When I first began practicing as an herbalist, I resented the standard disclaimer we are all taught to put on our intake forms and our websites -- "These products and services are not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition."
I felt like these words diminished the importance and power of the work I was doing. And it seemed somehow dishonest given that many of my first clients were people who were eschewing the medical system altogether, people for whom I was the primary health care practitioner.
But the deeper I have gone into this work, the more I have realized that my work has nothing to do with diagnosing or treating medical conditions -- though occasionally the protocols I've recommended have probably helped to cure them.
You see, contemporary medical science and practice for the most part, views the human body as a collection of parts. Diseases and injuries are identified by their symptoms and surgical and pharmaceutical strategies are developed to correct these particular symptoms by manipulating particular chemical and mechanical functions in particular organs and systems.
This approach works remarkably well to reverse symptoms in acute situations -- resuscitating someone who has had a heart attack or stopping an aggressive blood infection. We can do these things with herbs too, but medical procedures have a higher success rate here.
But the longer a condition persists and the longer a treatment is continued, the less predictable the outcome will be, and the more unintended consequences begin to develop. Steroid inhalers do a great job of opening the airways of an asthmatic in the short term, but over time lead to problems with the adrenals that contribute to the underlying autoimmune condition.
Some herbalists would suggest that the problem is that pharmaceutical drugs are too biochemically crude and that herbs can work better for chronic conditions because the plants that pharmaceutical drugs are derived from often contain chemicals that counteract side effects of the isolated compounds used in those drugs. And this is certainly true to a point. Many then take the next step and say that herbs can be used to replace pharmaceuticals in the treatment of chronic medical conditions and that we need to identify which herbs can most reliable be used to treat which diseases using which chemical pathways. And then find ways to standardize their cultivation, processing, and use.
This is where I take a sharp turn in another direction.
Because to me medical conditions are nothing but taxonomic descriptions of particular states of particular organs or systems in particular moments.
And they are meaningful only when the primary focus is on addressing the immediate symptoms.
But just as the laws of physics change when operating on different scales of space and time, so too medicine's description of the workings of the body and the actions of certain medicines in the body tends to break down when you change the frame of reference.
The body turns out to be more than the sum of its parts -- it is a living, self-organizing system. And changing a particular aspect of the operation of that system can have a host of seemingly unpredictable consequences to those who apply strictly mechanical and biochemical models to a dynamic system with a complex logic of its own.
I align myself most strongly with the rural New England Root Doctors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who, working with insights gleaned from European folk medicine and what knowledge they could gather of Indigenous traditions, worked to treat the person, not the disease, attempting to understand and work with what the body was trying to do to heal itself and bring itself back into balance.
Their philosophy was best articulated by some of the heirs of their tradition, the great Physiomedicalist physicians of the middle and later nineteenth century. Dr. William Cook wrote in 1869 that ""The living body is held in life and action by a living force" and healing is best promoted by supporting the actions of that force. His contemporary, Dr. T.J. Lyle said that "in the art of curing disease we can but influence to contract and relax with varied degrees of rapidity and energy in imitation of nature's way of using these structures in health."
In doing so, its necessary to find the imbalance -- the obstacle to cure -- that is preventing the body from healing itself, and remove it through an equal and opposite corrective action. Lyle wrote:
"In the work of restoration the attempt must be to restore to some extent the opposite condition of that abnormally existing. If the parts are congested apply heat and relieve the circulation. If the body is emaciated give proper food and sustain digestion. If there be too much relaxation, stimulate to the relief of such abnormal relaxation. If there be too much rigidity, relax to the relief of that rigidity."
The simplest ways to do this involve meeting the body's unmet needs for sleep, exercise, hydration, and nutrition.
But sometimes its necessary to bring in outside agents to effect change by warming or cooling, moistening or drying, stimulating or relaxing, in accordance with what the body itself is trying to do. This is at the core of my work.
Because plants have bodies remarkably similar to ours, they are constantly developing strategies for dealing with stresses remarkably similar to those experienced by our bodies. Like our bodies, theirs are trying to obtain or maintain balance. So plants that live in wet areas develop strategies for dealing with excess moisture. Plants that live in hot, dry conditions develop strategies for cooling and moistening their tissues.
And like us plants are more than the sum of their parts. In the laboratory it may be possible to identify particular compounds that produce particular results in particular conditions, but these are not the whole of the plants' medicine.
Plants operate as deep teachers to our bodies, helping us learn new strategies for correcting imbalances.
My work as an herbalist is the work of connecting people with plants that can help them find physical, emotional, and spiritual balance.
Any resemblance to work intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions is purely incidental.
Showing posts with label Ars Medica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ars Medica. Show all posts
Friday, July 2, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
Stirring the sluggish body and spirit
This post is part of the January Blog Party: Warming Herbs hosted by Yael Grauer at http://www.dirttime.org
I love the beauty of New England winters, and the rich dreamtime the darkness brings, so I have always been reluctant to think of myself as suffering from seasonal depression.
But the reality is that cold, damp weather tends to slow the body down -- and for us kapha types that can mean both physical and emotional stagnation that very easily lead to depression.
In recent years I've found that several gentle warming herbs have helped me tremendously during the winter months:
Holy Basil (Ocimum sanctum) -- Warm and aromatic. David Winston suggests Holy Basil for the treatment of "Stagnant Depression." I find that Holy Basil can prevent stagnant depression as well -- for me it quite quickly dispells mental and emotional fogs before they can set in too deeply. It is also a great upper respiratory decongestant which is important to me because I tend to store emotion in my lungs, and dispelling mucous and maintaining clear airways helps to prevent that. Holy Basil honey is particularly nice on a cold day.
St. John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) -- St. John's Wort's usefulness for relieving seasonal depression is well known, but tends to be attributed to the fact that the plant is such a wonderful nervous system tonic. Supporting healthy brain function is certainly one way St. John's Wort helps. But to me it is not the most important.
Kaphic seasonal depression often has a strong hepatic component -- exacerbated by the tendency to eat so many sweet, heavy foods in the winter, especially around the holidays. St. John's Wort is wonderful for gently stimulating bile production in the liver.
Two cautions here: First, if you are taking a prescription medicine that is metabolized by the liver, St. John's Wort may dramatically alter the level of the medicine in your bloodstream.
Secondly, when doing anything that might speed up the body's natural detoxification process it is very important to make sure you have clear channels of elimination to allow freed toxins to exit the body efficiently -- otherwise they can build up in the bloodstream. Constipation and slow bowel transit times can be significant issues for people with a kapha imbalance. I usually take Triphala and/or Chaga when I am taking St. John's Wort to keep things moving in my lower digestive tract.
Elecampane (Inula hellenium) -- Because I tend to hold emotion in my lungs, this warm, stimulating expectorant has helped me tremendously when deep depression and deep lung infections have hit me in winter. In Chinese medicine, the flowers are used for liver stagnation, and I find that the root has some benefit in this manner as well. Next year I hope to experiment with a whole plant tincture.
Eleuthero (Eleutherococcus senticosus) -- Eleuthero gives me the boost in energy and stamina that I need to get and keep my body moving in winter. "True" (Panax) Ginsengs tend to be too hot and too stimulating, and can be jarring to my system and make my heart race -- but Eleuthero gives my body just the nudge it needs to exercise when the cold and dark make me think I want to stay still.
I love the beauty of New England winters, and the rich dreamtime the darkness brings, so I have always been reluctant to think of myself as suffering from seasonal depression.
But the reality is that cold, damp weather tends to slow the body down -- and for us kapha types that can mean both physical and emotional stagnation that very easily lead to depression.
In recent years I've found that several gentle warming herbs have helped me tremendously during the winter months:
Holy Basil (Ocimum sanctum) -- Warm and aromatic. David Winston suggests Holy Basil for the treatment of "Stagnant Depression." I find that Holy Basil can prevent stagnant depression as well -- for me it quite quickly dispells mental and emotional fogs before they can set in too deeply. It is also a great upper respiratory decongestant which is important to me because I tend to store emotion in my lungs, and dispelling mucous and maintaining clear airways helps to prevent that. Holy Basil honey is particularly nice on a cold day.
St. John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) -- St. John's Wort's usefulness for relieving seasonal depression is well known, but tends to be attributed to the fact that the plant is such a wonderful nervous system tonic. Supporting healthy brain function is certainly one way St. John's Wort helps. But to me it is not the most important.
Kaphic seasonal depression often has a strong hepatic component -- exacerbated by the tendency to eat so many sweet, heavy foods in the winter, especially around the holidays. St. John's Wort is wonderful for gently stimulating bile production in the liver.
Two cautions here: First, if you are taking a prescription medicine that is metabolized by the liver, St. John's Wort may dramatically alter the level of the medicine in your bloodstream.
Secondly, when doing anything that might speed up the body's natural detoxification process it is very important to make sure you have clear channels of elimination to allow freed toxins to exit the body efficiently -- otherwise they can build up in the bloodstream. Constipation and slow bowel transit times can be significant issues for people with a kapha imbalance. I usually take Triphala and/or Chaga when I am taking St. John's Wort to keep things moving in my lower digestive tract.
Elecampane (Inula hellenium) -- Because I tend to hold emotion in my lungs, this warm, stimulating expectorant has helped me tremendously when deep depression and deep lung infections have hit me in winter. In Chinese medicine, the flowers are used for liver stagnation, and I find that the root has some benefit in this manner as well. Next year I hope to experiment with a whole plant tincture.
Eleuthero (Eleutherococcus senticosus) -- Eleuthero gives me the boost in energy and stamina that I need to get and keep my body moving in winter. "True" (Panax) Ginsengs tend to be too hot and too stimulating, and can be jarring to my system and make my heart race -- but Eleuthero gives my body just the nudge it needs to exercise when the cold and dark make me think I want to stay still.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Why I don't participate in the "health care system"
NOTE: This essay no longer reflects the full reality of my thinking or my life -- October 2012
"Whatever people say they believe in terms of spirituality and religion, what they do when they are sick and in need reveals the true basis of their belief system."
-- Matthew Wood, The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism
When dogmas reach a certain level of acceptance they begin to be treated as self-evident facts beyond questioning.
So it is with the notion that "people without health insurance cost us all money" because "everyone will eventually need to go to a doctor, a hospital, or an emergency room."
The idea that health care is a service that we receive from doctors is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is impossible for most people in our culture to imagine anyone choosing not to participate in the "health care system."
In order to understand why I refuse to participate in that system its necessary to understand its history and its nature.
------------------
In traditional societies around the world everyone knew some of the medicine that the world around them provided.
The art and science of medicine were practiced by witches, shamans, midwives, herbwives, medicine men and women -- people who were responsible for maintaining the soundness, wholeness, and integrity of all things. The health of the individual, the health of the family, the health of the village or tribe, and the health of the land were inextricably linked.
Knowledge and technique were passed down through oral tradition. But the medicine itself came through direct interaction with the living world. It was deeply relational.
The healer was responsible for making all things sound. And the community supported the healer.
This approach to healing and medicine continued to prevail throughout rural Europe well into the early modern period until it was systematically suppressed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (It is still the primary approach to healing in poor communities around the world, including parts of the U.S. like the rural south.)
But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new social and economic forces caused knowledge to become a regulated and privatized commodity.
The Catholic Church had already made some attempts to suppress these practices because of their ties to traditions that taught that the divine was present everywhere and healing grace was abundant and freely available. As Starhawk writes in Dreaming in the Dark:
But other forces began to come into play. Over farming and over grazing (a result in part of pressures on the countryside to provide food of the cities) were leading to diminishing returns on the land at the same time that the infux of stolen gold from the Americas was causing massive inflation in Europe, leading landlords to break up and sell their holdings. The Witches who were both healers and priests to their communities were responsible for the rituals that reinforced peoples' ties to the land. And so they were persecuted.
At the same time, the urban market economy was expanding into the rural areas. With its spread, Starhawk writes, "Knowledge itself began to be an 'intangible commodity.' It was something to be sold only to those who could afford to buy it." It became the property of licensed professionals. And medicine was one of the first professions to be licensed. Just as the clergy had been the guardians of the soul and sanctioned dispensers of grace prior to the Protestant reformation, in the newly emerging and more materialistic society, doctors were the guardians of health and sanctioned dispensers of medicine. Licensure was the legal instrument by which they established their monopoly.
The story we are told is that this is the point in history at which medicine became a science and it became necessary to have means of certifying that practitioners were sufficiently well versed in the appropriate knowledge. To say this is to belittle the richness and complexity of the body of knowledge and wisdom passed down from practitioner to practitioner throughout human history prior to the 1600's.
There is no evidence that the licensed physicians of the time had better results in treating their patients than the unlicensed herbwyfes, midwives, and witches who they condemned.
As Starhawk writes, citing the work of Jean Baker Miller:
In North America, the mingling of kitchen witch traditions with Native American and African healing traditions led to the development of rich healing traditions in many rural areas which in turn informed the rise of the Physiomedical and Eclectic medicine in the nineteenth century. These threats, along with the emerging threat from European homeopathy, was dealt with through the establishment of the American Medical Association which successfully lobbied for the passage of new licensing regimes.
--------------------------------
Well into the first half of the twentieth century, no matter how mechanistic their model of healing was, physicians used plants as the basis of most of their medicine. Healing was still about a chemical and electromagnetic conversation between living beings.
But after World War II, doctors began switching to pharmaceuticals made from synthetic chemicals primarily made from petroleum products -- the long decayed bodies of ancient plants and animals.
The biochemistry of plants is remarkably similar to the biochemistry of our own bodies. Plants create medicines to address their own chemical imbalances and to support the healthy functioning of their own systems. When we ingest a plant medicine, our body recognizes its structures, and over time can begin to imitate them. Subtle medicines can bring profound healing over time.
But ecause of our limited understanding of the chemistry of life, synthetic pharmaceuticals act at a very crude level, stimulating or suppressing a particular chemical reaction in our bodies.
This can have a host of unintended consequences. Our bodies can become too dependent on these outside stimuli, allowing our natural feedback loops to atrophy. And turning one reaction on or off can have a cascade of consequences elsewhere in the body.
Bacteria and viruses quickly learn and pass on new responses to these simple chemicals, setting off an escalating arms race between the chemists of the pharmaceutical industry and the infinitely more innovative infectious microorganisms that grow resistant to each new generation of drugs.
And since our bodies don't recogize these chemicals, we excrete most of them and they end up in our wastewater. They are taken up throughout the environment with often devastating results -- excreted Prozac in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico is altering shellfish mating patterns and excreted synthetic hormones are altering the sexual development of fish, amphibians, and possibly humans. (See Stephen Harrod Buhner's The Lost Language of Plants for an in depth exploration of these issues.)
-------------------
I spent much of my own life dependent on asthma medications that kept me breathing but taxed and weakened my body.
In the winter of 2006, I was introduced to Elecampane, an herb that would help my lungs release everything they were holding onto.
Mischa Schuler, the herbalist who introduced me to Elecampane, also introduced me to the possibility of learning directly from the plants, transforming my sense of the world as alive from an abstract belief to a literal reality.
Over the next few months, the plants began speaking to me more and more directly. They healed and transformed my body in profound ways.
They also transformed my sense of myself -- I had believed my body to be a broken machine in need of constant support. I came to see it as a living entity just like the forest capable of regenerating itself given the right conditions. That transformation required faith in my body's ability to heal and faith in the plants as teachers.
That faith was tested dramatically in June of that year when I contracted Lyme disease. Most of the people in my life were telling me that I risked debilitation and even death if I did not take antibiotics. Instead, I opted to put my faith in my body and the plants, and immediately began a complex herbal protocol that spared me from the dire consequences my friends and family predicted.
My relationships with the plants around me deepened, and I spent a lot of that summer walking in the woods alone, listening. By the end of the summer it was clear that I would spend the rest of my life deepening those connections. And it was clear to me as well that I could never again take the synthetic pharmaceuticals that had created such dangerous imbalances in my own body and the body of the living Earth.
Many herbalists I respect greatly continue to use pharmaceuticals themselves for various reasons -- and I don't think any less of them as a result. I am in no position to place judgement on anyone else's relationship to medicine.
But the integrity of my own relationship with healing plants and with the living Earth requires a radical trust. That includes trusting death's place in every life, and knowing that the time will come when it is time for me to die, and that I would rather die in right relationship with the world around me than prolong my life through methods that violate the sacred trust I have placed in my plant teachers and allies.
As an herbalist, I place myself firmly in the tradition that sees the health of the individual, the health of the community, and the health of the land as of a piece. I cannot justify trying to heal my body with chemicals that will damage the forests and fields that provide my medicine any more than I could justify digging up ever Lady Slipper root in the woods around me. Either would represent a betrayal of everything my work is about.
And I will not comply with any law that insists that I pay money to health insurance companies with a vested interest in maintaining a model of health care that insists that we cannot heal ourselves without poisoning our planet.
Consider me a conscientious objector. I will not obey.
"Whatever people say they believe in terms of spirituality and religion, what they do when they are sick and in need reveals the true basis of their belief system."
-- Matthew Wood, The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism
When dogmas reach a certain level of acceptance they begin to be treated as self-evident facts beyond questioning.
So it is with the notion that "people without health insurance cost us all money" because "everyone will eventually need to go to a doctor, a hospital, or an emergency room."
The idea that health care is a service that we receive from doctors is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is impossible for most people in our culture to imagine anyone choosing not to participate in the "health care system."
In order to understand why I refuse to participate in that system its necessary to understand its history and its nature.
------------------
In traditional societies around the world everyone knew some of the medicine that the world around them provided.
The art and science of medicine were practiced by witches, shamans, midwives, herbwives, medicine men and women -- people who were responsible for maintaining the soundness, wholeness, and integrity of all things. The health of the individual, the health of the family, the health of the village or tribe, and the health of the land were inextricably linked.
Knowledge and technique were passed down through oral tradition. But the medicine itself came through direct interaction with the living world. It was deeply relational.
The healer was responsible for making all things sound. And the community supported the healer.
This approach to healing and medicine continued to prevail throughout rural Europe well into the early modern period until it was systematically suppressed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (It is still the primary approach to healing in poor communities around the world, including parts of the U.S. like the rural south.)
But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new social and economic forces caused knowledge to become a regulated and privatized commodity.
The Catholic Church had already made some attempts to suppress these practices because of their ties to traditions that taught that the divine was present everywhere and healing grace was abundant and freely available. As Starhawk writes in Dreaming in the Dark:
"The Catholic Church had for centuries served for a model for an approved body that dispensed approved grace. Many of the charges against Witches and heretics can be seen as charges of dispensing 'Brand X' grace, one that lacked the official seal of approval"But while this ideology held sway in the cities, in rural areas where people continued to work the land together, older beliefs still held sway. And many feudal landlords looked the other way, seeing old customs, old beliefs, and old festivals as outlets for energies and impulses that might otherwise feed rebellion.
But other forces began to come into play. Over farming and over grazing (a result in part of pressures on the countryside to provide food of the cities) were leading to diminishing returns on the land at the same time that the infux of stolen gold from the Americas was causing massive inflation in Europe, leading landlords to break up and sell their holdings. The Witches who were both healers and priests to their communities were responsible for the rituals that reinforced peoples' ties to the land. And so they were persecuted.
At the same time, the urban market economy was expanding into the rural areas. With its spread, Starhawk writes, "Knowledge itself began to be an 'intangible commodity.' It was something to be sold only to those who could afford to buy it." It became the property of licensed professionals. And medicine was one of the first professions to be licensed. Just as the clergy had been the guardians of the soul and sanctioned dispensers of grace prior to the Protestant reformation, in the newly emerging and more materialistic society, doctors were the guardians of health and sanctioned dispensers of medicine. Licensure was the legal instrument by which they established their monopoly.
The story we are told is that this is the point in history at which medicine became a science and it became necessary to have means of certifying that practitioners were sufficiently well versed in the appropriate knowledge. To say this is to belittle the richness and complexity of the body of knowledge and wisdom passed down from practitioner to practitioner throughout human history prior to the 1600's.
There is no evidence that the licensed physicians of the time had better results in treating their patients than the unlicensed herbwyfes, midwives, and witches who they condemned.
As Starhawk writes, citing the work of Jean Baker Miller:
"Licensing is supported by the premise that it protects the consumer of services from incompetents, charlatans, and unethical practitioners. In reality, licensing protects those with approved credentials from competition by allowing them to limit their own numbers and raise their fees. It is one of the primary ways in which 'functions that a dominant group prefers to perform . . are carefully guarded and closed to subordinates.'"In the case of medicine, the system of licensure led to the criminalization of traditional healers and the marginalization of their methods and knowledge. Fortunately the fact that women's work in the kitchen was largely invisible and innocuous to the powers that be allowed some traditional knowledge to continue to be passed on from woman to woman.
In North America, the mingling of kitchen witch traditions with Native American and African healing traditions led to the development of rich healing traditions in many rural areas which in turn informed the rise of the Physiomedical and Eclectic medicine in the nineteenth century. These threats, along with the emerging threat from European homeopathy, was dealt with through the establishment of the American Medical Association which successfully lobbied for the passage of new licensing regimes.
--------------------------------
Well into the first half of the twentieth century, no matter how mechanistic their model of healing was, physicians used plants as the basis of most of their medicine. Healing was still about a chemical and electromagnetic conversation between living beings.
But after World War II, doctors began switching to pharmaceuticals made from synthetic chemicals primarily made from petroleum products -- the long decayed bodies of ancient plants and animals.
The biochemistry of plants is remarkably similar to the biochemistry of our own bodies. Plants create medicines to address their own chemical imbalances and to support the healthy functioning of their own systems. When we ingest a plant medicine, our body recognizes its structures, and over time can begin to imitate them. Subtle medicines can bring profound healing over time.
But ecause of our limited understanding of the chemistry of life, synthetic pharmaceuticals act at a very crude level, stimulating or suppressing a particular chemical reaction in our bodies.
This can have a host of unintended consequences. Our bodies can become too dependent on these outside stimuli, allowing our natural feedback loops to atrophy. And turning one reaction on or off can have a cascade of consequences elsewhere in the body.
Bacteria and viruses quickly learn and pass on new responses to these simple chemicals, setting off an escalating arms race between the chemists of the pharmaceutical industry and the infinitely more innovative infectious microorganisms that grow resistant to each new generation of drugs.
And since our bodies don't recogize these chemicals, we excrete most of them and they end up in our wastewater. They are taken up throughout the environment with often devastating results -- excreted Prozac in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico is altering shellfish mating patterns and excreted synthetic hormones are altering the sexual development of fish, amphibians, and possibly humans. (See Stephen Harrod Buhner's The Lost Language of Plants for an in depth exploration of these issues.)
-------------------
I spent much of my own life dependent on asthma medications that kept me breathing but taxed and weakened my body.
In the winter of 2006, I was introduced to Elecampane, an herb that would help my lungs release everything they were holding onto.
Mischa Schuler, the herbalist who introduced me to Elecampane, also introduced me to the possibility of learning directly from the plants, transforming my sense of the world as alive from an abstract belief to a literal reality.
Over the next few months, the plants began speaking to me more and more directly. They healed and transformed my body in profound ways.
They also transformed my sense of myself -- I had believed my body to be a broken machine in need of constant support. I came to see it as a living entity just like the forest capable of regenerating itself given the right conditions. That transformation required faith in my body's ability to heal and faith in the plants as teachers.
That faith was tested dramatically in June of that year when I contracted Lyme disease. Most of the people in my life were telling me that I risked debilitation and even death if I did not take antibiotics. Instead, I opted to put my faith in my body and the plants, and immediately began a complex herbal protocol that spared me from the dire consequences my friends and family predicted.
My relationships with the plants around me deepened, and I spent a lot of that summer walking in the woods alone, listening. By the end of the summer it was clear that I would spend the rest of my life deepening those connections. And it was clear to me as well that I could never again take the synthetic pharmaceuticals that had created such dangerous imbalances in my own body and the body of the living Earth.
Many herbalists I respect greatly continue to use pharmaceuticals themselves for various reasons -- and I don't think any less of them as a result. I am in no position to place judgement on anyone else's relationship to medicine.
But the integrity of my own relationship with healing plants and with the living Earth requires a radical trust. That includes trusting death's place in every life, and knowing that the time will come when it is time for me to die, and that I would rather die in right relationship with the world around me than prolong my life through methods that violate the sacred trust I have placed in my plant teachers and allies.
As an herbalist, I place myself firmly in the tradition that sees the health of the individual, the health of the community, and the health of the land as of a piece. I cannot justify trying to heal my body with chemicals that will damage the forests and fields that provide my medicine any more than I could justify digging up ever Lady Slipper root in the woods around me. Either would represent a betrayal of everything my work is about.
And I will not comply with any law that insists that I pay money to health insurance companies with a vested interest in maintaining a model of health care that insists that we cannot heal ourselves without poisoning our planet.
Consider me a conscientious objector. I will not obey.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Healing Through the Veil: Field Notes on Psychedelic First Aid
Anyone who has spent time accessing other states of consciousness -- whether through fasting, meditation, ecstatic dance, magic, plant medicine, or synthetic chemicals -- knows that the worlds we enter on the other side of the veil are very real, and so are the dangers we face there.
Psychedelic plants and chemicals can rapidly bring people to realms that practitioners spend years trying to reach through other means. This can make them very efficient tools for deep transformational work. But it also means that they can bring people who don't have the well developed psychic defenses of a trained shaman to worlds subtly but powerfully different from anything they have experienced before -- a potentially dangerous situation.
Working as an herbalist at festivals where a lot of psychedelics are moving through the crowd, I have begun to develop both a model of what is happening inside a person who is having a "bad trip" and some protocols to help them through what they are struggling with. What follows are some notes on my approach and understanding that will hopefully spur more discussion among herbalists and other healers working with people who use psychedelic plants and chemicals.
A Biological Model
Psychedelic compounds move the plants, animals, and humans that ingest them into a highly creative nonlinear state of consciousness.(1)
In humans they seem to operate by opening the sensory gating channels that bring information about sights, sounds, sensations, tastes, smells, and electromagnetic field fluctuations from the heart and the other sense organs to the neocortex. The neocortex works to extract meaning from the signals it is receiving. In this heightened state of sensory awareness, the neocortex has to work harder to extract meaning from the information coming in from the world around it, forcing it into a state of nonlinear creativity.
For some, though, this flood of sensation and information coupled with the discovery of new meanings in once mundane things can trigger acute anxiety. And for those who have been severely traumatized in this realm, that feeling of anxiety can bring back body memories of their original traumas (in some combat veterans and some survivors of sexual trauma, even Cannabis, with its milder psychedelic qualities, can trigger full scale dissociative episodes.)
The sense of metaphysical vertigo can be traumatizing in and of itself -- and can have lasting effects when a person returns to "ordinary" consciousness. My interpretation of "acid flashbacks" is that they have nothing to do with residual chemicals in the spine, but rather are PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) related dissociations brought on by external triggers that remind someone of some aspect of a moment of terror on either side of the veil.
A Magical Model
The purple-blue tinge of the bruised flesh of mushrooms of the Psilocibe genus is a signature of the opening of the Third Eye and the Crown Chakra.
The sudden and dramatic opening that the medicine of these mushrooms and the similar medicines of various other plants, fungi, and chemicals bring on can open someone to states of consciousness that reveal the existence of other worlds, other orders of reality.
These worlds are populated by their own flora and fauna and even societies with complex behaviors, rules of etiquette, and feeding behaviors.
Shamanic and magical traditions prepare people to navigate these worlds through years of practice in sensing and moving energies. Just as a city dweller suddenly dropped into the middle of the desert or the forest would be at a loss for how to survive, those who have not prepared for a journey on the other side of the veil between worlds can find themselves stumbling into difficult and dangerous situations. The fact that the territories of these worlds overlap and layer over each other can lull travelers into a false sense of familiarity and security.
As one teacher of mine says, not all beings without bodies have our best interests in mind. Beings that prey on us have been known to wear very seductive forms on the other side of the veil.
In helping people struggling with acute panic during a psychedelic trip its important to acknowledge the reality of what is happening in and around her -- her experiences are not metaphorical, they are lived experiences that occur in another world.
Handling an Acute Psychedelic Crisis
My first response when someone is panicked but lucid during a psychedelic trip is to get the person to a physically comfortable place, preferably accompanied by one or two friends, verbally let her know that she is in no physical danger and that she will come back from the place where she is, and encourage and model slow, calm breaths. Then I offer a calming tea.
During a festival I always keep a big pot of tea going containing Skullcap/Blisswort (Scutellaria spp.), Passionflower (Passiflora spp.), and Wood Betony (Stachys officianalis.) Note the violet/blue color of these flowers.
Passionflower is specifically indicated for "irritation of the brain, nervousness, restlessness, sleeplessness with muscle twitching, or circular thinking"(2) -- symptoms typical of the overstimulation brought on my psychedelic plants and chemicals. While some practitioners are concerned about the theoretical possibility that as a mild MAO Inhibitor, Passionflower could be dangerous for someone taking a Selective Seretonin Reuptake Inhibitor (eg.Prozac), I have not been able to find any documented cases of this kind of negative drug interaction, and my experience and that of other herbalists I have talked with suggests that Passionflower is generally safe for most people. However since depending on someone's degree of coherence during a psychedelic trip, it may be difficult to ascertain whether that person is taking an SSRI, those concerned about the theoretical risk the interaction presents might choose not to use the herb in this kind of situation.
The inclusion of Blisswort is more a product of intuition and habit than a carefully reasoned decision -- she tends to be an excellent adjunct to Passionflower and as a nervine that is not sedating she has an ability to help level off energies without bringing someone "down" too hard and too fast.
Wood Betony serves multiple purposes in this instance. As an herb with a strong affinity for the solar plexus, it is strongly grounding, helping to move consciousness into that region of the body, anchoring it to a degree in the physical world. Darcey Blue French writes that Wood Betony "helps to ground people here on earth, for those stuck in repetitive mental patterns, or in mind/head stuff who need to come down and think from their center, and be in their body."
Wood Betony is also a traditional herb of exorcism and psychic protection. French writes:
"Stachys has long been used as an agent of protection from evil ‘spirits’, nightmares and visions, and to repel venomous creatures like snakes. It was planted in churchyards as protection against evil, and the Greeks said, 'it shields him against visions and dreams.' It is claimed in folklore when surrounded in a ring of wood betony leaves, snakes would fight and kill each other. Those who wear it as an amulet would find 'good against fearful visions, and driving away devils and despair.'"(3)
Yarrow Flower Essence or an energetic dose (a few drops) of a Yarrow flower tincture may also offer a degree of psychic and energetic protection.
Occasionally if the tripping person seems mired in dark thoughts I add Lavender flowers to the tea. Tulsi (Ocimum sacnctum) might also make sense here because of its ability to disperse stuck thoughts and emotions.
For cases of more severe emotional trauma, bordering on and moving into dissociative states, some members of the Anemone family can be of great assistance. In an article on using various Anemone species to treat panic attacks, 7Song describes using Anemone to treat people having "bad trips" and people having trouble sleeping after taking LSD at Rainbow Gatherings.(4) Michael Moore used Pasque Flower (Anemone pulsitilla) to treat these conditions.(5) Buhner suggests that Pasque Flower works to regulate the sensory gating channels. (6)
It is important to note that in a small number of people, primarily those with constitutional tendencies toward excess heat, Anemone species can be agigating rather than calming.
So far, I have worked exclusively with a tincture of Anemone tuberosa. In mild cases, a 2 or 3 drops of the tincture will often help to calm a person immensely. In one more severe case, I gave 30 drops of Anemone tuberosa tincture and 5 drops of Monotropa uniflora tincture in water to an agitated, incoherent, and borderline violent 200 pound man who had taken a large dose of LSD, and he was docile within 10 minutes of drinking the water he was docile, within 30 minutes he was asleep.
I made the decision to include Ghost Pipe (Monotropa uniflora) in the formula I administered in this case based on Ryan Drum's reported success using the plant to calm an agitated and menacing man whose state was brought on by "sleep deprivation, dehydration, too much recreational medication, and no real food for many days."(7) and my intuition that, like Anemone pulsitilla and Anemone tuberosa, Monotropa uniflora acts on the sensory gating channels.
The plant's form suggests both the spinal column and brain stem and a tunnel between worlds. The irridescent violet of the tincture suggests an affinity for the Crown Chakra. Energetically it is cooling.
In my view, hospitalization is to be avoided unless you are unable to prevent a person from being violent toward herself or others, the person may have ingested a toxic substance while tripping, or the person has sustained physical injuries. Emergency room treatment for a "bad trip" will always involve taking a frightened and disoriented person with heightened emotional, sensory, and energetic awareness and putting that person into a place full of frightened people, many of them in extreme pain. It will often involve physical restraint and/or the administration of heavy anti-psychotic drugs designed to bring the patient quickly back into consensual reality -- a potentially traumatic ripping from one world into another. It will usually involve the administration of treatment by people who do not acknowledge the reality of the experiences the patient is having and are not concerned about the possibility that the person may have been subjected to psychic attacks.
Thoughts on further treatment
As an herbalist administering first aid at festivals, I seldom have a chance to follow up with the people I have helped in the midst of psychic and emotional traumas connected with the use of psychedelics. But I would like to offer a few thoughts on follow-up treatment for people recovering from a traumatic psychedelic experiences:
-- It is of the utmost importance that the person be given an opportunity to integrate her experiences. When she is ready to share them she should be treated with the same respect and support as a survivor of a traumatic event that took place in ordinary reality
-- Two herbs seem likely to be of great benefit to someone recovering from this kind of trauma:
Tulsi (Ocimum sanctum) is useful when the "patient is fixated on a specific traumatic event, and complains of fatigue and mental fog" according to David Winston. (8) Pam Montgomery writes that "Besides being a great protector plant it helps in soul retrievals, as it is able to locate exiled souls and bringing them home."
-- Wood Betony (Stachys officianalis) may help to address some of the lingering energetic attachments from time spent in other worlds. In his monograph on the plant, Jim McDonald writes:
"Another of Wood Betony's virtues, [. . .] is it's ability to dispel evil and ward of spirits of ill intent. The manifestations of that need not be supernatural (though I think it good protection from bad magic and those who deal in that and Matthew Wood has used it on several occasions for those suffering PTSD from alien abductions) sometimes we may know or be related to such people. To access these more esoteric virtues, one might carry the herb with them in a medicine bag, or rub doses of the tincture into their wrists or temples. Sure, this may make you question how very weird your belief system is becoming, but when you see situations change around you in a way that reinforces this usage a few times, you can just flow with it. It's quite likely, after all that your friends and family already think you a bit 'eccentric.'" (10)
Its worth noting that "alien abduction" may be a modern interpretation of the ancient and universal experience of being taken or led by strange beings into other worlds. It stands to reason that a plant that helps survivors of these experiences would also be of assistance to those who enter those realms voluntarily but return scarred.
The flower essence of Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is, in my experience, specific to smoothing the transition between worlds.
-- In some cases, especially when someone's personality or behavior seem dramatically changed after a traumatic psychedelic experience , the assistance of a shaman or root worker may be necessary to retrieve parts of the self left behind in other worlds or to dispell spirits and energies that have attached themselves to a person.
____________________________________________________________________
UPDATE -- OCTOBER, 2010
With another season of festival first aid under my belt, now seems like a good time to make some updates.
For cases of mild to moderate anxiety associated with psychedelics where the person doesn't necessarily want to "come down" I'm now generally using variations on a formula including Wood Betony (for grounding and protection), Mimulus spp. (for feelings of dread), Passionflower (for circular thoughts and to cool the mind), and Schizandra (to calm disturbed Shen, especially where breathing is fast and shallow.) If there are strong heat signs or if there is an edge of anger to the anxiety I'll sometimes add Melissa. If there is fixation on a particular negative thought or emotion I'll add Holy Basil. If the heart is racing I'll add Motherwort.
I realize there is some concern that Passionflower as a possible MAOI may further potentiate tryptamines, but a) I have never seen this happen at therapeutic doses and b) if a person is merely hitting a rough spot in a journey, the goal is to bring grounding and protection, not necessarily to abort the trip, so further potentiating tryptamines is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.
Phyllis Light mentioned to me at the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference that she has calmed people on LSD by having them drink a glass of milk. When Darcey and I recently had a phone call from someone who was having a bad trip and didn't have access to the herbs we would normally use we had her drink a glass of milk and put her feet in warm water. This succeeded in calming her to the point where she was able to lie down and sleep it off.
In cases of severe anxiety marked by agitation I have stopped using Anemone in part because I am concerned about the potential of paradoxical reactions -- I've not seen this happen in a situation related to psychedelics but I have seen people who tend to run hot become more agitated by a very small dose of Anemone tuberosa, and given that the kind of aggressive agitation I have seen in some cases of people having "bad trips" feels like a Pitta excess to me I'd rather play it safe and use other herbs instead.
What I've been using in its place has been Ghost Pipe. In a dozen or so cases in which someone has come to the first aid tent because she wants her trip to be over or someone has been brought to the tent because he has become aggressively agitated on LSD, and in one case of someone experiencing tremors and terror from PCP, I've seen 30 drops of Ghost Pipe tincture administered between one and three times calm people down to the point where they are able to relax and usually sleep (and then wake up without any major disorientation.)
I have seen two cases in the past year of men in their early twenties becoming physically violent and completely dissociated while on LSD. In both cases they were men who had always seemed kind and gentle to their friends (which I believe because in both cases their kind and gentle friends helped us hold them over the course of several hours and never lost their tempers.) In both cases we later found out these men were also on Adderall. In both cases the things the men were shouting about while trying to attack people suggested the strong possibility of childhood sexual trauma. And in both cases multiple health care practitioners involved felt the very clear sense of another entity partially controlling their actions.
The Adderall connection feels important here for two reasons. The first is that I think PTSD in young men is often misdiagnosed as ADHD, and the suppressive therapies used to treat their symptoms may prevent emotional release, worsening the underlying condition. Secondly I theorize that when LSD brings up buried trauma, a stimulant like Adderall may act to further stimulate the adrenals and to increase physical energy and stamina increasing the likelihood of physical aggression.
In the first case, we were able to administer Ghost Pipe orally, and we watched as our patient's pupils contracted and his eye motion became more responsive to external stimuli. But he continued to kick, bite, and scream for another several hours. We made the choice not to evacuate him because getting him in an ambulance would have required police assistance and we did not want to see him face charges of assaulting a police officer. Once he was physically exhausted his friends took him to a hospital.
In the second instance, we were unable to administer any herbs orally in doses capable of making a difference -- a few sips from a water bottle with various herbs added was the best we could do. We initially applied Rescue Remedy to the temples and wrists and smudged with Tobacco, Osha, and White Sage. Eventually we were able to get the patient to smoke a combination of Skullcap, Tobacco, and Cannabis (an Indica-dominant strain) and chew a small piece of Calamus root. This combination seemed to have a calming effect, and he was eventually able to leave with his friends still tripping but no longer aggressive. Several of us had side conversations with his friends about the importance of encouraging him to seek counseling in some form.
Ironically, in both these situations, I could see entheogens in a controlled, ceremonial situation under the guidance of an experienced healer being useful medicines for helping the patient work with the repressed trauma. But clearly the chaotic setting of a festival is not the right place for that work to begin.
____________________________________________________________________
(1) Stephen Harrod Buhner. "The Ecstatic Journey and the Sacred Teachings of Plants" workshop at Sage Mountain, East Barre, VT, June 26-28. The subsequent information about sensory gating channels and the neocortex reflects my own extrapolation from Buhner's comments.
(2) David Winston. "Differential Treatment of Depression and Anxiety with Botanical Medicines." (C) 2006, Revised 2007. http://www.herbaltherapeutics.net/Differ_Treat-Depression.pdf
(3) Darcey French "Wood Betony: Stachys officianalis." Unpublished monograph, March 2008.
(4) 7Song. "Herbalists's View: Anemone for Panic Attacks." http://7song.com/files/Herbalists%20View-%20Anemone%20for%20Panic%20Attacks.pdf
(5) Darcey French, personal communication.
(6) Buhner
(7) Ryan Drum. "Three Herbs: Yarrow, Queen Anne's Lace, and Indian Pipe." http://www.ryandrum.com/threeherbs.htm#IndianPipe
(8) Winston.
(9) Pam Montogmery. Plant Sprit Healing. Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2008.
(10) Jim McDonald. "Wood Betony -- Stachys officianialis." http://herbcraft.org/betony.html
Psychedelic plants and chemicals can rapidly bring people to realms that practitioners spend years trying to reach through other means. This can make them very efficient tools for deep transformational work. But it also means that they can bring people who don't have the well developed psychic defenses of a trained shaman to worlds subtly but powerfully different from anything they have experienced before -- a potentially dangerous situation.
Working as an herbalist at festivals where a lot of psychedelics are moving through the crowd, I have begun to develop both a model of what is happening inside a person who is having a "bad trip" and some protocols to help them through what they are struggling with. What follows are some notes on my approach and understanding that will hopefully spur more discussion among herbalists and other healers working with people who use psychedelic plants and chemicals.
A Biological Model
Psychedelic compounds move the plants, animals, and humans that ingest them into a highly creative nonlinear state of consciousness.(1)
In humans they seem to operate by opening the sensory gating channels that bring information about sights, sounds, sensations, tastes, smells, and electromagnetic field fluctuations from the heart and the other sense organs to the neocortex. The neocortex works to extract meaning from the signals it is receiving. In this heightened state of sensory awareness, the neocortex has to work harder to extract meaning from the information coming in from the world around it, forcing it into a state of nonlinear creativity.
For some, though, this flood of sensation and information coupled with the discovery of new meanings in once mundane things can trigger acute anxiety. And for those who have been severely traumatized in this realm, that feeling of anxiety can bring back body memories of their original traumas (in some combat veterans and some survivors of sexual trauma, even Cannabis, with its milder psychedelic qualities, can trigger full scale dissociative episodes.)
The sense of metaphysical vertigo can be traumatizing in and of itself -- and can have lasting effects when a person returns to "ordinary" consciousness. My interpretation of "acid flashbacks" is that they have nothing to do with residual chemicals in the spine, but rather are PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) related dissociations brought on by external triggers that remind someone of some aspect of a moment of terror on either side of the veil.
A Magical Model
The purple-blue tinge of the bruised flesh of mushrooms of the Psilocibe genus is a signature of the opening of the Third Eye and the Crown Chakra.
The sudden and dramatic opening that the medicine of these mushrooms and the similar medicines of various other plants, fungi, and chemicals bring on can open someone to states of consciousness that reveal the existence of other worlds, other orders of reality.
These worlds are populated by their own flora and fauna and even societies with complex behaviors, rules of etiquette, and feeding behaviors.
Shamanic and magical traditions prepare people to navigate these worlds through years of practice in sensing and moving energies. Just as a city dweller suddenly dropped into the middle of the desert or the forest would be at a loss for how to survive, those who have not prepared for a journey on the other side of the veil between worlds can find themselves stumbling into difficult and dangerous situations. The fact that the territories of these worlds overlap and layer over each other can lull travelers into a false sense of familiarity and security.
As one teacher of mine says, not all beings without bodies have our best interests in mind. Beings that prey on us have been known to wear very seductive forms on the other side of the veil.
In helping people struggling with acute panic during a psychedelic trip its important to acknowledge the reality of what is happening in and around her -- her experiences are not metaphorical, they are lived experiences that occur in another world.
Handling an Acute Psychedelic Crisis
My first response when someone is panicked but lucid during a psychedelic trip is to get the person to a physically comfortable place, preferably accompanied by one or two friends, verbally let her know that she is in no physical danger and that she will come back from the place where she is, and encourage and model slow, calm breaths. Then I offer a calming tea.
During a festival I always keep a big pot of tea going containing Skullcap/Blisswort (Scutellaria spp.), Passionflower (Passiflora spp.), and Wood Betony (Stachys officianalis.) Note the violet/blue color of these flowers.
Passionflower is specifically indicated for "irritation of the brain, nervousness, restlessness, sleeplessness with muscle twitching, or circular thinking"(2) -- symptoms typical of the overstimulation brought on my psychedelic plants and chemicals. While some practitioners are concerned about the theoretical possibility that as a mild MAO Inhibitor, Passionflower could be dangerous for someone taking a Selective Seretonin Reuptake Inhibitor (eg.Prozac), I have not been able to find any documented cases of this kind of negative drug interaction, and my experience and that of other herbalists I have talked with suggests that Passionflower is generally safe for most people. However since depending on someone's degree of coherence during a psychedelic trip, it may be difficult to ascertain whether that person is taking an SSRI, those concerned about the theoretical risk the interaction presents might choose not to use the herb in this kind of situation.
The inclusion of Blisswort is more a product of intuition and habit than a carefully reasoned decision -- she tends to be an excellent adjunct to Passionflower and as a nervine that is not sedating she has an ability to help level off energies without bringing someone "down" too hard and too fast.
Wood Betony serves multiple purposes in this instance. As an herb with a strong affinity for the solar plexus, it is strongly grounding, helping to move consciousness into that region of the body, anchoring it to a degree in the physical world. Darcey Blue French writes that Wood Betony "helps to ground people here on earth, for those stuck in repetitive mental patterns, or in mind/head stuff who need to come down and think from their center, and be in their body."
Wood Betony is also a traditional herb of exorcism and psychic protection. French writes:
"Stachys has long been used as an agent of protection from evil ‘spirits’, nightmares and visions, and to repel venomous creatures like snakes. It was planted in churchyards as protection against evil, and the Greeks said, 'it shields him against visions and dreams.' It is claimed in folklore when surrounded in a ring of wood betony leaves, snakes would fight and kill each other. Those who wear it as an amulet would find 'good against fearful visions, and driving away devils and despair.'"(3)
Yarrow Flower Essence or an energetic dose (a few drops) of a Yarrow flower tincture may also offer a degree of psychic and energetic protection.
Occasionally if the tripping person seems mired in dark thoughts I add Lavender flowers to the tea. Tulsi (Ocimum sacnctum) might also make sense here because of its ability to disperse stuck thoughts and emotions.
For cases of more severe emotional trauma, bordering on and moving into dissociative states, some members of the Anemone family can be of great assistance. In an article on using various Anemone species to treat panic attacks, 7Song describes using Anemone to treat people having "bad trips" and people having trouble sleeping after taking LSD at Rainbow Gatherings.(4) Michael Moore used Pasque Flower (Anemone pulsitilla) to treat these conditions.(5) Buhner suggests that Pasque Flower works to regulate the sensory gating channels. (6)
It is important to note that in a small number of people, primarily those with constitutional tendencies toward excess heat, Anemone species can be agigating rather than calming.
So far, I have worked exclusively with a tincture of Anemone tuberosa. In mild cases, a 2 or 3 drops of the tincture will often help to calm a person immensely. In one more severe case, I gave 30 drops of Anemone tuberosa tincture and 5 drops of Monotropa uniflora tincture in water to an agitated, incoherent, and borderline violent 200 pound man who had taken a large dose of LSD, and he was docile within 10 minutes of drinking the water he was docile, within 30 minutes he was asleep.
I made the decision to include Ghost Pipe (Monotropa uniflora) in the formula I administered in this case based on Ryan Drum's reported success using the plant to calm an agitated and menacing man whose state was brought on by "sleep deprivation, dehydration, too much recreational medication, and no real food for many days."(7) and my intuition that, like Anemone pulsitilla and Anemone tuberosa, Monotropa uniflora acts on the sensory gating channels.
The plant's form suggests both the spinal column and brain stem and a tunnel between worlds. The irridescent violet of the tincture suggests an affinity for the Crown Chakra. Energetically it is cooling.
In my view, hospitalization is to be avoided unless you are unable to prevent a person from being violent toward herself or others, the person may have ingested a toxic substance while tripping, or the person has sustained physical injuries. Emergency room treatment for a "bad trip" will always involve taking a frightened and disoriented person with heightened emotional, sensory, and energetic awareness and putting that person into a place full of frightened people, many of them in extreme pain. It will often involve physical restraint and/or the administration of heavy anti-psychotic drugs designed to bring the patient quickly back into consensual reality -- a potentially traumatic ripping from one world into another. It will usually involve the administration of treatment by people who do not acknowledge the reality of the experiences the patient is having and are not concerned about the possibility that the person may have been subjected to psychic attacks.
Thoughts on further treatment
As an herbalist administering first aid at festivals, I seldom have a chance to follow up with the people I have helped in the midst of psychic and emotional traumas connected with the use of psychedelics. But I would like to offer a few thoughts on follow-up treatment for people recovering from a traumatic psychedelic experiences:
-- It is of the utmost importance that the person be given an opportunity to integrate her experiences. When she is ready to share them she should be treated with the same respect and support as a survivor of a traumatic event that took place in ordinary reality
-- Two herbs seem likely to be of great benefit to someone recovering from this kind of trauma:
Tulsi (Ocimum sanctum) is useful when the "patient is fixated on a specific traumatic event, and complains of fatigue and mental fog" according to David Winston. (8) Pam Montgomery writes that "Besides being a great protector plant it helps in soul retrievals, as it is able to locate exiled souls and bringing them home."
-- Wood Betony (Stachys officianalis) may help to address some of the lingering energetic attachments from time spent in other worlds. In his monograph on the plant, Jim McDonald writes:
"Another of Wood Betony's virtues, [. . .] is it's ability to dispel evil and ward of spirits of ill intent. The manifestations of that need not be supernatural (though I think it good protection from bad magic and those who deal in that and Matthew Wood has used it on several occasions for those suffering PTSD from alien abductions) sometimes we may know or be related to such people. To access these more esoteric virtues, one might carry the herb with them in a medicine bag, or rub doses of the tincture into their wrists or temples. Sure, this may make you question how very weird your belief system is becoming, but when you see situations change around you in a way that reinforces this usage a few times, you can just flow with it. It's quite likely, after all that your friends and family already think you a bit 'eccentric.'" (10)
Its worth noting that "alien abduction" may be a modern interpretation of the ancient and universal experience of being taken or led by strange beings into other worlds. It stands to reason that a plant that helps survivors of these experiences would also be of assistance to those who enter those realms voluntarily but return scarred.
The flower essence of Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is, in my experience, specific to smoothing the transition between worlds.
-- In some cases, especially when someone's personality or behavior seem dramatically changed after a traumatic psychedelic experience , the assistance of a shaman or root worker may be necessary to retrieve parts of the self left behind in other worlds or to dispell spirits and energies that have attached themselves to a person.
____________________________________________________________________
UPDATE -- OCTOBER, 2010
With another season of festival first aid under my belt, now seems like a good time to make some updates.
For cases of mild to moderate anxiety associated with psychedelics where the person doesn't necessarily want to "come down" I'm now generally using variations on a formula including Wood Betony (for grounding and protection), Mimulus spp. (for feelings of dread), Passionflower (for circular thoughts and to cool the mind), and Schizandra (to calm disturbed Shen, especially where breathing is fast and shallow.) If there are strong heat signs or if there is an edge of anger to the anxiety I'll sometimes add Melissa. If there is fixation on a particular negative thought or emotion I'll add Holy Basil. If the heart is racing I'll add Motherwort.
I realize there is some concern that Passionflower as a possible MAOI may further potentiate tryptamines, but a) I have never seen this happen at therapeutic doses and b) if a person is merely hitting a rough spot in a journey, the goal is to bring grounding and protection, not necessarily to abort the trip, so further potentiating tryptamines is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.
Phyllis Light mentioned to me at the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference that she has calmed people on LSD by having them drink a glass of milk. When Darcey and I recently had a phone call from someone who was having a bad trip and didn't have access to the herbs we would normally use we had her drink a glass of milk and put her feet in warm water. This succeeded in calming her to the point where she was able to lie down and sleep it off.
In cases of severe anxiety marked by agitation I have stopped using Anemone in part because I am concerned about the potential of paradoxical reactions -- I've not seen this happen in a situation related to psychedelics but I have seen people who tend to run hot become more agitated by a very small dose of Anemone tuberosa, and given that the kind of aggressive agitation I have seen in some cases of people having "bad trips" feels like a Pitta excess to me I'd rather play it safe and use other herbs instead.
What I've been using in its place has been Ghost Pipe. In a dozen or so cases in which someone has come to the first aid tent because she wants her trip to be over or someone has been brought to the tent because he has become aggressively agitated on LSD, and in one case of someone experiencing tremors and terror from PCP, I've seen 30 drops of Ghost Pipe tincture administered between one and three times calm people down to the point where they are able to relax and usually sleep (and then wake up without any major disorientation.)
I have seen two cases in the past year of men in their early twenties becoming physically violent and completely dissociated while on LSD. In both cases they were men who had always seemed kind and gentle to their friends (which I believe because in both cases their kind and gentle friends helped us hold them over the course of several hours and never lost their tempers.) In both cases we later found out these men were also on Adderall. In both cases the things the men were shouting about while trying to attack people suggested the strong possibility of childhood sexual trauma. And in both cases multiple health care practitioners involved felt the very clear sense of another entity partially controlling their actions.
The Adderall connection feels important here for two reasons. The first is that I think PTSD in young men is often misdiagnosed as ADHD, and the suppressive therapies used to treat their symptoms may prevent emotional release, worsening the underlying condition. Secondly I theorize that when LSD brings up buried trauma, a stimulant like Adderall may act to further stimulate the adrenals and to increase physical energy and stamina increasing the likelihood of physical aggression.
In the first case, we were able to administer Ghost Pipe orally, and we watched as our patient's pupils contracted and his eye motion became more responsive to external stimuli. But he continued to kick, bite, and scream for another several hours. We made the choice not to evacuate him because getting him in an ambulance would have required police assistance and we did not want to see him face charges of assaulting a police officer. Once he was physically exhausted his friends took him to a hospital.
In the second instance, we were unable to administer any herbs orally in doses capable of making a difference -- a few sips from a water bottle with various herbs added was the best we could do. We initially applied Rescue Remedy to the temples and wrists and smudged with Tobacco, Osha, and White Sage. Eventually we were able to get the patient to smoke a combination of Skullcap, Tobacco, and Cannabis (an Indica-dominant strain) and chew a small piece of Calamus root. This combination seemed to have a calming effect, and he was eventually able to leave with his friends still tripping but no longer aggressive. Several of us had side conversations with his friends about the importance of encouraging him to seek counseling in some form.
Ironically, in both these situations, I could see entheogens in a controlled, ceremonial situation under the guidance of an experienced healer being useful medicines for helping the patient work with the repressed trauma. But clearly the chaotic setting of a festival is not the right place for that work to begin.
____________________________________________________________________
(1) Stephen Harrod Buhner. "The Ecstatic Journey and the Sacred Teachings of Plants" workshop at Sage Mountain, East Barre, VT, June 26-28. The subsequent information about sensory gating channels and the neocortex reflects my own extrapolation from Buhner's comments.
(2) David Winston. "Differential Treatment of Depression and Anxiety with Botanical Medicines." (C) 2006, Revised 2007. http://www.herbaltherapeutics.net/Differ_Treat-Depression.pdf
(3) Darcey French "Wood Betony: Stachys officianalis." Unpublished monograph, March 2008.
(4) 7Song. "Herbalists's View: Anemone for Panic Attacks." http://7song.com/files/Herbalists%20View-%20Anemone%20for%20Panic%20Attacks.pdf
(5) Darcey French, personal communication.
(6) Buhner
(7) Ryan Drum. "Three Herbs: Yarrow, Queen Anne's Lace, and Indian Pipe." http://www.ryandrum.com/threeherbs.htm#IndianPipe
(8) Winston.
(9) Pam Montogmery. Plant Sprit Healing. Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2008.
(10) Jim McDonald. "Wood Betony -- Stachys officianialis." http://herbcraft.org/betony.html
Thursday, August 6, 2009
My Place is at the Edge
The headline of a recent action alert from the American Association for Health Freedom urging support for provisions of the omnibus health care legislation now in Congress that would require insurance companies to cover treatments by all health care professionals licensed by the states they live in (including may naturopaths and accupuncturists) asks "Has the Time Come for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to Join the Mainstream?"
While I understand and appreciate and share the organization's goal of giving people more control over the choices they make about how they take care of their own bodies, the language of the question troubles me.
As an herbalist, I am not providing an alternative or a complement to anything. I am practicing an art and science and magic at least as old as humanity-- the practice of working with plants to help people remember how to recover and maintain the dynamic balance of health. It has nothing to do with the effort to "diagnose, treat, or cure" disease because it is older than the concept of disease.
What authority I have comes from my relationships with the plants and people I work with. It is a sacred trust, not something that can be judged and regulated by any agency or licensing board.
The licensing of doctors and the prosecution of those who practice medicine without a license has its origin in the witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Well into the 1600's, most rural people in Europe were Christians in name only, believing and practicing in traditions that bound them to land they worked in common. Their medicine came from that land, and its knowledge and traditions were kept alive primarily by women -- midwives and "herbwyfes."
Outlawing these traditional forms of medicine and making medicine the work of a small class of wealthy men trained in universities was part and parcel of an effort to break rural people's connection to the land and to strip midwives and herbwives of the power they still had in their communities -- a power that came from the intimate relationship these healers had with the living Earth. This was bound up with the replacement of living oral traditions of medicine with a single fixed approach that could be altered only with the permission of the recognized authorities of the new profession. All of it a patriarchal game.
Schemes to regulate and license herbalists reflect the same thinking that underlies the licensing of doctors -- the idea that there is a set body of knowledge, an established set of approaches and practices, to which all herbalists must adhere. But the plants themselves don't follow the rules others would set out for them. They are constantly changing in response to the world around them. Those who would work with them need to be able to flow with those changes and trust the messages the plants give them more deeply than they trust anything they learn from the best book or the greatest human teacher.
To those who would argue that the licensing and regulation of herbalists is necessary to protect the public from bad herbalists, I say that the existence of the medical malpractice insurance industry and the legions of medical malpractice lawyers provides us with ample evidence that the licensing of doctors hasn't protected the public from bad doctors. The best protection people have is a sense of responsibility for their own health and the intimate knowledge of their own bodies that gives them a sense of when something is moving them closer to health and when it is moving them further away.
I have no interest in obtaining certification from any government or even any board of herbal elders.
Nor do I have any aspirations toward being part of the mainstream -- the nature of my work involves dancing at the boundaries of the human and the wild.
The shaman, the witch, the healer have always lived at the edge of the village or outside it -- serving the community without being fully part of it. Only by living and working outside the constraints and customs and assumptions of the culture is it possible to maintain the fierce innocence necessary to maintain relationships with plants, animals, and gods.
My place is at the edge. Come, meet me there, where we can both be transformed.
While I understand and appreciate and share the organization's goal of giving people more control over the choices they make about how they take care of their own bodies, the language of the question troubles me.
As an herbalist, I am not providing an alternative or a complement to anything. I am practicing an art and science and magic at least as old as humanity-- the practice of working with plants to help people remember how to recover and maintain the dynamic balance of health. It has nothing to do with the effort to "diagnose, treat, or cure" disease because it is older than the concept of disease.
What authority I have comes from my relationships with the plants and people I work with. It is a sacred trust, not something that can be judged and regulated by any agency or licensing board.
The licensing of doctors and the prosecution of those who practice medicine without a license has its origin in the witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Well into the 1600's, most rural people in Europe were Christians in name only, believing and practicing in traditions that bound them to land they worked in common. Their medicine came from that land, and its knowledge and traditions were kept alive primarily by women -- midwives and "herbwyfes."
Outlawing these traditional forms of medicine and making medicine the work of a small class of wealthy men trained in universities was part and parcel of an effort to break rural people's connection to the land and to strip midwives and herbwives of the power they still had in their communities -- a power that came from the intimate relationship these healers had with the living Earth. This was bound up with the replacement of living oral traditions of medicine with a single fixed approach that could be altered only with the permission of the recognized authorities of the new profession. All of it a patriarchal game.
Schemes to regulate and license herbalists reflect the same thinking that underlies the licensing of doctors -- the idea that there is a set body of knowledge, an established set of approaches and practices, to which all herbalists must adhere. But the plants themselves don't follow the rules others would set out for them. They are constantly changing in response to the world around them. Those who would work with them need to be able to flow with those changes and trust the messages the plants give them more deeply than they trust anything they learn from the best book or the greatest human teacher.
To those who would argue that the licensing and regulation of herbalists is necessary to protect the public from bad herbalists, I say that the existence of the medical malpractice insurance industry and the legions of medical malpractice lawyers provides us with ample evidence that the licensing of doctors hasn't protected the public from bad doctors. The best protection people have is a sense of responsibility for their own health and the intimate knowledge of their own bodies that gives them a sense of when something is moving them closer to health and when it is moving them further away.
I have no interest in obtaining certification from any government or even any board of herbal elders.
Nor do I have any aspirations toward being part of the mainstream -- the nature of my work involves dancing at the boundaries of the human and the wild.
The shaman, the witch, the healer have always lived at the edge of the village or outside it -- serving the community without being fully part of it. Only by living and working outside the constraints and customs and assumptions of the culture is it possible to maintain the fierce innocence necessary to maintain relationships with plants, animals, and gods.
My place is at the edge. Come, meet me there, where we can both be transformed.
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