So, Why Plants as Medicine?

Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a trifecta of autoimmune disorders that completely changed the course of my life. Diagnosis sent me down many rabbit holes and I spent hours upon hours researching why this was happening to me. What causes the body to fight itself? What upended my nervous system? How did I get here? I was told repeatedly that I’d be living with each of these conditions for life and after seeing many specialists and exploring several medications, relief never really landed. I was stuck holding symptoms. Quite literally, holding symptoms within my body. Medications took the edge off, brought my body back from near fatal conditions but never touched my mental health or the overall condition of my body. After years of on and off again doses, new injections, multiple pills and no further improvements, I was frustrated. Perhaps this is what the rest of my life will look like.

But something niggled. I wasn’t satisfied at all with this, and it felt incomplete, like I was never handed the option to cross the finish line. It took me a while, a few years to be honest, to really start to see how we battle our health every day in lifestyles built to challenge it. As we live with stress, spend less time in nature, experience restricted connection through increased use of screentime, our nervous systems are frayed and yet we don’t recognize it. We pull into mindful moments here and there to check in with ourselves, but is there truly time for consistency in a world that constantly pushes us forward, out of our present state?

I am surrounded by Forest where I live and am fortunate to call what was once a retirement plan, my permanent home. I went from city living to country living as my immune system demanded space at the height of a pandemic and with all sorts of appointments, surgeries and recoveries going on, my world continued to spin into something I no longer recognized. Soon after realizing just how extremely stressed I was, I started to walk. Slow and steady at first as even 20 steps were a challenge, finding myself having to account for the steps I needed to return every time I stepped out. I left my cellphone in the house and went slowly, allowing myself to look around, to be okay with stillness. It takes a minute to see the Forest for the Trees and little did I realize, the lifestyle of stress I was living was hiding so much detail.

As the Forest drew me in, it revealed a different world to me and slowly, plants came into view. There’s a lot of green in the woods and through the lens of that stressful, ‘push forward’ state, green is quite a pretty colour. It’s very soothing but the vastness of greens can also appear quite flat, almost 2D until you begin to see the layers. So many layers live in the Forest, and it was when those flat greens came into focus that an incredible world changed my life.

As I got to know the plants that grow around me, I fell in love with how plants began to communicate. Each one serves a purpose. Not all are meant for consumption but each one carries meaning, carries teachings and offers insight into our current state of being. We can use plants is many ways and plants can be taken in through concentrated means, herbal infusions and even through the exchange of vibrational energy. Plants are mysterious and have always fascinated me. They know exactly what to do, how to be, when to grow and thrive when conditions are met. They nourish and inspire, they offer structure and, after being immersed in their natural cycles now for several years? They support.

So why plants as medicine?

Years of holding symptoms was what first came into my awareness as I started to walk. My health was in a holding pattern of sorts, and I came to know my body well enough to feel and see how it was responding to the medications I was taking. And not just how symptoms would ease, or how I’d feel better after a dose. But in how symptoms never truly cleared and how I’d only feel better for a short window. Balance always seemed too far away and the underlying stress this was causing required change.

So what options are there to help my nervous system regulate? Will my skin ever heal over? Would my digestive system ever feel soothed? Am I simply at the mercy of a metabolic disorder? These questions were always left unanswered by my specialists. The only offer was more medication, and I didn’t want to continue down that road. So, I asked, what if I started to take plants internally? This question has brought answers to me that no Doctor or specialist ever mentioned. Or, quite frankly, even knew about. And so began a journey into a world that I love to learn about. I have been actively studying Herbalism for several years now and what I have learned so far is fascinating.

Throughout my personal experiences, plants as medicine vs pharmaceuticals as medicine showed me one distinct difference. Pharmaceuticals hold symptoms. They make them comfortable for you to carry around, but illness and disease never truly go away. Pharmaceuticals are amazing things in cases of trauma, of emergency, of acute illness. They most certainly helped my physical state out of a dangerous situation. But they never supported or truly healed the depths of what was going on within me.

The body adapts to stress differently when using pharmaceuticals compared to plant-based medicines. Pharmaceuticals often override or force the body to bypass its natural stress response. This can lead to dependency and can also create tolerances. Both of which promote external and internal stress. So how was it that my symptoms would feel better but would never really go away? As my awareness grew, so did the understanding that my internal stress response was spinning out of control. The very pharmaceuticals that treated the initial trauma of illness when diagnosed, were no longer encouraging my body to heal. In treating the symptoms of each autoimmune disease vs the whole picture, each medication was further confusing and stressing out my body’s ability to heal itself.

So again, I ask, why plants as medicine? There are three groups of plants that my studies focus around for healing the physical body. Adaptogens, Nervines and Immunomodulators. Adaptogens are an incredible group of plants that support the body by subtly regulating the body’s natural stress response. Nervines work by nourishing, supporting and balancing the nervous system’s natural responses. Immunomodulators support, regulate and normalize immune systems natural responses. Notice a trend? What continues to impress me with the medicine that plants offer, is how truly supportive they are. They don’t deplete; they balance.

Fungi can help your body adapt to stress and not by introducing a chemical reaction but by supporting the body’s natural ability to navigate between states of fight or flight and states rest and digest. Nettle can improve your overall energy and not through stimulation but by deeply replenishing the natural stores that deplete when under stress. When we feel a common cold coming on or feel our system is fighting a virus, elderberry does more for us than decongestants or antibiotics, specifically through preventative measures as it supports the body’s natural immune system function.  

Plants work slowly and their consistency continues to surprise me. Their ability to adapt, support and nourish the body is the missing link in the world of pharmaceuticals. Science is impressive in its ability to recreate what the natural world offers so effortlessly, but it remains artificial in how far removed it has become from its root. Our bodies do not recognize the extracted components the same way it does when sourced from whole. That doesn’t mean we don’t respond, but what is familiar then becomes strange and our physical responses in holding vs healing illustrate this clearly.

Plants support us in every way. They offer us what we need for basic survival, food, shelter, clothing, even water. They support their world intuitively, without interference and this observation lends insight into the intelligence they carry. Plants communicate, adapt, nourish, support, invade, recede, populate, protect and even know when they are no longer needed. These actions are incredibly effective and when approached from a different perspective, are remarkably impactful when treating imbalances.

Slowly but surely, as my confidence in what I was learning grew, I gradually took myself off of all prescription medication. I worked with the specialists who supported this decision and those pushing for clinical trials, I walked away from. It was an exhausting process, and in recognizing that I needed to make a change, I acknowledged that my body needed a chance to rest from the overload of stress it was undergoing. So, I began to lean, and still lean on, the plant world and what once began as an external journey of understanding, has now become an internal one.