A ranty piece on subtlety in herbal medicine

(Okay, it's not that ranty. But this is a passionately written piece about concepts I consider essential to the understanding of what's behind herbal medicine. Good herbal medicine.)

I call myself a slow learner. I'm not being derogatory, I choose to learn slowly.

I learn best intimately. I don't do well with facts & figures and nomenclatures, they just sit there on the surface of my brain. I need sensory experience of what I'm learning, that's what gets new ideas down into the interior regions where they can hook onto similars and stand facing opposites and sometimes sing harmony with whatever tune's been popular in the play list of my mind that day.

Mixing metaphors may be grammatically verboten, but, well, fuck the grammarians. If they can't follow a thought through all the twists and turns it might take that's their problem. Tidy, linear, quantitative thinking is well and good if you're looking to corral a concept, and tame it. So you can bob its tail and braid its mane and show it off. Me, I like my thoughts free to get into trouble, raid the neighbour's cornfield.

And I wonder, what are students of herbal medicine learning when they're taught along the lines of "berberine is the active ingredient in goldenseal"? Does molecular weight teach us anything we can use on the ground?

Really?



Here, taste this bright yellow powder, it's goldenseal root. Wait, not that much! Just taste a few grains on the very tip of your tongue. Bitter, eh? Sit with that taste for a minute .. now tell me, what's going on inside your mouth? It's moistening, yes, and the taste is spreading throughout. And now there's a hint of sweet, right? Give it another minute .. now, what else is going on? Can you feel a sensation anywhere else in your body? Yeah, amazing isn't it, just by touching your tongue to those few grains, something opens up in your gut, a sort of emptiness, the 'all-gone' feeling, we call it. How can we take advantage of that? Who might need it?

What does it matter to the student looking up at the teacher at the whiteboard, that goldenseal grows only in the understory of a virgin forest? That you have to look down to find it?

What difference is there between learning the chemistry of goldenseal and being on one's knees in wet humus with the smells of moss and bark in the nostrils? Would we prescribe goldenseal capsules so often if we knew how much it's needed by that forest or would we think more deeply about finding other ways to treat bloat?

Once you experience it, you understand that it's the taste that initiated that cascade of change within your body, stimulating first the saliva, then the other gastric juices. That doesn't happen without the co-operation of the tastebuds. Such a tiny amount sure did initiate a big reaction, didn't it? So how much goldenseal would be needed, then? How often? In what form? Tomorrow, we'll taste dandelion, both the leaf and the root, fresh, dried and in tincture form. We'll compare them to each other, and then to the goldenseal. Today's homework - take note of how you feel for 24 hrs following that one taste of goldenseal powder. Please note both your physiological and emotional responses. Take note of any dreams as well. Class dismissed.

No one learns what needs to be learned about any herb by reading or passively watching a lecture any more than they can learn what needs to be learned about sex by watching porn.

Good writing or lectures will whet the appetite for deeper, hands-on learning though, so there's a time and a place for them, just as there's a time and a place for porn (yes, I just said that). Yet what looks good on paper (or the screen) just isn't right for everyone. It isn't much of a leap to say that those who push their super-herbs and extracts as cure-alls are no better than pimps. Both take something good, strip away the messy bits like morality, love and relationship, and turn it into a commodity that can harm both body and spirit.

The relationship between medicine plant and human is as intimate as sex. And as healing. Or as destructive. There has to be something akin to love there - or at least a deep understanding of self and other. For the relationship between medicine plant and human to work on all the levels that it should, then, that 'other' must be understood not as an it but a who.

To stretch my analogy (perhaps to the breaking point!) consider the people you love and who love you. Do you ever ask yourself why you love them? Why they love you? (That second questions's even tougher, isn't it?) I would suggest that when the love is real and strong and of the 'through thick and thin' variety there is no answer to the why of that love. It just is. There is, perhaps, an answer to how you love them. How they love you. Love, then, in the active sense, something we do, not just something we feel.

It's actually kinda the same with herbal medicines. It's not about the why (this plant contains chemical x, so we call it a sialagogue) but how (the saliva comes rushing forth, initiating digestion in the mouth, where it should start, which leads the body itself to make further adjustments downstream).

I know that's subtle, but this is a subtle field. That's why we need all our senses, why we have to taste and touch and go out there and sit with the plants where they live. Otherwise, we may as well let the drug companies decide what's best for our health.

When we turn to herbal medicine, when we call it "taking our health into our own hands", we ought to be able to mean it literally. When choosing our medicines or the practitioner who will choose them for us, we might do well to consider it with the same kind of care as we use when choosing our most intimate human companions.

I used to want to coax everyone to reach for herbs before prescriptions; now I'm changing my tune. I watch how current practice is turning plants into "its", resources to be stripped down as our tidy, linear, quantitative thinking sees fit. It's allopathic medicine dressed up in a green coat rather than a white one. Forced into capsules, plants become drugs.

Period.

But current practice blithely disregards, or pays lip service to, the cumulative knowledge of the traditional cultures and their uses of the plant medicines. Their assumption - that our clever discovery of the chemicals within is superior to centuries of careful practice - is hubris.

BUT - and here is reason for hope - although the 'old ways' have mostly been lost as the cultures that used them have disappeared, there are still some who go to the plants themselves, just as was done all through time, and learn slowly and with respect how they may benefit us. Not only do we learn how to heal ourselves physically, then, but also how to heal the relationship between human and environment. That environment becomes something more than a backdrop, more than resources, more even than a Disney-fied sentimental treasure.

It becomes a world full of individual lives. Not "life-forms", even that is too Star Trek-y and abstract.

Lives being lived. Who, not what.

That's a whole different ball of wax.