It serves little purpose merely to be scared by viruses. But it serves a good deal of purpose to understand them.
Frank Ryan, MD, Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues
If you aren’t skeptical about your skepticism, you aren’t a skeptic.
For several decades now, I have been deeply interested in antibiotic resistance, the intelligence of bacteria, and the use of treatment approaches that are, ultimately, more elegant than pharmaceuticals. Plant-based medicines, unlike pharmaceuticals, don’t cause resistance problems, they are much safer, and they are ecologically sound — they are biodegradable and renewable, which most pharmaceuticals are not.
My long-term interest in herbal antibacterials resulted, after a considerable time (and an early initial look at the topic), in a very deep exploration of systemic herbal antibacterials for resistant infections (Herbal Antibiotics, second edition, Storey Publishing, 2012). And during that exploration, many aspects of plant medicine not hitherto developed in the West began to reveal themselves (such as the importance of plant synergists).
This book is the beginning, for me, of a similar exploration into the world of viruses, emerging and resistant viral diseases, and more ecologically responsible (and often more effective) forms of treatment. In this book you will find information on some of the best broad-spectrum, systemic, antiviral herbs on Earth. As with herbal antibiotics, they are easy to use, easy to grow, and easy to make into medicines for yourself, your family, your patients. And they are very, very effective for emerging and resistant viral infections. For the plants themselves learned long ago, just as they did with bacteria, how to stop viruses from killing them. Plants can’t run but they sure can do chemistry.
The concept of herbal antibiotics as primary interventives has, over the past several decades, become common in cultures outside the Western industrialized nations. Medical systems in Africa, Asia, and South and Central America are turning away from pharmaceuticals as a first-line treatment for bacterial infections because of resistance problems and, most especially, because pharmaceutical corporations make a great deal too much money off the suffering of their populations. Cultures other than those in the West have realized that they just can’t afford corporate greed any longer — and they are unwilling to let the poorer members of their populations die because of it. Researchers in cultures across the globe have found that plant antibacterials are often more effective than pharmaceuticals. So they are exploring which ones are most potent, which forms of preparation are most effective, and how best to grow them. Then they are traveling throughout their regions (especially in Africa), giving seeds to local villages, teaching them all they have learned, and letting them get on with their healing. There is no middleman raking off profits in the process. A new model of health care is coming into being — and it’s about time.
It is my hope that this same kind of movement will begin in the treatment of viral diseases. (And in China, they are already years ahead of us; they see the writing on the wall.) We need a new paradigm of healing. We need new ways of thinking about viruses, their emergence, and their treatment — just as we have needed them about bacteria. (Even in the herbal communities in the West, our approaches to viral infections and viruses have been extremely shallow.) There is a lot we can do to create a more effective healing paradigm in our world, one that is ecologically sustainable while at the same time being more human friendly . . . if we step outside the box that our thinking has been trapped by.
I hope that you find the material in this book stimulating to your thinking. I hope that you begin, yourself, to add to this emerging paradigm of healing, one that is slowly extricating itself from the outmoded thinking of the past. We have a great opportunity to create something new, something that reflects more accurately the world around us, something that truly addresses the healing needs of the people who come to us.
I think the viruses are going to be pretty insistent that we do so. And soon.