Herb Spotlight: Cayenne Pepper

    Call me crazy, but I am in love with cayenne pepper. It's brutal, but when it comes to herbal efficiency, it's fantastic.

    How do I know?

    Yesterday, whilst cutting vegetables with a mandolin slicer to make a salad, I chopped the tip of my thumb partially off. Now, to be fair, the wound isn't as bad as that makes it sound--the injury is a flap of skin less than half the size of a dime that would threaten to wobble around on the tip of my thumb if it hadn't sealed itself very nicely after a night's sleep.

    What does this have to do with cayenne pepper, you may ask?

    In traditional, historical herbal knowledge, cayenne is a useful herb to use to stop bleeding--sources I've read and heard about claim that ingesting it or dumping it on a wound can stop the bleeding from a bad cut in ten seconds flat. If you think to question these sources, let me tell you that my experience with this spicy mouth-punisher fits the anecdotes I've heard. I got the cut, promptly stuck my thumb in my mouth to coat it with saliva (which, according to some sources, also has healing properties) and sucked the blood away while I fetched the cayenne powder and a glass of water.

    Half a teaspoon of cayenne powder later, the bleeding had stopped completely. In fact, I was still trying to work caked chunks of spicy tongue-death off my teeth long after the bleeding had stopped. Today, the flap of skin is completely sealed down, and while it looks ugly, it barely hurts, and I'm primarily keeping a Band-Aid on it to remind myself that I have done something to my digit.

    If you've not read my other herb spotlight about nettles, you may wonder what this has to do with writing, because this blog is primarily a writing and geek-out blog.

    The fact is, in fantasy, main characters often get some seriously nasty injuries, and if you don't have a lot of herbal knowledge, it can be really hard to know what they'd do to deal with it. Some authors have even felt the need to invent fantastical plants, animals, and substances with healing properties because they don't know that there are herbs in the real world that do pretty much the same thing. (And that's not a bad thing, because fantastical plants and animals are awesome, but I personally prefer to see if there's a real-world thing that does what I want before I invent something, because inventing things can be complicated.)

    If you have a character who is at risk of bleeding out despite your best efforts to keep them alive, and they're in a situation where their having a teaspoon or so of dried cayenne pepper flakes is reasonable and plausible, I personally think you can't go wrong with adding it to their arsenal.

    Whatever modern medical science might say about eating spicy food to stop bleeding, or worse, putting cayenne powder directly onto a bleeding wound (which is another acceptable approach among herbalists, but not one I wanted to try yesterday), it works. I can fully attest to the fact that this bit of old herb lore works. My thumb was bleeding Quite A Lot while I had it in my mouth, but once I took it out and ate my cayenne, I only lost one or two more drops of blood and then it was done. No scabbing, just a cessation of blood loss.

    At any rate, even if you don't write, cayenne has practical use. If you like to go adventuring, or have a job where injuries aren't uncommon, maybe buy some cayenne powder and carry a pill pouch full of it wherever you go, just in case. Frankly, I might start doing that myself.

    If you decide to try it, I will warn you that it sucks. Sure, I did a stupid and filled my stomach near to bursting with water instead of drinking milk (which theoretically kills the burn better), but that stuff burns. Honestly, the cayenne hurt worse than the cut did! But it did what I wanted it to, and I can already tell that my thumb is healing nicely. Also, the cayenne thoroughly shocked my system, and after the initial burning wore off, I spent probably ten minutes shivering and giggling hysterically before breaking down in tears--and no, they weren't tears of pain, because the cut had stopped hurting and the burn was pretty much gone, and I have no idea why I started crying except I was in shock.

    If you do write, having an herb-wise character who carries a supply of cayenne on their person might not be a bad idea. And hey, now that I've described my experience, you have some idea of what your poor injured character can expect.

    Do be aware, though, that not everybody responds the same way to shock. If my mom hadn't cut herself the same way I did when we were making sauerkraut two weeks ago, and I hadn't spent some time thinking she'd have had an easier time stopping the bleeding if she'd used cayenne, I probably wouldn't have been thinking clearly enough to go for the cayenne first instead of staring at the wound in surprise. Some characters, when confronted with a serious injury, are going to just sit there and stare at it numbly, even if they technically have the knowledge of what they should do about it. Additionally, the worse the injury is, the more likely I think it is that they'll lose their head and forget what they should do.

    If you can't justify your characters having cayenne but still want a real-life herbal solution for an injury, do some research into shepherd's purse. I've heard that it can be used for a similar purpose, but unfortunately I don't have any personal experience with it. Somehow I feel like it wouldn't work as fast as cayenne does (though I'm not sure why I think that, since I haven't any evidence that it doesn't work as fast as cayenne), but at the very least it's going to be a lot nicer going down.

    ... or does shepherd's purse have to go down when you use it? I don't actually know.

    Guess I've got some research to do, and probably another herb spotlight to write sometime. :) 

    Edit: Because I was curious after the initial write-up of this post, I did some research to see what science thinks of this remedy. Here's what I found:

    Basically, scientists and doctors will say eating cayenne or putting it on a wound to stop the bleeding is a really, really dumb idea. They haven't identified any substances or chemicals that would cause cayenne to stop bleeding, and putting hot pepper on a wound definitely doesn't sound like a logical thing to do. That's fine. These folks do the research; I just eat cayenne and pray it works, then write a blog post when it does. :)

    All I've got is anecdotal evidence that it works. I have no idea why, and science apparently doesn't know, either; but I've seen, felt, and read about cayenne working enough times that I'm willing to recommend it to others based on anecdotes.

    Love you lots, science; I hope that one day we'll understand the why behind the anecdotes. :)