“Healing The World With Four Herbs” - a game for herbal medicine students

I absolutely love mental exercises and thought experiments. I just lurve them, as the middle millennials might say. 

It is exciting as an herbal student to learn dozens, if not hundreds, of medicinal plants. Growing our functional materia medica is part of gaining a breadth of knowledge of the field. But I like to point out that most of the people helping other people all over the world do it with a deep knowledge of relatively few herbs. So I devised this game. The first time we play, I offer the herbal examples. Then the next time, each student chooses the herbs. 

It starts like this: Imagine you have one herb. Let’s say Ginger root. Let’s pretend that you have an abundant and consistent supply of ginger - you’ll never run out. Now let’s start listing all the types of people or conditions we might be able to help with just this one herb. You might start thinking of people with colds and coughs, certain digestive issues, and people with circulatory deficiencies or who run cold. Anyone who has difficulty sweating. Many people with abdominal or menstrual cramps. Now conversely, who can you not help with ginger? (Lots of possible answers here…)

For our second herb, perhaps we have Stinging Nettles. Now we have a hypothetically  infinite supply of both Ginger and Stinging Nettles. Who can we help? (In addition to everyone listed above helped by ginger alone, we might also help people with blood deficiencies of minerals, or allergic symptoms or those in need of some drying up of excessive nasal secretions).

Now, what if all we had at our disposal were three herbs: Ginger, Stinging Nettles and Marshmallow root? Who can we help? Who can’t we help? 

If the fourth and last herb was, say, Dandelion, then that becomes our entire materia medica. Just four herbs: Ginger, Stinging Nettle, Marsh mallow root and Dandelion. If we can combine these in any amounts and in any proportions, who can we help? Who could we still not help, even a little?

You’ll notice that at the constitutional level, anyone who runs cold can get lots of ginger. Anyone running cold and dry can have that ginger combined with marshmallow root. Anyone who is running dry alone can have marshmallow regardless of being constitutionally warm or cool, and if they are hot and dry then they can have dandelion and marshmallow root combined. If they are especially damp they can have nettles and if they are hot and damp they can have nettles and dandelion. If they are mostly deficient and only a little hot or a little cold, then they can have a big dose of nettles and mallow root, with only a little ginger or dandelion added in. In other words, these four herbs can reach just about anyone’s basic constitutional picture. Beyond that, we might be able to reach imbalances in deeper organs like the liver and kidneys. 

That doesn't mean we can help everyone with everything with just four herbs! Regarding more specific conditions, we might not have enough nervines in this grouping to help people with conditions like nervous anxiousness, certain types of headaches or insomnia. We might not be able to address a lot of different kinds of infections. We might not have what is needed for hormonal or thyroid-influenced patterns. 

Okay, we can’t heal the whole world… 

But we can help an awful lot of people if we have only these four herbs to work with. We can help nearly every type of cough and colds, lots of digestive issues, many skin problems, deficiencies at the blood level, body aches, spasmodic cramps, and certain problems of the liver and kidneys to improve blood cleansing that can in turn have a bearing on long term organ health of the heart or cardiovascular system. 

If, instead, the four herbs chosen were Ginseng, Lavender, Western Redcedar and Oregon grape root, we would get wildly different answers. Or if we chose Echinacea, Oregano, Wild Oat tops and Blue Vervain… After playing this game a few times in class, I find that it really stretches students to get extra creative and resourceful with limited herbal resources.

The point is to pick four herbs that you know really really well, and start thinking about combining just those four in different ways to help as many people as possible. It’s an excellent mental exercise to help get students out of the mindset of “I don’t know enough yet!” And simultaneously, it helps students connect with folk realities.. most herbalists historically have not had access to hundreds of herbs from around the world that can be ordered from big herb distributors. We might as well reckon with the partial collapse of an international market of commercially grown herbs, too, if that happens someday.

While we do cover 50-100 herbs in our first year training program, I love to remind myself and my students that they don’t need dozens and dozens of herbs to be a functioning herbalist. A Very Helpful Person with a few herbs that they know really well has something great to offer most of the people who come their way. (not everyone, I didn’t say everyone). If you only have four herbs that you know really really well, you can be one of those Very Helpful Persons.