Can Natural Medicine Cure? A Pharmacist’s Perspective.

I’m often asked whether “natural medicine” is effective for disease management, or whether it can cure.

Or even, whether “I believe” in herbal/natural medicine.

To that end, I can easily turn the tables and ask whether Western allopathic medicine really “treats” or “cures” disease states.

Can escalating doses in response to tolerance, introducing polypharmacy (drugs that treat side effects of other drugs) and burdening our organs of detoxification and elimination – really be the answer?

Is taking a pill (or really a number of them) on a daily basis, to keep symptoms at bay, equivalent to a cure?

Moreover, it’s almost impossible to even make sense of a person’s baseline health between the difficult tasks of gathering data between polypharmacy and their private medical records. Additionally, patients also hesitate to tell the truth of their dietary, lifestyle and supplement/herb intake and habits, due to fear of judgement or dismissal by the healthcare providers.

Does pharmacologic treatment treat or cripple?

On the other hand, supporting our own body’s ability to correct imbalance via a complex negative feedback mechanism – is a sustainable approach to therapy.

Let me ask you this, do you need to EAT every single day?

And do we all agree that we need to eat MOSTLY plants?

Then there’s nothing wrong with the concept of supplementing from the plant kingdom on the daily for our nutritional and medicinal needs!

Humans co EVOLVED along WITH the four other living kingdoms.

We think of ourselves as the top of the food chain, the most rational of all, and we prize our ability to reason.

But in truth life, death, rebirth, and the cycles throughout these are all about relationships.

About 57% of human cells are actually bacterial, viral, and fungal material! 

Genetically, our genome contains 20,000 “human” genes, and our microbiome has anywhere between two and 20 million microbial genes!

Our bodies were designed to continue evolving in relationship to the other kingdoms, and absorb all the necessary nutrients from our environment and ingesting NATURAL plant (and potentially supplementing with animal) material.

When we work with plants, we are enhancing our natural ability to absorb the phytochemicals, and get a synergistic net beneficial effect. 

When we ingest synthetic chemicals, we are having a single effect of a single isolated component that is mimicking what a plant would do (pharmacy EVOLVED from herbalism!).

This is a recipe for swinging the pole the other way in our biochemistry, and interfering with the natural biofeedback mechanisms.

Plants can also be toxic so we must be aware of this! I always recommend that we learn to identify the poisonous plants in our area.

Some plants have a narrow therapeutic index.

But even though plants have a risk of toxicity, the whole plant usually has components that mitigate side effects.

Overall, the risk of pharmacologic therapy must always be weighed against potential benefits.

I’m not AGAINST pharmacy, I’m FOR self-sufficiency.

I wouldn’t use a knife when taking medication will do…

A medication when a plant will do…

A plant when a word will do…

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