NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM

This common phrase has profound meaning when we observe that certain herbs will grow where they are most needed. This is something known by the wise but detested by the totalitarians.

Why do you suppose certain herbal medicines have been illegal in the recent 100 years? Could it be that they present powerful competition for patented pharmaceuticals?

Yesterday I casually mentioned on another Substack writer’s work that traditional Chinese medicine has been using Artemisinin from Wormwood to aid recovery from Covid. See the conversation on Igor Chudov’s newsletter.

Some of the responses I received there inspired me to write a bit more about the glorious history of herbal medicine and my experiences using it.

To aid me, and for accuracy, I quote from a useful paper I found and recommend to my readers:

“Herbalism is a traditional medicinal or folk medicine practice based on the use of plants and plant extracts. Herbs/plants, the major component of traditional materia medica in the world, are of the main forms of life on earth. It is estimated that there are about 350,000 species of existing plants (including seed plants, bryophytes, and ferns), among which 287,655 species have been identified as of 2004 [1]. Herbal medicine (HM), also called botanical medicine, phytomedicine, or phytotherapy, refers to herbs, herbal materials, herbal preparations, and finished herbal products that contain parts of plants or other materials as active ingredients [2]. The plant parts used in herbal therapy include seeds, berries, roots, leaves, fruits, bark, flowers, or even the whole plants. Man was mainly dependent on crude botanical material for medical needs to retain vitality and cure diseases [3] prior to the introduction of aspirin derived from Spiraea ulmaria which was already prescribed for fever and swelling in Egyptian papyri and recommended by the Greek Hippocrates for pain and fever.

Although written records about medicinal plants dated back at least 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who described well-established medicinal uses for such plants as laurel, caraway, and thyme [4], archaeological studies have shown that the practice of herbal medicine dates as far back as 60,000 years ago in Iraq and 8,000 years ago in China. With the advent of western medicine (or “conventional” medicine) over the past century, herbal medicine has been challenged by practitioners of mainstream medicine because of the lack of scientific evidence in the context of contemporary medicine, despite its long history of effective use.

The holistic and systematic development of Chinese Herbal Medicine (CHM) has resulted in an increase in the number of approved CHMs. Zhong-Hua-Ben-Cao, the most authoritative Chinese book with a complete record of CMM issued in 1999, lists 8,980 kinds of CHMs that are divided into 34 volumes and summarizes the contemporary research of Chinese medicine with modern science and technology. Zhong-Yao-Da-Ci-Dian (a dictionary of traditional Chinese medicine), published in 1997, recorded 5,767 CHMs; when it was reprinted in 2006, the number of CHMs had increased to 6,008. The Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2010 version) listed 2,165 CHMs and their products. About 300 of them are commonly used in clinical practice, and many others are used locally as folk medicines. In terms of the literature on CHM, the theoretical aspects and practical experiences of several thousand years of usage are documented in more than 8,000 books; the total number of ancient literature about both CHM and TCM reached 13,000. Therefore, the documentation of knowledge in CHM is unique in the world.”

The paper goes on to discuss the history of Indian Ayurvedic practices and Arabic Herbal Medicine. Again, I recommend my readers to read it.

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MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH HERBAL MEDICINE

When I was a child in the 1950s, my paternal grandmother would care for me while my parents worked. She would dose me up with Honey, Marrowbone Jelly, Rose Hip Syrup, Malt, Syrup of Figs and Castor Oil. She would impress upon me that these food supplements were essential for me to develop a good brain and body.

My mum was keener on more ‘modern’ ideas and fell for the advertisements she saw in her women’s magazines or heard about via Woman’s Hour on BBC radio. As a consequence she purchased a product known as Haliborange, which I note is still being sold in pharmacies and supermarkets.

After consuming Haliborange I came out in a terribly itchy rash which extended from my throat to my groin!

This is how the lifelong war between my grandmother and my mother began. It reached the point where they stopped communicating at all. A very uncomfortable state of affairs within the family!

Fast forward to 1972 and we find me, at age 20, delivering a 9 pound and 3 ounce baby boy, I was ecstatic. I had followed all my grandmother’s suggestions throughout my pregnancy and had also read a book written by a Navajo woman, whose advice about natural childbirth I followed rigidly, thank goodness! I had been practising Transcendental Meditation since being told about it by Yoko Ono during the recording of the Beatles song, Hey Jude. I meditated throughout seven hours of labour and had to be brought to consciousness, rather abruptly, by a panicking nurse who was yelling “You are delivering! Wake up!” Had she failed to notice me, lying silent in the ward, I might have given birth entirely in that state of bliss….. hey ho…. such is the ignorance of conventional medical practitioners!

When my son first began to wean I gave him some fruit juices and, for convenience, used proprietary brands of squash. Most were fine but when I gave him orange squash he developed that itchy rash from his throat to his groin, just as I had done with the Haliborange tablets. Whatever is in this muck? I asked myself and had a job persuading friends not to give my boy anything which purported to be ‘orange’ but I suspected had never been anywhere near a citrus fruit. He was fine with the actual fruit itself….. hmm.

While I was a stay-at-home mum I enrolled with the Open University to study the subjects I had avoided at school. Maths, biology, physics, chemistry and more kept me enthralled and, of course, my baby grew with a need to learn to read because that was what he saw his mum doing! When he was about three years old I received a microscope from the Open University and my son turned into a pint-sized professor! He ran around the house and garden preparing slides. He looked at skin scrapings, the contents of his nose and ears! He would line his slides up on the worktop, waiting to show them to his Dad, when he got home from work.
This produced one of my most favourite funny memories: After seeing some of the mites that live on our skin, at bedtime my naked husband was vacuuming our mattress. A sight that I will never forget! The poor guy was so freaked out!

My son and I continued our addiction to studying but we went in separate directions. He favoured physics, chemistry, electronics and computer science. I switched to literature, psychology, eastern philosophy, arts and crafts.

I was in my 30s, working as a board level PA in the City of London, going slowly insane with boredom and disgust at capitalism, when a close friend informed me of a job advertisement she had seen on the Essex University notice board. “He is a Barefoot Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine!” she enthused “He wants a PA/Apothecary who understands the I Ching!” Wow….. I was amazed that my fondness for Chinese philosophy could be a valuable asset on my CV.

I set up an interview and, beyond introductions, the first thing I was asked was “What is your favourite hexagram in the I Ching?” I said “Hexagram 32, Perseverance” and got the job on the spot.

For a quick reference look at this: I CHING - the ancient book of wisdom (a short article I wrote for novices about 5 years ago)

The first job I had at Richard Ashrowan's clinic was to organise the stock of herbs which were stored in a brand new wooden shed in the garden. It was just a huge jumble of brown paper sacks with unknown names written on each one.
I had an office with shelves full of badly labelled jars adjacent to the waiting room, a wooden table and one filing cabinet. From this bare-bones beginning I created my future apothecary.

Richard gave me a copy of The Barefoot Doctor's Manual to study and I took it home. The mysteries of Yin, Yang and Chi began to have meaning in the physical world rather than as purely philosophical concepts. I was absolutely entranced on the one hand and overwhelmed on the other.
There were over 6,000 herbs to learn about. Some had pages and pages of information.
There were thousands of strategies and suggested formulas.
My brain ached at the thought "I will never learn all this!"

But eventually after years of study with great teachers, I did and went on to set up my own practice.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, I had been trying to get Feverfew to grow in my garden but without success. It is an essential herb for migraine.
I took in a lodger who liked to sit on a bench in my garden to drink his morning coffee before going to work. Two robust looking Feverfew bushes suddenly sprouted up either side of the bench! When I mentioned them to my lodger he remarked that he had always suffered from migraines but had not had an attack since living in my house. That is when it dawned on me that the plants respond to need.

I found it profoundly important and began to observe that plants (aka weeds) were growing where they can do some good and they did not necessarily need to be consumed!

Image: Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium)

I noticed that my neighbour had Valerian growing in her front garden but I had Periwinkle in mine. Valerian eases depression and Periwinkle is said to ward off evil.

I spotted certain lawns loaded with dandelion and guessed that the people passing by or living there were suffering with liver damage, usually due to alcohol consumption.

Nature was offering her bounty and nobody noticed!

Rumblings in the British press began to alarm me around the turn of the millennium. They were saying that Chinese herbs were toxic, responsible for deaths and should not be trusted. Then the British government decided that herbs could not be thought of as food stuffs and would need to incur VAT and in 2003 they abruptly made the import of the most important herbs ILLEGAL. I was devastated. My revered teacher, Dr Mai Chen, returned to Beijing University and Richard Ashrowan gave up completely, turning to art and video instead. See his Wikipedia entry here.

I sold up, bought a van, kitted it out to live in and went on the road with two dogs and a cat to “find myself”.

IMAGE: Rasta, a Groenendahl Belgian Shepherd dog, and I in 2003, before we set off to live on the road in our hi-top Leyland truck. We explored UK, France and Spain until we found and settled upon our off-grid Avalon organic fruit farm in the Sierra de Gredos.

During my travels I met some wonderful people and observed some wonderful plants offering their gifts to an oblivious public. I worked alongside some daffodil pickers in Cornwall who had a horrible itchy red rash on their wrists from the toxic daffodil sap. I scoured the field where we were working until I found one weak and struggling plantain (aka scarlet pimpernel). I carefully lifted the whole plant, pounded it to a pulp and added it to a large jar of Vaseline. I created small pouches with cling film and handed them out to the workers. Everyone recovered. Before I moved on, I passed my information to them so that they could make their own salve in future.

The most memorable and inspiring conversation I have ever had occurred at dawn on a harsh winter day just before I left UK to see France and Spain. I was warming myself by an outdoor fire with a Welsh gypsy woman. She had asked me why I had taken to living on the road and when I told her my story about Chinese herbs being made illegal to import to the UK, she grinned and said:

You have all the healing power you need!
You love everyone!

Of course.
I should have known.
I had taken a long arduous route to finally remember something I had learned at my grandmother’s knee.