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THE ORGANISATION OF THE TEXT

This book wants to discuss health with scant reference to disease. It formulates a number of interlocking ideas that integrate circadian physiology with the transformations that constitute human life. Time, ecology and the biology of plants are always part of the background. The book arranges this discussion in three interrelated parts.

Part One elaborates this integrative model of health, linking circadian biology with the psychosocial human being and takes knowledge, information and data from various disciplines. For the phytotherapeutic perspective it draws heavily upon the theoretical and clinical work of Drs Duraffourd and Lapraz. These French clinicians have demonstrated the advantages of directing medicinal plants towards the different parts of the hormonal system and of the autonomic nervous system. They have developed and modernised the theory of terrain, primarily a relativistic analysis of these neuroendocrine processes and show how medicinal plants hold much more promise when used to modify these relations than as alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs. I follow them in using plants as alteratives (to use an old term in a new way) rather than as weak drugs. Their work has been developed further, and collaboratively, by Dr Kamyar Hedayat. The considerable input from doctors in other nations is fully acknowledged elsewhere.¹

Part Two is aimed towards the student acquiring knowledge and developing the skills to practise medicine as well as to the newly qualified herbal practitioner. The approach focuses on the physical presentation of the patient and her or his extended milieu taken from a detailed narrative. It makes little mention of ailments and disease yet attempts to formulate a clinical approach that favours the development of a broader understanding than the knowledge gleaned from a narrow curriculum.² I hope that the model presented here and in Part Three may also provide the experienced herbalist with some new ideas.

Part Three develops a theory that attempts to explain how medicinal plants modify the terrain and how they can contribute towards health in the sense that I have described as Poise. The theory hypothesises two different but complementary mechanisms which I have named Sensory Priming and Stochastic Resonance. The last section of Part Three is dedicated to Materia Medica.

The three parts are nodes about which the discussion flows but, to mirror the conception of mindedness, each of them is interpenetrative with the others. The result is untidy, the more to mirror the assorted nature of life, less a manicured garden and more an extensive hedgerow adjoining ruderal habitats. The structure of the book is also founded on the interpenetrance of the tripos represented by the social, psychic and biologic: this leaking of people into poise and plants into all our lives.

Note: Therapeutic Shorthand Names of Plants are used in the text. Their definition is given in Materia Medica Section 24.

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¹ In La Médicine Personnalisée, Lapraz & de Clermont–Tonnerre, translated into English by Julian Barker. Published by Aeon Books.

² One of the best discussions I know of the difference between knowledge and understanding is found in Vignale 2011.