Devil's Club-The Adversary

While being a very useful plant...especially to the Alaska natives...Devil's Club is wicked for the unsuspecting.

Depending on which part is used you can get tea, oils, juice, etc. from it. I have a patient on Prince of Wales Island who make gallons of juice and claims it will help diabetes and even cancer.

I usually don't post eye pictures here, but this patient was too interesting. He was flown in to the clinic in Klawock from a logging camp.

He had been hit in the face with Devil's Club while walking in the woods. His eye was red, light sensitive, watery, and hurt. Eventually, Jason Barnes a 4th year optometry student

who worked with me that week flipped over the upper eye lid and we found a bit of a thorn of the plant.

When I went to pull it out...it wouldn't move. Then we found the other end of the thorn on the outside of the lid. So it had penetrated the eye lid. We had to send him to an ophthalmologist in Juneau. The thorn scratched the front of the eye every time he blinked or moved his eye. Here is the Wikipedia article on Devil's Club.

Devil's Club is also a good looking plant. It grow pretty tall, has big leaves which are a bright yellow in the fall, and produces bright red berries in the fall.

So avoid it.