Four steps to your health empowerment

Empowering health with plants is a core aim of this site. Here are 4 principles that can guide you to making the best of herbal remedies for yourself. They are distillation of a half century experience of what plants can best do, and not do. 

It is amazing what your body can do to look after itself. When you get a cut or broken bone it heals, when you get an infection mostly it will clear up. You grew and developed from one cell, through embryo and childhood, to become YOU, without any doctor!

Indeed the body has a mind of its own, digestion even has its own nervous system! During sleep, we let go of conscious control, and the body switches on mind-numbingly complex metabolic processes, immune overhaul, detoxification and other housekeeping, and then we mostly get up and start another day, it’s a daily miracle!

 In clinical trials a drug is often tested against a dummy, which can still induce impressive ‘placebo effects’. The usual call is this is ‘mind over matter’. Of course what we think has a huge influence on our health. We can bring about improvements by raising expectations and especially by interacting with another person. However, down in the tissues the regulatory mechanisms, the immune system, and metabolic processes all work on healing anyway.

It’s called ‘self-organisation’. It’s seen in all complex living systems. This is transcendent science. There is mathematical magic here: Stuart Kauffman, a mathematician, biophysicist and physician called it “order for free“. ‘Complexity theory’ already underpins ecology, has transformed most scientific disciplines and is the basis of AI. But it has not yet had much impact on medicine!

When we are sick we first want to stop the symptoms. Mostly though these are signs that the body is battling to defend us.  Life is able to surmount the worst odds, it can push its way through barriers, like a dandelion through tarmac. As Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park “life, uh, it will find a way.“

 What if we had medicines that nudged life to find its way better, with more focus than placebos, to boost healing functions even further, so that we get over problems better?

Yup we do, always have done!

Lessons in practice over a half century that when a patient comes with a complaint the real problem always lies elsewhere, further back.

 We mostly go to a health professional to get rid of a symptom. Of course we do, it is sore, it stops us doing things, it may be disabling, exhausting or even dangerous. Modern medicines are designed to fight things and are even named so: anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, pain killers, immune suppressants, antacids … We have indeed gotten better at targeting, especially in cancer treatments, and such approaches extend many lives.

 Mostly though there is a problem. Attacking symptoms may relieve, but rarely correct. Symptoms are consequences; actually they are often how our defences feel!

 Sure antibiotics may eliminate bacterial infections, but now most infections are viral and antibiotics become useless, and the doc has no medicines to clear the harm viruses can do. If your joints or bowels are inflamed anti-inflammatories will do nothing for the causes. Indeed they can lead to long term complications.

 What if we see symptoms as signposts instead? Pause, and ask where they are pointing. No, even better, see our symptoms as our TEACHERS and aim to learn from them?

 A pain is the body’s way of telling us to take note. When there is obvious injury we tend, bandage and treat that. However pain may mark an inflammation (an ‘-itis’, arthritis, cystitis etc), a spasm of the blood vessels (eg menstrual and heart pain and migraines) or of the muscles. Can we understand these better?

 Viruses are always with us. We inhale them all the time. Our tissues and cells always contain them. Most of us have herpes and Epstein-Barr from early exposures. Why do most of us not suffer viral diseases? Maybe they give us trouble when our defences are down?

 Exhaustion tells us we definitely didn’t do it right. How to work back and do so?

 To help out here check Symptom Guides. There is much more help on this site. So let’s learn how to read our body when it is telling us where to go and fix that!

Plant remedies are different from conventional medicines. Once we understand 1) that the body is always healing itself and 2) most symptoms are signs that it is working harder to put things right (see last two steps), then yes, we can see a job here.

Herbal medicines are plants that people found DID things when they took them. They felt them calming or stimulating, heating or cooling (translation: improving circulation or digestion), they relieved spasm, colic or bloating, increased appetite, promoted bile-bowel or urinary eliminations, helped coughs do their job, increased energy, sealed wounds. As soon as humans could write they classified their medicines in these ways, not by diseases but by what they did when they took them: the pharmacology of experience!

 So now you can start using herbs yourself. You have problems to clear but look behind them as far as possible (see last post). Do you need calming, warming, cooling digestives, building up, clearing out? Check out our resources on plantguides.net (link in bio) or herbalreality.com for plants to choose. Then start out. Teas are good: low dose, and water extractions pick out the gentlest constituents (if root, wood or bark you will need gentle boiling to extract the goodness).

 How did that go down? Not sure? – move on to something else. Feel OK? Then double or triple the dose. Old medicinal doses were an ounce of dried herb to a pint of water, taken over one or two days. At these levels you should start feeling things shift. If anything starts feeling uncomfortable back off: if you use recommended safe plants and have no relevant allergies you should do no harm in the short term.

 The key is to trust your body to guide you. Much better than someone else telling you what to do. As you explore you learn what is right for you.

 Maybe start combining teas you have found helpful. When you find the plants that fit you will feel improvements in your symptoms and your confidence: “I can handle this!” You might then look at herbal extracts, check in with a practitioner perhaps for further support. Keep exploring. Keep learning.

I was once caught in a storm in a small fishing boat. We rushed back to harbour along with a dozen similar boats. Interesting! Some were bobbing about in the waves like corks, others were steady in the water. Big insight: we cannot control the waves and the world out there, but we can build and sail a better boat.

 Getting people stronger is the work of herbal practice. Sometimes patients’ stories are heart wrenching, prospects look grim, but each time we roll up our sleeves and get down to rebuilding, rebooting even. Plant medicines are ideal for this. Time and again we see energies renewed.

 Once it was understood that a bout of illness was only a first stage. It was important to recover properly. Now we often forget this: get back to work as quickly as possible; take the painkillers, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, stop the fever and get over it. What the elders would have said is that if you did not repair, the problem would return. And they were right: much modern ill-health is long-term, repeated infections perhaps, or ‘problems-upon-problems’: chronic inflammatory diseases, autoimmune conditions, chronic fatigue, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer. Poor food and lifestyles are key of course but unresolved ill-health maybe more so.

 Did you really recover from that virus infection?

 Convalescence was once normal: after illness you would rest up, find right levels of regular exercise, eat only nourishing foods, and … take ‘TONICS’, ie. medicines to help you repair. Most of the remedies in the herbal dispensary seem to support healthy functions, much more than targeting symptoms.

 Time and again we see herbs give people their energy back: less relapses, fewer infections, better sleep and digestion. This can start quickly and extend into the long term.

 If you explore the power of plants you can see how they can make you stronger, more resilient, fire up core functions, or calm down those that are overactive. You can build yourself a better boat! plantguides.net (link in bio) is a portal to vast resources to guide you in this wonderful world of natural health. Happy plant gathering!