What does the Thirty Years War Have to Do With Your Doctor?

Mind-body dualism, empiricism, and resistance to herbal medicine

Have you ever been prescribed medication by your doctor that caused side effects? When you returned to your doctor to address the side effects did they prescribe another medication? While it’s only natural that when you have a hammer, you tend to treat every problem as if it were a nail, most of us recoil from that approach. We feel that if the medication is making us feel worse we should stop taking it. While there are some conditions that are severe enough or have few treatment options that managing side effects with medications is necessary, many times changing the medication or using a non-medication treatment option is safer and more effective. 

If you’ve been following my series on medicinal plants you’ll know that the evidence for the use of plants like Dandelion and Plantain is surprisingly strong. The side effect profile for some plant medicine is concerning and needs more study because the dose that helps is not far from the dose that harms. However, with dandelion and plantain, this is not the case. There have been no adverse effects reported in the medical literature from dandelion treatments except for allergic reactions which are also quite rare. People who take plantain sometimes suffer from nausea, but that is a side effect of nearly all prescription medications too. In contrast, if allergic reactions were the only thing I needed to be concerned about when I prescribed amoxicillin (a common antibiotic), I’d do a dance of glee. Amoxicillin can cause a serious skin blistering illness called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which can be life threatening, anaphylactic allergic reactions, which are also life-threatening, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, or rash. 

So, why then, do some of my colleagues look like they are about to call the toxicologist when I make medicine from turkey tail mushrooms or dandelions in spite of solid medical evidence supporting their use (or at the very least stronger than the evidence to support the use of prescription medications we currently use that are much riskier like clot-busting medications in stroke). I am still trying to figure it out. Part of it, certainly, is that we are never taught about the safety and efficacy of these medications. Even though I have practiced medicine for 15 years and completed an apprenticeship as an herbalist, the first time I, a plant enthusiast doctor, encountered much of the medical literature about these plants was while researching these articles over the last few months. Of course, if you are a busy, non-plant enthusiast doctor who tries their best to keep up with medical literature, but is barely keeping your head above water in life, you’re not going to find them. Is there some “Big Pharma” conspiracy disconnecting us from this information? While I wouldn’t put it past them, I think only by omission, that they have no incentive to promote plant medicine, while they do have incentive to promote their own products. 

What I think is most at play is a desire for standardization or control. When you make medicine out of dandelion, each dandelion has different concentrations and ratios of medicinal chemicals based on the sunlight and water the plant received, the quality of the soil, contamination of the soil, when it was harvested (both time of day and time of year). Sometimes stresses like being eaten, can cause plants to produce more of the bitter chemicals that make them taste bad, but are often also powerfully medicinal. How do you measure that to ensure each patient gets the same amount and has a predictable response? Without significant chemistry lab equipment that goes far beyond both the available equipment at a clinic or hospital and the physician’s knowledge, there’s no way to know, and it’s totally impractical to do this analysis on every individual plant. 

There’s another question that begs answering though: do you need to know those things? If I prescribe you a diabetes medication or a blood pressure medication I might have a sense of the average blood sugar or blood pressure decrease over a population, but I won’t know how it will affect you specifically. You will need to continue to measure your blood sugar or your blood pressure to ensure that the change we have made remains in a safe zone. You could do the same thing with plant medication. I think the standardization is important to doctors because they, like you, are products of a culture that has taught us that nature is harsh, unforgiving, and needs to be conquered. It can’t be trusted and neither can your body. I took a medication I made from mushrooms to help me focus. For the next 10 minutes, I felt really panicky. I tried it one more time to see if it was just a coincidence, but it happened again, so I stopped taking it and realized that is not the medicine for me. If I took an antidepressant and told my doctor I didn’t like taking it because it made me feel panicky, they would likely ask me to override that sense and stick it out a few weeks to see if it helped. Why don’t doctors, these mechanics of the body trust the information the body gives them? 

Where did our culture find that notion that nature and our bodies need to be tamed? There are some who would say that it goes all the way back to the dawn of agriculture and civilization. It definitely could, but I don’t have the receipts for that. There is a very clear line from the enlightenment to the mind-body dualism of modern culture and specifically modern medicine. Particularly, the philosophies of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. In spite of what a philosopher might tell you, transformative ideas don’t spring up from thinking really hard in a room by oneself. Rather, they develop in response to the society in which they live. The society of Bacon and Descartes was reeling from the Thirty Years War. I don’t think I understood how profoundly the Thirty Years War impacted early modern Europe until quite recently. The Thirty Years War was a sign of the end times to those who lived through it. Germany was particularly hard hit. Nearly continuous violence terrorized rural and city dwellers alike. Soldiers pillaged from them regardless of who they were supporting. All lives were in danger. 

 “The war’s savagery, famine, and disease were commonplace throughout Central Europe. The war wiped out almost a third of Germany’s population. The prewar institutions that gave people their bearings and the beliefs that ordered their lives lay in tatters.” as history professor, Dominic Aquila wrote in his book The Church and the Age of Enlightenment. When the war ended, citizens were more skeptical of a king’s divine right to rule and skeptical of the old ways of knowing that were steeped in religion or tradition. Francis Bacon, specifically, was very skeptical about how knowledge was acquired. Aquila explained, “In his (Bacon’s) view, the learning of the past was barren. It provided little benefit to people’s everyday lives. Bacon viewed knowledge as an untapped power for subduing nature for the benefit of humanity.” 

This suspicion of traditional ways of knowing led to viewing nature as something to be controlled and tamed, rather than the classical and biblical views that man was not separate from nature. This era was the dawn of knowing things to be true only if they could be directly observed or experimentally proven. There is a lot of merit to this approach, but it also can lead to the omission of the complex, the nuanced, the incomprehensible.

Scientists also began to break complex processes (human bodies, ecosystems, space) down into its component parts and attempt to draw conclusions based on those experiments. This led to groundbreaking science, but also led to overly simplified conclusions at times. This suspicion of traditional knowledge and requirement of experimental proof also led to the professionalization of fields like medicine. That professionalization meant that in order to be a physician one had to attend university. Women were barred from university, so they couldn’t be trained to be physicians and their knowledge and that of their forebears was excluded from research and clinical practice. 

Licensing became important in this era. This is the beginning of control over medical practice. “University trained physicians actively prevented unlicensed healers, including women and minorities such as Jews and Muslims in addition to any other untrained empirics, from practicing medicine.” Leigh Whaley, professor emeritus of history, wrote in her book, Women and the Practice of Medicine in Early Modern Europe. There certainly was an economic incentive for physicians in making medical practice exclusive, but given the suspicion of the “old ways”, it was also probably rooted in a legitimate new concern for quality-control, which has persisted in onerous licensing requirements to this day. However, the benefit of licensure was/is not always clear, as Whaley explains, “Licenses were established as a form of official recognition and approval of a practitioner’s competence in medicine. As such, a license was supposed to guarantee some level of skill, but this was not always the case. One expert has argued that rather than encouraging improvement in medicine, regulation actually held back progress and any form of innovation. Physicians used regulations to criticize colleagues and incompetence was often hidden behind them.” Instead, physicians of that era developed practices such as blood-letting, purges (taking medication to induce vomiting), and clysters (enemas), which are definitely less scientifically supported than the use of dandelion. 

Rene Descartes, of “I think therefore, I am” fame, is the thinker whose ideas led us to thinking of the mind and body as separate. Descartes took Bacon’s ideas and extended them, understanding that medicine would be the ultimate triumph of Bacon’s project because, as Thomas Merrill, assistant professor of government puts it in his article about Bacon and Descartes, “[It was] Descartes who foresaw that the ultimate instrument of the Baconian project would have to be medicine, since health is the primary good of life and the foundation of all other goods.” Descartes suggested that we humans should aspire to be “Like masters and possessors of nature”. 

I think we can see how these philosophies continue to reign today, particularly in the field of medicine. Evidence-based medicine often means only certain types of experimental research conducted in certain places by certain people. Physicians continue to view the human body as separate organ systems rather than a complex interconnected system, often “punting” patients outside of their organ system of specialization to another specialist rather than looking at a whole person.

As I noted above, my suspicion is that much of the resistance to plant medicines is rooted in control. However, from my vantage point, it appears that we have made a bad bargain. We have accepted control with more side effects, rather than letting go of control with less side effects. Having swum in this fishbowl for the past 400 years, it can be difficult to imagine it otherwise, but there are other ways of operating in the world right now. 

Unlike Descartes' view of “I think, therefore I am”, Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems lab at Deakin University, describes the indigenous view as “I locate, therefore I am.” This means that instead of defining oneself as an individual, we could define ourselves based on being somewhere, based on your relationship to your surroundings, community, nature. It was

Dan Kieran

’s writing here on Substack, that reminded me of Yunkaporta’s transformative work. He summarized the implications beautifully, “If our sense of existence was based on our relationship with the outside world instead of being siloed in our own minds, life would become about the relation between yourself and where you are. Your existence would rely not on your own perspective but on how you connect with what is around you instead.” This means we are defined not by our isolation, but our connection. We are healed not by separating mind from body or man from nature, but by reuniting them. To me, finding medicine where you are located seems integral to that.