Human Health and its Maintenance with the Aid of Medicinal Plants. Julian Barker

that suggested that the author of a plant extract could be biological rather than technological, or rather, he wanted to stress, what you call a thing rather depends upon the demarcation line that you care to draw. Bees are emblematic creatures to humans, emblems conserved among a wide range of human groups; beekeepers, who take the risk of being stung to death despite their white vestments, are members of their priesthood. The beekeeper talking to us herbalists was quite tentative in his suggestion that honey might be considered a plant extract, even a medicinal plant extract. I was less tentative in developing parallels between our sociality with those of bees. With social bees, the individual dies if the queen dies. To retort that here in Britain we happen to have a queen must sound facetious and puerile because if she dies we do not, and monarchy could be replaced with republicanism or some other system of order. The quip conceals the truism that some social order emerges necessarily from sociality and that political, socio–economic and religious philosophies attempt to codify the nature of the glue that binds people in the face of the perceptions that separate. Without heterogeneity we would not have politics, without cohesion we would not have societies. It is common to speak of social insects as “super-organisms” and quite simple to reject application of this concept to human organisation on many grounds but, as the beekeeper wanted to suggest, what you call a thing rather depends upon the demarcation line that you care to draw and whether you take an exclusively human–centred view of the biosphere.

      In its entry for honey, the Penguin Encyclopaedia39 reads “Its intimate association with nature…has led to claims of specific health effects for honey, which are not justified.” The entry goes on to describe the sugar content of nectar, adding “The protein, mineral and vitamin content of honey is negligible.” The writer is very clear where the line for health is drawn and does not mention propolis, nor does it have an entry elsewhere. There is, as you would expect, an entry for Stradivarius who undoubtedly used propolis in the making of his violins. There are entries for wax, bees and beeswax but nowhere any mention of propolis. Now this may just be an oversight, though oversight is not the word commonly associated with the word Encyclopaedia. It may be that because the benefits of consuming propolis to “human health” (which we are trying to get at in this book) is a subject of controversy, the editor of the Encyclopaedia has censored its inclusion. I have never myself made any claims for the benefits of propolis but do think this phyto–complex (operating as glue in the beehive) to be as fascinating a metabolite as other plant products; it is rather like a loose but adherent collection of plant extracts.

Boundary conditions

      If Gaia⁴⁰ is an inclusive analogy between the physical world and the biosphere, living systems nonetheless quite evidently border upon non–living ones. At the system level, the boundary itself may be composed of intermediate boundaries and the number of these will contribute to the breadth of the boundary zone. In some ways all intermediates between extremes constitute an extended boundary: the differences between mountain scree and lakes, bogs and deserts, woods and meadows could be designated by the number of steps that separate them.

      The interconnected-minded matrices in any system, the human body for example, show changes near a boundary as they are constrained by chemistry to give up the properties of one region for those of another. They do so for thermodynamic reasons if that is the basis of all organisation, the line–drawer in effect. We experience a world of objects and also processes: the tree, the leaf and the effect of the breeze moving within these objects. One could materialise the wind to air, but rather it is a movement through the material. Given enough time (and with nothing better to do), an observer could witness the emergence of the shoot from its bud and its subsequent decay on the forest floor, to look at a relatively short cycle. Even our perception of objects is a convenient shorthand for manoeuvring through the world: objects are processes held together in one place for an arbitrary length of time. Although it would be pedantic and pointless to draw attention to this in daily life: to insist that in reality there are no nouns, only verbs (no leaves, no trees), that things are clusters of events and will eventually disperse, it does have better meaning in biology where bordered states define the entity, always a temporary affair. An isolated border is sterile in the biological sense, meaningless on its own, soon dispersed.

      All life takes place on or close to a membrane: without such a structure the differential chemistry of life could not proceed. Bounded states are essential to charge separation and the storage of energy: the boundary resists its dispersal. Time is the measure of change in both Gaia and her younger sister.

      Circadian, seasonal annual and epochal phases show state transitions rather than physical boundaries (dark to light, hot to cold, young to old) and help us envision our lives, our own personal sense of a continued self. The tellers of continuities at the larger scale of human history, the continuation of the generations, may construct boundaries to imply that forces that temporarily unite are as inevitable as forces that separate.

      To transpose from political history, the fate of the ancien régime of Early Modern France or that of the Austro–Hungarian Empire that ended with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife could be read with hindsight as a study in ecology: the existence of boundaries that contained for a while the flow of political, economic and social energy. Unlike biological systems, competition tends to win over cooperation, at least in the long term and on the larger scale. The Kings and Archdukes may be seen as fossils of history but are embodiments of an “old order” which had not the capacity⁴¹ to preserve its life. The guillotine and bullets which pierced the living boundaries of individuals unleashed the stored capacitance for competitive aggression on the largest human scale. As has been pithily remarked, the lesson from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.

      The distinction between a historian and a personal historian (the patient and the doctor) is that, in medicine, we use the past to alleviate the present and hope to alter the future. It is helpful to recognise that phase transitions in the patient's life have become boundary conditions where previous capacitance no longer holds.

Bounded states

      Specialisation, which I seemed earlier to deplore,⁴² is of course necessary to the examination of detail that no generalisation can hope to accommodate. This book needs to be generalist because of its subject: integration is the basis of health. At the level of detail all manner of inconsistencies and even contradictions will inevitably occur which the specialist will condemn if he could so be bothered. The most perilous territorial waters for the generalist to navigate are those of medicine and science, though even the humanities may sneer at the interloper. All humans owe science a debt if only because the technologies that created the modern world are dependent upon the experimental method, but that method did not of itself create the techniques of modern surgery with anaesthesia. Good observation tested by rule of thumb of practice can foster progress if the cultural climate permits it. Professional opinion usually resists change until the borders of the paradigm are allowed to shift. Medicine is not unique in this conservatism. The purview of what constitutes the medical endeavour has now become too narrow and too broad, failing to recognise that people without disease may become ill. The medical industrial complex exerts considerable political pressure over those who resort to untestable modalities for relief. Science and Medicine are inevitably entangled but not really equivalent constructs. Medicine has evolved a taxonomy of disease from clinical observation and historical accident but such an enterprise can hardly be equipped to help people move towards a state of poise. Herbal Medicine (beyond the testing of drug plants and known active compounds from plants) is not easily amenable to testing by the scientific method. This expresses a regret, not a defiance of the paradigm. The Bio–psychosocial model of health links the biological facts of the inner mindedness with the social space which humans must occupy in health. It has been castigated as “one more disingenuous euphemism for psychosomatic illness”.⁴³ It is difficult to avoid the suggestion that two separate classes of illness are conceived, and that a potent driver of the classification is financial and economic, driven by fears of unsustainable claims on health insurance. While it would be wrong and naive to suggest that the huge drains that disease makes upon public services could be better served by some rhetorical device instead of well–tested strategies, it must equally be said that over–extending the biomedical model—for which the scientific method is