Herbal medicine is now promoted by virtually all facets of society. Its virtues are extoled in newspapers and popular magazines. Our friends and neighbours are recommending herbs to us for our various ailments. Most health professionals include herbs as an important part of the service that they deliver to us. But what separates the highly-trained herbalist from the rest of the practitioner masses and what does this mean to you?
A medical herbalist is guided by three main maxims. These three maxims rightly constrain the herbalist's scope of practice and they greatly impact the approach taken to restore health to the diseased patient. The maxims are:
Herbal medicine works because it has been used and practised for hundreds to thousands of years. The products and procedures are well-tried and true to their health-sustaining objective.
Individuals, families, and even communities are fully capable of practicing the gamut of herbal medicine. Herbal products are all-natural and are easily prepared by any reasonably knowledgeable individual. Even natural therapeutic facilities are easily established and at low cost. Whether in the year 1000 B.C. or the year 2000 A.D. little has changed in the practice and preparation of herbal medicine. The current standard (or orthodox) medical system is barely 150 years old and in that time hundreds of thousands of drugs and procedures have come and gone.
Long after the current drug and gizmo medico-based system is dead and gone herbal medicine will remain. The medical herbalist sticks to the tried-and-true and is not willing to take up the newest "natural" discovery-of-the-month and apply it toward a state of ill-health in the hopes of a quicker fix. All disease can potentially be overcome using herbal medicine. This was as true 4000 years ago as it is today.
This rather arbitrary maxim reflects the true depth and sincerity of the natural healing profession. It is embraced by herbalists, traditional midwives, aboriginal healers, faith healers and many others. It simply does not make sense to torture, destroy, or annihilate nature to further our own dubious ends.
The maxim of no animal experimentation clearly and distinctly separates herbalists from naturopaths. A naturopath will likely use new, refined and exotic products which demand extensive animal experimentation, capital investment, and marketing promotion. A herbalist will not; especially as there is no need.
For example, a naturopath will use melatonin. This is an endocrine hormone and it is either extracted from the brains of mammals or it is created in a pharmaceutical laboratory. Although people who sell it will declare it to be safe there is in reality no way to know that this is true. Justification for the use of melatonin at all is dubious at best.
I once saw a Star Trek episode on TV where space explorers Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock happened upon an extremely advanced human race on a distant planet. The "advanced" race was essentially an over-sized brain in a big medical bell-jar, with many probes and wires attached to computers sticking into it. No medical herbalist would support any form of medicine which could lead to this state of affairs! In contrast, the herbalist views "an extremely advanced race" as genetically-unchanged human beings living in a beautifully-natural world populated with non-bioengineered living creatures.
The nihilistic medical practices of standard medicine (cutting, poisoning, altering) do not conform with the concepts of a self-healing body, natural process therapeutics, and improved environmental promotion extoled by medical herbalists. Herbalists and other highly-trained natural healers work at a more holistic level and prefer to be called Alternative health practitioners.
How should you view a herbal practitioner? A herbal practitioner is a person who can help you restore original health to your body in a tried and true manner. It may not be fancy or fast but it is as effective or more effective than other health-altering options.
There are many types of herbal practitioners. They range from the native healer of aboriginal medicine through to the well-recognized clinical medicine of the medical herbalist.
In the final analysis it is your degree of humanity and the quality of treatment desired that determines whether seeing a herbalist practitioner is appropriate for your condition of ill-health.