Herbal Medicine and The Great Turning
Joanna Macy
“The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilisation.”
Chris Johnstone
“If we succeed in making the changes required in our times, future generations may look back on the early twenty-first century and talk of it as the time of the great turning”
Three Dimensions of the Great Turning, according to Macy:
- HOLDING ACTIONS
Political activism and legislative, legal, and regulatory work undertaken to slow down the destruction inflicted by the industrial growth society.
STRUCTURAL CHANGE
Understanding the dynamics of the industrial growth society as a pre-requisite for changing it. Employing systems thinking to analyse the structure of the drivers behind growth and the destruction of resources and the natural environment. Clarity helps us to understand how old systems can be replaced.
“What interlocking causes indenture us to an insatiable economy that uses our Earth as supply house and sewer? It is not a pretty picture, and it takes courage and confidence in our own common sense to look at it with realism; but we are demystifying the workings of the global economy. When we see how this system operates, we are less tempted to demonize the politicians and corporate CEOs who are in bondage to it. And for all the apparent might of the Industrial Growth Society, we can also see its fragility—how dependent it is on our obedience, and how doomed it is to devour itself.”
Herbal Medicine, as a holistic health practice that enlists the self-organising powers of body and mind is just one example of a structural alternative.
SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS
Perception of the Earth as a living system in which we are intricately interconnected. An end to the human experiment that separates mind from body.
Herbal Medicine
In the context of The Great Turning, Herbal Medicine occupies space in dimensions 2 and 3.
It is not possible to understand modern western herbal medicine without reference to both the history and tradition of its practice, and its political relationship to the dominant medical model of today: evidence-based biomedicine. Herbal medicine was the primary form of medicine from the earliest civilisations up until relatively recently. There are several key moments in the development of modern science over the past 200 years that have led to the marginalisation of herbal medicine in the West. One in particular illustrates well where modern medicine began to diverge in a completely new direction.
Claude Bernard (1854)
“La fixité du milieu interieur est la condition d’une vie libre et indépendante”.
The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life.
When the French physiologist made this assertion it opened the door for experimentation on the human body as a set of chemical reactions rather than as a living entity. It effectively got rid of the need for a ‘life force’.
Walter Cannon (1932)
:
The Wisdom of the Body: Homeostasis does not occur by chance but is the result of organised self-government.
A systems view of the body, predicting the developments of endocrinology and immunology. Describing how chemical events happen in the body in a linear series, producing feedback mechanisms that alter the physiology. All modern pharmacological interventions are based on this understanding. Fora more detailed explanation listen to Jonathan Treasure’s podcast on this subject.
Modern herbalists are trained in all aspects of scientific medicine: anatomy and physiology, pathology, pharmacology, epidemiology and research methods, but also understand there is another, parallel view that predates Bernard, and that is more useful when using herbs therapeutically, that recognises and works with a ‘vital force’. Some modern herbalists have completely rejected the vital force as a grounding therapeutic principle, and use herbs as though they are simply pharmacological agents acting on the same biological mechanisms as orthodox medical practitioners. These herbalists are sometimes known as phytotherapists - and this is also the non-holistic model of herbal medicine that the dominant, scientific medical establishment tend to recognise.
Many experienced herbalists, though, understand that there is a significant difference in the effectiveness of herbal interventions when they are directed by a therapeutic philosophy based on the existence of vital force. One of the reasons for this is because our understanding of how to use herbs has always been based on a constitutional and energetic view of human health, acknowledging that what works for one person might not work for another, because they have a different constitution or whatever. This can be summed up by saying that in this form of medicine the practitioner treats the patient and not the disease. This is the holistic model.
Taking herbal medicine forward as an essential skill for realigning civilistaion towards life-sustaining, and away from mindless industrial growth, the holistic model makes much more sense. Mainly because you can do a lot more with herbs by adopting the holistic view, and also because the connection that is implied by acknowledging the existence of a vital force - ie. the interconnectedness of all living things, and ulimately between mind and universe, allows for a medicine where people can manage their own healthcare with far less dependency on ‘experts’. As guardians of their own vital force, they are more likely to take good care of it. This is where we enter the third dimension of the Great Turning.
One of the great theorists of the vital force, or vitalism as it became known towards the end of the nineteenth century, was the American physiomedical herbalist J M Thruston. In his great work “The Philosophy of Physiomedicalism” he noted that working with the vital force “will yield the same unerring practical results at the sick bedside, as well as in prophylactic and sanitary work, whether the materialist or vitalist be right.” In other words, it doen’t matter whetheror not its true, as it gets results.