grows in trees, rooting into their bark.  Hippocrates prescribed the herb for disorders of the spleen, but most other ancient physicians, particularly Dioscorides and Galen, advised limiting this herb to external uses, foreshadowing the current controversy over its safety.

A French medical text of 1862 recommended mistletoe for "falling sickness" (epilepsy), and some herbals still recommend it for convulsions.

Despite the traditional belief that European and American mistletoe have opposite actions, science has found out that they contain similar active chemicals and have similar effects.  Mistletoe has the ability to slow the pulse, stimulate gastrointestinal and uterine contractions, and lower blood pressure.

Mistletoe contains substances that may raise blood pressure as well as substances that  may lower it, but blood pressure reduction appears to predominate.  In Germany, where herbal medicine is considerably more mainstream than it is in the U.S., mistletoe extract is an ingredient in many medications prescribed to reduce blood pressure.  High blood pressure is a serious condition requiring medical treatment.  Use the herb only with the permission and supervision of your doctor.