The Healing Point - Herbal Medicine

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Herbal Medicine

Here you'll find some information about herbal medicines. For an herbal consultation with Adrian Bean L.Ac., Nationally Certified Chinese Herbalist, please call (619) 239-7516.

Herbs are Medicines
In the buzzing alternative medicine field, we are exposed to more information about this herb for headache or that herb for energy. While I enjoy seeing people interested in natural medicine, I also see people making decisions and giving themselves herbs because they read an article and decided to give it a try. In most cases this is safe and won't hurt anyone. However, it is important to understand that herbs are medicines. Just because herbs are natural doesn't mean they are harmless.

It is also important to consider that the same symptom can be caused by different reasons. Let's imagine 6 people with headaches. One man gets headaches when his blood sugar gets low, another is stressed out and anxious, and another has migraines (vascular cause). One woman gets headaches before her menses or when ovulating (hormonal fluctuations), another has sinus allergies with headache, while another has high blood pressure. The point I am making here is that feverfew or some other herb that people have heard about for headache may work for a vascular headache but won't touch a hormonal headache. I have seen many patients self-prescribing based on very limited knowledge and unclear motives. Lots of people feel tired and want more energy so they take ginseng or stimulants like energy drinks. This could work temporarily but it could also further disrupt their already compromised physiology.

A trained herbalist with clinical experience is your best bet. I use high quality formulas in capsule/tablet form as well as liquid extracts (tinctures) and raw formulas (herbs that you then cook to make tea). We can customize the formula to meet your body's needs.

Some herbs are very potent and should be used only by trained herbalists. These herbs tend to have strong side-effects. Prescription drugs are similar to these herbs; in fact many drugs were developed from herbal medicines. Many other plants are moderately strong medicinals that can create profound effects when used properly. This class includes herbs like cascara sagrada (a laxative), vitex and angelica (hormonal regulators), and saw palmetto to name a few commonly used herbs. These herbs can be hazardous if applied inappropriately. Other herbs are mild medicinals, including spices like ginger, mint, and cayenne. Many teas, like green tea, are in this category. Other plants have even milder medicinal effects and are considered foods. All foods effect the body and some foods, like sprouts, lemon, and fresh salad greens are medicinal foods. Other foods, like processed white flour and chemical laden snacks, have little nutritional value and no medicinal effect. See the graphic below to illustrate their relative potency.

This is not to imply that foods are weak medicines. On the contrary, food is of paramount importance. In fact, I always try to use the gentlest form of intervention while creating the maximum effect. If you want to heal, you must fine-tune the body and food is the foundation. Many of us make the costly mistake of by-passing the basics (our diet) and then seek to correct imbalance with very strong and imbalanced medicines. You can eat burgers and then take Lipitor. Many of us eat "dead" and highly processed vacant food and then take coffee of ginseng or sugar to give us the energy that we didn't get from our food. The higher you go up on the herb potency scale, the harder it is to balance. A better approach is to view food as medicine and continually treat with every meal. The net effect over time is a much stronger medicinal effect than using a very strong drug or herb which is trying to undo what the diet has created.

Restoring Function
I find that herbal medicines help many people regulate and balance the body, especially for those suffering from functional problems. Functional problems include stress related problems, insomnia, many digestive maladies, certain types of fatigue, hormone imbalance and poor immune function. Basically, some systems in the body are not functioning well. In this instance, the person is not gravely ill but rather their body is not working well. Eventually, these imbalances can lead to tissue damage and structural changes. Functional problems are different from structural problems, which are caused by the structure being damaged (tissue damage). Most structural problems can also be treated with herbs. For most of these cases, however, I recommend herbs as support to "front-line" physical modalities like acupuncture, myofascial release modalities, physical therapy/exercise (yoga, etc.) and sometimes surgery.

A common example of when herbs are appropriate is with the following example. Patient A comes in with menstrual irregularity and moderate cramping, PMS symptoms, mild to moderate low back ache, digestive sensitivity (maybe IBS), and fatigue. The patient also reports feeling stressed out and depressed, erratic sleep patterns, and weight gain. This is a classic example of functional disturbances that will likely respond well to herbal medicines. Conversely, if this patient were to seek medical care from her doctor, she may be put on birth control pills for her menstrual problems (perhaps from her ob/gyn), digestive drugs for her bowels (perhaps from an internist), pain killers for her back (from her orthopedic doctor), prescription sleep aids and anti-depressants (from a psychiatrist). These meds may help or they may make things worse.

The herbal approach to this case includes recognizing a possible relationship between some or all of the symptoms. One likely relationship is with the fatigue, stress, and erratic sleep. Poor sleep deprives the body of needed rest which increases fatigue. Like virtually all tissues, the bowels are highly innervated by the nervous system. That means that if the nervous system is out of whack and the current that is moving through the nerves is either excessive of deficient, the bowels will lose their ability to efficiently process and digest the food. Over time, this can lead to metabolic disruption and weight gain. With herbs we can interact and effect the various systems of the body, like the hormonal system, without completely overriding the body. The birth control pills, on the other hand, obliterate the menstrual cycle by overriding the body's own hormones. With herbs, we are simply trying to modify and fine-tune (regulate) the body's natural processes.

Herbs and Drugs
Currently in America, pharmaceutical medicine is the dominant medical modality. It is interesting that many drugs originated as herbs. That is, chemists looked at herbs and tried to isolate "active ingredients", those molecular compounds that produced health effects. This is an excellent idea and it can be very useful. However, in my opinion, we have become myopic when it comes to the body. We tend to reduce everything down to chemistry that we can understand. The fact is, our knowledge of the workings of the body is still very limited, especially when it comes to the more complex adaptive mechanism and interactive functions of the body. These complex functions include many self-regulating mechanisms and feedback loops involved with neurological regulation (sympathetic and parasympathetic), hormonal balance, and immune responses. We have little room in the western medical model for concepts like balance, life force, body intelligence, conscious awareness, etc.

We are at a point where we have identified some of the cellular processes that take place but we have yet to clearly describe the many ways the body communicates to itself and decides what to do next. We are just now understanding how emotions effect the body. Just because we don't understand the mechanism for something doesn't mean that the mechanism doesn't exist. Many doctors are still bogged down with this very limited perspective. The result of these limitations in paradigm are vague and incomplete diagnoses and heavy handed treatment strategies.

It is amazing to me how many of my patients come to me without a useful diagnosis. That is, they have problems or pains that don't fit into one of the textbook diagnoses. Just about every other patient (who may have a clear diagnosis) is seeking help that is unavailable from regular medicine. The most available options are: take drugs, have surgery, or take stronger drugs.

For chronic problems, my approach involves improving cellular function by maximizing nutrition (food, herbs and oxygen), reducing pollution (cleansing herbs, oxygen, and antioxidants), regulating the nervous system (acupuncture, exercise, and stress reduction), and removing structural problems like mal-alignment, adhesions and scar tissue, etc (myofascial release and electro-acupuncture).

Why Herbs
About 4 years ago a patient asked me if acupuncture worked for anything other than weight loss. I paused for a moment as several responses crossed my mind. What occurred to me was that if aliens came to earth and wanted to learn about humankind, they would ask some questions about our behavior. One question they might ask is, "What do humans do to help themselves?" Another way to phrase this is, "What is their medicine?"

I thought that over the course of human history more people had acupuncture than any other single form of medical treatment. China, throughout its very long history, has had a significant portion of the global population.

My next thought was that acupuncture was likely the single most used physical treatment but that herbal medicine is the most used medicine. That's because every culture has some form of plant based medicine. In fact, over the centuries, most cultures have developed extensive clinical expertise with herbs. Herbal medicine is without question the most widely used form of medicine over the course of human history. Funny how it is marginalized and considered "alternative".

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