Let's talk about the herbalist in the room

Why people hear "alternative medicine" and suddenly think I'm active on QAnon forums: An exploration

Hardly a day has gone by in the past two weeks that I haven’t guinea-pigged this essay onto one of my friends, talking their ear off about herbalism. Alternative medicine, I tell them through a series of anecdotes, has cleared my skin, stabilized my moods, regularized my digestive system, energized me tenfold. I make them feel my forehead to show them how soft it is now. Some of them feel it and say, Oh shit that is soft, go on tell me more! Some of them feel it (reluctantly) and give me a pitiful look like they think there is no longer a sound mind behind it.

Talking things through with other people is a good way to scaffold an essay; you can see which aspects you aren’t fully able to articulate yet, which get unexpected reactions, which shoot off into tangents more interesting than whatever you were discussing in the first place. When I first set out to write this all down, I thought the most interesting details would be in the specifics of the medicine, but two weeks into orally blueprinting my thoughts on the topic I’ve found that the most remarkable part of talking about herbalism isn’t the herbalism but the talking about it. For a generation that, as far as I can tell, widely accepts that Big Pharma is evil, that indigenous cultures were systematically discredited, and that to live in the modern world is to live with a chronic sickness of the soul—in short, that things are not all right here—alternative medicine remains a weirdly touchy subject.

Here’s how the conversations would go: At first, I would start with the details of my three days in Sedona, a place known to be a hub of new age spirituality. I’d tell them how I went on a hike to an energy vortex (these vortex tours are Sedona’s main attractions) with a woman who taught me how to stand and breathe properly at the base of a red rock mesa, how a different woman gave me an herbal tincture based on my specific health issues, and how both left me feeling lighter and stronger than I have in a long time. Later, I’d talk about my visit to the traditional Chinese doctor I found in Chinatown, and I’d show them photos of the prescription—two paper packages of dried fruit and roots to brew into tea, and two small envelopes of unmarked capsules to take three times a day for four days—that would supposedly cure me of being both blood-deficient and qi-deficient. (Unfortunate diagnosis! However, Dr. Zheng did not seem concerned, and frankly, I trust that man.)

Always, they ask me how I feel. I say I feel fucking amazing. And thus things diverge.

Such an enthusiastic thumbs up to the question, “Did you enjoy your alternative medicine experience?” is a polarizing response, as it turns out. About half the time, I’m met with open-mindedness and a good-faith unpacking of the many angles (political, medical, consumerist, ethical, spiritual) of non-Western medicine. With these friends I safely assume their view of me remains unchanged. I’m the same girl with the same views and education, who isn’t suddenly going down the alt-right rabbit hole, egged on by sketchy internet threads.

But the other half will hear this and turn from listening to skepticism. First it’s a narrowing of the eyes, a furrowing of the brow, a crossing of the arms—a body language that undertones an incoming devil’s advocate. Then suddenly they’re reminding me about the wonders of modern medicine, about clinical trials and scientific methods and hundreds of years of research, all diligently carried out and recorded by smart men who did it all in the name of righteous technological advancement. It’s this digging in of the intellectual heels that frustrates and fascinates me. It warps a discussion into an ideological debate, that science is real and herbalism is magical thinking, as if I’m trying to say the opposite is true. I say “herbalism” and these men (because they’re almost always men) seem to hear woo-woo libertarian anti-vax propaganda, and the idea that two things may be true at once is lost to a fit of what feels a lot like evangelism. 

Why does alternative medicine provoke such emotional responses? Why is it so scary to unpack our definition of healthcare? Last week I was sitting on the floor of a bookstore with my partner, a history and economics teacher, watching him read an old consumerist critique from 1958 called The Affluent Society, when he pointed out this passage:

To a very large extent, we associate truth with convenience—with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal wellbeing or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocations of life…But perhaps most important of all, people approve most of what they best understand. Economic and social behavior are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as if to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding. This is a prime manifestation of a vested interest. For a vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure. It is why men react, not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to the defense of what they have so laboriously learned. Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.

(Thank you to Johny for reading lauded economic texts that sum things up so academically, but I also think we could all just listen to “Rät” by Penelope Scott and come away with the same idea.)

So outside of the clinging-for-dear-life-to-the-more-convenient-truth aspect of it all, I have two thoughts on why natural medicine talk provokes such fervor: 1) The pandemic made things way more political (from the little I heard of it pre-covid, the anti-vax conversation used to be more granola moms, less death cult), and 2) the exotification and expunction of indigenous practices is baked so deeply into Western culture that I’m not surprised any validation of alternative medicine gets the “Believe science, witch!” attitude. I mean, here even I am making the argument for its legitimacy and still calling it “alternative,” because anything Western is the global default. Eurocentrism, folks!

Funny enough, bringing it up like that, term-dropping “indigenous practices” or “eurocentrism,” makes it way more palatable for my armchair scientist friends, who generally live in the same progressive, coastal bubble that I do. This is what I mean when I say that how we talk about herbalism, about alternative medicine (or non-Western, or traditional, or holistic, or whatever you want to call it), is more remarkable than what we say about it: Framing things in academic terms makes it theoretical, which makes it removed from reality, which makes it unthreatening. Now it fits right into the convenient truth du jour, which is that the more natural ways of life were tragically lost to time and colonialism, but now there’s nothing we can do about it except make land acknowledgements and yearn for a cottagecore life and then move on. But the inconvenient truth is that much of that wisdom is still around if you want to look for it—and if you do, you’ll find that it doesn’t all fit into the narrative that keeps things chugging along, business as usual.

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?!?!?! i mean pls

I’m going to interject here to say a few things: I’ve been having these conversations and working on this essay for weeks, and I still don’t feel like it could ever be nuanced enough. There are whole aspects—like the loudness of white people in the herbalism conversation (it’s like they have a history of stealing credit for other cultures’ discoveries or something!), or the intersection of herbalism and wellness/diet/consumer culture—that I know I’m not going into. Everything is connected to everything, and I’ll simply never post anything on here if I try to fit in all the discourse. So consider this my disclaimer that of course I know it’s deeper than this…but at the same time it’s really not. Adding a few select herbs and roots to your life does not necessitate a shift to the extreme. In all likelihood, they’ll have some mild health benefits and maybe encourage better sleep hygiene, more frequent exercise, a more balanced diet—mostly, they’ll support a more intentional routine and a more grounded mentality as you move through your days, which remain otherwise unchanged. So I believe natural medicine has legitimate value, but I still do modern things that are good for the collective (get vaccinated) and bad for me (go on TikTok). I still engage critically with being a white American with the privilege to cherry pick ~*what resonates*~ from a mishmash of other cultures, but I also eventually shut the fuck up about it and go outside. Call it balanced, call it dissonant, call it living in the modern world.

In the end I’m just trying to feel okay, investigate why I don’t feel okay in the first place, and be open and earnest enough to form new opinions when presented with new information. I’m looking for solutions to problems we all know exist. Like, for all its sophistication, there are serious blind spots in the American healthcare system. When I was in middle school, I had to go to three different doctors before they believed that there really was something wrong with the mass I could see bulging through my lower belly, which turned out to be a basketball-sized ovarian cyst and not some embarrassing but innocuous result of pubescent weight gain. After the surgery, they slapped hormonal birth control on as a band-aid solution, and now I’ve never known my adult body (or teenage body, for that matter) without it. Another cyst never developed, so I’m sure I’m here benefitting from all those clinical trials, but the many stories I’ve heard about women who have gone off birth control and awoken to some clarified version of themselves leave me longing for an alternate Cydney, whose body runs in pure, natural order, whom I may never get to meet.

And to bring it all back, this is how the second type of conversation about herbalism goes: The friends who are fascinated by it have usually had some similar experience. Maybe they were also put on birth control for some totally different reason (like acne or moodiness) as a teenager, so we laugh our sad little laughs about how it would be nice to meet ourselves. We discuss how we’re all fine to take a pill at the expense of our libidos and stable weight and energy levels, because, hey, it was approved by the FDA. We talk about how we’ve gone to see doctors for debilitating mental or physical pain, each arriving with unique genetic makeups and circumstances and all leaving with new debt and the very poignant medical advice to drink water and eat regularly (but only if we’re thin already; if not, we’re told to practice eating behaviors that DEFINITELY aren’t anorexia). We agree that there is something deeply wrong with our society, with its preference for knowing over understanding and its sanctioned erasure of community and spirituality. Eventually, we say goodbye because it’s getting late, and tomorrow we’ll have to get up early, return to a schedule built to support the hormonal cycles of men, and sell our labor to corporations that operate only for profit, at the expense of the planet and of humankind.

The path from finding a few choice herbs that can cure your most stubborn myalgias, to questioning the healthcare system, to questioning every system, is a quick and slippery slope. But even before I dove into herbalism I could’ve told you that this is what I know to be true: The modern world is not good for us. Our phones are built to be addicting. Almost everyone I know is or has been on some form of antidepressants. Apples (the fruit) are all covered in wax, and Apple (the company) wants us to believe that this is a thing that we actually want for the future. Money runs everything and corrupts everything and most of us will be chained to bullshit jobs until we’re too physically debilitated to spend our retirement years doing anything but dying.

So when the skeptics write it all off as pseudoscience, I want to shake them and scream, “The world is sick! Does this feel right to you? Can’t you imagine that there’s more than this system of living?!” Even what we call science is an intellectual paradigm, and it requires a trust fall to believe it: To live by the instructions of the Western doctors, you must believe the American Medical Association—and all the pharmaceutical institutions surrounding it—has zero administrative issues and all our best interests at heart. And to live only by Western medicine, you must ignore indigenous herbal knowledge and declare it nothingness. Institutional organization and clinical trials and widespread sanitation have gigantic problems covered, of course, but there are still holes in the fabric that I know even the most hesitant people can feel. 

It will take me months to see a doctor if I schedule an appointment today, but after two weeks of taking tinctures and drinking strange teas made specifically for me and my body, I feel healthier than I have in a long, long time. Perhaps the ingredients in these concoctions are in fact powerful links to some ancient hive mind. Or maybe they are just natural treatments for common ailments, like tiredness or flushed faces or constipation, and the thousands of years of results have just not been recorded by today’s institutions. But at the very least, they are indeed placebos that inspire a healthy set of correlative behaviors. Even the wellest of us live in an unwell environment, and seeking treatment for illness caused by the systems of modern life with remedies made by the system itself may never be enough. Perhaps the possibility of a newfound sense of mental peace is reason enough to find an alternative. Or at least a supplement.