But Lyme can be managed quite effectively with natural protocols. In this class, we will discuss Stephen Buhner’s herbal protocol for Lyme, the modifications to that protocol as detailed by Tim Scott, as well as flower essence protocols developed at Delta Gardens. We will also discuss dietary guidelines for recovering from Lyme. You will learn how the different strategies address Lyme and its co-infections, how to implement them, and how to decide which one is right for you.

We will also cover preventative protocols, for folks who don’t have Lyme, so that you can go hiking without fear!

Don’t let Lyme ruin your life! Join us for this workshop and take control of your own health!

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
7:00pm – 9:00pm
25 St. Mary’s Court, Brookline

Evening Lectures are taught at our office at 25 St. Mary’s Court, Brookline – near BU; the fee is $25.

Please pre-register for classes: just send email to info@commonwealthherbs.com, fill out our contact form, or call at 617-750-5274.

Evening Lectures take place once a month on Wednesdays, from 7:00 – 9:00pm, and are a great way to learn about the use of herbs for a particular condition, or just to get your herbal feet wet! Come learn how to care for yourself, your family, and friends!

Conversely, we might feel a sense of accomplishment if we make some change “for our health”, but we can’t have real confidence in it unless we can point to a pattern of cause and effect linked to it. Put those pattern recognition skills to work, and quell any doubts about the value of your adopted habits—whether those doubts are your own, or those of others who look askance at your strange new ideas about food, medicine, and movement.

baseline patterns

If you started your record before you made changes, you can look in it for baseline patterns in your health:

• Review your record, and look for anytime you felt particularly bad, particularly good, or particularly weird: migraine, nausea, panic attack, carpal tunnel; made a creative breakthrough, smiled at strangers, felt lucky; got turned around in my own neighborhood, forgot my co-worker’s name, lost an hour wandering in the internet. These could be isolated events, or “flare-ups” of chronic or recurring conditions you’re already aware of.
• Search for other instances of that same bad, good, or weird feeling in your record.
• Look at the days prior to those unusual feelings, to see if you can find any intake/output differences from your norm: changed my workout routine, tried a new restaurant, had ice cream for the first time in a month.

Some patterns will have a short time frame, like a few hours or a day. Had cheap take-out for lunch, headache at 2pm. Skipped breakfast Monday, snacked three times that day. Went to bed early on Wednesday, got a lot done on Thursday! Others will recur weekly. Pasta night on Thursdays, diarrhea on Fridays. Four hours’ sitting in the Tuesday status meeting, backache every Tuesday night. Still others could be on the scale of a month or longer. Drank Nettle and Friends every day this month, PMS & cramps were much less intense. But it should be possible in almost all cases to find some connection worth investigating.

(If you jumped right in and switched everything around on the day you started keeping your record, don’t worry. You can still get useful information to drive good results. But do take some time to reflect on your pre-change condition, and write down some notes about recurrent health problems, along with anything you suspect makes them better or worse.)

making changes

Generally, when starting a self-experiment, you’ll already have some information to work with. You’re not likely to spontaneously decide to start eating or exercising differently out of the blue: change takes work, and you’ll only put in the work if you have some expectation of benefit based on information you trust. Depending on your personality, this could be anything from a recommendation from a friend, to an article you happened across while browsing, to an intensive review of studies and reports on the subject.

So you’ll probably have some idea, when you start changing your diet and habits, about which areas of your health you’re hoping to affect. But, I would suggest that it’s best to keep your goals general. Don’t get too caught up in the adjustment of one number or another, be it your body mass index, cholesterol count, or one-rep max for the benchpress. Try to see the whole picture.

If you don’t have a specific health target in mind, you don’t have to worry too much about isolating variables—determining the individual effect of each dietary or lifestyle change. You’d do this if your goal was to determine whether a reduction of your sugar intake by 100g/day resulted in more favorable A1C numbers after 60 days, or whether taking 10ml of hawthorn extract three times a day reduced your incidence of heart palpitations by 90%—but that’s not your goal. Your goal is to feel better, and fast. Making multiple simultaneous changes will be more effective. You can always rechallenge some individual pieces later, if you have a nagging doubt that some aspect of your new program isn’t doing you all that much good.

Mark down in your record when you decide to make a change, and don’t be shy about telling your friends and family. Having it on paper, and letting others know about it, will keep you accountable!

making connections

After you’ve made your changes (gone soy-free, made your sleeping space as dark as possible, started walking 30 minutes a day) and—and this is key—stuck with them long enough for your body to adjust, then you can begin to evaluate their effects. The process is much the same as when looking for baseline patterns.

Review your record over the whole period of your experiment, and try again to find any bad/good/weird feelings. This time, keep a particular eye out for those symptoms you were hoping to address with your changes; note both their frequency and their symptom scores, and whether and how they changed over the course of your experiment. But look, too, for general trends: are you feeling good more often than not? Are your energy levels higher, overall?

It can be especially helpful to compare your condition now, after a month (or more) of your experiment, to your condition at baseline, before you changed anything at all.

Once you’ve found those trends and patterns, drawing a conclusion should be simple. If your habitual complaints have lessened, if a previously deteriorating condition has stabilized or begun to turn around, if you’ve gotten more done or felt less stressed — if you’re meeting your definition of health — then your experimental change has been working.

If it’s working, stick with it! If it isn’t, you can turn your attention to other options. If you’re not sure one way or the other, you have choices—you can try to identify and eliminate some confounding variables, stick with it for another period to see if effects will emerge after more time, or just leave it in the “undecided” category and focus on things that do have apparent success.

In any event, you’ve gained some useful information about how this change works in your own particular case, and because you’ve done your due diligence, you can feel confident in your decisions about it as you go forward.

 

In the next, final article of this series, I’ll summarize the process and give some tips for putting this into practice.

When she was small, I used every herb that had ever been mentioned for dry skin. I tried them all – but nothing would touch her eczema. It seemed like the only option left was hydrocortisone cream, but I didn’t want to try that. One day I was thinking about licorice – which slows the body’s breakdown of cortisol. Although at the time I couldn’t find any information talking about the topical use of licorice, it seemed to me that if I could slow the breakdown of cortisol in a local area, that would effectively yield a buildup of cortisol – it would have the same effect as hydrocortisone. So I went to the stove to cook up a batch, and it worked great! Since then, I have turned to licorice oil again and again for everything from basic dermatitis to psoriasis, and it’s never let me down! Of course, you still need to address the root causes, but while you wait, nothing hits the spot like licorice!

Make licorice oil just like any other herbal oil. You can fill a jar with licorice root and pour olive oil over it, then let it sit covered for 4-6 weeks. To be honest, I’ve never made it that way, because I always am in too much of a hurry. Instead, I put a few handfuls of licorice root (I prefer the cut-and-sifted to the slices or sticks for this use) into a pot, and pour in just enough olive oil to cover all of the root bits. Put the pot over very low heat and stir it regularly. Generally I leave it on the stove for about three days, turning the heat on very low anytime I’m in the kitchen and can watch it – it’s important not to let the oil boil. (Many people will tell you it’s important not to let the oil get over 120 degrees, but if that does happen, don’t panic! I’ve had good results with licorice oil that got a little warmer than I intended. Try it before you throw it out and start over: if it works, it works!)

Once the oil is ready, whichever method you used, strain the root bits out of the oil and set the oil aside for whenever you need it. You can add beeswax to the oil to have a salve – often easier to transport than oil that might spill in your bag. Usually I put the oil into a dropper bottle, drop some on to whatever dry eczema spots there are, and rub it in.

You could certainly use a liquid extract of licorice to do the same job, however, in a dry flaky kind of condition, having the oil is quite soothing!

How can this be prevented? First, we need to recognize the potential mistakes. Then we can find tools and strategies to help us avoid them.

self-experiment or self-justification?

There are some valid concerns about using self-experimentation as a technique for sorting out healthy and unhealthy diets and habits. Foremost among them is the prodigious human capacity for self-delusion and susceptibility to various forms of cognitive bias.

Andrew of Evolvify has written about what he calls “the self-justification diet”: “Bias makes it hard enough to train scientists to draw useful insight from experiments on others. Turning everyone into objective simultaneous experimenters and experimentees strikes me as an infinitely utopian endeavor.”

Chris Masterjohn comments in the same post: “A proper self-experiment, as opposed to a flimsily interpreted experience, would be to put oneself (preferably blinded with the help of someone else if possible) through several treatment and control trials in a randomized order, in which the “n” becomes the number of trials rather than the number of individuals. Then one can use statistics to determine if there is a treatment effect.”

Kurt Harris suggests that evidence from self-experimentation should indeed be the “ultimate” consideration—in the sense of the last thing considered, arguing that subjective experiences are too unreliable to be trusted and that scientific evidence should be the basis of all dietary and lifestyle changes. He goes on to say that “the scientific reasoning should be sound and there should be evidence. And then N=1 should be applied with caution, with emphasis on objective measures of health.”

does n=1?

If you followed any of the links in the last section, you saw the phrase n=1 come up a lot. In the current vernacular of the “paleosphere” (bloggers writing about various evolutionary-history-inspired diets, where this topic comes up often), n=1 is the shorthand used for self-experimentation. The term comes from the notation used in scientific studies (specifically, cross-sectional studies, or studies that take a single set of measurements from a number of participants) to indicate how many participants were involved: a study with 42 participants would be n=42. So, any self-experimentation would naturally be an n=1 experiment.

As you may have noticed, n=1 often comes with a pejorative undertone in these discussions. The criticism is that such studies can’t be used to generate reliable conclusions, because they don’t gather enough data to make generalizations. No reputable journal would publish a study that was only n=1 — “that’s not data, it’s an anecdote.” But this criticism is a red herring.

Ned Kock of Health Correlator wrote a nice article not too long ago, explaining why calling self-experimentation n=1 is inaccurate. In reality, he explains, n equals however many data points you give yourself; you are in fact doing a longitudinal study (a study that takes several measurements from participants over a period of time) with one participant. Just like with cross-sectional studies, greater n values are more useful. So if your “n=1″ really is an n=1 — if you really only use a single experience (data point) as the basis for your conclusions, then yes, you’ve only reached the level of anecdote and you’re not justified in making claims. But if your “n=1″ is really an n=10 or n=100, you’re that much more justified. (Refer back to Chris Masterjohn’s comment quoted above, where he says that “n” becomes the number of trials rather than the number of individuals.)

Why does this settle the criticism? Because it changes the terms of what we call n=1 and what we expect of our self-experimentation. We might still use the term n=1, but only in its colloquial sense; self-experimentation is the more exact term, and we can set down some parameters for what does and does not count as “real” self-experimentation.

subjectivity, objectivity, and practicality

An immediate reaction to first feelings (e.g. “but I feel good when I eat pizza!”) doesn’t constitute an experiment—you haven’t done the work. Delayed-onset and invisible effects haven’t been accounted for: are you feeling an endorphin response due to your undiagnosed gluten allergy? Is your immune system attacking your own tissues because they bear some structural similarity to food proteins that are passing undigested through your damaged intestinal walls? Will you have a migraine tonight, or be constipated tomorrow? And if you are, will you remember that the last three times you ate pizza, you had the same symptoms?

It would be nice to know for sure. It would be nice if we could have objective, clear-cut answers to every dietary and lifestyle question we can come up with. But objectivity like that isn’t cheap (and so, for many, it isn’t accessible), and in many cases it isn’t even possible.

There are some constants, and some concretes: trans fats are bad, green leafy vegetables are good. But more to the point, there are some areas where a large range of individual variation comes into play. Those are precisely the areas where self-experimentation is most helpful and indeed needful—and where, conversely, reliance on (sparse, contradictory, disputed) evidence from studies and one-size-fits-all prescriptions are least helpful.

How many grams of carbs per day makes a diet “low carb”? Can raw dairy be part of a “paleo” diet? Should nightshades be avoided entirely, or can they be eaten regularly? Is white rice a “safer starch” than sweet potatoes? There is no consensus among researchers or enthusiasts about these questions and more like them. Many have never been studied at all—either they were never considered, or they were disregarded as obvious due to the assumptions of conventional wisdom. And in the cases where they have been, the variation between individuals is high.

In herbal medicine, there are similar questions that can be most easily answered (for a given individual) by experimentation. Will valerian help me sleep or keep me up all night? Will the licorice in this tea blend exacerbate my high blood pressure? Is skullcap or blue vervain better for my particular breed of anxiety? An herbalist will be able to see the factors that make one or the other answer most probable, but the interaction between person and plant is complex and often surprising. If you’re on your own and want to get started right away, you’ll just have to try it and see—and that’s no problem! With a little work, you can make sure your self-experiments are successful.

perception, reflection, and connection

If we boil the many criticisms in the anti-n=1 posts and their attendant comments down to their fundamental ideas, we get the following core argument:

• self-experimentation is reliant on subjective experiences
• subjective experiences are susceptible to cognitive bias
• cognitive bias leads to unchecked and incorrect conclusions

• ∴ self-experimentation leads to incorrect conclusions

In logical analysis of an argument, you can either dispute the premises themselves or show that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. In this case, the argument is of simple and direct form (if A then B, if B then C, if C then D; ∴ if A then D), so we must concentrate on the premises. Three premises means three points of vulnerability:

• reduce reliance on subjective experience
• reduce susceptibility to cognitive bias
• justify conclusions more thoroughly

Which is to say: we must work to develop skills of perception, for subjectivity shades into objectivity with sufficient perceptive depth and breadth; reflection, for cognitive bias can [only] be overcome by cognitive discipline; and connection, for discerning a distinct pattern gives us greater certainty in our conclusions.

 

In the next article, we’ll start at the beginning: with the development of skillful perception.

Solomon’s Seal has some other great actions, but I want to focus on this one for the moment: this idea that connective tissue that has been stretched out of shape, or has been “atrophied” out of shape, can be nourished back into its shape by balancing the fluids that feed it. Jim McDonald uses the example of stretched leather: if you stretch leather that is old and dry, you damage the leather, and it will be very difficult for the leather to return to its original shape. But if the leather was well cared for, oiled and supple, it can be stretched and will come back to its shape reasonably well.

For any sports injury, you can see where this is a vital function. But there’s another place in the body where connective tissue is at play: it’s what holds your organs in! Let’s say you’re a woman with Uterine Prolapse – Solomon’s Seal is for you! Why? Prolapse is all about connective tissue health. Uterine Prolapse is not caused by pregnancy, it’s not a normal part of aging: it’s a result of poor structural alignment. We sit for so much of our lives that the backs of our legs shorten. This leads to poor standing posture, because the legs aren’t as strong as they need to be to hold us up properly, and because the shortened leg muscles pull the pelvis out of alignment. All of our organs are held in place by connective tissue that is attached to muscles and bone, and when the muscles and bones are out of alignment, they pull the connective tissue that holds the organs in – eventually stretching them beyond the point where they can maintain integrity. That lack of integrity is prolapse.

So obviously, a big part of dealing with prolapse is to get your body aligned properly, but Solomon’s Seal can help drastically decrease healing time by improving the flow of fluids into those stretched out connective tissues.

Natural remedies can very effectively manage and reduce stress, whatever its source. Boosting natural immunity, building stamina, and developing more balanced reactions to stressful events can all be accomplished with the aid of herbal and nutritional therapies.

Even panic and anxiety can be effectively controlled with herbs – and without side effects!

Don’t let stress control your life! Come learn safe, holistic strategies for dealing with stress and anxiety!

February 18th, 2012
1:00pm – 5:00pm
25 St. Mary’s Court, Brookline

Class will run from 1:00pm until 5:00pm. The fee for the Saturday Seminar is $75.

Please register in advance for the class: just send email to info@commonwealthherbs.com, fill out our contact form, or call at 617-750-5274.