Medicine That Replaces the Body, Medicine That Wakes the Body

If you ask someone taking blood pressure medication "When can I stop?", you have most likely heard the answer "for life."

This does not mean the drug is bad. On the contrary, it means the drug is doing its job precisely. That drug lowers blood pressure on the body's behalf. For as long as it does so in the body's place, the body does not do that work itself. So when the drug stops, things return to how they were.

I am not trying to criticize this. There are clearly situations where it must be done this way. If blood pressure is dangerously high, there is no room to wait for the body to regulate itself. The drug that does it on the body's behalf protects life in that moment.

But I want to say that there is another kind of medicine as well.

Medicine that does not do the body's work for it, but makes the body do that work again.

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Replace the body, and the body quits the work. Nudge the body a little, and the body does it better. I use herbal medicine in the second way.

Two ways

	Medicine that replaces	Medicine that wakes
What it does	Performs on behalf the work the body cannot do	Stimulates the body to do it again
The body's response	Rests that function	That function revives
When it stops	Returns to how it was	In some cases it holds
Concentration needed	Enough to act for certain	Only little enough for the body to notice
Situations it suits	When it is urgent and dangerous	When it is long-standing and has slowly collapsed

Both ways are needed. It is not that one is superior — the situations are different.

Why giving less can make the body do better

Here I will tell a strange story.

Small stress makes the body stronger.

Think of exercise. Exercise damages muscle. And yet after that damage the muscle becomes stronger than before. This is because the body prepares, thinking "a burden of about this much will come again."

Sunlight is the same. Get a moderate amount and the skin readies itself to protect itself. Get too much and you burn.

The same stimulus, yet by amount the result is the opposite. This is called hormesis.

   Size of the stimulus
   ────────────────────────────────────→
        small      moderate       too much
          │           │              │
          ▼           ▼              ▼
      no change   grows stronger   damaged
                  (body prepares)  (body endures)

What matters is the middle band. In this band it is not the drug that does the work. The body works. The drug has only handed over the signal "get ready."

Why herbal medicine's low concentration is not a weakness

In another piece I spoke of the paradox of concentration. The concentration at which herbal compounds remain in the blood is, by the standards of modern pharmaceuticals, astonishingly low — and yet the body clearly responds.

Seen from the standpoint of hormesis, this paradox looks different.

To replace the body, the concentration must be sufficient. To wake the body, enough to be noticed is enough.

To seize and hold down a receptor, you need enough of the substance to cover all of those receptors. But to signal "there is something here," a far smaller amount is enough.

That herbal medicine works at low concentration may be not because the medicine is weak, but because it is doing a different kind of work in the first place.

So what happens then

When the body notices the signal, it begins to prepare on its own.

• It turns on in advance its self-defense systems that handle oxidative stress
• It runs the cleanup and regeneration that clears out old parts and makes new ones
• It lowers, on its own, the inflammatory response that had been over-excited

All of these are things the body originally knows how to do. It is only that, left neglected for long, it stops doing them. The medicine merely flips that switch back on.

That is why there are cases where it holds even after the medicine is stopped. That is when the body is doing that work again.

But there is a trap here

This logic can be very dangerously misused.

"Less is better" does not mean "anything is better in a smaller amount." A poison is a poison even in a small amount. There are substances for which hormesis holds and substances for which it does not.

And the right band differs from person to person. The amount that wakes one person's body is the amount that harms another's. For a body already exhausted, even a small stimulus is a burden.

Give a large amount of food suddenly to someone who has starved for a long time, and they fall ill. Give a strong stimulus to a body that has long been at a standstill, and the same thing happens.

Gauging that band is what a consultation is. Knowing the names of the herbs and knowing how much is right for this person right now are entirely different matters.

On the phrase "healing crisis"

At this point there is a phrase I must address without fail.

If an uncomfortable symptom arises after taking herbal medicine, that is not something to endure and let pass.

Hormesis does not mean "if it hurts, it gets better." A stimulus just large enough for the body to notice is generally bearable. If the reaction is hard enough to bear, that is a sign it has already exceeded the right band.

• Swelling, or a rise in blood pressure
• The chest pounds and the pulse is irregular
• The lips or the hands and feet tingle
• An unusual draining of energy

These symptoms are not the process of getting better. You should stop the medicine and let me know.

The judgment should fall on the side of checking, not on the side of enduring. If we check and it turns out to be nothing, that is good; and if it is not nothing, we can act early.

When you need medicine that replaces

Finally, I want to say clearly.

The way of waking the body is not always right.

If blood pressure is at a dangerous height, if blood sugar is not being controlled, if an infection is spreading — there is no time to wait for the body to manage it on its own. In those times the medicine that does it on your behalf is right. In that situation the right course is to stay on the medication you have been given.

The place I take on is elsewhere. Someone with no great abnormality on their tests who has long struggled; someone not in urgent danger but who has slowly collapsed; someone who, while using medicine that does it for them, wants to reclaim the part the body can do on its own.

The two are not in a relationship of conflict. It only remains to judge which of them this person needs right now.

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Hormesis is a phenomenon widely observed in biology. Exercise, fasting, heat, low oxygen — in all of these a moderate stimulus raises the body's capacity to prepare.

That herbal medicine works by this principle is not yet an established fact. There is evidence supported in the lab and in animals, but not much has been confirmed in humans as "this herb, through this pathway, by this much."

There are also actions of herbal medicine that this frame does not explain. Some herbs act quite directly.

I use this as a frame that explains what I have observed. I do not claim it as truth. If a better explanation appears, I intend to change.

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Patients often ask: "This medicine — do I have to take it for life?"

I try to answer this way.

"That depends on the illness. To the extent that your body comes to do that work again, the share my medicine has to carry grows smaller."

To use medicine of which I can say that — that is close to the reason I do this work.

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Written by Dr. Heo Ji-young (PhD in Korean Medicine Pathology, Kyung Hee University · former Research Professor of Herbology, Kyung Hee University)