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Herbal Medicine

Most people are intrigued by herbal medicine. The idea that plants have actions in the body that can help our health has fascinated people for generations.

The media presentation of herbal medicine as either a miracle-worker or as dangerous is sadly often missing the point. Herbal medicines have been used for thousands and thousands of years - including until very recently here in the West - and in most parts of the world today they are the main form of healthcare, according to the World Health Organization, which advocates greater understanding of how plants can help people.

The pharmaceutical industry continues to find active constituents in plants, in fact around 60% of modern drugs came originally from plants. So why not just use chemical drugs?

Traditional Herbal Medicine differs from this use of plants as drugs in two very important ways:

• Firstly, herbalists recognize that constituents extracted from the plant and then produced synthetically, act differently to those same constituents found in nature in their complete form. The classic example of this is aspirin - the original compound being called salicylic acid, found in a number of plants including the willow and meadowsweet. Aspirin is now known to thin the blood, and is used for this purpose, but it also thins the lining of the stomach and can cause inflammation there. This is in complete contrast to plants containing salicylic acid, which do not thin the blood and are used to reduce inflammation in the stomach. Plants cannot be used like natural versions of drugs.
• Secondly, herbalists are interested in the function of your body as a dynamic ecosystem in its own right. That is to say that everything is linked to everything else, the body is 'intelligent' and will restore function and health if put under the correct circumstances.

Herbalists aim to help put those circumstances in place. That might mean taking herbal medicine, but also perhaps looking at what a person eats and drinks, how they live, as well as what they are thinking, because we are a composite of these factors, as well as our genetics.

So, when you hear of miracles being performed by plant medicines, it might be one of these unique moments when a person does just the right things at just the right time, and the body then gains enough force to throw off a long-standing or troublesome problem.

Most of the time however, herbalists simply try to work with the person, to understand their body as a whole, using herbs to correct malfunctions, gradually but steadily enabling the person to take back control of their health for themselves.

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