HERBALISM — RE-ESTABLISHING WITH THE PAST

[Guest guest]

http://www.redflagsweekly.com/extra/2003_sept04.html

 

 

HERBALISM — RE-ESTABLISHING LINKS WITH THE PAST

 

By RFD Columnist, Todd Caldecott

of Clinical Herbal Studies

Wild Rose College Of Natural Healing

Calgary, Alberta

 

Email: phyto

 

Website: http://www.wrc.net/phyto

 

Hello, my name is Todd Caldecott. I am a practicing clinical herbalist in

Calgary, Alberta, and a director of a 3-year clinical herbal program at Wild

Rose College of Natural Healing. I do a lot of teaching and writing, and as I

was frequently sending off tidbits and snippets of information to

Redflagsdaily.com, I was eventually asked me if I would like to write a column

on herbal medicine. Although I am constantly strapped for time, which apart from

my professional responsibilities includes a young family of two boys and now,

their little sister, I will do my best to regularly contribute. I would like to

hear from all of you about what you would want to know about herbalism. I will

attempt to include a Q & A section with each column, so I can receive your

feedback and answer a few of your questions.

 

As some of you may know, herbal medicine is one of the oldest forms of healing

practiced by humans, and one could argue, by all animals. Today the World Health

Organization estimates that up to 80% of all people rely upon traditional forms

of medicine, of which herbal medicine is the predominant form. At one time,

before the early advances in chemistry made by the alchemists of medieval

Europe, herbal medicine was the main form of healing in the Western world.

Little by little, as modern medicine evolved, the time-honored practices of

herbal medicine declined. I am increasingly seeing that my role as an herbalist

is to reconnect folks with the information previously known to their great

grandparents, their parents before them and so on, down throughout the ages to

the infancy of humanity. But it is a form of knowledge that was almost

completely lost to us. Our forebears were duped out of believing at least some

of the " Old Wives Tales, " and encouraged to embrace instead a pedantic

form of scientific medicine advanced by the social elite in expense medical

schools, whose authority came from awesome leather-bound tomes rather than

empirical practice. This had the effect of denying the laity any significant

personal responsibility or authority for their wellness. In some cultures that

never had that link severed, such as India and China, herbal medicine remains an

important aspect of everyday life, and most everyone knows herbs - which ones

make food taste good, which ones serve as medicine, and which ones, like garlic

and ginger, represent the best of both worlds.

 

To me, herbal medicine remains one of the world’s greatest untapped natural

resources, with millions of hours of empirical evidence behind it, with similar

practices represented in cultures as diverse as those in China, India, Africa

and Europe. This is why I hypothesize that herbal medicine is an innate feature

of humanity, born of an intimate and sensual relationship with the natural

world. Evidence of this is amply found among the most skilled herbalists, some

of whom only need to taste a plant to understand its potential medicinal

properties, without even knowing its botany (although this certainly helps!).

Similarly, the morphology of the leaf may suggest some physical ailment, such as

the herb Skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora), whose flowers indeed appear

skull-like when one looks down upon them. Skullcap is one of the best herbs in

the western herbal materia medica for nervous system disorders - everything from

addiction and withdrawal to epilepsy.

 

Unlike drugs, which are usually toxins with a small therapeutic window, most

herbs are a kind of " super " food, with usually very large therapeutic windows

that can be used with success in both very small and very large doses, depending

on the indication and patient. In fact, most herbs contain hundreds, if not

thousands of secondary plant metabolites, indicating that the potential for

synergism in even one plant is beyond our current scientific comprehension.

 

Increasingly herbs have also been shown to modulate gene expression, and so it

is with some degree of smug satisfaction that I am already practicing a kind of

gene-therapy, but unlike drugs currently being developed, it is a gentle therapy

that has already been in use for several thousand years now. It only remains for

science to investigate and analyze herbal medicine: to move beyond the

inflexible approach of the double-blind placebo controlled study that cannot

begin to explain how an herbal formula works; to move beyond proprietary

research in which herbs cannot be patented; and to move beyond the belief that a

medicine must be toxic and dangerous in order to " work. "