Quotes & Sayings About Plant Medicine

People in the U.S. are more cranked up on pharmaceutical drugs than any other culture in the world today. I want people using safer medicine. And that means plant medicine. — Chris Kilham

One of the great challenges in healthcare technology is that medicine is at once an enormous business and an exquisitely human endeavor; it requires the ruthless efficiency of the modern manufacturing plant and the gentle hand-holding of the parish priest; it is about science, but also about art; it is eminently quantifiable and yet stubbornly not. — Robert Wachter

Most recently, as the medical value of marijuana has been rediscovered, medicine has been searching for ways to "pharmaceuticalize" the plant - find a way to harness its easily accessible benefits in a patch or inhaler that doctors can prescribe, corporations patent, and governments regulate. Whenever possible, Paracelsus's lab-coated descendants have synthesized the active ingredients in plant drugs, allowing medicine to dispense with the plant itself - and any reminders of its pagan past. — Michael Pollan

The number one reason why marijuana is illegal is because the Pharma Cartel does not want you to grow your own medicine. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. The first car ever made ran on hemp oil. Hemp seeds are also the healthiest food on the planet with the highest protein content out of any plant. — Joe Rogan

Health is Wealth — Ronnie Plant

One reason we would use plant medicine: to be able to take care of the body as a whole. Another reason is that it is accessible, approachable, and requires few invasive methods. — Karen Rose

If science is defined or understood as a mode of seeking knowledge, a means of interpreting nature in a way that can be demonstrated to others, then the plant-medicine traditions of the Amazon as they have been practiced constitute an authentic scientific discipline. — Jonathon Miller Weisberger

I know of nothing else in medicine that can come close to what a plant-based diet can do. In theory, if everyone were to adopt this, I really believe we can cut health care costs by seventy to eighty percent. That's amazing. And it all comes from understanding nutrition, applying nutrition, and just watching the results. — T. Colin Campbell

Every herbalist has their favorite plant. Mine is Rhodiola rosea. — Chris Kilham

Plant medicines work beyond the physical response; sometimes, it's your spirit or emotion that needs healing, and plant medicines can address that also. — Karen Rose

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. — Bill Lambrecht

Their [plant secondary compounds] healthful effects in humans, however, are not well understood, in part because things in nature like coriander and basil can't be patented so there isn't a lot of money being thrown at them, and in part because long-term studies that measure small effects of low doses are expensive and don't yield the kind of unambiguous, major effects you get with pharmaceuticals, but mainly because preventions are never as exciting as cures. — Mark Schatzker

Plant spirit medicine is the shaman's way with plants. It recognizes that plants have spirit and that spirit is the strongest medicine. Spirit can heal the deepest reaches of the heart and soul. — Elliot Cowan

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grow like a manic fungus and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less then six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age. — Hope Jahren

By nature, we are a plant-based intelligence - not just our exhale, which plants inhale, but they are my food chain. They are my medicine. I cannot live without plants. They are part of my life support. And this is why plant species need to be preserved. — Horst Rechelbacher

The scope of herbal medicine ranges from mild-acting plant medicines such as chamomile and peppermint, to very potent ones such as foxglove (from which the drug digitalis is derived). In between these two poles lies a wide spectrum of plant medicine with significant medical applications. One need only go to the United States Pharacopoeia to see the central role that plant medicine has played in American medicine. — Donald Brown

If ever there was a plant that speaks to its connection to your heart, it is sweet blue violet. Not only does violet help your body dissolve cysts, lumps, and bumps, this plant's soothing nature can help you dissolve the red-hot burn of anger, cool the draining white heat of frustration and resentment, and relieve the simmering roil of feeling stuck in separation when ruled by your judgmental mind. — Robin Rose Bennett

He was becoming an effective human being. He had learned from his birth family how to snare rabbits, make stew, paint fingernails, glue wallpaper, conduct ceremonies, start outside fires in a driving rain, sew with a sewing machine, cut quilt squares, play Halo, gather, dry, and boil various medicine teas. He had learned from the old people how to move between worlds seen and unseen. Peter taught him how to use an ax, a chain saw, safely handle a .22, drive a riding lawn mower, drive a tractor, even a car. Nola taught him how to paint walls, keep animals, how to plant and grow things, how to fry meat, how to bake. Maggie taught him how to hide fear, fake pain, how to punch with a knuckle jutting. How to go for the eyes. How to hook your fingers in a person's nose from behind and threaten to rip the nose off your face. He hadn't done these things yet, and neither had Maggie, but she was always looking for a chance. When — Louise Erdrich

Fifteen years ago I had an odd dream. In it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings. — Stephen Harrod Buhner

Plant medicine does not just improve symptoms; it approaches healing the whole of the body - as opposed to Western medicine, which may just approach the symptom. — Karen Rose

All of my experience of studying religion, studying spirituality, studying natural healing, traditional medicine, has kind of enriched my vision of the world. Not only seeing reality as this moment, but as a culmination of all of the history behind us, and all of the fruit that hopefully we will be able to grow from the seeds that we are trying to plant, of goodness and peace and beauty and equality. — Assata Shakur

You need to understand plant chemistry, be inured to discomfort and awesomely flexible. When something breaks down-the plane, the boat, you just have to roll with it. — Chris Kilham

Often, people take herbal medicines for a physical response, but what they find is that the body also responds in an emotional way to the plant medicine that they're taking. — Karen Rose

If you or I want to be healthy (whether it's our digestion, our reproduction, our skin, or anything) we have to assume greater responsibility for our wellness. One of the best ways to do that is to be familiar with and to use on a regular basis, plant medicines. — Chris Kilham

Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. 3. Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction. — Seneca.

Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood... — Hope Jahren

There are many plant medicines that are available to us that have a lot of stigma around them that I hope, in the future, our medical community can look at, because I would absolutely go to those alternatives first before I went back to Western medicine. — Melissa Etheridge

I have found that if I tend to a person's illness rather than to the
person, I am going to treat that person as if they are their illness. In doing so, I run the risk of limiting them greatly and helping them to focus in on their illness as if that is all they are. It is so important to see and help a person and not just a condition. Everyone is different, with unique twists and challenges, so the same herbs are not applied for the same 'condition.' The herbs chosen are connected to the whole personincluding their illness, their constitution, their diet, their psychology, their
history, their tastes, their lifestyle, and their joys and sorrows. I always
try to set a person up to succeed, and take their preferences, abilities, stamina, and financial resources into account when helping choose their plant medicines. — Robin Rose Bennett

Ayahuasca is a fickle mistress - she likes it when you put out for her, make a show of it, and put some effort in. But ayahuasca is also a plant medicine, and as such she reads you and what you need, and that changes every time, both as you progress on the path and as new issues come to light. Like a high maintenance girlfriend, the relationship with 'aya' can be hard work, but the rewards far outweigh the sacrifices. — Rak Razam

Several years ago, I realized that I didn't want to spend all my life in medicine. It had me in a sort of spiritual box, like a plant whose roots are getting crowded. I felt I wasn't growing. So I promised myself that I would quit while I still had the energy to get involved in something new. There's nothing wrong with medicine. There's more paperwork, more lawsuits, less understanding between doctors and patients. But it's still a great business. But not for me - not any longer. — Richard S. Weeder