r/HerbalMedicine

People keep asking me for natural energy boosters. I deal with herbs for many years and constantly get this questions.

Meanwhile ginger has been sitting quietly in grocery stores for thousands of years pretending to be soup ingredient :)

If herbs had job titles:

Chamomile >> HR department.

Lemon balm >> therapist.

Peppermint >> IT support.

Ginger? >> rocket engineer.

It's funny because ginger doesn't contain caffeine...

VERY IMPORTANT: It doesn't borrow tomorrow's energy.

Instead it seems to improve some of the systems that make today's energy actually available:

• increases thermogenesis
• improves circulation
• supports digestion (which is where quite a lot of your energy budget disappears)
• may improve glucose handling
• activates TRPV1/TRPA1 receptors (the same family that responds to heat and spicy compounds)
• and somehow manages to make cold mornings feel less gloomy.

The most underrated trick?

Many people think of ginger as a winter tea.

I think of it as a launch sequence.

Especially before:

• long walks
• workouts
• mentally demanding work
• heavy meals
• cold weather

No, it won't replace sleep.

Neither will coffee ;)

Ginger anybody? Fresh? Tea? Powder? Juice? Fermented? Candied? I'd love to hear your tips and tricks. Also, please do not feel shy to object and argue, if you feel like sharing counterarguments

it's long but very good. very worth your time.

i'm a chronically ill person with various complex conditions who got into herbalism to help support my health. honestly, sharing this here was inspired by the post i just saw of someone looking for alternatives to antibiotics. the truth is, sometimes medication is needed and helpful and alleviates suffering. herbs have been incredible for me but i wouldn't be where i am without medication and it's felt alienating at times the way some in the herbalism community seem to demonize medication.

some quotes i pulled:

"The story I just told about M is one I see, in some version, every few weeks. The teachers vary. The supplements vary. The specific way the community failed the person varies. What does not vary is the structure of the belief. What does not vary is the moral weight. What does not vary is the cost.

There’s the person whose hypothyroidism went unmanaged for six years because levothyroxine was “synthetic hormones” and she was going to support her thyroid with herbs and seaweed instead. Her TSH was over forty by the time she let me run the test. She cried when we reviewed the results together because, somewhere inside her, she already knew. There’s the person with type 2 diabetes whose fasting glucose was averaging over three hundred and who would not take insulin because insulin was for people who had given up. He’d built his protocol around berberine, gymnema, and cinnamon, then added strict carnivore for a year. By the time he came back to insulin his vision was blurry and his feet had started to numb. There’s the person with an LDL never less than 200, who refused statins for fifteen years and had a heart attack at fifty-two and survived it, and still, after surviving it, was not sure if he was going to take the statins. The pharmacist filled the prescription every month. The bottle stayed on the counter.

I’m not telling these stories to ridicule the people in them. I love them. I work with them. They are some of the most thoughtful, careful, intelligent folks I know. They read more than most clinicians I know. They take their health seriously in a way most people don’t. They do not deserve mockery and they will not get any from me.

What I want to do is name the framework that hurt them. Because it is a framework, and once you can see it you can see it operating everywhere in our community. It runs underneath every conversation about toxins and detoxes. It runs underneath every horrified gasp about seed oils and fluoride. It runs underneath every refusal of an intervention that might have helped, every embrace of an intervention that didn’t, every quiet shame at having to admit to the herbalist that yes, the doctor put you on a medication, and yes, you are taking it.

The framework is simple. Everything humans make is contaminating. Everything humans haven’t touched is clean."

...

"The belief is a creed because it isn’t held the way scientific claims are held. It isn’t tested. It isn’t revised when contrary evidence comes in. It isn’t graded for confidence depending on the strength of the data. It is held the way moral commitments are held, and like other moral commitments, it organizes behavior, identity, and community. When M told me she didn’t put that stuff in her body, she wasn’t reporting an empirical observation. She was telling me who she was."

...

"It is not a coincidence that purity rhetoric in the herbal world I came up in has intensified over the last twenty years, the same period in which Western herbalism has struggled with its place in a medical landscape that has both absorbed pieces of what we do and dismissed the rest. The community feels embattled. Its boundaries feel porous. The purity framework, with its sharp lines between us and them, between clean and contaminated, between authentic and corrupted, performs the work of holding the boundary. Every refusal of a synthetic intervention is a small ritual affirming that we are still us."

...

"The list of “toxins” we refuse changes constantly. Twenty years ago it was aspartame, MSG and saccharin. Then it was gluten and soy. Then it was seed oils. Now it’s carbohydrates and EMF. The list updates almost as fast as fashion. If the framework were tracking actual chemistry, you’d expect some stability: substances dangerous in 2005 would still be dangerous in 2025, and the same evidence would govern the same fears. Instead the list changes with the community’s mood. New threats arise; old ones quietly drop off. This is what pollution rules do. They track the community’s sense of what is threatening it, not reliably what is dangerous, and not in proportion to danger.

Take seed oils, the strong one right now. The biochemistry that gets invoked is not fake. Linoleic acid is a real fatty acid. It enters real pathways. Oxidation chemistry is real. Industrial extraction is real. There is a real conversation to be had about the modern rise in added fats, the displacement of whole foods, repeated heating in restaurant fryers, and the hedonic value of ultra-processed food. That conversation should happen.

But that is not usually the conversation happening. The conversation happening is: seed oils are toxic. That is a category judgment pretending to be biochemistry."

...

"Purity frameworks ask belonging questions, not replacement questions. Canola oil belongs to the factory. Sunflower seeds belong to nature. Tahini belongs to traditional foodways. Almonds belong to clean eating. The fatty acid may be similar enough to deserve comparison, but the moral meanings are completely different.

That is why “seed oils are toxic” is not really a toxicological claim. It is a purity claim with a biochemical footnote.

Sugar works the same way. White sugar is contaminating; maple syrup and honey and coconut sugar are clean, though the body’s metabolic response to comparable doses is broadly similar. The moral difference outruns the metabolic one."

...

"None of this is easy to write, and changing my beliefs about these things has been difficult. I spent a decade eliminating seed oils from my diet and teaching others to do the same. The omega-6 to omega-3 ratio argument made sense to me. The biochemistry sounded right. I had students who would not touch a salad if there was canola in the dressing because I had taught them not to.

Then I was challenged to review the science again. I did, and wondered if I’d misinterpreted things. So I experimented on myself. Reintroduced seed oils. Felt fine. Maybe a little better, honestly. Then I went back to the research with even more careful eyes, and was forced to admit that what I had been confidently teaching was not what the evidence actually supported. I had been wrong. I’ve been trying to correct that with students for the last five or six years.

After reviewing hundreds of studies and rebuttals and criticisms of studies, I’m more confident than ever that the categorical refusal isn’t doing the toxicological work it claims to be doing, and I still have a mental hangup about canola oil. I know it’s fine. I know it’s probably better than several of the oils I’d reach for in its place. And when I’m in the grocery store, I still grab something else if it’s available. The intellectual position changed. The unconscious reach didn’t, not fully, not yet."

...

"If I leave the argument where it is, I’ll have done something I don’t want to do. I’ll have left the impression that worry about industrial exposures is silly, that we made this up out of moral panic. That isn’t right. The original concern was a real concern. It got hijacked by a moral framework, but the underlying observation was sound, and it was our community that first sounded the alarm.

Over the last two centuries, and especially in the last seventy years, industrial chemistry has produced an enormous number of novel compounds that human bodies and ecosystems have never encountered before. Some are inert. Some are useful. Some are dangerous. The dangerous ones have done real damage we are still learning to recognize. DDT in the bird populations of the 1960s. Lead in the children of the 1970s. CFCs in the ozone layer. PFAS in nearly every water supply on the planet. Endocrine disruptors at low doses with effects that wouldn’t have been predicted from earlier toxicology models. Microplastics in tissues across the food web. These are real. They matter.

The legitimate concern is that industrial production has moved so fast that regulatory science has not kept up. The doses we are exposed to are the result of choices made by industries with a financial interest in our continued exposure. The health effects are often slow, often subtle, often individual, and very hard to study in the ways that produce confident conclusions. In the absence of good data, ordinary people have to make decisions about what they let into their bodies and their kids’ bodies and their homes. Being thoughtful about that, choosing the less-industrialized option when other things are equal, supporting agricultural systems that minimize exposures, these are reasonable responses to a real situation.

What I want to name is the shift from this reasonable position to the purity framework. They sound similar from a distance. They are not the same thing, and the difference is the load-bearing distinction in this whole essay."

Every spring I admire these beautiful purple flowering trees but this year I decided to follow them till the fruits.

Apparently they are ornamental crabapples (Malus sp.). I started digging into scientific papers and honestly I was quite surprised.

These tiny fruits seem to contain quite an interesting cocktail of compounds:

- anthocyanins (the color speaks!)

- chlorogenic acid (learned from a scientific article)

- quercetin derivatives (claimed by lab reports)

- procyanidins (scientific article)

- lots of other antioxidant polyphenols (logically)

They are edible (quite sour - the bite at the last picture is mine :), yet I almost never see anyone mentioning them in herbal medicine.

So now I'm curious...

Has anyone here actually harvested ornamental crabapples?

Did you use them as food or as herbal medicine?

Tea? Oxymel? Vinegar? Tincture? Jelly? Fermentation? Something completely different?

Do some cultivars have much higher medicinal value than others?

And finally... are they just another forgotten edible tree growing in our parks or do they deserve much more attention?

I'd love to hear your own experience, traditional uses from your country or any interesting scientific papers I may have missed.

Thanks!

What would you guys do with such a beauty? And which medicinal purposes would you recommend that for? For now I'm enjoying eating a thin slice chewing it slowly ang giving my taste buds enough time to read it and love it before it goes down my digestion system :) Yet, there are tons of usages but I want to collect opinions from herbal medicine fans - real people, not the AI or websites 🤓☝️

Recently visited the Cheongha Korean Ginseng Museum in Seoul and thought some people here might find it interesting.

I knew ginseng was popular in Korea, but I didn’t realize how important it is to their culture and traditional medicine. The museum had displays about how it’s grown, harvested, graded, and used over the years.

Sharing a few photos from my visit. For those who have tried Korean ginseng, have you noticed any benefits from it? I’d be interested to hear your experiences.

Hey everyone! Great to have you join us!

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