(ANALYSIS)I stood at my friend Monique’s kitchen counter and complained about pharmaceuticals.

Monique is an Orthodox Christian mother of four. She homeschools her children in a country home 30 minutes outside Richmond, Virginia. After encouraging me to trust my doctors, she lent me the book “Health through God’s Pharmacy: Advice and Proven Cures with Medicinal Herbs.” Little did she know that this book would launch me on a hilly, forested journey into the world of herbalism.

The book has a photo of some daisies and other white flowers with bees on the front. It is by Maria Treban, an Austrian herbalist who died in 1991. In it, Treban includes anecdotes of people healing from various diseases which mainstream doctors could not cure.

One notable story was of a woman told by a doctor that her cancer was incurable and she had a few days to live. After her daughter brought a urine sample to an herbalist and received an herbal remedy, the herbalist said, “Why didn’t you come sooner?” and sent the girl home with herbs which gave her mother a swift recovery.

The Amazon description of “Health through God’s Pharmacy” reads, “[these] time-honored herbal remedies have been shown to cure even some so-called ‘incurable’ diseases.” When our time has so many health and diet fads, something like this is often (and reasonably) categorized as too good to be true. However, I am a little embarrassed to say I believe something else.

Herbalism has a tradition within Christianity. Today, herbal practice is associated with traditional Chinese medicine and ayurveda. Historically it was used by Christian healers and, I suspect, is still hidden away in some monasteries somewhere.

I learned about this tradition by going down an internet rabbit hole looking for Christian herbal practice. I came across a Christian herbalism website run by Vas Avramidis, a man who claims to teach Christian herbalism. He attended thirteen schools or certification programs, with at least four of them being for herbalism.

On his website he mentions the unmercenary healers, Christian saints throughout the centuries who healed with herbs and without pay. For hundreds of years, these examples of Christian piety relieved people of spiritual and physical ailments, always with prayer and sometimes with miracles.

I listened to part of one of Avramidis’ lectures. He talks about the “energetics” of herbs: properties of the plants that are warming or cooling, loosening or tightening, moistening or drying. These principles are found in nature as well as in human bodies.

I had to confirm this with my priest, Hieromonk Zosimas.

“It is real?!” I half-exclaimed, half-asked Zosimas.

“Yes,” he said.

“I mean, it’s real that herbs have these properties and can be used to heal people in this way?”

“Yes.”

Apart from any religious belief, herbalism has some credibility because of its use for thousands of years before the existence of the pharmaceutical industry. “Health through God’s Pharmacy” represents the breadth of herbal remedies, whose index includes everything from acne to fits of anger.

When I read the book, I was inspired to harvest flowers, and when I realized it would be difficult, I decided to order herbs on Amazon. I added mistletoe to the cart for “unwillingness to work.” According to a list on Cancer.gov, mistletoe helps with epilepsy, asthma, hypertension, headaches, menopausal symptoms, infertility, dermatitis, arthritis and rheumatism. I purchased less than a handful of mistletoe herbs for $18 only to read in the front of the book that (of course) herbal remedies should not be taken without supervision by an expert and that some herbs are more gentle than others.

“Yeah, that sounds like not a beginner herb,” said my friend Amber Nedreberg when I visited her home in Cumberland, Virginia. She lives in pine-heavy woods, 26 miles from the nearest strip mall. She had ordered chickens for their property, and it was her husband’s dream to farm his land. Amber majored in bioethics and was designing her own curriculum before family life became very busy. When I visited Amber, she had given birth to her second daughter with the help of a midwife weeks before. Amber makes lotion out of beef tallow for herself and her daughters.

I had read that dandelion was a good beginner herb, a blood cleanser good for a whole host of things. After mentioning it to Amber, she pulled her supply out of an old-fashioned wood-burning stove to show me. “I’m sure you can find some in New York,” she said.

In New York, I did. My roommate Aberdeen Livingstone and I went to Radicle Herb Shop along Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, a small and cozy place with wood floors and shelves full of herbs. There was a fireplace on the back wall and nature sounds or ambient music playing very softly. There were many books in the store, books of the sort that people put in book mailboxes – worn books, probably fifty years old. I learned later that many of these were from the personal supply of the owner, Chris. The weathered spines had words like “botanical,” “Western herbs” and “Chinese medicine” in their titles.

I was warmly greeted by Chris behind the counter. He was an olive-skinned and dark-haired young man who seemed to be around thirty. Chris was quick to smile. He told me that herbalists educate, but do not prescribe. I told him a brief overview of my health.

“I was thinking dandelion,” I said.

“Dandelion would be good.” He cheerfully showed me different (and better) options, and I walked out of the store with an oat tincture. He said it would take a week or two to really kick in, but I felt a difference after three days. I was calmer and more present.

I returned a second time to get another tincture and got a sample for a friend from church. She said it helped her. I then realized I wasn’t sleeping well and went back a third time to get a mixture for sleep: skullcap and valerian.

This time Jonah, another knowledgeable and kind educator, was working behind the counter. Jonah was young and white with strawberry-blonde hair. His brother had just come in from out of town, and he sat on a bench in the shop behind us as we spoke. He told us he had stayed up too late researching sleep pathways.

I asked Jonah what would be the difference between using valerian and using pharmaceuticals for sleep. “Well,” he said, “Pharmaceuticals target one pathway in your body for sleep. Pharmaceuticals are good at doing one particular thing powerfully. But herbs will flood all the pathways gently.” I took the herbs and dreamed for the first time in months. The quality of my sleep became truly restful.

Avramidis said something similar to Jonah about the difference between herbs and conventional medicine.

At the beginning of his first lecture, “Foundations of Christian Herbalism,” Avramidis explained the biomedical approach to medicine, which chemically alters the body's system through drugs and surgery. This approach is very effective at doing one specific thing –at changing the body through a more invasive approach such as surgery, and most importantly, at saving lives when time is short. However, the biomedical strategy is concerned with the management of disease, not its reversal. Furthermore, different doctors with this approach often say different things about treatment to the same person, and err on the side of overprescribing medications.

Avramidis’ father died while on ten pharmaceutical drugs after seeing multiple doctors who, according to Avramidis, “gave him conflicting advice and told him to ignore the other doctors’ treatments…. Never once did I hear a doctor address his lifestyle or diet.” This was an incredibly formative experience for Avramidis.

He describes, “Within ten years of being diagnosed with high cholesterol, this once-athletic man [his father] who was able to run circles around younger men on the soccer field could no longer walk more than 100 yards without needing rest.”

On the other hand, Avramidis’ idea of a holistic approach seems to be in line with what Hippocrates, founder of Western medicine, meant when he said, “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”

Author and classical Christian teacher Joshua Gibbs discusses this proverb by Hippocrates in an episode on his podcast Proverbial which came out last summer titled “The Gray Physician.” “Not all physical problems are the result of spiritual problems,” Gibbs said. “Slip on the ice and break your leg, that’s not a spiritual problem. But spiritual problems will lead to physical problems….If you’re a glutton, there will be physical consequences. High blood pressure is in the cards for you if you are a glutton. That doesn’t mean that everybody with high blood pressure is a glutton, but it does mean that gluttony leads to high blood pressure.” Likewise, anxiety and depression take their toll on the body in headaches and digestive issues and a whole host of other things. Sometimes, I become so anxious about schoolwork and relationships that I make myself sick. This is a spiritual problem that has become a physical one.

The connection between the physical and the spiritual is why, in Avramidis’ opinion, an herbalist should spend time getting to know someone to assess their lifestyle, thought patterns and physical symptoms. Sometimes our health issues have their root not in nutrient deficiency but in our habits. Physical treatment for an ailment whose root is spiritual will be only a bandaid and not actual “healing.” I’ve often heard this acknowledged by doctors who prescribe medication. These doctors will say that medication helps someone manage a problem, but it does not heal the problem.

Herbs cannot do everything, just as medication can’t.

But could they do something for my friends? Sarah Ramey published “The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness” in 2020, a memoir of her mysterious illness and a discussion of elusive chronic diagnoses that many women eventually receive. The book posits that many of these chronic symptoms are due to changes in lifestyle which have come about very recently in human history with technological advancements.

Since my roommate Aberdeen —who has chronic struggles— told me about the book, I’ve been noticing how many women I know confront a bundle of symptoms that cannot always be tied together with a tidy diagnosis. These women go to many different doctors.

My godsister Anastasia Vogelgesang-Andreadis has seen surgeons, neurologists and a shoulder doctor, and has been to the ER multiple times for sciatica and muscle spasms. (Now she receives steroid injections to manage the pain.) Aberdeen has been to several doctors for pain in her shoulders and arms with no diagnosis. My friend Lizzie Reed from high school deals with a list of symptoms the size of the diameter of my hand and may soon receive a diagnosis of POTS, which can be managed but not cured according to most conventional doctors. These friends do not use herbs for relief in the same way that I have (though an oat tincture helped my friend at church, a Russian woman in her sixties).

For my friends with chronic pain, the fact that they don’t use herbs may have less to do with herbs and more to do with how exhausting it is to seek alleviation for the pain.

“You have to take breaks from it,” Aberdeen told me.

As far as traditional medicinal treatments go in our modern age, many people utilize acupuncture (a 3,000 year old Chinese medicine technique), but herbs are not nearly as widely used. If they are, it’s often pills or CBD.

Avramidis said that herbs in pills are almost pharmaceuticals in the way they operate. While CBD is technically an herb, it’s often disconnected from a robust arsenal of plant remedies. Such an arsenal, like that of Radicle Herb Shop, is not always a given even in holistic treatment. I also visited a functional medicine doctor who did not treat me with herbs.

I asked Chris why he thought more people didn’t use herbs. He said he didn’t know, but noted that most people do not know about them. He did not know what an herbalist was until more recently.

Ignorance seems to be the best explanation. Most of the people I know simply do not know very much about herbal remedies. I did not know about them until I borrowed that fateful book four months ago.

Abigail Prior is a senior at The King’s College majoring in English.

A College Student's Journey into the World of Herbalism