Transgenerational Herbal Therapy

Ryan Drum
Island Herbs
P O Box 25
Waldron, WA 98297-0025

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TRANSGENERATIONAL HERBAL THERAPY:

Herbal Nanonutrients

I believe early herb exposure enhances herbal therapy successes. The basic premise is that herbal therapeutics, especially nuanced treatments, may succeed or fail as a function of the patient's prior early herb exposure in the egg, in utero, and juvenile exposure to the herb(s) used for treatment of specific health problems including acute trauma and systemic failure. I will link various known phenomena and observed data to support my theory. The topics include:

astrology and the importance of geographic location stability

dynamic turnover and bioaccumulation

deliberate and accidental transdermal percutaneous perfusion of complex organic molecules

palmar and plantar pore structures

herbal poisoning from cow's milk

our respective origin points as individuals

drug-induced drug metabolism

cultural culinary herbalism, and lastly

the distinctly human mammalian epidermal characteristic as the only NAKED SPECIES and what this implies for herbal exposure.

My intent is to discern and describe personal and cultural early voluntary and involuntary herbal therapeutics as a probable explanation for the apparent wide range of patient response variability to various herbal and other natural therapies. In particular I am intrigued by the apparent modern decline in individual response sensitivity to gentle and mild herbs, and the apparent increasing usage of strong herbs to treat common health problems.

WHEN DO WE BEGIN AS DISTINCT INDIVIDUALS?
The human female embryo makes egg cells for future offspring at 6 weeks in utero; when a healthy female baby is born, EACH of her ovaries carries about a MILLION eggs. The male embryo develops primitive sperm cells at 6 weeks in utero. Perhaps we can consider our beginning as a molecular and structural entity as an egg developing in our mother's ovary when she is only a six-week-old embryo.

This means that our maternal grandmother's prenatal diet and behaviour have direct effects on our earliest real structural development. The dominant foods she eats will provide both the basic materials for embryo building as well as secondary plant and animal metabolites which can freely cross the placental barrier and become lodged in egg cell membranes and subcellular organelles. I believe this is our first imprinting on cell membranes of therapeutic plant substances and preferences for those molecules, in utero, in postpartum juvenile development, for therapy, and living place preferences. We also know that it is not only obvious dietary molecules that enter our bodies, but also molecules that we walk on, touch with our hands, and touch with any unclothed body surface. Instead of closed impenetrable bags with bones and muscles, we are selective molecular sponges. We selectively take in the available environment with our entire epidermis.

This means that in addition to food and drink, what your maternal grandmother touched, sat on, slept on, walked on and through, all contributed molecules potentially destined for her daughter's developing eggs, one of which became you. Hopefully she sat on wild plants, particularly medicinal herbs, traipsed through meadows and marshes with medicinal herbs, and fondled them in preparation of food and medicine. The skin pores on the palmar and plantar surfaces (hands and feet) are the largest in the body, although those on the nose do seem to be huge(lately). The classic plantar pore experiment is to place crushed garlic on the bottom of a foot and then notice that the strong odor of garlic soon is detectable on the breath of the person with garlic on their feet. I believe that physiologically significant essential substances, needed only in tiny amounts, I call them ESSENTIAL NANONUTRIENTS, are required to pass through our skin to avoid the acid bath in the stomach. We need to have live skin-plant contact for intake. This is almost passive molecular intake; more proactive is the naked epidermal encounter with plant spines, needles, burs, and sticky surfaces. I believe that little microinjections of significant trace molecules, secondary plant metabolites, dripped onto or contained upon and within sharp spines provide us with needed tiny amounts of specialty substances, the NANONUTRIENTS. I believe that the absence or deficiency of essential plant nanonutrients in a particular individual can contribute to less than optimal health. I also believe that lack of early exposure to essential signature and highly species- or even location-specific plant constituents can reduce a particular individual's ability to optimally use those molecules therapeutically when and where healing is desirable, particularly in adult and geriatric times of acute trauma and infectious disease progression. I believe that otherwise inexplicable systemic illness with no obvious pathogenic organism responsible is exacerbated if not caused by nanonutrient deficiency.

WE ARE BUILT FOR NANONUTRIENT ABSORPTION
We are the only naked primate and only naked mammal. Some apologists have claimed that this is for heightened tactile pleasure during romantic ( ie reproductive) intimacy. I suggest that more importantly, this singular nakedness facilitates the absorption of nanonutrients and that we progressed away from ape-like hairiness because we survived better with increasing epidermal exposure for increased molecular uptake., from plants especially. Over time I believe our bodies as a species have become long-term dependent on the probable and continued total body area epidermal nanonutrient absorption for both optimal body functioning, reproduction, and repair, as well as survival of Homo sapiens as a distinct species. What is the probable mechanism for health enhancement due to early plant metabolite exposure? Two areas of known novel molecular adaptation response may tell us. The first is known as "drug-induced drug metabolism". The observation was made that liver cell mitochondria are able to figure out how to successfully metabolize synthetic drug molecules previously unknown to both those particular mitochondria and all life. The result is either drug molecule fragmentation or packaging (binding to neutralizing carrier molecules) for safe excretion. Unicellular bacteria , structurally similar to mitochondria and perhaps the origin of intracellular mitochondria, are similarly able to figure out how to convert novel molecules to food resources by developing previously unknown metabolic mechanisms. In the case of human nanonutrient exposure, the younger/earlier a person encounters and absorbs these nanonutrients, I believe the more likely that individual will learn and then KNOW at the cellular level how to use them for optimal functioning as needed in an experience progressive and additive life. I am not certain if the actual molecules can persist in the same individual from egg to adult, unchanged or barely modified; or, is there molecular memory? The basic, (if slightly accuracy-corrupted) version of "dynamic turnover" claims that we replace 90% of our molecules every year, and everything except the enamel of our teeth and the lenses of our eyes every seven years. Possibly. The reality of pernicious wastes, heavy metals and fat-soluble synthetic poisons, which tend to accumulate through time-function bioaccumulation suggests some modification of the "everything in seven years" claim. So, it is possible that plant molecules originally absorbed through the epidermis may persist relatively unchanged for a lifetime somewhere in a human body. Not all bioaccumulations are man-made substances or industrial exposures. Apparently the consumption of pods and immature seeds of beach pea, Lathyrus spp., results in a non-metabolized lifetime accumulation of toxins; when a certain critical tissue or whole body level is exceeded, the person dies. There are no obvious warning signs. See: N.J. Turner. Children especially seem to enjoy eating the young pods. When a beach pea death occurs the cause is seldom connected to the event. I suggest that similarly, inadequate nanonutrient uptake results in less dramatic suboptimal health with no obvious connection between lack of certain stuff and lack of good health. The therapeutic consequences of accepting the premise can be delightful. I urge herbal practitioners and herbal users and concerned humans to deliberately have wild herb beds and cultivated sacrificial herb patches where both pregnant women and small children can lay naked or barely clothed on herbs for hours at a time if so desired to promote transdermal perfusion of herbal stuff into their respective bodies to enhance future health. For families with known genetic susceptibilities to particluar pathologies, herbs known to be beneficial could be planted together to provide deliberate particular longterm therapy.

Small children, infants even, can be placed on the less-spiny herbs and just allowed to roll, crawl, rip and tear the herbs to bits, tasting, smelling, just messing with the herbs in joyful encounter. In truth this is what we have done as infants for hundreds of millenia as our past mothers left us for a moment or just placed us on the available vegetation for sleep or play. In our times, children delight in playing on grass and in meadows, often becoming stained and scratched during active play by the herbs they run through and upon. Young children tend to hardly notice the little scratches and stains, certainly far less concerned than some hyper-hygenic protective parents. I have watched with great glee my children and grandchildren frolic naked or nearly so on bare ground and on wild plants. Some plants seem to thrive on the contact; especially chickweed, plantain, dandelions, yellowdock, mallow, many of the mints, including yerba buena and self-heal. I think we are depriving our children of essential topical herbal nanonutrients and developmental medicines by keeping them away from the herbs. No need to restrict herbal bedding to small children and pregnant women; herb beds or patches for patients could be easily prepared. This also may help to extract herbal practice from indoor offices and clinics. I encourage you all to just get as naked as you dare and first walk through a healthy herbal meadow then sit naked upon a bunch of growing herbs and get some real live herbal contact. Daily walking barefoot and bare-legged through the herbs is probably an essential part of maintaining health through preventive transdermal herbal self-medication. I encourage my patients, especially those who have no herb gardens to walk through wild meadows as a part of their respective treatment plan. Compliance is good so far. We have an unhealthy oral fixation in herbal medicine these days. We need to resume using our entire bodies as herbal feeders. Continual lifelong transdermal herbal molecule uptake is our inherited need; we need regular, even daily environmental herbal contact and absorption as functional maintenance and preventive medicine. Indoor winter sickness may be herbal deprivation sickness. The recent so-called back-to-the-land movements may actually be back-to-the-herbs urges. Then there is the obvious: minimal clothing (as naked as possible) crawling through the herbs. I find that is a very experiential way to get to know not only the herbs but also a lot of insects and spiny plants rather intimately. There is probably a specialty niche for romantic herbal beds for therapeutic intimacy; clover comes to mind except for the estrogenic effects.

MOTHER'S MILK
We know that herbal constituents pass freely from mother's diet into her milk and thus into her nursing child(ren). This may be a great way to get herbal molecules into infants and toddlers(maybe adults ?) in addition to epidermal contact. The nutritive herbs such as chickweed, dandelion, watercress, plantain, sheep sorrel, miners' lettuce, and young leaves of yellow dock would be good. Toxic herbs or those suspected of gross toxicity should be avoided. As in Eupatorium rugosum, white snakeweed in particular, which causes milk fever in those who drink milk from cows that have eaten E. rugosum.

The recent research seems to indicate that dirty children, those children who regularly play in real soil and wash with soap only when absolutely forced to, have much healthier immune responses, fewer minor illnesses as adults, heal much faster after physical wounding, and have lower rates of asthma. There are no ready data on psychiatric symptoms. I think we need the plant contact as well as the dirt contact.

LIVING IN ONE PLACE: THE ESSENTIAL POSITIVE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILIAR
I believe that early herbal experience especially with local herbs is an important part of an individual's developing sense of place; and from that a communitiy's collective sense of place. Humans living in a place or ecosystem for many generations are intimately healed in unseen ways by multigenerational contact with the local herbal communities just by living with them. In the I Ching, part of the commentary on the hexagram for The Well: you can always move the town but you can't move the well.

When we really live in one place for a long time, taking our food from that place and returning our wastes to the soil or water, not to the ocean or some mysterious destructive sewage system, we really become a part of the local molecular pool where many generations and kinds of organisms share the same elements and molecules over and over again. After gardening in the same place for 30 years I feel that the soil and plants and I are the same extended organism. Food from other gardens does not seem quite right no matter how flavorful or lush. It is strange, it is other. My resident molecules do not recognize any of their longtime companions in the food from other places. There is suspicion and biological clumsiness. Feeding and feeding from the same soil and wild places has made me an obligate dependent on the familiar; molecular familiarity has become an essential or at least preferred characteristic of my food. Every place is microbially, molecularly , and biomagnetically unique. That is why there is " no place like home". What then do we think about the so-called " nomads"? My limited database studies and experiences in Persia while trying to migrate with the Quashkai pastoral nomads from the Caspian Sea to the southern shore of Persia give me the understanding that these nomads are human browsers, just like their goats: since no single place has adequate reliable year-round nutrients, these nomads cruise a patterned loop from one somewhat isolated resource to another for about 8 months of the year, an approximately 1500 mile round trip , northward in the spring and southward in the autumn. The loop is almost the same each year and has been for thousands of years. This sequential resources are the equivalent of a fixed place with a low nutrient density. They live in an "extended place".

Living and eating the same foods for generations from the same ecosystem can generate predictability: endemic iodine deficiency goiter in Switzerland and interior China is one example where thousands of years of cultivation in one place and iodine-poor rocks and soils in the other lead to many human generations with a high incidence of iodine-deficiency goiters on the neck. To be without one was almost undesireable. In the same way, we know that certain mineral deficiencies are associated with behavioral or psychiatric consequences. I believe that nanonutrient abundance or deficiencies can have longterm multigenerational predictable consequences. This may help to explain the peculiarities of certain spices associated with certain ethnic groups; these spices are attempts to overcome nanonutrient deficiencies which may be from environmental lack or culturally imposed lack of access (rolling around naked in the herbs as outlawed behaviour).

THE CASE FOR PICA
Pica is usually understood to mean any unnatural cravings for questionable food items such as starch, clay, ashes, plaster or paint chips. I believe that in some cases of juvenile pica it was discovered that the children were apparently consuming relatively rich sources of essential minerals otherwise defficient in their diets (plaster and ashes); this is not the case for eating lead-based paint chips and flakes. I believe that pica is perhaps more complex than just primal mineral foraging. I think it may represent genetic memory from paleolithic times. The reasoning is as follows: it seems from archaeological excavations in much of the limestone areas of Europe that many of our ancestors lived in limestone caves for long periods of time. If those people were cavebound for long periods of foodless times during the glacial periods, perhaps they ate pieces of algae-covered limestone which were relatively easy to pick off of cave walls. These would have been nutritionally rich if not exactly scrumptious. Those who ate algae limestone chips may have survived when those who did not eat those chips did not survive. The wall chip reflex may have persisted as a behaviour which only manifests when certain dietary mineral requirements are deficient; calcium is the obvious probable first choice. The habit/reflex could easily and safely persisted as the descendants of the limestone cave dwellers moved out of the caves and into simple homes whose poorly lit dark interiors were regularly brightened with lime-based whitewashes. Small children deficient in calcium could be expected to eat limestone paint chips as they crawled about. The problems began when lead oxide replaced lime whitewashes. Children who eat lead-based paint chips and flakes develop lead poisoning. Reflexive behaviour which was once survival positive is not so in lead-based paint interiors. But the urge persists.

ASTROLOGY
The case for real functional predictive and analytical astrology can be supported by nanonutrient theory combined with what we think we know of early hominid settlement patterns and the gestation time for humans. People have been very smart for many thousands of years: research in the field of archeoastronomy shows very conclusively that ancient humans were able to very accurately map the positions of the planets, and also predict alignments involving the sun, moon, and earth. I predict that the rise of astrology was inevitable as the data accumulated that the various celestial positionings seemed correlated with human behavior and then with birth time. What caused the differences?

The differences, that is, in individual behavior? What caused different individual responses to the apparently same celestial conditions? At the crudest level, I believe that in utero diet determines a lot of behavior, especially major character differences. The human gestation time is about 9 months, roughly 3/4 of the year. That means that each developing fetus has an incomplete set of yearly seasonal food variations, semi-independent of planetary positions; I believe that macro, micro, and nanonutrient exposure in utero determine behavior trends and are unique for each major food availability set of the year. Prior to canned goods, refrigeration, and the shipping of food (so-called) thousands of miles from points of origin, we as a species either ate locally as the seasons permitted or migrated following food resources. In both cases, each 9-month gestation, preceeding a finite period of time, say a 30-day month , would be different if not entirely unique. And, the foods available would probably be different at least on the micro and nanonutrient level. This might not occur as highly differentiated in the tropics or where the seasonal variations in food are minimal. In fact, are there any places where there are no distinct seasons and no astrological traditions? Recent mass human migrations, global food distribution, and extended 'shelf life' for dead foods have nullified astrology's previously precise predictive accuracy and that has allowed critics in our times the luxury of sneering derision.

Prenatal nutrients are known to affect embryo development and certain nutrients must be in place for optimal progression through the various critical developmental stages both in utero and in early childhood. I believe that our recent ancestors had faith in astrological observations because those observations were accurate and repeatable so long as people lived in the same place, ate mostly the same foods, and had minimal outbreeding, so that genetics supported trends initiated by available food resources. So, in the long haul, astrology had both explanatory and predictive accuracy unwittingly based on embyologically significant repetitive annual dietary cycles, sometimes for thousands of years as in Mesopatamia and Mesoamerica. In the USA and Canada, I believe that there are more August-September births than any other time (Virgo): harvest time babies. How to use this in practice?

Start encouraging everyone, patients and people in general, to get more real live exposed body contact with live growing herbs. Recognize that patients who seem not to heal with common gentle herbs may be victims of inadequate early herbal exposure and imprinting. The apparent therapeutic need for harsh, non-local medicinal herbs may be a sign of herbal insensitivity. Can this be corrected by remedial abundant adult herbal contact? Let us try. Encourage pregnant women to eat a wide variety of herbs during the first and second trimesters.

From the proceedings of the 6th International Herb Symposium 2002

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