NO MYTHICAL BULLET
One of the frustrations I experience as a student of herbal medicine is the erroneous assumption that an herb can or should act like an allopathic drug: Pop! and all is {or feels} well.
One man, sitting behind a plate piled with sausage and bacon, asked me what herb could be taken for heartburn. My answer was a frank stare at his plate. He laughed, a little embarrassed. ‘Without changing my diet.’
Oh.—without changing your diet.
Many use vitamin and mineral supplements to ‘correct’ a terribly deficient diet they have no intention of improving. {I have seen advertisements that explicitly promote supplements this way, assuring customers that they won’t need to worry about eating healthy food!}
Likewise, we tend to regard medicine—conventional and herbal—as silver bullets that miraculously cure our bodies despite an unhealthy, imbalanced body environment.
In both cases we are attempting to work around a fundamental problem; real change is difficult. But as Wendell Berry wisely pointed out, we need to start looking for solutions that don’t cause new problems. And there are definite problems with shutting down the body’s alert system: those symptoms of dis-ease and imbalance.
Nutritional and botanical supplements nourish and support the body, but they aren’t magical, and they aren’t substitutes for the work of diet in establishing a healthy ‘terrain.’ When richly nourished by wholesome foods, the body has a better basis for maintaining good health and proper function.
Your best medicine is still food.
• cut echinacea root •
July 15, 2014