Posted by Hombre on July 30, 2010, at 3:11:26
In reply to Re: Herb Formulas for the Treatment of Mental Disorder » Hombre, posted by Phillipa on July 29, 2010, at 20:29:10
I think the thrust of the article is that problems with the emotions are not separated from problems with the physical body -- it's the difference between a holistic view of health and a reductionist view of disease.
Emotional symptoms have equal weight with physical symptoms. One could even go so far as to say that emotions lie at the heart of all disease and eventually affect the physiological functioning of the body. An equally valid but opposite way of understanding would be that emotional symptoms are an expression of imbalance in physiological function. In either case, we see that the health of the body and the ability to maintain balanced emotions depend on each other.
If we choose to try herbs, which is more familiar to our medicine taking culture, we can choose them based on our emotional and physical symptoms. The key is to find a pattern that links all or most of the symptoms together. Herb formulas attempt to balance out or cancel out the pattern by tonifying that which is deficient, reducing that which is excessive, warming that which is too cold, and cooling that which is too hot.
This is how we experience sensation in the body, along with some more variations and subtleties, but for the most part our experience of illness is not so complicated. Nobody really "feels" like specific liver enzymes and neurotransmitters are not working, unless we are referring to the patterns that are associated with these conditions that we've picked up from studying texts. And we know that only the very talented p-docs can treat us according to this type of paradigm after years of experience. No amount of clinical training can teach a p-doc or any doc for that matter to know or even test for neurotransmitter deficiencies in any definitive way. They go by years of trial and error. That's why the traditional herb formulas, tested over many centuries, are still relevant today. There has been a lot of time for these herb formulas to be formulated and tested. And if the principle behind the formula is understood, herbs can be carefully added or subtracted to create variations that address the individuality of a person's illness.
The plus side of herbs, which are by no means a panacea, is that they work in predictable ways and in a much less scatter bomb-like fashion to alter the functioning of the body. Each herb is more like a smart bomb that homes in on a particular organ system and has a specific effect. The ratios of herbs in formulas provides synergistic effects that improve the performance of each individual herb so that the net effect is greater than the sum of the parts. Indeed the different herbs "harmonize" with each other, much as the different voices in a choir produce resonance and harmonics that cannot necessarily be predicted by listening to each individual voice.
And just as it takes a while for an orchestra to get tuned up under the watchful ears of the conductor, one cannot expect the body to suddenly achieve perfect balance in a short amount of time whether affected by herbs or psyche drugs. That would defy physics, chemistry and any of our other forms of understanding the natural universe.
Drugs don't always work the same way over time. If remission is attained quickly, sustained remission is still an art. The miraculous stories of instant remission are the exception, not the rule, yet it seems like the longer we suffer the more we count on that happening to us. We start to ignore the basic and mundane work of exercise, diet and realistic optimism, or our illness has gone on long enough to have undermined our will to function at even a basic level and it becomes harder and harder to think outside the illness. Our emotional energy drains the physical and we cannot increase our physical capacity to fuel more positive emotions.
poster:Hombre
thread:956254
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20100703/msgs/956423.html