Dandelion Hunter by Rebecca Lerner

Author:Rebecca Lerner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780762793129
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-06-03T21:52:49.185374+00:00

We went outside to walk around in Erico’s garden. We picked bright orange calendula flowers and blue borage blossoms and ate them, and then we strolled around to the backyard, where we came to a stand of bleeding heart, Dicentra formosa, a plant that has narcotic properties.28 I watched a bumblebee buzz around its delicate, bell-shaped pink flowers. I asked him if there were any philosophical differences in how professional herbalists like him view medicine, compared with how conventional doctors do.

“Almost all over-the-counter drugs are suppressive; their intention is to suppress symptoms so that you can keep going to work,” he said. “But many of the things that happen to us when we’re sick happen for a good reason. A lot of the older herbalism, and a lot of traditional American and European and Greek medicine, were oriented toward strengthening the body’s reactions. This is the root of holistic medicine.”

“What about a fever? How is a fever good?” I asked.

“A fever is a wonderful reaction that the body has to cook out a pathogen,” Erico said. “All of the old herbs that people used for colds and flus and fevers were diaphoretic herbs—Chinese medicine says, ‘Release the exterior.’ In European and American traditions, these are things like elderflower and mint and ginger and yarrow flowers, herbs that help the body open up the pores, sweat a little bit and expel pathogens.”

He continued, “When the illness finds its way past the outer defenses, the usual place it goes first is either the lungs or the stomach. If it goes to the lungs, the immune system wants to produce lots of phlegm and expectorate this stuff. White blood cells are able to move around more easily in good quality mucus. You want to be making phlegm and expelling phlegm. Or if you have a cat scratch on your hand, the temperature of the infection site locally can get up to 110 degrees. That’s inflammation—it’s the body’s attempt to mobilize lots of energy and local blood and flood it with everything the immune system needs and cook out the infectious agent with heat. It’s all supposed to happen this way. So all of these immune system reactions are exactly what we want to support.”

Just as a forager eats by making the best of what nature already plants, an herbalist heals by embracing what nature already does.

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