How to Prepare Lagundi Extract for Cough Treatment, Vitex Negundo

Lagundi, a herbal medicine is becoming popular as treatment for cough. In fact, the Philippine Department of Health is actively promoting it as an alternative medicine. The herb is included in 10 herbal medicine approved by DOH.

If you are not lazy to prepare the tea or lagundi extact, make it as follows: Gather one-half cup of chopped fresh leaves and boil it in two cups of water for 10 to 15 minutes. Administer one-half cup three times a day. I hope a 15 minutes preparation would not hurt your busy schedule.

This herb has other medicinal uses by BPI:

• Efficacious in reducing inflammatory, rheumatic swellings of the joints and swellings of the testes due to suppressed gonorrhea or gonorrheal epidymitis and orchitis. Also effective for sprained limbs, contusions, leech bites, etc.
• The fresh leaves are put into an earthen pot, heated over a fire, and applied as hot as can be borne without pain; or the leaves are bruised and applied as a poultice to the affected part
• A pillow stuffed with the leaves is placed under the head for relief of catarrh and headache.
• The dried leaves, when smoked, are also said to remove foetid discharges and worms from ulcers.
• The leaves are applied as a plaster to an enlarged spleen.
• A decoction of the leaves as a warm bath in the puerperal state of women who suffer much from after-pains.
• Leaves, heated over fire, are applied with oil externally on wounds.
• The flowers are used in diarrhea, cholera, fever, and diseases of the liver, and are also recommended as a cardiac tonic. Powder form is administered in cases of discharge of blood from the stomach and bowels.
• The fruit is cure for headache, catarrh, and watery eyes, and when dried, is considered vermifuge.
• The seeds make a cooling medicine fro skin diseases and leprosy, and for inflammation of the mouth.
• An oil prepared with the juice is applied to the sinuses and to scrofulous sores. As a bath for rubbing on the head in glandular (tubercular) swellings of the neck. Also found to effect marvelous cures of sloughing wounds and ulcers.

Last few words: lagundi leaves have insecticidal properties.