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Five "Ifs" for the New Herbalist

In my lectures over the past decade I have stridently campaigned for comparative trials of medicinal herbs and their corresponding pharmaceuticals. It's become one of the main raisons d'etre of my sunrise years. While herbal remedies may not be for everyone, every time, they're well worth considering:

If you are one of the nearly 20% of Americans who can't afford prescription drugs - or the doctors who prescribe them.

If your last visit to the doctor took less time than your last trip through the car wash. Today's HMO physicians spend on average six minutes with each patient. And, worse still, they don t seem to be listening: One study showed male doctors interrupting patient responses after 14 seconds, while female doctors cut in after 40.

If you have reason to doubt your diagnosis. Even with today, advanced diagnostic technologies, some 50% of Lyme disease diagnoses are wrong, while an estimated 20% of adult cough are believed to be undiagnosed pertussis, or whooping cough.

If you have comorbid factors, or more than one thing ailing you (most of us do).

If you are deficient in any essential vitamin, mineral or other nutrient (most of us are).

If you fit into any or all of the above "iffy" categories, the herbal alternative may be right for you. Herbs are accessible, largely affordable and don't require an expensive visit to your doctor.

More important, most every herb contains thousands of biologically active phytochemicals, a few or dozens or hundreds of which will, if purposefully selected and ingested in the right amount, help to prevent, treat or reduce the symptoms of whatever's troubling you, plus alleviate some or all of your comorbid factors, diagnosed or not.

And, as an added bonus, the "herbal shotgun" provides many of the nutrients missing from or underrepresented in the average American diet. If it's an essential element mineral, amino or fatty acid, precursor peptide, enzyme or vitamin you're lacking, a little and most herbs give you a little, more of most or all of the above can go a long a way.

But perhaps the most compelling reason to turn to herbs is that our genes and the genes of Earth's friendly flora have enjoyed a lengthy history together - history that began several million years ago near the Great Rift Valley, where our ancestral genes first met the ancestral genes of African composites ... some edible, some medicinal, some poisonous. Herbs are nothing if not biologically familiar.

They are also biologically complex. What is perhaps one of the simplest herbs, the four chromosome Arabidopsis, has some 20,000 genes, each coding for a master chemical controlling one or more physiological activity (amazing when you consider humans, in all of our conscious glory, have only about 100,000 genes).

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