“White Coat”-ing Herbs: How to keep carefulness in care

There are many ways to use natural products in attempts to gain and keep our health and vitality. I believe that herbal medicine is People’s Medicine and that we have rich traditions that can address most of our complaints while they are still in the beginning stages. One of my goals is to share simple herbal remedies with our communities so that people feel confident treating themselves and families with early stage, common illnesses. If we catch our illnesses as they start, we can help redirect the body so that we don’t need the big guns of Western medicine. Being in touch with your body and noticing when it is going off course and teaching our children to do the same is key.

I am listing two approaches to herbal medicine below, ranking in gentler to stronger. If we can catch our illnesses early, all we may need is our backyard herbs for many complaints. If we ignore our symptoms, keep working too hard and refuse rest, we need to move onto Chinese Herbal Medicine. And if we keep ignoring, we may need our friends in the pharmaceutical world to help us.

Backyard Herbal Medicine & People’s Medicine

We have many herbs that are considered weeds right outside our doors. Some of them are more nutritive, like nettle, red clover and purslane. Others are more corrective like elderberry and mullein for coughs or catnip for fevers. If we use nutritive plants regularly in our diets, we will be ingesting some of the most nutritive plants we can eat and that have a much higher absorption rate than any pill you could ever take. Using herbs like elderberry when we start to feel ill, may just keep us on course so we don’t fall pray to full fledged illness. Early intervention is the key. The gentlest way to ingest these herbs and absorb as much as possible is through infusions.

Chinese Herbal Medicine

We use concentrated herbal formulas to correct an imbalance. There are gentle formulas that you can use as a tonic to maintain health if you have a chronic underlying issue, but generally speaking, we use these formulas to address a health complaint and create positive change. We look at the body holistically and try to understand the underlying cause of the complaint. Are the painful periods caused by blood stagnation or cold in uterus? The tongue is purple, so let’s treat blood stagnation. We don’t have a pill for painful periods, but we do have many formulas that address the patterns that manifest as painful periods.

So What Is “The White Coat -Washing Of Herbs”?

This is using herbs as if they are a pharmaceutical. When you go to the doctor, you want a pill to cure you. Many times that pill has side effects and may harm other systems in your body, but the benefits outweigh the risks. You have a symptom and you want the symptom addressed. Herbal traditions that have a heritage do not look at symptoms alone. For example, Chinese Medicine is not treating your migraine. It’s treating the imbalance in your body that can lead to migraines. One acupuncture point or one herbal formula is not the right fit for every migraine sufferer. I don’t use my needles that way, and I don’t use herbs that way. When we treat symptoms only, many times we are missing the underlying issues and the illness returns. We need to approach our bodies as complex webs that are effected by our emotions, the foods we eat, the weather and our environments. We need to encourage ourselves to stay within a delicate balance. It’s when we shift too far away from center, that illness sets in. When using herbs, let’s keep the holistic mindset close at hand so that instead of being mechanics to our bodies (replacing broken parts), we are gentle gardeners, keeping the weeds at bay and offering up healthy nourishment.

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