I want to chat with you for a moment about the purpose of this blog, but in order to do that I need to give you some context. During the Covid lockdown, volunteers in the mutual aid group I organized sent out hundreds of care packages to people who were quarantined with COVID-19.
As a herbal clinician, I was the point of contact for handling requests and offering recommendations for herbal adjunct care. Many people complained to me that their doctor didn’t help them much. Rather than dragging their physicians I chose to take the high road replied, “I am glad that you don’t have a severe case.”
Doctors are doing exactly what they are supposed to, right now. They are fixing people when they are critically ill. Right now, they are really overwhelmed. They may seem cold, and dismissive, and are often guilty of not really connecting with patients’ needs. That is what we call physician burnout. Give them a break.
There is no “cure” they can hand out for this virus, and they haven’t been taught how to make sick people more comfortable. This is just the reality of this illness, if you are not in the hospital, the most advice you can realistically expect to hear from a doctor is rest, ibuprofen, and fluids. Physicians have never had a satisfactory treatment plan for post-viral syndromes, so I don’t expect that they are going to have a plan for long-Covid, either.
Nursing used to be the branch of the healthcare system that trained students in nutrition and convalescent care. They don’t receive nearly as much as they used to. There’s no point when insurance companies rarely approve extended hospital stays anymore, so the focus of nursing has changed to skills that, for better or worse, are more appropriate to the modern healthcare system.
I chose to pursue a degree in clinical herbalism because I didn’t want to get bogged down in that system. Unfortunately, I have learned that professional “herbalism” really isn’t much better than professional medicine at meeting people’s needs. They are really just focused on suggesting nutraceutical alternatives to pharmaceuticals.
The herbalism field is also unfortunately riddled with unqualified covid-denying, anti-vaxxers who use scare tactic marketing to make you distrust medical science and doctors because they want your money. Then you have the Instaherbalists — the name I have given social media influencers who can take a pretty picture and are good at cutting and pasting information from a Google search, but probably have never actually worked with a client.
To my leftist readers I would point out that the idea that you need to pay an “elder” or a “professional” to teach you how to take care of yourself is a patriarchal idea that people have used to market “lost remedies” to you.
This is a snapshot of how capitalism commoditizes everything. That false narrative serves to make the information seem exclusive and consequently turns what was once common knowledge into something people must pay to access.
I propose that you and I forget all that. In the past, we did not involve “professionals” so much in our day-to-day pursuit of wellness and there’s truly no point in doing so now. Most of the time you don’t need a doctor, nor do you need an herbal clinician.
The information that was passed around in the old skill-sharing networks was free and didn’t always come from an elder. Sometimes advice came in a letter from a friend, from a conversation with a neighbor, or even from a consultation with a professional medical practitioner.
Regardless of the source, the receipts came from a person who had used the receipt and was actively engaged in taking care of people or overseeing their care. I value this type of empiric knowledge over almost anything you can read in a book. It is the foundation of domestic medicine.
I propose the revival of a strong popular healthcare culture that is informed by modern medical research and grounded in traditional knowledge. By this, I mean historically accurate traditional knowledge based on centuries of trial-and-error experimentation –not the modern herban legends posted on social media.
To do my part I decided to put together this new site with some posts pulled in and spruced up from my other blog and some new ones. I invite readers to pour themselves a nice cup of tea and join me in a discussion about the daily things we can do to meet our non-emergent care needs.
[i] Morris, Zoë Slote, Steven Wooding, and Jonathan Grant. ‘The Answer Is 17 Years, What Is the Question: Understanding Time Lags in Translational Research’. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 104, no. 12 (December 2011): 510–20. https://doi.org/10.1258/jrsm.2011.110180.
Domestic Medicine 
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