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Natural Herbal Healing
Although herbal medicine has existed since the dawn of time, our knowledge of how plants actually affect human physiology remains largely unexplored. Since the dawn of time, the life of humans and that of plants have been inextricably woven together, with every aspect of a human being's life being dependent upon the plants. For tens of thousands of years, plants have provided us with clothing, shelter, food, fuel, textiles and countless other necessities of living. Human beings breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. In turn, plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen--our most precious resource. If there were no plants, there would be no life. It's as simple as that. This is a physical reality that too many fail to recognize in our modern lives.
In general, herbal preparations are thought to have three major advantages: lower cost, fewer side-effects and medicinal effects which tend to normalize physiological function. When used most effectively, the mechanism of action of an herb will often correct the underlying cause of a disorder. In contrast, a synthetic drug is often designed to alleviate the symptom or effect without addressing the underlying cause. Interestingly, research has often shown for many plants that the whole plant or crude extract is more effective than isolated constituents.
The term "herb" refers to a plant used for medicinal purposes. In 1985, the World Health Organization estimated that about 80 % of the world's population relies on herbs for their primary health care needs. To the uninformed, herbs are generally thought of as ineffective medicines used prior to the advent of more effective synthetic drugs. Of the drugs in today's modern pharmaceutical armamentarium, approximately 65% were originally derived from plant-based chemicals. Still, 25% of prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs continue to be derived from plant materials.
Over the last one hundred years, Americans have lost touch with their herbal medicines, and the United States is unique in being one of the only nations to have almost completely lost its herbal tradition. However, we are in the midst of an herbal renaissance. It has been estimated that 70% of all medical doctors in France and Germany regularly prescribe herbal preparations.
There is an estimated 250,000 species of plants on earth. There are approximately 121 prescription drugs in use today in different countries. Of these 121, 74% were derived from only 90 species of plants. Only 5,000 plants, a fraction of the world's plants, have been studied scientifically. Yet, humankind has already reaped enormous benefits. Herbal medicines have the potential of providing Americans with lower cost and safer alternatives to many of the excessively expensive, often dangerous pharmaceuticals commonly used. Adverse effects caused by pharmaceuticals are responsible for approximately one-third of all hospital admissions. Once in the hospital, 35% of patients can expect to experience an adverse drug effect.
Herbs have long intrigued us--and for good reason. Because of their potential as food and medicine, they have enjoyed a special relationship with humans throughout the ages. To our ancestors, knowledge of herbs meant survival. Druids revered the oak and mistletoe, both rich in medicinal attributes.
In the Eastern world, physicians wrote tomes on herbal remedies, some prized to this day as authoritative medical sources. Later, the Greeks and Romans cultivated herbs for medicinal, as well as culinary uses. Hippocrates, considered the father of Western medicine, prescribed scores of curative herbs and taught his students how to use them. The search for precious herbs and spices led Europeans to the New World. There they found scores of new plants, which they brought back with them to the courts of England, Spain and France.
The development of pharmaceutical drugs some 100 years ago changed our focus from herbs and natural healing to the new "wonder drugs." Medical practice turned away from botanicals and embraced these new chemical-based medicines. In addition, the Industrial Revolution meant urbanization, and city dwellers, which now had limited access to gardens, welcomed the convenience of shopping for, instead of growing, their medicines and foods.
We have seen, in recent years, a renaissance. Pharmaceutical drugs proved not to be the magic bullets we'd hoped for. Seeking ways to feel better without the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, countless people are rediscovering herbs as natural remedies.
No group of plants is more difficult to define than an herb. In general, an herb is a seed-producing plant that dies down at the end of the growing season and is noted for its aromatic and/or medicinal qualities. Among the most utilitarian of plants, herbs lend themselves to a seemingly endless array of medicinal preparations. And you don't have to be a pharmacist--or a shaman--to make them.
Like other healing traditions, herbal medicine recognizes and respects the forces of nature: Health is seen as the proper balance or rhythm of natural forces while disease is an imbalance of these forces. Because the forces of nature are not easily grasped and manipulated, herbal traditions turn to the earth's masters of natural balance and symmetry--plants. Plants are ideal biochemical medicines. We have built-in systems for metabolizing plants and using their energies. But our bodies have difficulty metabolizing and excreting synthetic chemical medicines.
And think about the negative terms used to describe the actions of synthetic pharmaceuticals: they suppress, they fight, they inhibit. They do little to support overall health. Medicines made from plants, on the other hand, tend to nourish the body without taxing it, to support the body system rather than suppressing it.
Most plants contain a dozen or more different constituents. The idea that we can entirely duplicate the action of a plant by simply synthesizing a single active constituent is misguided. Part of a plant's healing effect is due to the synergy or sum total of all the constituents. To isolate certain constituents is to rob a plant of its deeper healing potential. This concept of a healing vitality or life force in the whole plant is central to the tradition of herbal medicine and is recognized in all the ancient medical systems.
Plants offer us nourishment and healing actions that synthetic medications cannot. Many herbs have shown profound healing effects when used as tonics over long periods. Furthermore, synthetic drugs are combined with waxes, stabilizers, tableting agents, and coatings. Plants, on the other hand, are complex collections of naturally occurring and nourishing substances that may have vital roles in health, including vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, fiber, and bioflavonoids. Synthetic drugs also cause side effects and long-term toxicities that are rare in plants. Botanical medications restore the body's processes to normal function; synthetic drugs can push these processes to unnecessary extremes.
Herbal medicine will certainly play a major role in the medicine of the future. Modern medicine has only existed for a relatively short period as compared to herbal medicine, and the attitude of modern medicine is akin to that of a teenager's "know-it-all" attitude. As modern medicine matures, gaining more biochemical knowledge and understanding about health and disease, it is adopting therapies that are more natural and less toxic. Lifestyle modification, stress reduction, exercise, dietary changes and many other traditional naturopathic therapies are becoming much more popular in standard medical circles. ("Maybe Mom and Dad do know something after all!") This illustrates the paradigm shift that is occurring in medicine. What was once scoffed at is now becoming generally accepted as an effective alternative. In fact, in most instances, these natural alternatives offer significant benefit over standard medical practices.
This difference is due to the growing sophistication of herbal medicine. With the continuing advancement in science and technology, there has been a great improvement in the quality of herbal medicines available and in the understanding of their optimal clinical utilization. Improvements in cultivation techniques coupled with improvements in quality control and standardization of potency will continue to increase the effectiveness of herbal medicines.
"And God said, behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."
"And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat; and it was so."
Genesis 1:29:30
Since the dawn of recorded history, plants have been the primary source of medicine for people throughout the world. Even today, plants are the major source of medicine in most countries. Those plants which are used as medicines have been referred to as herbs for over 4,000 years by the cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean, the word herb being a derivation of herbe and the Latin word herba.
The science and art of using plants for healing is known as herbology. Herbalists use medicinal plants (herbs) to effect changes in body systems to allow the body to heal itself. The herbs are either ingested orally or applied externally. According to the medical definition, medicine is anything which enters the body and alters its structure or function. Using that definition, all foods and even water and air could be considered medicines. To a lay person the term medicine is confused with drugs and connotes a dangerous and probably toxic substance that must be used with extreme care and only under professional supervision.
In the United States, the FDA classifies herbs as foods when no claims are made that the herb will cure, treat, mitigate or prevent any disease. When medicinal claims are made for an herb the herb is regulated as a medicine. Companies selling herbs as food cannot publish any material relating the use of their products to diseases without risking legal prosecution. Hence, herbs are sold as foods but used as medicines. Although herbs are sold as foods there has been very little material available on their nutritional value. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, said "Let your food be your medicine and let your medicine be your food."
In the early 1800's a system of herbal therapy developed by the pioneer herbalist Samuel Thomson was very popular. This method of herbal practice considered herbs as an aid to assisting the body's own natural ability to heal itself. Thomson considered his medicinal herbs to be of the same order as foods. Thomson's system focused on aiding the eliminative function of the body and the regeneration of tissue. These two actions are known to most herbalists as cleansing and toning.
Cleansing the body and building up the health of body systems have been the major goal in much of the world's herbal practice. Herbal therapy is entirely different than drug therapy. In drug therapy, the practitioner seeks to describe specific causes for disease and then seeks to make specific chemical changes in the body to correct the cause. In herbal therapy, the practitioner views disease as a general imbalance of the body. Herbology focuses on assisting the self-healing process of the body. The herbalists approach is more often nutritional than medicinal. Orthodox medicine attempts to effect a cure by killing an infection with powerful inorganic drugs or by the injection of dangerous serums or vaccines. The herbalist and natural healer, on the other hand, recognizes that disease, excluding trauma, is the result of violation, intentional or otherwise, of the laws of nature; that germs cannot exist in harmful numbers for any length of time in or on tissue whose life and vitality is high. So that the only way the disease can be overcome is to aid nature in the healing process by the elimination of the poisons and toxins through the body's natural channels, allowing the vitality to return to the body.
The various elements (especially minerals) in the herbs are their primary virtue. Herbs support the natural function of the body by supplying "organic" elements to the organs and systems of the body. Just as the cells which compose the different organs and tissues select only those elements from the blood which are their natural foods and without which, it would not be possible to constantly maintain their peculiar and particular chemical constitution. So, also, do the herbs which supply those particular chemical constituents to the animal or human body select only those elements from the soil which build or maintain their various and peculiar chemical constituents.
Herbs are foods that build up the health of the various body systems rather than just being medicines, which correct specific symptoms. Many of the plants sold as medicinal herbs have been used as food by various groups of people at one time or another. For example, dandelions, marshmallow, comfrey and alfalfa have all been cultivated for food by various peoples. Hawthorne berries, used by today's herbalists as a stimulant for the heart were originally used by African tribes as a staple flour.
In Ayurveda, the oldest known system of healing from India, pharmacology and nutrition are treated as the same science. The use of spices (such as various curry mixes) in India was not done solely to provide flavor to food. Spices were and are still used to balance the food medicinally to help prevent illness. While some plants may be considered to be foods for normal consumption, there are other plants which are strictly medicinal. Many of these plants are sources for modern drugs--such as digitalis from the fox-glove plant. There are plants such as garlic, ginger and capsicum, which can be used for both food and medicine. Thus, herbs and spices are considered "health foods" in traditional cultures; they are medicinal foods.
The ancient physician Avicenna categorized plants according to their degree of action in speeding up or slowing down the metabolic process. He indicated a plant might be heating (meaning it sped up the metabolic process) or cooling (meaning it slowed down the metabolic process). He then subdivided the heating and cooling groups into one of four degrees. A plant might be heating or cooling in the first, second, third or fourth degree.
Substances that affect the body in the first degree have no discernable effect on the body, that is, they are totally overwhelmed by the natural forces of the body. The second degree plants have some effect on the body, but in the end are overwhelmed by the body. Third degree substances act on the body and overwhelm the natural forces of the body. Fourth degree substances are poisons and usually alter the metabolism so far as to cause death. These substances cannot be used as medicines except in very minute quantities and with great skill. Traditional systems of medicine have not viewed nutrition and medicine as two separate subjects, as we do in our modern natural healing culture. Instead, they regard them as two ends of a long spectrum of plant substances available to aid the maintenance and restoration of health.
Because of modern nutritional science we tend to think of foods as substances containing just fats proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, but the truth is that all natural foods are complex mixtures of chemical substances. For example, a food we think of as relatively simple, the potato contains over a hundred and fifty known chemical substances and many unknown chemical substances as well. Among other things potatoes contain the solanine alkaloids, oxalic acid, arsenic, tannins and nitrate, all of which have no recognized nutritional significance to humans. Just one of the components of an orange the orange oil contains 42 chemicals, including 12 alcohols, 9 aldehydes, 2 esters, 14 hydrocarbons and 4 ketones. All fruits and vegetables and other natural substances are similarly complex.
Many of these substances in isolated form would be toxic. For example, the alkaloid solanine found in potatoes interferes with the transmission of nerve impulses and carrots contain a potent nerve poison called carototoxin. Fortunately, the amount of toxins contained in these foods are extremely small and cause no ill effect when ingested in normal sized food portions. Other chemicals found in everyday foods have medicinal qualities. Oats contain an alkaloid which is mildly stimulating and antispasmodic, which explains why an infusion of oats was used in times past as a nerve tonic. Cranberry juice is a New England folk treatment for urinary infections. Researchers found it contains a substance that is converted into a urinary antiseptic.
All natural foods contain substances which affect the structure or function of the body. Most contain about 500 to 1,000 mg. of such active compounds per kilogram or about 0.1%. Thus, all natural foods have some medicinal action, however weak it may be. In fact the only foods which do not contain these substances are refined foods like white flour and white sugar. The herbs we call foods have an abundance of fuel and structural components while medicinal herbs have a greater abundance of those other chemicals that alter structure or function.
Looking back through history and observing how nutritional research has developed shows that cures that were once thought of as medicinal are now thought of as nutritional. For example, many years ago there was a dreaded disease called scurvy. In 1753, Dr. James Lind, a physician in the British Royal Navy, published the results of his experiments that showed that the introduction of lemon or lime juice into the sailor's diets would prevent and cure this dreaded disease. His proposal was rejected by the Lords of the Admiralty, and after four years of unsuccessfully trying to convince them, Dr. Lind remarked that "there are certain persons who just will not let themselves be convinced that a terrible disease can be cured easily, yes, that it can even be prevented."
It was 42 years before Lind received recognition for his discovery when lime juice became an optional feature in sailor's diets. It took another 88 years before this simple food supplement was made mandatory and another 36 years before vitamin C was isolated. Thus, the chemical substance vitamin C can be thought of as a medicine in that it both cures and prevents scurvy, but as we can see it took a long time for this fact to become recognized. Today a whole new branch of medicine is developing known as orthomolecular medicine which deals with the use of nutrients in the treatment of diseases. Results are not always a result of correcting deficiencies; in some cases it may be that the supplements simply act as catalysts to stimulate certain natural functions in the body. Our knowledge of nutrition is really still in its infancy.
In times past, a tea made of rose hips or pine needles was used to treat scurvy. At one time this use of herbs to cure a disease would have been thought of as medicinal, but now, since we know these plants are sources of vitamin C, we would think of the cure as a nutritional one. In recent years a number of "non-nutritive" substances are becoming recognized as important to good health. A recent example of this is fiber. Fiber is the material in plants that cannot be broken down by the digestive process. Hence it provides no fuel, no structure-building elements and no nutrients for biochemical reactions. But this indigestible fiber in foods has important health benefits. Adequate fiber helps protect the body by binding toxic wastes in the bowel to prevent their absorption into the blood stream. Dietary fiber has been shown to lower blood cholesterol levels, slow the release of sugar into the blood, bulk-out and lubricate the stool to help maintain "regularity," and most recently to have a protective effect against certain types of cancer by removing the toxic burden from the immune cells in the body.
In any organism, be it plant or animal, the process of life is sustained by various chemical reactions that take place continually within the cell. Thus, in one aspect, life can be thought of as a series of highly controlled chemical changes. These chemical processes take two basic forms, the building up of tissues--anabolism--and the breaking down of substances to provide fuel and building blocks for anabolism--catabolism. Collectively, these chemical reactions are known as metabolism.
Although both plants and animals carry on similar biochemical processes inside the cells, animals (including human) are different from plants in how they obtain their foods. Plants build up their own food from small molecules whereas animals take large molecules and break them down. All our nutrition and energy comes from plants either directly, by eating the plants themselves, or indirectly, by eating animals which have eaten the plants. Those substances we think of as ordinary foods contain an abundance of basic nutritional elements, fats, proteins and carbohydrates. These are the essential compounds used to provide fuel for the body and components for building the structure. These plants also contain vitamins and minerals which are needed to catalyze body processes. Other plants contain very little of the basic nutritional elements, although they may contain substantial quantities of trace nutrients.
One out of every four prescriptions issued in the United States was derived from an herb. When over-the-counter medications are included with prescription drugs, the percentage of drugs derived from or containing an herb rises to well over fifty percent. For example, the most widely used drug in the world, aspirin, is based on the naturally occurring salicin in white willow bark. The entire class of compounds called amphetamines is based on the alkaloids found in the Chinese ephedra herb. Pseudo ephedrine and ephedrine, are the basis for most over-the-counter decongestants, including Sudafed, Actifed and many others. The alkaloids in golden seal root were formerly used to provide the astringent and antiseptic action in eye drop formulas, like Murine. The bark of the Cascara sagrada tree is an effective laxative, with so few side effects that to date, no synthetic preparation can match it.
In order to sell garlic as an antibiotic a company would have to pass FDA testing requirements or prove garlic was safe and effective. Among other things, they would have to specify which microorganisms garlic was effective against and at what dosage level. The major problem is that once a company completed all this research, it would have no way to recover its investment. Anyone could go buy garlic at the grocery store for a few cents or grow it in their backyard. No one would buy garlic at the inflated prices the company would have to sell it at to pay for the research. Hence, plant drug researchers look to isolate chemicals which can be modified and patented. Digitalis is a powerful heart stimulant employed widely in conventional medicine. The drug appears today in a purified form but is still extracted from the Digitalis purpurea plant commonly called Foxglove. Long before Digitalis drug was developed, herbalists used Foxglove herb to treat dropsy and what we term today congestive heart failure.
The herbalist is alerted to a potential overdose of Foxglove when a patient complains of irritation in his stomach which always occurs before the onset of arrhythmias. Nature, it seems, has provided a natural protection against an overdose of Foxglove herb by causing ones stomach to burn, warning him to stop taking the herb or he will get sicker. Lobelia is often criticized as a toxic plant because it contains lobeline and its related alkaloids which, when acting alone, are central nervous system depressants that can cause feeble pulse, coma and death. In the proper dosage, however, these alkaloids relax the body and especially the respiratory system, making them potentially useful in treating asthma, general tension and a spastic colon.
Nature has built an overdose protection device into lobelia that causes an overdose to be expelled from the body by violent emesis (vomiting). One of the common side effects of chemical diuretics is that they flush potassium out of the body and often a potassium supplement is required for long-term use of a diuretic. Plant diuretics, on the other hand, often contain potassium in significant amounts, hence avoiding this potentially harmful side effect. Valerian root is another example of synergy within plants. Valerian is an herb with sedative qualities. It is also high in calcium, in fact, the highest herb tested in that element. High levels of calcium in the blood have a sedative effect on the nervous system.
Typically, an average person will not consider herbal therapy until traditional allopathy cannot palliate nor placate her anymore. The herbalist then begins to purge the effects of the western diet and sedentary lifestyle from the body using herbs, exercise, stress management and other lifestyle changes required to help the body heal itself. Ideal health requires a commitment to a complete lifestyle where optimum health is achieved by balancing the body, mind and spirit. The oral ingestion of herbs is only one part of optimal health.
More and more people are using herbs to achieve optimum health and to prevent disease conditions than ever before though. Ever since Samuel Thompson introduced composition tea over 160 years ago, the focus of modern western herbology has been to eliminate toxins from the various organ systems of the body, thus allowing the body to better heal itself. This purification process is accomplished by the use of aromatic and bitter herbs which stimulate (usually by irritation) the purging mechanism of a particular system. These herbs promote evacuation of the bowel, urination (diuresis), vomiting (emesis), sweating (diaphoresis), and coughing up (expectoration), that results in the removal of toxins from all body systems. Once the toxic substances are eliminated from the body, herbalists use astringent, mucilaginous and nutritive herbs, to revitalize body systems by soothing, tightening and strengthening inflammed and flaccid tissues. The purification and revitalizing process achieved by the use of herbs is aimed largely at the digestive system.
Herbal therapies also affect the circulatory, urinary, respiratory, skeletal and nervous systems. Organs of the body such as the liver, kidney, stomach, thyroid and heart are also targeted specifically by combinations of herbs. And, most significantly, adverse effects due to pharmaceuticals are directly responsible for up to 250,000 deaths every year. Utilizing low-cost herbal medicines would result in potential savings into the billions of dollars, and a significant improvement in quality of life. Maintaining the status-quo of our current medical monopoly deprives Americans of hundreds of safe and effective therapies that can be used to improve the health of our nation.