How to Stop a Wound Bleeding…Naturally!

Have you, or anyone in your family, every had a cut or wound that just didn’t want to stop bleeding?

Sometime back I came across an article about a product that is used to stop a wound from bleeding. It is a bandage that is soaked in kaolin clay and is called QuikClot. What I found so interesting about it is that the active ingredient is a totally natural product! I am noticing more and more that natural ingredients are still being used in a lot of medications, albeit together with other chemical and synthetic stuff. And some, surprisingly, like this bandage, are purely natural ingredients dressed up with fancy names.

While most of us don’t generally have kaolin clay lying around the house, for those ‘big bleed’ emergencies, we could buy it and keep it on hand if we wanted to…any decent health store should have it in stock. There are, however, a couple of other things that we could use to stop a wound from bleeding.

The first is a flowering herb called Yarrow. It is an attractive, low growing plant, with a feathery leaf and a lovely lace-like flower head that is normally white or lilac but, nowadays, also comes in peach, red and yellow. It is very easy to grow as it isn’t too fussy, plus it grows like a weed, sending trailing roots out into the garden, which mean the plants ‘pop up’ all over the place.

In Europe Yarrow grows wild in the fields and is known as the ‘Soldiers Herb’.

Yarrow has a lot of amazing properties, which I won’t go into now, the most interesting of which is its ability to stop bleeding. Hence the name ‘Soldiers Herb’. During the war the soldiers would chew the leaves of the plant to create a paste and then place it on a bullet, cut or other wound to stop the bleed.

While it isn’t necessary for you to ‘chew’ the leaves to create a poultice for a bleeding wound, the leaves do need to be ‘mashed up’ to allow the juices to flow. I’ve used it a couple of times with great success, although truth be told, the bleeds weren’t what I would consider excessive.

Just recently, though, I had a staff member who cut a big chunk out of her finger, while using a rotary cutter …. and she is a ‘bleeder’. I placed a few leaves, that I tore into smaller pieces, into a mortar bowl with a little boiling water to help soften the leaves and then crushed them for a few seconds with the pestle. I then placed the leaf poultice onto the wound and covered it with sterile gauze and a plaster. The blood could be seen through the plaster and then something amazing happened, it looked like the blood was being ‘sucked’ away from the plaster because it began to clear up. And the bleeding stopped. Within seconds! It worked that quickly. Amazing!

The second ingredient is something most of us have in our kitchen cupboard… Cayenne pepper! Although I must admit that I personally haven’t tried this. Apparently it will also stop a bleed within a few seconds, plus it will disinfect the wound, numb the area and promote healing.

Jethro Kloss in his famous book “Back to Eden” wrote only half a page on each herb discussed and yet dedicated a full TEN pages just to cayenne pepper. That has to say something about the amazing properties of this spice!

But back to the blood clotting…. a dash or two of cayenne pepper powder on a cut is a really simple thing to do, it is readily available and easy to keep on hand.

And while we are still here…another interesting read is a blog post entitled “Cayenne Pepper Stopped my Bleeding in 30 seconds” by Suzy Cohen which can be found at https://suzycohen.com/articles/cayenne-pepper-bleeding/

As always, my advice is, to do some research of your own. You will discover just how amazing natural healing can be.

Well, when all is said and done, it might just be worth while keeping cayenne pepper on hand… in your bag, satchel, brief case or car.

Have you tried any of these items to stop a bleed?

Would you try cayenne on a bleeding wound?