Do your friends ask you, “what’s a good herb for…” IBS, or PMS, or fibromyalgia, or whatever is bugging them? If you’ve ever struggled to answer such a request, you’re not alone. It’s not just about the difficulty of the pathology, though – it’s also about the complexity of the person, and the variability between people.
Everyone thinks they can ask “what’s a good herb for IBS” and that you should have the answer. (Oops, you might even be thinking about an answer right now!) The question to ask right alongside such a thought is this: is that answer appropriate for the person asking? Remember, every body is different!
As herbalists, we need a lot more information than just the name of the problem.
One of our favorite mottoes around here is: “people don’t take the names of herbs”. It means that you’re not giving a good answer if a person asks “what’s a good herb for migraines” and you respond “feverfew”. You’ve left out tons of important details: form, dose, timing, duration, formulation… the list goes on.
The other side of the equation would be “people don’t take herbs for the names of their symptoms”, or their discomforts, or their diagnoses. There are no “herbs for IBS” in the abstract, or in every individual case.
Examples make this point most clearly, so this week’s episode of the Holistic Herbalism Podcast is us talking through five different examples of people asking for help with health problems. We describe how we would break those problems down so that we can figure out what the right answer is for them, specifically – not for “someone”, generally.
What would we ask first to get a foothold on the issue? What would we observe, and ask the client to observe, as we work to figure out the information we need? How would we construct a protocol and a set of health experiments that will actually help them? Listen in to hear us talk through the process in several different cases.
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