I remember when I finally caught on to the true essence of ginseng, the most famous medicine in the Oriental Materia Medica. The more I worked with it, the more amazed I was by its ability to adapt itself to the needs of each particular person. If the kidneys were weak, ginseng would energize; if the heart was overactive, ginseng would calm it down. The plant—which is even shaped like the body of man—seemed to know what was required in each particular case. Noticing this remarkably intuitive capability, early practitioners of plant medicine coined the term “adaptogenic” for a whole group of these versatile, magical plants.

Working with these plants as an herbalist requires one to become, in a sense, part empirical scientist and part magician, and it is this mysterious play, with all its attendant sensual and intellectual pleasures, that makes the practice of herbal medicine so endlessly fascinating and rewarding. Stephen Buhner is an herbalist who knows this more than most. An award winning author and educator, Buhner is that rare kind of herbalist who not only knows and loves this magic, but is able to write about it in a manner that appeals equally to the poet, the scientist, and the engaged human that each of us natively is. Buhner’s writings on subtle anatomy, herbal medicine and the environment are some of the best we have.

In two of his most recent books, The Lost Language of Plants and The Secret Teachings of Plants, Buhner sounds an ominous warning about our current cultural and environmental predicament. At the same time, he inspires the reader with what he calls the “amazing natural patterning in which we are immersed, enmeshed, and most fundamentally healed.”

Buhner uses the words “lost” and “secret” in the titles of his books for good reason: the wisdom and holistic genius inherent in plants has been largely lost to the modern world, as have so many other forms of hard-won wisdom gained throughout our history. No generation in history has been subjected to more false teachings than ours. We live in a media-dominated age, where we are overwhelmed with sensory input from every direction. We process more information in a day than our ancestors did in a year. In the old days, cultural instruction was transmitted around the campfire in the form of stories and myths. The effect of these teachings—good or bad—was personal and local. In the modern media age, where the darkest distortions can be transmitted to billions of beings in a matter of moments, the effect is global. 

In one of his last public performances, the late George Carlin warned his audience that they, and the culture as a whole, had been infected by false teachings and lies. The audience laughed, but the message was clear: we are eating bullshit, and it is not good for us. The collective force of so many uninspected presumptions and points of view has overheated our brains, and grown our conceptual faculties to dangerous proportions. We have lost what our ancestors used to have: a perceptual, feeling relationship to the earth, the plants and each other. In its place, we have the modern thinking man, who knows no other way than to tear the world apart.

Among the many false teachings we have been fed in modern times, the dogma of scientific materialism remains one of the most prominent and destructive. Scientific enquiry is a great and necessary tool—that much is not in doubt. We get in trouble, however, when science’s conceptual beliefs become the dominating collective point of view. The thinking this orientation induces in us, by its very nature, becomes chronic. Man is moralized in his feeling heart—not his thinking mind.
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Over the course of his many years of service to humanity, the modern great sage, Adi Da Samraj, made it abundantly clear that this chronic thinking mind is not a virtue at all, but rather a dissociative, egoic imbalance with very real personal and collective consequences. This modern thinking mind, he wrote, is inherently reactive in nature, arising “From A Non-conceptual emotional-physical State of Doubt.”  This very disposition, he wrote in The Enlightenment of The Whole Body, actively dissociates us from reality.

The scientific, rationalist, intellectual and technological core-culture of our social order is the secret esoteric ‘Mother Church’ of the left brained congregation of ordinary people. It is through the growing and pervasive influence of this exclusively left brained esoteric or most highly developed core of our verbal culture that the holistic, intuitive, psychic, or right brained communion with the conditions and the Reality of our world is being gradually eliminated as a possibility.

This world of ours is not ultimately material—which means the separative, conceptual mind we make out of all our chronic thinking is not our true identity. We inhere in the context of light, being and consciousness, not matter. The presumed boundaries between rock and sky and man and nature are not real. They do not truly inhere in things themselves. We are not really separate from anything. This understanding, once it truly takes hold, profoundly changes our relationship to our natural circumstance and to each other. Stuck in the chronic mode of thinking, we fear what we see as separate from ourselves, and so we try, through all our misguided means, to control what is in front of us—whether it’s nature, other cultures, or each other. But to do so, as we can see in the signs of trouble all around us, can only end in destruction.

In The Lost Language of Plants, which was published a couple of years before Secret Teachings, Buhner offers his reality consideration on modern man’s management of the planet. The story, as we all know by now, is not good. Among other things, we are awash in toxins. Our drinking water is full of manufactured residues and pharmaceuticals. Nowadays, we all practice hormone replacement therapy, whether we like it or not, every time we drink from the tap. The chemicals we have come to rely upon to support our modern lifestyle, Buhner writes, do not just disappear when we throw them in the trash:

In their final manufactured form the environmental impact from pharmaceuticals continues through excretion, hospital wastes streams, and landfill dumping of expired drugs. Pharmaceuticals are inserting significant quantities of highly bioactive chemicals into soils and water throughout the world.

In his important study, The Hundred Year Lie, Randall Fitzgerald gave us a full picture of global toxicity. The Lost Language of Plants paints a similar picture. The indestructible synthetic drugs we are pumping into the earth are disrupting a delicate natural symbiosis upon which human life depends. They are also damaging the natural growth pattern of human beings. We have already disrupted our natural habitat to an alarming degree. As Buhner writes, the time for correction is now.
Looking at how the problems and excesses of our time relate to the very stuff of life, The Lost Language of Plants provides an essential understanding of where we are at as a species, and what can be done to arrest our slide. Buhner deserves to be read. Right understanding is the beginning of change. 

As Buhner reminds us, plants provide the best foods and medicines for man and the earth he inhabits. Plant habitats must be preserved. The whole survival struggle of plants in nature can be found in the chemistry they create. The bioactive chemicals that result—whether nutritional, antiseptic, antibiotic, or anti-inflammatory—can be transferred to humans. After all, we too are a part of nature, and confront a similar survival struggle as plants do. To illustrate the point, Buhner points out the wonders of plant terpenes, a large group of hydrocarbons found in the oils of plants. Terpenes, he writes, “purify the air, modulate plant emergence, enhance the respiration of the plant community, feed into mycelial networks, and play an essential role in the formation of humic acid.”

According to Buhner, this is prime evidence of how plants are, by their nature, working for the greater good. Plants, he says, “exist not for themselves alone; they create and maintain the community of life on Earth, they produce the chemistries all life needs to live, and they heal other living organisms that are ill.”

But for plants’ many interwoven functions to be able to work their restorative magic, Buhner writes, balance needs to be restored to the environments in which they exist:
Ecosystems, to be healthy, must be composed of many plants that

are working together in such close-knit communal relationships. There is in such systems, always a diversity of plant species and a diversity of
functional types. The larger the number of plants with diverse chemistries that occupy the largest number of ecosystem functional categories, the more vital and healthier the ecosystem.

{pagebreak} In The Secret Teachings of Plants, Buhner does his best to counteract some of the prevailing materialistic fundamentalism by singing his own song of the body electric. The back cover of the book describes Buhner as an “Earth poet”, and in this book he offers us a good deal of the poet’s hope and inspiration. The book opens like a poem, and then gradually develops into a guided meditation. Buhner leads us into the unfathomable plastic that is conditional existence, skillfully describing the chemical and electro magnetic life of the cells. It is inspiring, excellent reading.

The core of the book contains Buhner’s writings on the heart itself. His descriptions of the functioning of the human heart, and the spiral circulation of the blood, were music to my ears. It is here, painting his picture of unity, relationship and interconnectedness, that he is at his best: 

The whole body is cradled within the electromagnetic field generated by the heart. The information embedded within that field is communicated to the external world through electromagnetic waves reaching out from the body. It is communicated within the body through the blood stream, which conducts electromagnetic impulses throughout the body.

He goes on to say: 

But the heart is not only concerned with its interior world. Its electromagnetic field allows it to touch the dynamic electromagnetic fields created by other
living organisms and to exchange energy. Like all nonlinear systems that display self-organization and emergent behaviors, the heart is supremely sensitive to external perturbations that may affect its dynamic equilibrium. The heart not only transmits field pulses of electromagnetic energy, it also receives them, like a radio in a car. And like a radio, it is able to decode the information embedded within the electromagnetic fields it senses. It is, in fact, an organ of perception.

In these passages, Buhner reveals an esoteric secret formerly reserved for serious doctors and spiritual practitioners: the heart, not the brain, is the true seat of feeling and consciousness. The idea that human consciousness is somehow a product of chemical processes in the brain is, to state it bluntly, wrong. Human consciousness is a kind of “step-down” modification of infinite consciousness, and it is the heart and not the brain that is the true organ of perception. In the modern world, we are taught to exercise our brains, not our feeling hearts. And this is the source of all our trouble.

This “linear mind”, as Buhner calls it, has made us destructive exiles in our own garden world. In The Secret Teachings of Plants, Buhner uses his extremely compelling observations of cells, plants and the living system around us to get our attention. Once he has us tuned in, he then artfully works to draw us out of this linear mind and into the feeling realm of the heart. This is no easy task for a writer—or any artist, for that matter—but this is their necessary work. Now, more than ever, humanity requires the clarifying voice of true artists and educators. 

As the great teachers of mankind have always instructed, the mind must fall into the heart. Humanity must wake up to the unity of all things. At the end of The Secret Teaching of Plants, Buhner offers exercises and guided mediations that are intended to help us do just that. We are called in these exercises to stop, breathe, and simply feel the biosphere in which we exist. It is sound advice for any moment.

Every single human being is utterly dependent on plants for healing and sustenance. The symbiotic relationship we share is utterly unique, an emotional and psychic connection that goes beyond the physical. Nature responds to our essential human needs through the plants. We are evolving together. Buhner wants us to rediscover this shared growth and change. For the sake of humanity, he wants to restore that living intimacy to all our lives.

There is no arguing with what Buhner has to say. We have to restore our right relationship to the world around us before it is too late. Our survival in this human form is completely dependent upon a right cooperative relationship to the greater pattern in which we exist. Even so, nature, in and of itself, is not the God that humanity so sorely needs to embrace. Nature can bathe our olfactory senses with exquisite perfumes one day and wipe out hundreds of thousands of innocent creatures the next. There is no lasting peace in nature. Humanity’s ultimate liberation lies in the realization of the radiant transcendental consciousness in which nature inheres—that ultimate reality to which Buhner’s excellent books always seem to be pointing us.

Angelo Druda, author of The Tao of Rejuvenation, is the Health and Sexuality editor of DharmaCafé. He can be reached at adruda@dharmacafe.com.

I had been there about three weeks, drinking ayahuasca three nights, then one night rest, then three more nights, and so on.
One morning, at the crack of dawn, following a night of drinking, I walked down to the lake to take a swim.  At the shore was the usual scene:  the girls and women washing clothes, boys readying their nets to catch our breakfast. I paused to reflect on this primeval happiness. It made me think how much more civilized the Shipibo (the people of the lake) are compared to our so-called modern culture, and how much I love them and their place.  I remembered the sublime mystery I was treated to just a few hours before when my body filled with a divine light. We are so smug in our western science, yet these simple people hold the key to profound religious and scientific mysteries that dwarf our knowledge.  In this pristine moment, I savored that wonderful blend of the sacred and the simple and ordinary.
I dropped my towel to the ground.  A very large, brownish-red ant quickly darted into it. It was more than an inch long.  Very gently I reached down to shake the ant out. The moment I touched the towel, as quickly as it darted in, the little fucker darted out and bit me in between my fingers.  I have never felt such intense and sharp pain.  I had no idea if it was poisonous but I feared the worst.  My friend Emilio, Mateo’s son in law and apprentice, was down by the lake helping the young boys fish. “Emilio!  Help! Pronto!”
Emilio came running. My hand was already starting to swell. It was already as big as a golf ball where it was bitten.
Emilio arrived. I pointed to the vicious ant that was poised to strike again, its pincers throbbing.  Emilio looked aghast, and with the heel of his bare foot stomped it into its next life.
“Es toxic?,” I ask.

He looks at me blankly.
I went paranoid, thinking I was about to become a statistic. Another dumb gringo dies of some insect bite while looking for God in the jungle.  Well, at least I found it. I think I can feel my face begin to sag on one side.  I was becoming paralyzed.  I put pressure on my wrist to stop the flow of blood, thinking that will help.  “Es toxic?”
We head to the village, a hundred yards away. I start to run but then I remember that that will just make my heart beat faster and speed my death.  When we finally reach the village Emilio gets some mapacho (tobacco) and chews it.  He put the gooey mess on my swollen hand and warms it over the fire.  To the Shipibo mapacho is the mother of ayahuasca and can cure anything.  I am in tremendous pain. I’m not sure if its the ant bite or the vice grip I have on my circulation, or if I am just burning myself in the fire.  I love Emilio like a brother, but I want the real shaman.  “Donde esta Mateo?,”  I ask.  Emilio, who speaks Shipibo, Spanish, and very little English, makes a gesture to tell me he is still sleeping.
Mateo is all curled up with his lovely wife Adelia under the mosquito net hanging from the thatched roof.  Emilio explains what happened. By now the entire village, really an extended family that of which I had become an honorary member, is awake. This is a big event.  Everyone is gathered around, wanting to know what happened to hermano Roberto.  Word was I had been bitten by a snake.
When Adelia learns I was bitten by just an ant, she smiles her big gold toothed smile, and says something in Shipibo.  All the women and girls run away squealing with laughter.  Emilio looks at me, smiles, and pats my back.  I am slightly relieved but I still don’t know if I’m going to die or just be paralyzed.  “Que significa?,” I ask Adelia and Emilio.  They just shake their heads.
Emilio forces a little laugh,  ““Only woman help.”
Mateo stirs.  I ask him, “Is this poisonous?”
“No,” he says smiling from the moment he opens his eyes. “Not too bad.”  He said something to Emilio in Shipibo that sent him running off into the trees.  Mateo came to this place because of the master plants that grow here.
“Mateo,” I said, not satisfied with his answer.  “This really hurts.  Look.”  He didn’t seem that interested.
“Don’t worry,” he said yawning,  “I was sleeping in a tree and got bit by sixty of them at one time.”
“Sixty of them!  What happened?”
“I laughed,” he said.  “It made me happy. Made me stronger.”
“That’s you,” I said still putting so much pressure on my wrist that my hand turned blue.  “What is one of them going to do to me?”
We already had an episode with the lovely chiggers, darling little bugs that enter your body through the pores of your skin down by your ankles, and begin to colonize your body, marching upward, reproducing every step of the way, hundreds, thousands of times, until your body breaks out in blistered sores oozing puss and itching like all hell. I and another member of our party got them the first day here. The Shipibo just pick a lime off a tree and a rub a little juice mixed with mapacho on the first sign of itchy ankles, which stops the problem.  But Mateo recommended alcohol mixed with mapacho for us.  The other member of our party thought he was a native and opted for the lime juice cure, which didn’t work.  I went straight for the alcohol-mapacho blend which worked so well I carried a bottle of it around at all times, pouring it liberally on me whenever I felt the slightest itch.
I wanted to be sure I was getting gringo therapeutics for the ant bite.  The “asula” they called it.
But before Mateo could answer Emilo came back from the forest with a branch of a bush, as thick as my finger, about two feet long, that he was sharpening to a fine point like an arrow with his machete.
Mateo quickly jumps up and very firmly grabs my wrist. He looks at my wound. Emilio approaches with the pointy stick.  I am not happy, about to undergo my first jungle surgery.  I thought of how my father, a dentist, would hide the needle from the patient’s view so not to scare them, acting nonchalant as he stabbed them in the gum.  The thought of that sharp stick piercing my hand nearly makes me faint. But okay, if it will save my life.  I put my head between my legs to stay conscious.  I try to find some trust. I miss Karen, and my son, and wondered where is that divine light when you really need it.
But instead of piercing me with the sharp stick,  a pearl sized drop of white sap oozes from it onto my wound, instantly relieving me of the pain. Within twenty minutes the swelling was gone. I could hardly tell where I had been bitten.
But why did the girls and women all run away, abandoning me in my moment of real need, when they had the cure all along?  What kind of karma is this?  Finally our translator wakes up. I take her to Adelia and ask her to repeat what Adelia said about the cure. She laughs.  Emilio’s translation lacked a certain detail.  She said,  “Only the juices flowing from a women’s vagina can heal the pain of the asula.”
It works for everything else.

Robert Forte studied the history and psychology of religion at the Divinity school of the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He served on the board of directors of the Albert Hofmann Foundation and is the editor of Entheogens and the Future of Religion and Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In.

Women’s life styles and behaviors directly affect their physical and
emotional wellbeing, both for the short and long term.  It’s no
wonder that their hormonal health is under attack.  Premenstrual
Syndrome (PMS), painful periods, irregular or absent periods, ovarian
cysts, polycystic ovaries, fibrocystic breast disease (lumpy, painful
breasts) endometriosis, hormonal migraines, fibroids, acne,
allergies, fatigue and mood swings are occurring in young women at
epidemic rates.  Many girls try to ignore their health problems
hoping they will disappear.  Others schedule appointments with their
doctors.  Odds on, they will leave the doctor’s office with either a
prescription drug or some version of the Birth Control Pill.

Rather than perceiving hormonal imbalances as aberrations created by
the many abuses of modern life.  Medicine has convinced women that
menstruation itself, is the problem and those natural menstrual
cycles are dangerous, disease producing and require medical
intervention.  Doctors have also convinced many women that their
ovaries are the villains behind their health problems and emotional
turmoil.  The solution: shut it down.  The method: some form of birth
control!

The erroneous notion that menstruation is a rather unpleasant, toxic
process has been around for a hundreds, if not thousands of years.
So has the belief that the source of a woman’s suffering resides
within her ovaries, uterus and her menstrual flow.

In a syndicated column written by a well-known Australian doctor a
reader asked the following question. “My doctor told me recently that
monthly periods were now regarded by some as a ‘disease’ and totally
preventable. Is this true?”  His reply. “Why should women be burdened
with loss of valuable blood each month, which is often not
manufactured in similar amounts, often leading to anemia and chronic
tiredness?  Taking the active ingredients of the oral contraceptive
pill daily, with no seven-day break solves the problem.”

The sentiment that periods are a disease - or at least a most
unwelcome, unproven and unsafe physiological process - reflects a
growing trend amongst both physicians and pharmaceutical companies to
promote the theory that menstrual cycles should be eliminated.
Leading the charge to eradicate menstruation is Dr. Elsimar Coutinho,
Professor of Gynecology, Obstetrics and Human Reproduction in Brazil.
In his book, “Is Menstruation Obsolete?” Dr. Coutinho argues that
monthly bleeding is not the “natural” state of women and that
actually places them at risk of various medical conditions.  The
author maintains that menstruation is neither medically meaningful
nor sound.  He asserts that prehistoric women had fewer than 160
periods in their lifetime.  On the other hand, modern women, start
menstruating earlier, and spend less time pregnant, and have more
than 400 menstrual cycles. 
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Dr. Coutinho believes that women should be able to choose the timing
and frequency of their periods.  In addition to perceiving
menstruation as a failed process, he also contends that it is devoid
of beneficial effects and may even be harmful to women’s health.
Coutinho’s work suggests that the most medically advanced “treatment”
for menstruation would be its total cessation in all reproductive-
aged women.

According to Dr. Coutinho, the profoundly complicated reproductive
system that has taken millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning
has now been declared obsolete and harmful.  Medical science is about
to provide the rationale and the means to make menstruation
completely disappear.  The solutions are simple: just give all women
a continuous low dose birth control pill which is used continuously
for 84 days followed by a seven-day break.  This will allow only 4
bleeds a year.  (By mimicking pregnancy, the Pill literally shuts
down the ovaries, and causes a forced bleed each month not a natural
menstrual cycle).

Physicians and researchers alike have enthusiastically embraced Dr.
Coutinho’s theory.  They see no reason why all women wouldn’t want
to have fewer periods.  Whether is a problem such as migraines or the
just the ” inconvenience and messiness ” of menstruation, the Pill
can now come to the rescue.

Now that “medical advances” have conquered menstruation and drug
companies’ glossy marketing campaigns have succeeded in extolling the
Pill’s virtuosity, what has actually been achieved?  What does the
future portend for all the young women presently seduced by these
promises?  Does the Pill really improve a woman’s health?  Or, will
it contribute to a health catastrophe of unparalleled proportions?

The Shocking Facts About the Pill:

The pill has become the most popular method for birth control. But,
in recent years, oral contraceptives have increasingly been
prescribed to young women for noncontraceptive purposes. The Pill
has become the darling of the medical world for treating just about
any hormonal problem a girl may have and then some. To date, the
Pill is prescribed for acne, to “regulate” periods, for heavy
bleeding, and painful periods, to treat PMS, endometriosis,
migraines, ovarian cysts and polycystic ovaries. The Pill is even
prescribed to girls as young as thirteen for acne.

The Pill is said to be one of the safest drugs around. But is it?
In December 2002, the US government published its biannual Report on
Carcinogens that added all steroidal estrogens to the list of
“known” human carcinogens. The gravity of this finding cannot be
overstated: all estrogens used in HRT and oral contraceptives have
now been proven, unequivocally, to cause cancer! To make matters even
worse, synthetic progesterone (proteins) such as Provera or Depo-Provera,
used in HRT, oral contraceptives, injections
and implants are also listed as carcinogens.

  This is the indisputable fact:  the ingredients of the Pill,
whatever its formulation, cause cancer.  How can any carcinogens be
deemed safe especially when given to vulnerable young women?
Studies have linked estrogens and progestins to breast, ovarian,
endometrial, cervical, skin, brain and lung cancers.

There is nothing natural about taking the Pill.  As a result of the
Pill, a woman’s ovaries may be permanently damaged, resulting in
infertility.  Fabio Bertarelli, a billionaire manufacturer of
fertility drugs told the Wall Street Journal: “Our usual customers
are women over 30 who have been taking birth-control pills since they
were teenagers or in their early 20’s.”

Contraception formulas also increase the risk of coronary artery
disease, immune dysfunction, liver toxicity, strokes, blood clots,
osteoporosis, gum disease, high blood pressure and ectopic
pregnancies.  The side-effects include nausea, vomiting,
migraine-type headaches, breast tenderness, allergies, weight
increases, changes in sex drive, depression, head hair loss, facial
hair growth, colitis, Crohn’s disease and increased incidence of
vaginitis. Many of these effects may persist long after the
discontinuation of the Pill.

  In addition, the Pill depletes Vitamin B1, B2, B6, Folic Acid, B 12,
vitamins C, E, K, zinc, selenium, magnesium and the amino acid
tyrosine, essential for proper thyroid function.

Even more alarming is the fact that the earlier a woman uses the Pill
the greater the risk of developing breast cancer and also having a
worse prognosis. One disturbing study showed that the Pill
caused chromosomal aberrations in the breast tissue of young female
users. This research was further backed up with a study showing
that there was a 100 percent increased risk of breast cancer, which
extended from 10 years of pill use down to just three months!  So, it
is of no surprise that women as young as 17 years old, are now being
diagnosed with breast cancer.

  In one landmark study, researchers found that women who took the
Pill before the age of 20 and were later diagnosed with breast
cancer, have tumors with the worse prognoses than do breast cancer
patients who started taking the Pill at a later age or had not
previously taken it. Another study found this most terrifying
result: the younger the women were at the time of diagnosis, the
greater the possibility they would die within five years.

Echoing these findings, the U.S.  National Cancer Institute published
a study in 2003 showing that the risk of breast cancer was
significantly increased for women between the ages of 20-34 who had
used the Pill for at least six months.

Progestins make their own mischief, raising “bad” cholesterol and
blood pressure, altering sugar metabolism, compromising the immune
system, and creating undesirable masculinizing effects.  One study
found that women who used Depo-Provera before the age of 25 increased
their relative risk of breast cancer by 50 percent and for women
using it for six or more years; their risk was raised significantly
to 320 percent.

Of further concern are studies showing that oral contraceptives and
Depo-Provera contribute to bone loss in adolescents.

With the arrival of the continuous low dose Pill, normal menstrual
cycles are now fair game for the drug companies.  This option appeals
to many young women who believe that menstrual cycles are, indeed, “a
curse” and an unnecessary inconvenience. Nutritionally depleted
diets, stress and environmental toxins, the real culprits of
menstrual irregularities and hormonal imbalances, have been all but
ignored by doctors who prefer to opt for a quick drug fix.
Getting healthy is really the challenge before us.  Understanding the
immense importance of a healthy diet, good nutritional support,
exercise, relaxation techniques along with the guidance of competent
holistic health practitioners is the only way to truly assist young
women to regain their hormonal health and ensure their fertility.
Should menstruation, an intrinsic expression of a woman’s
physiological and psychological self, ever be made obsolete?

Absolutely not!

Health and healing books written by actual working clinicians provide welcome relief from the miracle cure propaganda that bombards us every day. Whether it is the ecstatic TV faces of people using the “Purple Pill”, Cialis, or the constant drone of your best friend’s multi level marketing spiel, claiming that they possess a silver bullet’s healing power, has become the common strategy of all medical marketing in the modern world today.

Working clinicians know, however, just how challenging and difficult actual healing can be, and that the medicine itself is not nearly as important as the regime that is practiced when the medicine is actually taken. Real doctors understand: alas, there is no edible deity.

The empirical approach to healing, (this cure is good for this disease) is not nearly as effective as the rational approach in which the body is examined at every level, and restored to balance via a comprehensive regime that effects and heals the whole.

Such understanding and vision serves deeper and more fundamental healing and positions this school of medicine firmly among the other traditional and rational approaches.  A true Anthroposophical doctor can’t help himself. He wants to treat the root of the issue, not just the branch. He will not be satisfied by symptomatic relief alone.

The beauty of Antroposophical Medicine lies in its clear recognition that man’s physical body is merely the tip of a much more extended and subtler organism. The constituent elements of man then are four fold - physical,  - etheric, astral and the human spirit. Health is established by maintaining the proper equilibrium between the constituent parts of man who is healed then by a four fold path. 

So every good doctor requires a way of observing the body in its completeness and in its relationship to the universe and all the things of life. The great traditional medical systems that came out of the East, the Chinese, Ayurveda and Tibetan medicine, are all rational systems. They understand that the physical body is just the visible part of the extended person. The whole must be treated.  No meat body materialist will ever be a great healer.  In The Fourfold Path to Healing, the good doctor, Thomas S. Cowan, another allopath gone alternative, shares his rational approach to health and well being.

The book is a cooperative effort, combining the talents and experience of Sally Fallon, the author of Nourishing Traditions and Jaimen McMillian, the founder of Spacial Dynamics. Cowan’s approach is most deeply influenced by the thinking of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophical Medicine, a school of practice which clearly acknowledges that man is much more than simply a machine and that we are as humans alive and functioning on energy levels subtler than merely the physical.

He has also been influenced by the work and teachings of Edgar Cayce, and the research of an American dentist named Weston Price who went in search of the perfect human diet in the early years of the twentieth century. Being a dentist, Price concluded that he would see the vision of that perfect diet in the mouth of his subjects, signaled by the sign of perfect upper and lowers. Price’s conclusions about the right human diet and the need for proper animal fats, may shock vegetarian purists but as Cowan says, he has the clinical proof in scans and in happy clients.
Dr. Cowan rightly understands that healing requires initially an address to diet.  The physical body is fundamentally a food body; therefore all healing begins with a dietary correction in the food body. Cowan’s conclusion, however, that the human body requires a regular dose of animal fat and even red meat in order to maintain health and well being may well be his most controversial offering.

Practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine have been exhorting their vegetarian clients to eat red meat since the system first came to the West. Ancient Chinese medical texts show early oriental doctors treating epidemics of cold and damp diseases which are clearly exacerbated by cold, and phlegm forming raw vegetarian food substances.

So the anti-raw, anti-vegetarian, disposition has become part and parcel of that system even today. Traditional doctors are taught that just about any substance in nature can have medicinal value, and so they are willing to make temporary use of all kinds of foods and herbs in order to heal. Yet the call for the regular use of red meat stands in the face of more modern research.

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DharmaCafe asked Ori Hofmekler, author of The Warrior Diet Book, to comment on the regular use of flesh foods in the human diet. He provided the following from his book:

As for meat, let me say it upfront: Humans haven’t fully adapted to eating meat. Unlike other predators, we lack enzymes that convert degraded “D” proteins into live “L” proteins. All life forms on this planet are made from “L” proteins. Nonetheless, upon the death of an organism, “L” proteins convert spontaneously into “D” proteins. This process, known as racemization, typically occurs during the decomposition (rotting) of meat.

Meat is known to be a good source of protein, iron and zinc. Nonetheless, one should always be aware of the downside of meat eating. 
Cowan’s book opens with his theoretical approach to healing and diet and then moves on to a discussion of the other and subtler forms of healing that are almost always required. In the heart of the book, (25.US) Cowan offers his sometimes very unique considerations of the common human diseases, their causes, and his own approach to healing them.  His sections on cancer and heart disease are worth the price of the book. Everyone should read these chapters, since together these conditions are the great killers of mankind. 

Cowan calls for cancer suffers to contemplate great works of art. I was reminded of the time that I had the opportunity to view Adi Da Samraj’s artwork, The Breather, with a group of thirty-five people or so. After twenty minutes of viewing this monumental image, everyone had come to rest and balance, their nervous systems harmonized by the mere contemplation of the piece. Art is made great and it heals, when it invokes the Eternal Sustenance upon which the body the depends. 

Female clients will account for up to seventy five per cent of any clinician’s workload. Their complex reproductive physiology requires constant attention and they tend to seek out help more easily than men do. Thus as a group they have tended to be more easily exploited by modern industrial medicine.

The Fourfold Path to Healing contains an ample section on women’s health issues and it is written with a good heart. Dr. Cowan offers life positive and sex positive instructions to serve women in their wellness regimes.  His section on osteoporosis should be read by all women, but particularly those who may be underweight and at greater risk for this terrible disease. His instructions on how to target calcium supplementation so that it actually gets to the bones are quite unique.

Of course what every reader of health books wants is lots of exercises and lots of remedies that they can do on their own. Cowan does not disappoint in this matter as he details many of the homeopathic and herbal remedies that he prefers. All disease begins with a knot, a contraction or stagnation of energy in the natural flow of the body and so exercise can be a critical part of any healing regime. Cowan grants significant portions of the book to Jaimen McMillian’s Spatial Dynamics, which are designed to:

“Move in an economical manner using the laws known to physics, engineering, and biomechanics to maximize your mechanical advantage, thus benefiting the Physical Body.”

As McMillian notes, “by practicing movement that provides wholeness to the Emotional Body, an individual will progress from a condition in which he is a pawn of fate, to one in which he is the architect of his relationships, goals and health.”

Exercise lovers will derive many hours of pleasurable activity from the detailed instructions and diagrams included in the book.

Like many fine doctors, Cowan is not above commenting on how political and economic issues are effecting our personal and social health. Consider these statements from his homily on cancer:

“What can we conclude after over 30 years of a strategy that attempts to kill every last cancer cell in the body? In the case of the most common forms of solid tumors (breast, lung, pancreas, colon, prostate, etc.), when the tumor has spread (metastasized), this strategy never works. It never results in the permanent eradication of the cancer and the restoration to health. Never!

And

“In the war on terrorism, as with orthodox cancer treatment, the toll on the host increases as “treatment” progresses. To combat terrorists, we have already passed laws that define any citizen who speaks out against government policies as a terrorist and that allow the security establishment unprecedented powers to deal with non-conformists. Ask any oncologist. He knows where all this leads. The patient will soon die, partly from the assault of the “terrorists”, but also from the debilitating effects of the therapy.”

Thank you Dr. Cowan