Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @nick_routledge

@pauljpastor 2/ Plants, we say, are Nature's pharmacists. Today's harvest, Oregon Grape, a go-to for both the fledgling and seasoned herbalist hereabouts and also, interestingly, a phytomedicinal (medicinal herb) examined by Science for its powerfully synergistic whole-plant pharmacodynamics.

Oregon grape roots and leaves, harvested across a broad stand, washed and ready for cutting into segments headed toward a tincture-in-the-making.
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Oregon grape roots and leaves, harvested across a broad stand, washed and ready for cutting into segments headed toward a tincture-in-the-making.

Hand holding a pint mason jar with a label reading: Oregon Grape Berberis aquifolium in moonshiner brandy
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Hand holding a pint mason jar with a label reading: Oregon Grape Berberis aquifolium in moonshiner brandy

Copy of tweet thread: For the most part medical herbalism remains very poorly understood and naively conceived, a prejudice reinforced by a cultural affinity for business-as-usual, the depressing ubiquity of what Illich names ‘medical religion’ and... ...the antagonism of vested interests in sustaining the tyranny of a dominative biomedical worldview and the immense array of epistemologies and institutions it exclusively validates. No matter, botanical medicines, well-applied, are working well.
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Copy of tweet thread: For the most part medical herbalism remains very poorly understood and naively conceived, a prejudice reinforced by a cultural affinity for business-as-usual, the depressing ubiquity of what Illich names ‘medical religion’ and... ...the antagonism of vested interests in sustaining the tyranny of a dominative biomedical worldview and the immense array of epistemologies and institutions it exclusively validates. No matter, botanical medicines, well-applied, are working well.

This comes as no surprise to experienced herbalists who universally concur that the essential character of botanical medicine lies, for the large part, beyond the ken or conception of the scientific establishment precisely because the essence of botanical medicines is found not in the ‘identifiable’ arithmetical sum of the individual, isolated behaviors that plants contain, but in the inscrutably complex cooperative interactions of their ‘whole-plant’ components - the immeasurable whole is not merely more than the sum of its measurable parts, but very different, too. Given a similarly holistic perspective of human biology - we are not fragments because we partake of a whole - an integrated whole plant–whole person dynamic assumes a mind-boggling level of complexity which can never be wholly seen or understood. The ancient word we use to describe the mysterious, larger harmonies of integrated as distinct from differentiated behaviors, is ‘synergy.’
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This comes as no surprise to experienced herbalists who universally concur that the essential character of botanical medicine lies, for the large part, beyond the ken or conception of the scientific establishment precisely because the essence of botanical medicines is found not in the ‘identifiable’ arithmetical sum of the individual, isolated behaviors that plants contain, but in the inscrutably complex cooperative interactions of their ‘whole-plant’ components - the immeasurable whole is not merely more than the sum of its measurable parts, but very different, too. Given a similarly holistic perspective of human biology - we are not fragments because we partake of a whole - an integrated whole plant–whole person dynamic assumes a mind-boggling level of complexity which can never be wholly seen or understood. The ancient word we use to describe the mysterious, larger harmonies of integrated as distinct from differentiated behaviors, is ‘synergy.’