Connectivity and Transmission:
How to Awaken a Patient’s Desire for Herbs in a McDonaldized Society
By
Leila A. Plummer
AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine
NuHerbs Scholarship Essay
for 2014 Competition
Connection. It’s one of the reasons we become TCM practitioners, and it’s one of
the reasons our patients come to see us. Yet sometimes our patients see herbs as
inconvenient or strange, or as taking too long. How do we show them that herbal
medicine can be transformational – that it works – that it’s “worth it”? How do we
provide the patient with a vital connection to the medicine?
My first experience with herbs was juicy. When I was little, my grandmother
gave me sweet, purple elderberry; when I was older I reveled in the plants on my
grandparents’ wild land. Dandelion and Honeysuckle seemed to be part fairy; their
mythologies were intertwined with the stories my father told about constellations.
Because these first experiences were kind, connected and tasty, trying them again became
easy and desirable. As an adult I tried Chinese herbs, and was amazed to watch formulas
clear up my joint pain and eczema.
Later in herb school, I participated in “plant sits” where one would drink a
decoction of a plant, and then watch the effects generated on the body. Rou Gui
(Cinnamon) is experienced as warming, and Bo He (Peppermint) can be cooling.
Sometimes one could feel a warmth in the belly – with Ding Xiang (Clove) or Gan Jiang
(Ginger) -- or a shiver along a certain meridian. Other times an image of how the herb
might be used might pop into the head, its use later confirmed by bookish investigations.
This experience which has become common practice in some Western herb schools is a
critical part of our Chinese herbal heritage -- legend is that the Divine Farmer Shen Nong
took all the herbs, “determining if they were bitter or sweet” (Flaws i), and that he even
had a transparent stomach enabling him to see how the herbs affected his insides.
So, tasting an herb can have immediate and strong responses in the body. Science
shows us that we even have bitter taste receptors in our lungs (Desplande). The effect on
the body can be so instantaneous that some herbalists will place a single drop of a tincture
onto a patient’s wrist to see if it is the correct herb for them.
Our rhythms used to be more tied to nature. With some exceptions, food came
from close-by, and medicine was plants and stones. Feeling cut-off from paradise is not
new, but the physical separation from our food and medicine is distinctly modern. The
mid-1800’s marked the moment when, as Raymond Williams notes, “for the first time,
anywhere,” in England more people lived in urban settings than in rural ones (Williams
217); it was also the time of factories, Dickensian horrors, and “filthy fogs” (Baudelaire
168-9). The industrial revolution had its benefits, but the cost was an increasing
separation from our biological roots.
George Ritzer coined the term McDonaldization to refer to the way that fast-food
principles are coming to dominate the world, and he connected it with older ideas of
institutionalization and factories; increasingly we have become a society that is lessconnected to the patient or to the natural world that surrounds him, and more concerned
with “efficiency, predictability, and control” (Ritzer 12). The culture of pharmaceuticals
and five-minute doctor appointments is a symptom.
Potent medicinal plants go beyond having curative effects and measurable
physical responses; they can help us to reconnect to the natural world. But how to bring
this possibility into our clinical practice?
We should start by expanding our training as TCM herbalists to include a focus
on the sensory properties of herbs. It’s not enough to memorize channels, organs, and
flavors – we should actually taste these herbs and intimately investigate their effects on
their bodies. Every year candidates pass herb boards without ever having tasted herbs;
this is a tragedy. Students should be led into local wild-spaces to encounter living herbs;
practitioners should grow herbs at their home and clinic space. We should return to
historical Chinese medicine roots of direct experience, and incorporate Western herbal
traditions, to experience herbs in a more living and connected context.
After the budding herbalist has had these direct physical and numinous
experiences, the herbalist is now in a unique place to serve as a bridge for transferring
this experiential connection to the patient.
Have you heard this framing? “These herbs taste like dirt, but you just have to get
them down. They might prolong your acupuncture treatment’s result.” It is likely that if
the situation were handled differently 1) the patient might like the taste, or at least not
hate it; 2) the client might be guided to feel changes in his body immediately upon intake
(a rush in his head, or a feeling of being grounded, or a warmth in his chest); 3) the
patient might see the herbs as the valuable healing tool that they are.
Consider this alternative vision of how prescribing might occur: As the herbalist
after the intake, you know exactly which herbs will work for this patient: He Huan Pi
(Mimosa) and Xiang Fu (Nutgrass). These herbs make more than intellectual sense; you
have physical and intuitive knowledge based on your own experiences tasting them.
Taking the herbs out of jars, you let her inhale their scent; or you give her some
granular extracts to taste. “Your chest may open and your heart may expand; the herbs
taste sweet and a little like blood.” You tell her she is joining a tradition of women who
have used these herbs for millennia before their cycle. You might watch her pulse
change, or her shoulders relax. You advise her to sit under the mimosa tree near her
house. Later, when she cooks the herbs, she finds them exactly what she needs. She
feels them in her body as the region below her ribs expands, and her heart opens.
WORKS CITED
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Trans. Richard Howard. Boston: David R.
Godine, 1982.
Deshpande, D. A., et al. “Bitter taste receptors on airway smooth muscle bronchodilate
by localized calcium signaling and reverse obstruction.” Nature Medicine Nov.
2010: 1299-304.
Flaws, Bob. Preface. The Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica: A Translation of the Shen
Nong Ben Cao Jing. Transl. Yang Shou-zhong. Boulder: Blue Poppy, 1998. ivii.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Revised New Century Ed. Thousand
Oaks: Pine Forge P, 2004
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.