Remedy: Ancient Medicine for Modern Illness Season 1: Episode 1 The Quest for Lost Medicine
Rosemary Gladstar: Healing is really about self-empowerment. No matter what's going on, we use doctors and herbalists, and homeopaths really to help guide us, and to help empower us to make the right decisions. But when we hand over our power to them, we become at the mercy of everything around us, and we're not steering our own boat or reigning our own horses. We flounder that way, I think.
Ellen Kamhi: These plants work. They have worked traditionally in traditional medicine for thousands of years everywhere all over the world, in every culture. Look at yourself. Look in the mirror. See your grandmother and grandfather. Wherever they came from, there was herbal medicine.
Nick Polizzi: Hello and welcome to Remedy, Ancient Medicines for Modern Illness. My name is Nick Polizzi, and I'm going to be your host for these next nine episodes. Each day, we'll be diving into a specific illness or health condition, and exploring the powerful herbs and green medicines that have shown tremendous potential in treating it. You will meet a number of the world's best alternative medicine experts from herbalists and naturopaths, to leading scientists, researchers, and doctors.
These remarkable individuals come from a variety of backgrounds, but they all agree on one thing. There is an entire realm of human health that the western world is largely unaware of, and I'll let you in on a little secret. It all starts with herbs. For the past fifteen years, I've been on a quest to discover natural solutions to the world's most devastating illnesses. Now, a common theme in the experts you're about to meet is that like me, many of them were once sick, and they reached the end of their rope trying to heal either themselves or a loved one.
Out of desperation, they began trying alternatives to modern medicine and came across these innate and effective herbal remedies. They called this the "wounded healer phenomenon." I thought I was alone. It turns out I wasn't, and neither are you. Over the next nine episodes, you will see that there are answers to the world's most challenging illnesses.
Did you know that 80% of the world still turns to natural medicine first before they ever consider using a drug or surgery? The most used form of this natural medicine by a landslide is herbs. I was stunned to find out that there are green medicines out there that are being used to treat every health challenge known to man from stress and anxiety, to insomnia, to Parkinson's disease, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, to name a few.
Many developed countries around the world are beginning to make herbs a medical standard in their hospitals. Why? Because there's overwhelming evidence that they work. By the end of this series, you'll have a whole new perspective on the power of the plant world to heal us. What if there's an answer to what you or your loved one is suffering from that modern medicine doesn't know about, or worse yet—isn't letting you know about?
Within these episodes, I think you're going to be stunned, amazed, and most importantly, filled with hope for the future of our health and well-being as humans. We start tonight's journey with two simple questions. One, what is herbal medicine? Two, how long have we humans been using it?
Daniel Vitalis: When we talk about herbalism, and we put that "ism" on the end of it, it starts to sound like it's just one more ism on the big menu of isms that we get to select from like, how are we going to live? As if it wasn't a fundamental thing to being an animal on this planet. Especially one that's an omnivore, or some animals are herbivores, so they have no choice but to engage in herbalism every single day. We're omnivores. We are engaged in herbalism every single day, and we always will be.
It's almost impossible even if we look at people who ancestrally lived in a high arctic, like the Inupiat Indians or Inuit peoples who ate—the huge percentage of their diet, like over 90% of their diet—from animal food. Still, the plants that they imbibe would make them, in some sense, herbalists. So, we are naturally herbalists. We always have been practicing herbalism. In the last, let's say, ten thousand years or so, we kind of had this tremendous shift in how we were interacting with the world.
We say ten thousand years, it could be fourteen. These dates are malleable as we find more archeological sites that indicate when these things happened, but we've been on an interesting trajectory. Ten thousand years ago, we started planting things intentionally, and we had already been guiding plants in some sense. We had been interacting with a management plan and the landscape as a species around the world. But ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, there was this idea to start planting weed and to start to alter the landscape in a dramatic way. Over time, that's unfolded itself to where we are today.
In the last couple hundred years, we started getting away from plant medicine altogether. We had down-bred plants for a long time. We started breeding for food. Herbalism was still the type of medicine we always practiced. It was our native medicine. Starting with the alchemist Paracelsus, we started to move towards this idea of mineral-based medicines and then chemical-based medicines, and that started to take over in the last couple hundred years.
Herbalism's been mistakenly called an "alternative medicine." The word alternative is interesting because it is "alter" and "native" like a compound word—alter-native. So if we're going to alter-native medicine, we would end up with probably chemical medicine. In other words, modern medicine would be
the alternative medicine, but we've come to call our native medicine the alternative or alternative medicine.
Jake Fratkin: Herbs were a big part of medicine. If you look at the history of healing among humans on this planet, the number one majority was herbal medicine. Galen was an herbalist. Hippocrates was an herbalist. Nostradamus was an herbalist. They were all herbalists. They were all herbalists until homeopathy came along in the 1850s, 1860s. Herbal medicine was it. The only question is what herbs do you have and do you have it available and is it working or not? It wasn't just laudanum for pain. Herbal medicine is big.
Tieraona Dog: I'm an evidence-based person, so we're always looking at the evidence and the trials, and I think historical use and tradition is on that spectrum of evidence, very strong evidence itself. But there was an herb, vervain, verbena hastate, and others, but vervain that there's all this blur around like they say it sprung up on Mt. Calvary after Jesus' crucifixion, that it was used in holy water in the church.
So, a lot of mysticism around it, a lot in the Christian faith. Over there in Ireland where you got the Celts, they're using it, the Druids in their Celtic traditions. They're using it as something that opens their mind and helps them with their dreams. And then fast forward and come over here to the United States, to the Southern Paiutes that are living in what is now Nevada and Northern Arizona, pre-contact, before any of these people were talking to each other.
They're using vervain to help them before they go out seeking visions or before they're going out for dreams. Now, you can understand an herb being used as a laxative because it would have a distinct effect. You get that, but how do you begin to explain a plant that was used by Renaissance painters to enhance their creativity, by Celtic priests for communication with the divine? With the Holy Catholic Church for their altar and their holy water, and people living in the southwest, what is now the United States, using it for dreams and visions? This is not a common thing, and yet they used the same genus, the same vervain, even though they were like slightly different species, they all used it for the same thing.
How did they know that? Where do you get that? How does that come about? I don't know because it's a mystery, but I think that the more time you spend with these plants, the more … Not like they're talking to you, that's not it. That's not what you're feeling, but you feel some like you're getting a vibe from them.
Lisa Ganora: So what we're getting into with humans, plants, phytochemicals, medicinal substance, is basically coevolution. Life on Earth has been working out its relationships between all these different organisms, for what? Three and a half billion years I think is the scientific consensus. Up until the last few hundred years, we ate wild plants, wild animals, wild mollusks, bugs, grubs, all kinds of wildlife.
The interesting thing to me about this is instead of looking on the individual organismal level like, here's you, here's some corn, there's a deer, look at the actual biochemical flow between all life forms. If you follow like an amino acid, it's made in this plant, and then this mouse eats it, and then this wolf eats the mouse, we're not going to eat a wolf, but you see what I'm saying.
If you follow a nutrient or biochemical all through the web of life until it gets to you, you see that that's all connected. That's how life developed on Earth for three and a half billion years. Obviously, we recognized food plants, medicinal plants, food medicinal animals, poisonous plants, nourishing plants.
All that is part of how life on Earth developed. Sometimes, it helps to dissolve the outlines of the organisms and just watch the flow of biochemistry that goes through all of life. If you look at that from an energetic perspective, how does the life flow through all of the organisms in the world? That's like here's a plant, it's capturing the power of the sun, photosynthesis. It's taking those photons. It's turning them into sugar.
It's turning the sugar into everything else a plant makes, like glucose is the ancestral phytochemical of all the other phytochemicals, or at least partially derived from that original chemical that photosynthesis made, powered by photons, and then we eat it. It goes through us, and it does something to our microbiome which is passed on to whoever gets our microbiome, and we excrete the parts we don't absorb. Ideally, that's supposed to go back into the soil and be decomposed by various bacteria and fungi, and reenter the food web, all cleaned up gradually in some new plant that grows.
I think it's following the flow of life, which is a very traditional Chinese concept too, the flow of chi through the food, through the medicinal plants, through the human, and out from the human back into the whole connected web of biochemical and life energy flow. That's the way I look at that.
Daniel Vitalis: It's really strange because throughout time you haven't been able to separate herbs from a medicinal perspective and food because we've always eaten plants and they've always been joined, co-joined. The food and the medicine, calorie and nutrient and medicine, were all in one package. Ten thousand years ago when we started to breed plants, we started to breed a lot of that medicine, in a way, in an attempt to change the flavors and to change the fecundity of things, and we started to lose that medicine.
We're at a point now where our diet is deficient in medicine. The plants that we're eating—a lot of people don't understand how bland the food they eat is. And that the flavors that are missing in the food are not just nutrients, not just sugars like glyconutrients and things like that, but they're actually medicines as well.
We're eating a diet really deficient in medicine. We are a species because we're a species that eats plants. We can't live without plant medicine. That's a really important thing to anchor into your awareness. It's like you can't live without plant medicine. You need it. When the plants don't have medicine left, you start to have a medicine deficiency, and we've been filling that with chemical medicine, and most of that medicine was discovered first in plants.
They say usually about 80% of the pharmaceutical drugs now were once from plants, or have either been extracted, or we've learned how to synthesize them, and we changed them slightly structurally, and now we're trying to fill the void of medicine from our diet with chemical medicine.
We've gotten to the point now where we actually ridicule herbal medicine in the mainstream as the alternative, and that's the big joke because our biology is very ancient, but our current human form— Just recently, some interesting new science came out pushing us back one hundred thousand years. They're saying that we're three-hundred thousand years old in our current form.
For three-hundred thousand years, we have lived with a diet that contained an herbal medicine component, and for about two hundred years, we have been veering off course. In that time, we have seen a dramatic increase in all of the diseases of civilization, and it's obvious to those people who understand the big picture about what that is. A big component of that, a big pie slice of that, is the lack of herbal medicine, so it is part of our natural diet.
Nick Polizzi: Herbal remedies are the first medicines we humans ever used. They were the only real medicine we had until a hundred years ago, and our bodies actually contain special receptors for their compounds as in, we're born into this world with abilities that can only be unlocked by the right plant substance. How did we go so far astray?
While the tale of how we lost this knowledge is essential to understand, it's even more important to know the story of the heroic individuals who have been protecting it against all odds for thousands of years. While there are definitely exceptions to the rule, herbalists, anthropologists, and scientists alike agree that this natural medicine was discovered, honed, and safeguarded in large part by women.
Rosemary Gladstar: When I was growing up as a young child, my grandparents lived close to us, and my grandmother was one of those traditional herbalists. She learned from her grandmother, and that's the primary medicine she practiced for her family, because it was familiar, and also because she could afford it. It's what she knew and felt safe using.
My grandmother was also a survivor of the Armenian genocide, and she used to tell us when we were growing up, all the grandchildren, "It was my deep faith in God," because she was a very religious woman, and the knowledge of the plants
had saved our lives. And she meant that literally because they had nothing to eat, nothing to use for any of the terrible health situations that came up for them, but my grandmother was knowledgeable, and she was able to use the plants for healing.
So she felt it was almost like a religious duty to teach us. And what so often happens and traditionally—this is the way it usually is—is that in every family, just about, and definitely in every community, there are people that have what I call the "green blood." They have that association that's genetically passed down. So I had that, and so just the natural inclinations as a child, I listened deeper, and I hung out with my grandmother a little bit more and paid a little deeper attention because this was already drawing me.
Tieraona Dog: I think women have played just a powerful role in healing in general. We've been the ones who brought life into the world, and we're the ones that care for people when their life is ending. It's the moms and the midwives and grannies who've just always taken care of it, and it would've been rare to have found a woman who did not know the plants that were around them for both medicine and for food.
Remember, because people were always gathering. I think what's interesting is that the tradition that women held, much of it was handed down orally from mother to child whereas men traditionally wrote more. So all medicine was herbal medicine until a hundred years ago, one hundred and twenty years ago, when we became infatuated with heavy metals and other things, but the men wrote the books and the men did the writing.
You had a few exceptions like Hildegard von Bingen and Avis who wrote extensively, but I think that there was this way in which women's medicine and women's voices were just not heard because they were not the prolific writers. That really was given to men. In Europe, a lot of that happened just because the ones who were educated were men and much of the education happened in and around the church, and women were not allowed access to that.
It's like sometimes people say, "Let's study the history of medicine." I'm like, "Well, then you've just studied the history of herbal medicine." Because herbal medicine was our medicine for thousands of years and clearly today even, 20% probably. It gets a little less now with the new biologics but about 20% of our drugs are still originating from plants, or plants were the source of the generation of those pharmaceuticals.
Rosemary Gladstar: I think it's because the role that we play in our communities and our cultures, it's typically been our role to give birth and then to care for the young and to care for the elderly. So it's not that men aren't tender and don't care. They have a whole different way that they care—the hunting, and the building, and all the great things that they do. But the actual caring for the sick, it's oftentimes— even though in traditional cultures, the shaman might be a man—it's oftentimes the women who then come in and do the actual long-term care of that. We see
that in our modern medical systems where there are certainly fabulous women doctors, but you have far more male doctors in the modern system. They come in, and they make a diagnosis, and they listen to your heart, and then the women come in and care, so I think it's just the nature of how we've evolved.
Partly, it's our physiological role. You give birth, then you're nursing that baby, and so there's a tending that women have. I think it's natural. It's kind of, again, encoded in us.
Bob Rountree: All traditional herbalists were all women. What can I say? I think there's this prejudice like, "herbs are for witches," and "herbs are for voodoo practitioners," and "how can we ever possibly take that seriously," even though there's science on it, but it still gets cast in that light? To some extent, nutritional medicine is the same way.
Nutritional medicine was under the umbrella of the home economics majors. The home ec majors were women that went to learn how to be good housewives. There was this notion that nutrition was the same thing, that nutrition was a soft science that we didn't really take seriously.
Daniel Vitalis: When we look into the past—precivilization, preindustrial, preagricultural, however you want to look at that—we find very strong gender polarization in those cultures in the past because we have sort of dimorphic job responsibilities. We have what's called "division of labor." There are certain things that are just cultural and certain things that we find are transcultural.
In other words, we might find this tribe did it this way with men and women, this tribe did it this way, but certain things we find are across cultures. One of the big ones is that men typically take on the hunting jobs. The high-risk jobs for the acquisition of protein and in some places, the high-risk job for the acquisition of concentrated sugars, namely honey.
They need to climb into trees, break those trees open into compartments to pull out stinging bees and their honey. Women would rely on men for these jobs, but men did not bring the bulk of calories back to the community. Men would bring back inconsistent calories. So what you have in a tribal setting would be something like protein sufficiency starts to wean off, not enough protein, men go out. Maybe they're successful, maybe they're not, protein sufficiency again.
But what you have with the plant side in the female journey is the heading out into the environment to harvest much more consistent calories from tubers, from aerial parts of plants, from fruits, nuts, seeds, from pollen, all the plant parts, and obviously, the medicine as well which was integrated in.
Women would bring that back consistently. Imagine that world, always baby strapped to you, always talking to each other. No need to sneak around and hide like the hunters did. Always among flowers and fruits chatting, chatting,
chatting, talking about the social dynamics. Women were responsible for the social dynamics in communities. That's a fascinating piece too.
Women would go out into the environment, bring back all that plant food, more calories, and they would have a sense from all the communication who needed what. Who needed what plants, who needed what medicine, does that make sense? Who needed different things from the environment? Women have had their hand in herbalism a lot longer than men.
In fact, men probably, you could say through time, have understood the ecology of animals better, and women have understood the ecology of plants better. There's a really fascinating study on the Hadza, out of Africa, and we see a lot of studies on them in the literature because they're one of the remaining, if not, the only remaining group that are truly hunting and gathering, at least some of them in Africa today.
We get to see a lot of our studies on hunting and gathering people through the lens of how the Hadza lived. There was a really cool paper done on food preference between men and women, and they had five food groups, so it went honey, fruit, berries, meat, baobab fruit, and then tubers, and they ranked amongst the men what were their favorite.
Everyone's number one favorite food, by the way, was honey, sugar—rarely available, less abundant than what we have today. But then men rated their next favorite food as meat, then baobab, then berries, then tubers. Women went honey then berries, then baobab, then meat so men had a greater desire for meat because we were the meat. We're the ones who went after it.
Women have had a greater desire to be amongst plants and to eat the plants historically because they went after that, does that make sense? I think that that filtered up through time. Women kept in their lineages the knowledge of plants, and that didn't go well for women at a certain point. It got to where we started to really fear that knowledge, the ability to alter physiology. It's like scary to men. It became scary in a patriarchal culture.
Husbandry rules now—men have been in control in the patriarchy in civilization and got to a point where they feared so much in that plant knowledge, that we actually, at one point, waged war against it. And we destroyed a lot of the plant knowledge we had in our lineages by burning and drowning women who carried that knowledge in our witch trials and our inquisitions. But through time, yeah, women have been the keepers of that knowledge.
Richard Mandelbaum: You look at healing and herbal traditions in particular and again, there's historically, it's been diverse which is as it should be. But there's certainly this incredibly strong tradition of women being the predominant healers and the herbalists, and interestingly, you can find these hidden histories or references to
them because that chain of oral tradition was broken at least in "western culture."
We've lost a lot of that, and because the written history is written by the victors, we lose a lot of that, and you find these little hints. So for instance, there's an incredibly famous medical treatise written in the 1700s in England by a physician named William Withering, and it's a treatise on the medical uses of foxglove. And William Withering wrote this treatise on it introducing it to western medicine—not discovering it—and that's where we have to be really careful with that term.
To his credit, he at least acknowledged that he learned about it from a woman herbalist who he left unnamed, which, surprise, surprise! But at least he mentioned. At least he didn't claim ownership, and that's the history of a lot of this. We have these wonderful nineteenth-century herbals from here, this part of the world for instance, from what's now the United States.
It's as if these white men invented this herbal medicine and of course they didn't. They often learned about it from women healers, often native healers, and that goes way too frequently unacknowledged, unspoken.
Tieraona Dog: It's interesting though even when I was starting out in herbal medicine here in my more professional career in the early '80s. There were not many women herbalist writers. All of the people that were writing books were men, and yet, all the people that were really doing the herbal medicine were women. Even in my generation, I found that a very interesting phenomenon. Women are busy doing, men were busy writing.
Sayer Ji: Herbs, Echinacea, just basic spices, these are things that every woman has in their kitchen, and Grandma's been passing down recipes since time immemorial. No one gave her credit for keeping our genome functioning, but if you look at the etymology for the word prescription, it comes from a French word for recipe, and the Rx symbol is actually a recipe symbol.
So these formulas that Grandma passed down—there's a pinch of pepper, a little turmeric here with ghee—are literally epigenetic inheritance systems that keep our genome expression patterns healthy and optimized in relation to our environment. They are as essential to our health as the hardcoded proteincoding genes in our genome. And who would have ever given Grandma credit, and all the many women that have suffered eons silently performing miracles by keeping a child alive with a fever, taking care of them?
The herbal tradition is part of this "oral tradition." There's been no historical record of recognition of it. "His story," it's just such a different wavelength to inhabit, and so I think that that's part of the story of medicine today.
Richard Mandelbaum: It's one of the things that I work with, and that most herbalists would work with and come across, are issues that arise during peri-menopause and menopause for women. Because we have a lot of diet and food and lifestyle and environmental toxicity that contributes to menopause being problematic when on its own, it's a perfectly natural transition in life. And there was always this bias in, again, this patriarchal attitude towards menopausal challenges that, "Oh, this is unnatural," "This is something wrong." "This is something to reverse," versus now.
You may be aware of this, something called the "grandmother hypothesis" which is that actually, there is a very important social role for grandmothers, for women who go beyond reproductive years, but to be there to pass on the wisdom. To make sure that dad is not making dumb mistakes, to make sure that the kids are learning what they need to, to jump in and help as needed, and we've so severed ourselves from that. But when you shift your framework and realize, "Oh, we're social animals," and you look around at other social animals, whales, apes, even ants and bees which are not as closely related to us—all social animals.
There's an important role that non-reproductive members of that society play, so why would it be any different for us? Absolutely, I think we really do need to regain as individuals and absolutely as a society as well, that feminine to bring it back and to balance its way out of balance, and it has been for a long time.
Nick Polizzi: As you've already heard, the history of herbalism has a dark side. The women who brought this knowledge forward were often persecuted because the miraculous effects of the compounds in these plants were considered to be magic which went against the religions of the day and age, for sure.
Even though legendary early doctors like Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, praised these plants as being an innate source of medicine. But what works, works, and the power of these medicines always prevailed and remained our go-to remedy throughout human history—until the early 1900s, when big business in collaboration with the government began to do everything they could to wipe natural medicines off the map.
Why would they want to do that? What interest could they possibly have in taking effective medicines away from those who are desperately in need of them? We were shocked at what we discovered.
Rosemary Gladstar: Nick, it's still illegal to practice herbalism in the United States. So today, our bodies and the choices that we make are ruled by the government which, in a free country, when you have choice to eat what you want, and to wear the clothing that you want, and do the work that you want, and to practice the religion you want, you should absolutely have the right to practice the health and healing you want. It should be your choice, not the government's.
So many people are unaware of this situation that for the last, over a hundred years, they've allowed it to happen. So herbalism, the oldest form of healing in the world, the most widely used form of healing in the world, became illegal to practice in the United States. We are one of the very few countries in the world where it's illegal to practice herbalism—and the American public doesn't even know it.
What's happened is that Big Pharma has become so involved in medicine and insurance that oftentimes it cripples the very medical field that everybody depends on. It's not that allopathic medicine is the issue. It's oftentimes the red tape, and it's oftentimes the pharmaceutical industry. The drug industry oftentimes owns and promotes these doctors, and then we'd see the insurance companies.
I think the insurance business is probably the most insidious side of healthcare. I think one of the strongest points about herbalism, it's really about self-care. It's about health care and the person caring for themselves as well as being cared for by others. But in allopathic medicine, we see so often, it's really about drug companies and about insurance kind of owning the healthcare system, very sadly and unfortunately.
Tieraona Dog: The United States is unique in the fact that our pharmaceutical system really changed how herbal medicine was viewed and used in this country, because to be able to patent a drug, pharmaceutical companies had to—usually using a plant, they would synthesize—they would replicate something from that plant that inspired them to make the drug, and then once they did the R&D, they got a seven-year patent protection on it.
You can't patent Echinacea. You cannot patent chamomile. You can't patent peppermint. So pharmaceuticals—really this whole model—was driven towards synthetics and to pharmaceuticals and now, biologics. It's why I don't like the system, and why I resent it always, and fought against this alternative medicine moniker because once something's alternative, it just takes forever to get it in the mainstream.
To me, if something has evidence of effectiveness and we have an insurance system that covers things, then it should just cover it whether it was made by Pfizer or Gaia Herbs. To me, it doesn't matter if there's evidence of effectiveness, but because the pharmaceutical industry has been built the way it has over the last one hundred years, it makes it very difficult for this to happen, for insurance to cover it.
You basically have to turn an herb and go through a drug route to get it covered. And that's very difficult. And for somebody like me, I'm like, "Why would I want to do that?" Anyway, I can grow a lot of these herbs in my own garden. I can buy a pack of organic seeds for four dollars, and I can have all the herbs that I want. I can dry them, put them in a jar, drink them all year.
So, I think that's a problem. Physicians are a little different. I think there's a growing number of physicians who are much more interested in trying to find other ways of reproaching, like chronic pain. Chronic pain's a huge problem right now. More than sixty-thousand people died in 2017 from drugs, from opiates, and opiate overdoses, so this is another one of those areas where it's not sufficient just to use a drug. You need a much broader approach to it.
As a physician, I have to be honest, it's like when you see somebody so sick that you can't believe that they're going to live, and they leave the hospital three days later, and you're just like, wow. You really realize that there is a place for modern medicine. And those of us who have visited very poor parts of the world, many of them would like access to that kind of care too.
The problem is though that with that type of model, the pharmaceutical industry has, in many ways, made it seem like that if it's not an FDA-approved drug that is made by a pharmaceutical company, it's not effective.
Michael Balick: Some people say that there's no evidence for the efficacy of herbal medicine, and it's interesting to me that a thousand years of human clinical trials with a plant like chamomile is not counted as evidence. That's just symptomatic of our arrogance in some ways.
Bob Rountree: When I first came to Boulder which is about 37, 38 years ago, I was involved with the Herb Research Foundation. I was quite excited about that possibility that if we just educated the public, and we told them, "Look, there's all this amazing research about herbs, and you can use them, and they're relatively nontoxic. You can use it to treat yourselves, so you don't have to go to doctors."
I remember getting interviewed by people who were saying, "You think this is the future of medicine?" I said, "Well, this is obvious. This has got to be the future of medicine because it's got all the answers. You can treat almost every human illness with botanical medicine." So I guess I would call it a naive optimism at that time.
What I didn't realize is how strong the hold that Big Pharma had on our whole society, so that even if you came up with, let's say, a remedy for migraine headaches. If you could say, "Gee, you can take this herb called "butterbur" and it's relatively inexpensive, and it can cut migraines way down." For some reason, it just never caught on. Even though the facts were there, the data was there. As I said, we realized it was safer. People could treat themselves. They didn't have to spend thousands of dollars on doctors. What happened?
Now, we have more and more expensive drugs, and we have a new drug that just got approved for chronic migraines that you inject. You inject, and it's thousands of dollars to use this drug. And so I'm a little bit, I could say, in awe, but not in awe in a good way, of how powerful Big Pharma is and how powerful
those influences are on medicine. The Big Pharma pays for the conferences that doctors go to.
Doctors basically get inculcated. They get trained to believe that this is the only way and that everything else is French.
Ellen Kamhi: Right now at this point in time, there seems to be a vast movement towards repression of herbal medicine. They're saying it's for the good of the public and clothing it in the verbiage of safety, but I don't buy that, looking at the fact herbs are not totally safe. I've said that before. There can be side effects. Sometimes when people have side effects, they get a little stomachache or a rash. There have been reports of death due to herbal medicine.
There is one report of thirty-seven a year during a period of time of 1992 to 1998. Thirty-seven a year in that same period of time pharmaceutical drugs caused hundreds of thousands of documented deaths from the use of the pharmaceuticals as they were indicated, so there's no contest there.
Bob Rountree: I think there are several different reasons why we're not acknowledging that we have this gold mine of medicinal plants because I do think there's a great future there. A number of years ago, I had consulted briefly for a company called Shaman Pharmaceuticals, and their whole gig was, "We're going to go down there, and we're going to find the good stuff. We're going to have the cure for diabetes and cancer and high blood pressure and all that stuff," and it fell apart. The only thing I could think of is that it must have been the terrible burden of trying to prove that these things work.
What you have to go through now to bring a drug to market is so difficult, it's so expensive, it's so many millions of dollars that unless you've got endless capital to exploit this, you're not going to get anywhere, and the drug companies don't really seem to care because they feel like they've got all they need.
Ellen Kamhi: The laws are becoming so repressive that if somebody wanted to make, let's say, ground up Echinacea, right? You could not say on the bottle that it supports the immune system unless there have been two studies that are published in mainstream literature, and many of those journals, of course, are paid for in terms of advertising dollars by the pharmaceutical industry, and it costs a lot to get the studies done. You have to have two studies showing not even that Echinacea worked but that the exact form that you are going to market worked.
In other words, the same milligram amount, the same extraction process, the same isolated component. That is far and above, anything that's needed to know that these plants work.
Jake Fratkin: There's no money in herbs, so no one put research into herbs. No one. You can't market it. I can extract it. I got aspirin from willow bark, that's cool, Bayer did that in Germany. Yeah, I can extract some things where I can.
But basically, we got to package and then sell it. We can't have people picking their medicines out of the backyard. People coming into medical school were taught, "Here's how we treat this problem with this chemical," so that took off. There's no profit in herbs. That's basically it.
Like in America, it's particularly been frowned upon by an educated scientific medical community. You go to Europe and herbs are quite popular, and doctors are using them, and more rural areas of the world, obviously herbs are the goto. Everywhere around the world herbs are it.
Michael Balick: Of the 7.6 or so billion people on this planet, the WHO has estimated that maybe 70, 75, 80% of them still use plants as part of their primary health care. That's an astonishingly high number, but it's really understandable because the plants that you use grow all over your yard, they grow in little pots on your window, they grow in your fields. The estimate in this county alone is eighty million people using some sort of complementary medicine for a part of their health care.
Now, that could be as simple as a supplement or a vitamin, or it could be teas to calm you at night, a chamomile tea to relax your stomach if you're not feeling well. A cup of Ashwagandha tea to relax you before you go to sleep, kava tea, a cup of coffee to wake you up, or other caffeine-bearing plants that aren't just coffee. These are very commonly used effective modalities around the world. People embrace this, they understand it.
When we go into a village, or a country, a community, people get it right away because they use things. Their grandparents use things. Their great grandparents use things like plants for healing. They know that they are culturally acceptable. They know that they are inexpensive. They know that they are efficacious. They know that there are fewer side effects than going into the hospital and getting a pharmaceutical medicine. And again, these are for primary healthcare issues.
Ellen Kamhi: How have we moved away from herbs and all natural remedies as a culture? That has to do with a political situation that really was through the early 1900s.
Jake Fratkin:
It started after World War I, and they started finding chemicals that could treat things. Antibiotics were invented in 1939 by Fleming. He isolated it maybe earlier, but commercially it was available, but then he isolated fungus that could kill bacteria. Chemotherapy started with the use of mustard gas in World War I. They started using mustard gas for the earliest cancers and getting successes. That was in the 1940s which is very late. They found it could treat certain cancers and that started the whole chemotherapy thing.
Basically, the pharmaceutical industry which took off in the twentieth century probably started going around 1920s, and it became a great model. Suddenly, you were selling things and making money, so then you could research more
medicines and hire scientists and make more medicines. What we have is since World War II, and that's really skyrocketed. And they realized how profitable it could be. If you look at the pharmaceutical manufacturers, they're among the most profitable industries in the country, big profit margin plus big income, big research and development fund, they've taken over. They've taken over.
Schools that promoted herbal medicine and homeopathy were basically suppressed. The Rockefeller Foundation after World War I started supporting chemical medicine, and then after World War II, not they, but the electrical and nuclear industries got into the game, and basically, it's profitable.
Ellen Kamhi: Then what happened here even in the United States and around the world, there was a division between people called "irregulars" and people called "heroics." The heroics like to do things like give people mercury, they use mercury for everything. A lot of famous people died because of it, although it was somewhat effective for things like syphilis and different diseases, but then you would get a reaction to the mercury later and very often be deceased because of it. The irregulars, where who they referred to in terms of natural healers, herbalists, let's say, Native American healers. They were called the irregulars.
Then, actually in 1847, that's when the AMA came into being, and they put in place certain regulations saying, "Let's split these two groups." If you're going to be part of the more highly-trained class of what's called "physicians," the following is what you have to do. First of all, you have to get licensed, and they put in a procedure for licensing.
Second of all, there were certain people who can never even be licensed, and that included women. They were on that list of "no-no." Negroes no-no, Native Americans no-no. No one except light Caucasian men could even apply for the program to be licensed, and that was a big start of this split.
Not only that, those people who chose to be part of the AMA and be licensed could not discuss a case even if their therapy was not working. They were not allowed to discuss the case with an irregular. That would be those people I just listed—any kind of herbalist, natural healer, spiritual healer, dowser, they could not discuss the case with them. So there were a lot of rules put into place.
Then in 1904, they put together a council to evaluate what was going on in the educational system of herbal medicine. A very important person to look up if anyone's interested is Flexner. In 1910, there was the Flexner Report. Abraham Flexner, he actually went around and visited the various medical schools to see what they were doing in terms of teaching. They were promoted by Andrew Carnegie and also the Rockefellers.
Now, it soon evolved for them to understand that if they put together this conglomeration of drugs, with the pharmaceutical industry, AMA, and other
factors that they actually could politically and financially control health care. This is not like it just happened. Let's say organically, it was the opposite, it was a planned political maneuvering, and look it up—the Flexner Report.
Lise Alschuler: The outcome from it was that the way that medical education was taught, and ultimately would be funded, was very codified. At the time, there were several, for example, medical schools of homeopathy, and that was a very integral part of, at that time, conventional medicine.
After the Flexner Report, funding was essentially gone for those homeopathic medical schools, and they were gone. If somebody wanted to become a physician, then the only choice was to learn what we now call "allopathic" medicine which was very much focused on using pharmaceuticals and more invasive techniques. Certainly helpful and good in lots of ways, but this travesty, if you will, after that time is that instead of trying to figure out a way to continue to integrate some of these other modalities, they were just left out of the realm of conventional medicine.
Really, that was the beginning of the death of integrative or holistic medicine. It didn't die ever completely. However, there was always and has always been both lay practitioners and even professionals who have held true to integrative herbally-based therapies, and it's gained over, I think, the last several decades a resurgence of sorts.
Michael Balick: You have lots of people growing herbs in their gardens. You have a lot of people going to integrative physicians and to herbalists, and to naprapaths and naturopaths. You have a lot of people accepting complementary modalities. You have people eating more healthfully. When I grew up, sometimes dinner was in an aluminum tray that came out of the oven. These days, people are taking time to grow their food, choose their food, prepare their food, and it's quite different from what it was. So it's kind of a pushing back against the sort of agro foods that a lot of us were raised on.
Now, sometimes I think we're part of the biggest human experiment in history. To answer the question if you take all these chemicals, the toxins, the poisons, the growth hormones, the vitamins, is that a good thing? Is that going to have you live longer? Will there be more disease? The results aren't in yet, but clearly, we're in that kind of human experiment because of our economy and all of that. I think today there are a lot more people interested in plants as medicine, nature as a healer, and standing up for our roots than ever before.
Lise Alschuler: As we have gained affluence in the western world, our lifestyles have really led us to a path of chronic disease and unwellness, so these miracle drugs aren't fixing us anymore. We're just not feeling very well, and a lot of our chronic diseases persist as chronic diseases, and people understand that when they go into a hospital for treatment of a chronic illness, they're not going to just come out cured. They're just going to come out with more medicine or something like
that. I think that that's really led people to question, "Are we doing the right thing, are we including enough?"
With that questioning, the door inevitably opens to the world of botanical and nutritionally-based therapies and prevention, really primary prevention, lifestyle-based prevention. I think it's driven by people ultimately that are starting to see those values. "There's more that I can do to make my health better." "There's more I can do to help my kids not get sick." "I want to live long, but I want to live long and well, not just live long and yucky."
Daniel Vitalis: You remember that story the emperor wears no clothes? It's like the people in that story, even though they're seeing a naked king, are unable to perceive the fact that he's not wearing clothes. They have become convinced that he is. We've been convinced that modern medicine offers cures, sometimes overnight cures, but the evidence experientially isn't really there. Here's what I think most people have in their mind, this idea—a sickness arises mysteriously, they go get a diagnosis, a drug is given as a therapy, the disease is cured, life goes on as normal.
It's a beautiful story, it's a fairytale. We almost have as much evidence as we have for say, Bigfoot with this, right? The reality most people experience is symptoms arise, they go to a doctor, and they get bounced around to a bunch of specialists, and no one can figure out what it is. This may go on for years. They may be told it's in their head which is another way of saying, "We don't yet have diagnostics to determine what you're dealing with," or "Your illness is too complex of a syndrome, a set of different things. We can't really determine what it is."
Maybe they are able to diagnose it, and the drug has 30% efficacy, or 50% efficacy, but it doesn't heal them of it—except in rare cases. Here's a few places, and this is the bait-and-switch. We have tremendous, at present—though we're losing this ability—we have tremendous antibiotic therapy right now. We all know that these are starting to slip through our fingers, right? The biome is adjusting to these faster than we can produce them.
If you have an infection, which is often an indicator of an immunocompromise at some level, but let's say that you have an infection and it's bacterial in nature. We have this incredible ability right now to cure that almost overnight with the scorched-earth impact of antibiotics. That has been used as almost a bait-andswitch where we've been convinced that because we can do that, we can also cure a whole bunch of other things. But when you start asking, "What have we cured?" What you see is that a couple of things that happened, antibiotics were developed, and wonderful sanitation protocols were put in place in the very developed parts of the world.
Those two things, the convergence of them, gave the impression that we had conquered all kinds of diseases. The fact is we don't have cures for heart disease, we don't have cures for cancer, we don't have cures for diabetes, we
don't have cures for arthritis. I could list them all day long, but we've been convinced that healing is an overnight thing that we can do with a pill. Then when we switch onto herbalism, we feel that we need the caveat. Listen, healing is more of a journey as if it wasn't before, and it was. The challenge is with allopathy we have such strong concentrated amounts of drug medicine.
I like to use a distinction, by the way. When I say "drugs," I mean pharmacology, pharmaceuticals, artificial drugs. When I say "medicines," I mean plants or naturally-occurring medicines from the environment. The strength of the drugs we have today can allay symptoms to a point that it looks like we've cured something sometimes, when in fact the underlying thing—I think this is almost cliché at this point—but the underlying thing remains.
David Wolfe: We've gotten here because we put a lot of faith in people beyond ourselves. We don't allow ourselves to be the masters of our own knowledge, the masters of own investigation—as ultimately to be the masters of our science. We have a lot of people, "They should know because they're up in some ivory tower." It's like the old biblical story, or it's like, "The priest knows, they got the bible, they know, we don't know." It's that same story all over again, so it's giving away our power that's what gotten us into this mess.
When you get on the healing path, you take your power back and say, "I can do this," right? To me, today is day twenty of a cleanse that I've been on, liquid diet cleanse, and it is been tough. There has been times where it's been like "Whoa, I really want to just mow into that food right there because it looks really good." Then I'll have half a soup, and suddenly I'm full, I'm like, "Thank God, I'm good," and it's tough. This is the kind of thing that we've got to move back into, like facing ourselves, and facing our own blockages, and facing our own cravings, and facing our own addictions, and then dealing with it, and just sitting with it. When we do that, then we come out the other side responsible, and when we're self-responsible, we can heal.
Susanna Raeven: When you take plant medicine that is always made from the whole plant or a whole part of the plant, so all the flowers, or the leaf, or sometimes it's actually the flowers and the leaves and the roots sometimes have similar constituents. When you use a plant, first of all, you extract the constituents into the tea or the tincture or into the ghee or the oil, whatever your extraction medium is. But you also extract everything else that's in the plant into your system.
If you're looking for particular constituents that, for example, is a pain reliever like in meadowsweet or willow bark that by itself, like an aspirin, has the sideeffect of lessening the mucous membranes in your stomach wall, and so it's prone to give you an ulcer over a longer period of time. The constituents that are, in addition, in the meadowsweet plant actually counteract that particular side-effect. Meadowsweet is a demulcent which means it actually has this little bit of a soothing, coating quality that coats your mucous membranes.
If you would have ulcer damage in your stomach from taking aspirin so long and you would switch over to meadowsweet, it would not only give you the antiinflammatory benefits, but it would also heal your ulcer at the same time. Pharmaceutical drugs are very, very strong and they're very, very powerful because they target this particular symptom and they hit it really, really hard. It's almost like with the baseball bat. Then you have all these other effects that come from this big effect.
It's like you make this big ripple and it just affects a lot of other things, and we call those "side effects," but they're actually effects. They're all effects, they're all the effects of the plants, the ones that we like and the ones we maybe don't like, and there's all the effect of the pharmaceuticals. We just call them that because we don't really like them, right? Some plants also have side effects that we don't necessarily want, but 99.9% of all the plants that we work with here don't have them. The ones that do have them we don't use at all, or we use them in tiny doses, or we use them for a very, very short period of time, in a very conscious way, a very safe way, or we don't use them at all.
There's so many safe plants out there. We don't actually have to use the plants that have side effects in that way. We have a lot of plants to choose from.
Nick Polizzi: In these final minutes of Episode One, we will be going into some specifics that will aid you on your journey through the rest of the series. Now, over the next two weeks, you're going to hear about a number of different herbs and how to use them to heal the health challenges you might be facing. Interestingly enough, the majority of the herbs we'll be sharing with you fall into two main categories, or families, of herbs—adaptogens and tonics.
Tieraona L.: Tonics are interesting because in most systems of medicine other than western medicine, there is this notion that you can take something that'll strengthen either the overall body or a particular system, right? Most people know if I lift weights with my right arm for eight weeks but not my left, one arm will be much more toned at the end of eight weeks because it's been tonified. What it means is that it will work more efficiently, there'll be less stress, it won't fatigue as quickly. The concept of tonifying herbs is that there are certain herbs that have an affinity for certain parts of our body.
Karta Khalsa: A tonic herb is an herb that has long-term, slow-acting benefits for a wide variety of things in the body. Usually enhances immune function, sexuality, libido, muscular strength, and ability to maintain consistent energy throughout the day, a clarity of mind, promotes long life. All those characteristics pulled together give us the idea of a tonic. They usually enhance immune function, they increase stamina, they act over a long period of time, broadly beneficial, usually very food-like, very nontoxic, so just about anybody can take them in any quantity. You can take high doses, you're not going to get side effects.
They call them medicines for healthy people. We don't wait until somebody is busted, we give it to them ongoing as a rejuvenative to make sure they stay
healthy. That idea just really does not exist in our culture, but it's the core of herbalism in Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. Why wait until you're busted? Keep yourself from being broken, that's the whole idea. These tonic herbs have a broad basis.
Rosemary Gladstar: Adaptogens by its scientific definition means pretty much the same thing. They help our bodies adapt to modern day stresses, they can be used long-term generally with no side effects, and they work nonspecifically on the body but more through a toning and building action. This category to me is probably the most important herbal group for people to use because these are the herbs that our ancestors used all around the world. Of course, they had different tonics and adaptogens depending on their habitat and climate and all of that, but this was the group of the herbs that our ancestors used as everyday foods.
Karta Khalsa: Adaptogens have a push-pull action. In other words, they regulate a body system so they could be given to someone with high blood pressure or low blood pressure, and it would normalize. They have to be nontoxic, in other words, you could take large doses of them and not have any problem there. They enhance stamina, and they work through a type of endocrine function called the HPA or hypothalamus, pituitary, "adrenal access" we call it. We know that that's how eleuthero primarily works, and ginseng would be in that category, and there would be a few others that would meet that precise criteria. Then we have maybe thirty herbs that are in that group of long-term staminaenhancing tonics.
Nick Polizzi: In the next nine episodes, we will be exploring the powerful herbal healing secrets from three main schools of traditional medicine. Herbalism was the first medicine we ever used, and as you heard in this episode, it still exists on every continent today. But there are certain cultures that created extra-precise documentation of these plant-based treatments. One, the Ayurvedic schools of India; two, Chinese herbalism; and three, western herbalism from Europe and North America.
Karta Khalsa: Herbal medicine is intimately associated with humanity, and ever since there have been human beings, they've been using herbal medicine to enhance their health. Everywhere on Planet Earth within a day's walk, there is enough plants to heal every condition that those people would experience. Traditional healers often are not only clinicians but also pharmacists, wildcrafters, and they sort of do it all. They might spend the morning going out in the jungle gathering the things that they know they'll need for their clients they're going to see in the afternoon. They know how to harvest it when and where, the right season, the right way, and they know how to process it and how to dispense it.
The average natural healing practitioner has a repertoire of about two-thousand substances. That's about my repertoire now after forty-seven years. They learned that from their mentor over decades of being immersed in it and figuring it out. They can handle pretty much most things that people come to them with and that's everywhere from desert, to tundra, to jungle, to
mountains, and wherever you are there's always these things that are available. Of course, some of these systems became much more formalized and we have what we call the "big three," Western, Ayurveda, and Chinese. These are places where people were literate very early, and they could create a system that was teachable from generation to generation.
By far, the majority of the world uses natural healing methods to maintain their health, a huge majority. It's only Europe and North America where it's not the core thing that people do. In fact, in Europe, it's integrated, so conventional medicine evolved. But herbal medicine wasn't suppressed, and so it continued to evolve along with that. You have people who use both interchangeably and many practitioners who are familiar with either one, and again it's integrated.
In North America, we know that herbal medicine was obliterated for political reasons around 1910, and then it was suppressed until around 1970. I was in that early crew of people that got interested and helped to resurrect it over the last almost fifty years. Now, we've created something that's really workable.
Lisa Ganora: What a lot of people try to do with herbalism is they try to substitute herbalism for modern medicine. If you say, "Here's a medication, take it for whatever condition you have," a lot of people will think what's an herb that I can use instead? I call that allopathic or substitutional herbalism, and it has its virtues also, but it's limited in that treating symptoms with herbs is not that different than treating symptoms with drugs, you know what I'm saying? You can make some progress by doing that.
The type of herbalism that I practice is called "vitalist herbalism" which is we're engaging the life force, and we're looking for patterns of dysfunction, and we're looking for the origins of conditions. If somebody comes up to me with a question like this, "I have diabetes, type 2 diabetes, what herb is good for that?" I go, "It doesn't actually work that way." There's not like, the magical herb that you're going to take that's going to make your blood sugar go back down again. We have to look at how that developed in your particular body, and then we have to address the roots of that.
Jake Fratkin: Chinese medicine meanwhile—so what's a healthy body? A healthy body looks like this. What's an unhealthy body? Here's how it manifests. And they looked at things like too much heat, too much cold. The symptoms are rising, the symptoms are sinking, symptoms were inside, symptoms were outside, and they started creating this language of why disease happens based on organs. Each organ can go bad in a certain way, some of them only two ways, like the kidneys can go bad two ways, the heart can go bad five ways, the stomach can go bad twelve ways.
Christine Cannon: One person may have a headache due to a liver, gallbladder imbalance. Another person may have a headache due to a kidney and liver imbalance, and our job is to identify which organ systems are out of balance so that we can then bring them into balance and the headache will go away.
Jake Fratkin: On one hand, the herbalists were cataloging the actions. This herb the energy goes up, this herb the energy goes down, this herb the energy goes in. This herb has five temperatures, hot, warm, neutral, cool, cold, which one is it? If you have heat, you need cool and cold herbs. If you're cold you need warm and hot herbs. Every herb is cataloged, that's totally different to any other system.
Christine Cannon: Western herbal medicine is a little more linear in its clinical use. A much more linear, a much more, this herb treats this condition. Whereas Chinese herbal medicine is more, this herbal combination of herbs can treat this pattern that can create this condition, this condition, and this condition. So there's a broader application. The patterns have held through thousands of years which is fascinating to me.
Karta Khalsa: Ayurveda is a complete healing system. It's the oldest indigenous continually practiced healing system on Planet Earth. The oldest book ever written is a book about Vedic Sciences of which Ayurveda is one. Every natural healing technique that you can imagine is included in Ayurveda from diet to therapeutic foods, to herbal medicine, a bodywork exercise, and a whole load of lifestyle routines.
Ayurveda is all about individualized therapy. There are no absolutes in Ayurveda, there's no ideal diet, no ideal lifestyle, it depends on you as an individual, and it's very finely tuned. We look at each person as a very specific entity that there's never been anyone like you, there'll never be anyone exactly like you again. We find, too, in those remedies to your physiology, your age, where we are in the year, where we are in the day, so everyone's routine is slightly different.
Ayurveda, in particular, says that food is the most core element of maintaining a healthy body, a healthy lifestyle, and a long, long life. It's just an incredibly huge system, nobody could master all of that. In fact, no one person could master any one of the big three systems. Now that they're all merging or becoming aware of the best of the best from everywhere, it's just daunting. I mean the onion peeling, it's just endless. I think all of us feel like what we've learned is how much we don't know, but of course, that takes into account what we do know.
Herbal medicine is incredibly vital and dynamic now because this is the first generation in human history where all these things are available. You can go on the internet with a click of the mouse, you can have an Ayurvedic herb from India on your doorstep in two days. I did all my training never being able to see any of these herbs because we just couldn't get them. There were no texts, you couldn't get the herbs, and now they're easily available. It's just a wonderful time, a tremendous herbal renaissance, and we're learning from the best of the best, and it's all overlapping and integrating.
These ethnic divisions, I think probably will be pretty much gone within another, let's say, twenty years, because the herb doesn't care where it grew. The only reason we have to separate out these different systems is because the texts now are in different languages, and they have a little bit different procedure or
regime that their used. But the big three more traditional western herbalists, if we go back to Hippocrates, and Ayurveda and Chinese medicine are all 90% identical. If you learn one, it's pretty easy to learn another one. Language is going to be different, the pharmacopeia is going to be a little different, but if you study it, you'll be able to easily then graft the other two on which is what I've done.
We're creating this system that I call "global herbalism" and it's just the best of the best from all over. Very, very exciting. As we've been talking, I've mentioned herbs from all the big three, and I feel completely comfortable mixing and matching them in a new way that's never been done before.
David Wolfe: In my humble opinion, disconnection from nature is one of the primary causes of illness. Disconnection from each other, that's a major cause of illness. The feeling isolated, very dangerous, especially if you have a severe condition or you have a severe diagnosis. Being disconnected from nature is disconnection from healing and all of the incredible resources that nature provides, oceans, mountains, trails, jumping into ice-cold lakes, making a fire outside in the middle of the forest, and working with the energies of fire like the yogis do, climbing trees. It just goes on and on. Picking your food, picking wild mushrooms, making teas. Nature is providing all of that stuff.
Daniel Vitalis: As far as the journey goes, yeah, I think that the medicine is one component, but it's only one small component, and we've become fixated on it culturally. We'd be wise to ask ourselves what are the— I think a human being is being made of these five important bodies or parts. I think of us as a physical being, but I also think of us as an emotional being, as an intellectual being, as a sexual being, and as a spiritual being. We want to be looking at how healthy are we in all of those areas.
It almost might sound a little far out to say that at first, but when you think about it, can emotional health affect your physical health? We know that it can, right? Of course it can. Can our psychological health affect our physical health? Of course it can. Can our sexual wellness affect how we behave in the world and therefore health? Absolutely. Can this thing we call "spiritual," our ability to feel connected in the world affect us physically? We know that it can. We need to be healthy in all those levels, and when we look at the medicine component, we tend to fixate on the physical, and I think the true healing journey.
I'm not saying that it's the herbalist's job to treat all those other things, it's the job of the person on the journey. It's not just when you're sick, it's just that the journey tends to start when people are sick—when they start having symptoms. There's this idea in the mysticism of the past I love in the tarot deck. We see this card called "the fool." It's carried over in the playing cards as the joker or the jester. It's this idea of walking through the world without a care in the world. In that card we see a person smelling a rose walking towards a cliff.
It's the idea that you don't even know yet that you're walking into danger because you haven't learned about the world yet. We get sick, and suddenly we shift from the fool. It's like we've had the rug pulled out from under us, and the world changes, and we realized it's not a place to just walk around blindly smelling roses. "I have a problem now," and that starts us on a journey that it's like a hero's quest and that journey is to heal and restore, and there's a lot more to it than the medicines we bring in. Those are just a couple of colors and the palette of the painting that we're making.
Nick Polizzi: That concludes our opening episode. Now that we understand the power of herbalism and its hidden history, it's time for us to really dive in. In the next eight days, we'll be going to specific health challenges and uncovering potent herbs that are highly effective at treating them. Before we go, here's a quick rundown of what will be covered in each for our next eight episodes.
Tomorrow we'll be airing Episode Two which is a two-parter. In the first half, we'll be covering the invisible seeds of disease—stress and anxiety, and then in part two, we'll be discussing herbs that can get rid of chronic pain.
Episode Three is another two-parter. Part one focuses on plant remedies that strengthen and balance the immune system, and part two opens the lid on the miracle of the microbiome. In other words, the trillions of microorganisms that live inside of us and have a huge impact on our health.
Episode Four is all about brain function. From everyday things like how to sharpen memory, clarity, and focus, to treating more severe conditions like MS, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's.
Episode Five focuses on a silent epidemic that is spreading across the northern hemisphere like wildfire, Lyme disease, and the breakthrough herbs that can heal it.
Episode Six is called "Healthy Hearts and Happy Minds." The first half of the episode dives into powerful ancient remedies for cardiovascular wellness and circulation. Then we explore green medicines that can alleviate depression, a condition which, as you'll find out, is closely connected to the heart as well.
We've dedicated Episode Seven to something that many of us adults over the age of thirty need. Herbs to raise our energy reserves, get better sleep, and prevent fatigue.
In Episode Eight, we shine an herbal perspective on one of the most dreaded diseases of our time, cancer. I'm extremely proud of this episode because of the careful and methodical approach we took in assembling the best information on the topic. Cancer is a disease has affected all of our lives in some way, so definitely make sure not to miss this one.
Lastly, in Episode Nine we uncover some of the most powerful herbs on the planet, for sexual function, hormone-balancing, and overall reproductive health.
This is going to be an inspiring, educational, and truly transformative ride. Are you ready? Okay. One more note, if you know someone who could benefit from the medicines that we're sharing in this series, please make sure to share it with them using the share button below this video.
Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you can sense from what you just watched that we're passionate about helping people find their way back to a healthy life, a deeper connection to themselves, and ultimately, their power.
See you tomorrow
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