From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You're listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is Chanchal Cabrera. Chanchal is a medical herbalist whose clinical specialty is helping people manage cancer and chronic disease.
She has held the faculty chair in botanical medicine at the Bousser Institute of Naturopathic Medicine in New Westminster since two thousand four. She publishes in professional journals and lectures internationally on medical herbalism, nutrition, and health. Chanchal is author of the book, Fibromyalgia, a Journey Towards Healing, published by Contemporary Books. She is a certified master gardener and a certified horticultural therapist. Chanchal has been a member of the National Institute of Medical Herbalists in the UK since nineteen eighty seven, where in two thousand nine, she was honored with a fellowship for service to the profession for over twenty five years. She lives in Vancouver Island in BC where she and her husband farm seven acres, and you can visit her any old time at chanshall cabrera dot com. Chanshall, welcome.
Thank you, John.
So what do you grow on these seven acres that you and your husband have there on Vancouver Island?
Oh, I wish you could see it right now. It's just the most beautiful time of year. All the flowers are coming up. We grow food for twenty house olds. My husband is the farmer, and we are uncertified organic, and we are machinery free. So everything is done by hand.
And so we're growing a lot of food, everything that we can grow in this climate, including winter gardening. So we do a lot of of greens and root vegetables over the winter. And then myself, I'm growing the medicinal herbs, and I have, at this point, almost two hundred medicinal herbs planted and, of course, a whole lot of wild stuff in the woodlands as well.
Wow. And and so, and this is called, Innisfree Gardens, or Innisfree Farm. Correct?
Innisfree Farm. And we chose the name because for many, many years, I lived in the city in Vancouver, and I had the poem, the Lake Isle of Innisfree, printed out on my bulletin board at my desk. And it's by by William Butler Yeats. And he was writing about the man standing in the gray rainy pavement dreaming of his little piece of land that he would have one day. And so all of years in the city working away trying to make money so I could buy my little piece of land, that was my inspiration. That's what kept me going. So, of course, when we bought the farm, we called it Innisfree Farm.
Now you have therapy gardens for people with disabilities.
Is that how this horticulture therapist work? Is that the same? Is that connected?
You know, horticulture therapy for me was, was one of those light bulb moments after being a clinician as a medical herbalist for, at that point, I guess, about seventeen or eighteen years.
I was also a gardener, but I'd never actually put the two together and realized that my therapy, my personal therapy is gardening. If I'm upset or anxious or whatever, I go out into the gardens. I I I pull weeds with a vengeance and feel better afterwards or pee head things grumpily, you know. And and then you feel better after that or just even going for a walk in the woods. And so about seven or eight years ago, I, came across a small paperback book called The Healing Fields, and it was about the application of gardening in a psychotherapy practice.
And it really was a light bulb moment. I was actually in graduate school doing my master of science in herbal medicine And I was still in the program when I enrolled as a student of horticulture therapy. So I came out of grad school and went into a a diploma program as a horticulture therapist.
And essentially what we do at the farm with it is we have a number of gardens that are designed for people with disabilities. Mhmm. So I have, for example, a perfume garden, which is wonderful for seniors because scent and smell helps to bring back back memories. And so I've planted a lot of things there that have pertinence to a senior's health. So for example, right now, the lily of the valley is in full bloom. It's a heart medicine for our senior population, and it's a very, evocative scent that many people remember from their childhood. It's a very traditional sort of English flower garden type of flower.
So we also have laid out paths that are very easy to navigate if you have, difficulty walking even, for example, we have a labyrinth which is a hundred foot diameter, fully wheelchair accessible labyrinth. It's actually the only one I know of that is a wheelchair accessible design.
So we really try to build a garden that is it's open to the public and we've tried to make it really as accessible as possible. I would say we've got a long way to go, but we that's the plan.
That's fantastic. And do you make the medicine that you use in your practice from the herbs in this garden?
I do make the medicines in my practice. At least I make many of the teas now. I'm not set up to manufacture tinctures.
In Canada, that does require some particular licensing from the health department, and it requires a fair amount of investment in supplies and equipment and simply the space to do it and the time to do it. So I've chosen to spend more of my time actually doing client care and less time making the medicines.
But I do grow a lot of the herbs for the teas now, and we also have a small shop on our farm.
So we make a lot of pleasure products out of the hood before the shop too nice and the website for that is inners free farm dot com Not c a.
Not c a. Not innisfree farm dot c a.
Great. Okay. Just since we were talking about it, might as well mention that. So, you know, Shanchal, I love I love getting, herbalist stories and how they got their start working with plants.
Have you been working with herbs since, you were a young girl or is that something that you established a relationship you established later on?
I I have to say, John, I think I'm one of the luckiest people in the world because I found my calling very early on and have really never looked back and never wanted to go and do much else with my life. So I grew up on an organic farm in, West Wales. And back in the in the late sixties, early seventies, organic, you know, the term hadn't even been coined. It was we called it chemical free, and we were definitely weird. And my mom made bread and cured her own ham, and nobody wanted to trade sandwiches with me at school because mine were homemade bread and home cured ham, and I wasn't you know, peanut butter and jelly didn't feature.
So, I was always interested in plants. As a small child, eight, nine years old, I would take my pony and my plant books and go out for the day and pick flowers and press them and then mount them in scrapbooks and write up the Latin names of them.
And, regrettably, my mom threw those scrapbooks out once in a move when she was cleaning the attic.
Oh, no.
But, yeah. I was, I guess I would have to say really that the person, the one person who who got me to this place today is David Hoffman. And I I tell David that I blame him for everything now.
David was, was responsible for taking care of my father's house when my father was very ill when I was a young teen.
And David was a newly graduated herbalist. And when my father recovered his health, it was, a little bit of a miracle in our family. And my sister, who now also is a herbalist in Scotland, we both were quite struck by the fact that the medical profession were not interested in the fact that dad had been taking herbs and had had what they called spontaneous remission from cancer and a miracle cure, and and they didn't want to talk about the herbs he'd been taking.
So we were both you know, I was fourteen, but I was very struck by that. And David Hoffman, I have to say, was very gracious with a an awkward teenager who had a lot of awkward questions. And I went backstage and watched him pouring the tinctures and making the remedies for my father and and peppered him with questions. And basically, by the time I was eighteen or nineteen, I'd figured out that this was what I wanted to do. And at twenty one, I went to her school in England. And, it's been a a really wonderful career for me, I have to say.
So, a big part And and by the way, I should tell you that my father died six years ago, of absolutely different different conditions.
He had forty years of really good health thanks to David.
That's incredible.
Wow. What a story.
It's just you never know when you're doing your work who you're affecting. So you yourself are doing your work in your life, and you never know what, you know, young girl or boy is watching you and what what they may become.
That's that's Yeah.
It is actually quite interesting. I I keep a file of letters and cards from people who contacted me to say, do you know that you changed my life in some way?
And it it is very gratifying, I must say.
So with many of the clients you work with, say.
So many of the clients you work with, with with chronic illness, and so, you know, it's it's it's kind of an area that people, getting into herbs and and and and a lot of people I've interviewed often have I've noticed kinda tiptoe around. And and what, and and and and so what I'm curious is, when working with people with chronic illness, like, what is your foundational view of how you explain how herbs work with, for chronic illness? Because it's easy to talk about or teach or do things when it's more acute, you know, but chronic is such a long, you know, situation. So, anyway, I won't be talking anymore. You know, kinda know where I'm getting at. Right?
No. It's actually a very good question because, it speaks to the whole issue of self care and self responsibility so that, you know, if if you have an acute disease, as you say, it's actually quite easy to manage in a sense because you're going to you expect to get a noticeable improvement.
And when you have chronic conditions, it's often a matter of management rather than expecting a cure.
Mhmm. And management requires the patient to be actively engaged in the process.
So in that sense, you might say that we're less successful with our chronic cases because it requires more from the patient. And our model of health care doesn't lend itself to that. We're very much about take that silver bullet, give up your responsibility to the doctor.
And, you know, most people don't appreciate that the word doctor and the word teacher come from the same root.
So I explain that to my patients. I say to them, I'm not a doctor. I'm not licensed in medicine in that way, but I am a teacher.
And I can teach you about better health care, self care, preventative care, and so on. So I think once you're dealing with chronic conditions, there's a huge amount of education involved.
Education about realistic expectations and about self responsibility, let's say.
Mhmm.
But, you know, if I could just allude into some of the questions that your listeners have sent in. I have a a wonderful array of questions from your listeners. And and as I said to you in an email earlier this week, I could spend the hour just answering any one of these. But spell the theme in your questions or in your listeners' questions and the themes that I could pick out. There was a number questions about autoimmunity and there were a number of questions about cancer and some other questions about chronic immune dysfunction.
And the common thread in there is, you know, those are chronic conditions where there is no silver bullet. There is no magic answer. One of the questions was about somebody who's been taking a lot of steroids and was having problems from that, you know, for autoimmune disease, that's the only really standardized medical treatment and it's not a treatment. It's a management tool.
So so the theme in there, as far as I could see, was about how do we learn to live with chronic disease and how do we learn to live well with chronic disease? We may not get rid of it, but how do we learn to manage it? And underneath all of that, you come back to actually, it's not rocket science. You come back to immune support because in cancer, in autoimmunity, these are fundamentally immune dysfunctions.
And underneath all of that, behind all of that, what the patient, what the individual can do is all about lifestyle.
So I'm not sort of fluffing off the responsibility of the practitioner here. We actually do a lot of very active engaged work. But in the long term, somebody with autoimmune condition is going to be dealing with that for, really, the rest of their life. Mhmm. And so I can't hold their hand the whole time. Mhmm. So we come back to what can you do for yourself, and it comes down to the really simple stuff about being well hydrated, well nourished, and not getting overweight, keeping up your exercise, keeping up your sleep.
And actually, I prescribe to my patients all of those things. I help them work out good sleep patterns and work out good diet programs, but I also prescribe play. I actually believe that play and relaxation and fun are part of the healing journey and we've kind of forgotten how to do that. We don't get brownie points for taking an afternoon off to go and build sandcastles.
And yet, it would probably be more productive and healthier if we did.
So I literally write out prescriptions that include things like taking a nap, and I have to put it in writing so people don't feel guilty about it. The, the National Cancer Institute, which is very conservative research body at the National Institutes of Health, they have estimated that thirty five percent of all cancers are, attributable to diet and a further thirty percent to lifestyle, which is primarily exercise, weight management, and sleep. So if you can sort out diet, weight management, exercise, and sleep, sixty five percent of cancers could possibly be prevented.
That's I find that really fascinating when you think that less than one percent of the health care budget in Canada and I assume the US is very similar. Less than one percent of our health care budget is actually spent on prevention.
And, yeah, sixty five percent of our biggest killers could be, averted or or at least reduced, if we took care of ourselves better.
Right. Exactly.
That's so let's get to some of the the questions then, and, that that's great. That's a great great foundation, for people to to know the approach of where you're you're coming from. So anyone listening kinda can kind of, wrap their head around that and and use that not just not just if you are have an illness, but also to, as you said, prevention.
So, we have let's see. First question here is from Cynthia. What herbs do you suggest to protect my organs and maybe counter the high doses of chemotherapy, getting ready for, stem cell transplant?
Mhmm. Yes. I love that question. And, you know, I guess what I have to say as a preface to the question is that the, the place where you start to work with drug therapies, interacting with herbal therapies, when you're going into chemotherapies, going into stem cell transplants, that is the place to consult with a health care professional.
So I could list several herbs, but I have no idea if those were the right herbs for this person or indeed safe with the unnamed chemo that she's being offered.
So I can't give a sort of prescriptive answer there except to say that it is absolutely something a herbalist could or would work with. And, there could be many things, but there may be timing of the herbs and maybe some herbs not to use with some drugs. So the question is is, obviously a very relevant question for a lot of people who are in chemotherapy programs.
But it's much too big for me to give a safe or even a very useful answer right now, accepting that there are herbalists who can help with that. That it's definitely a practitioner intervention situation. And there were several questions in the list of people asking about specific treatments around cancer.
And, you know, I would have to say that there are some herbs that could be useful for all of those people. So your green tea and your turmeric and certain supplements like resveratrol or co q ten might be relevant for almost everybody.
But then again, green tea does not go with certain chemo drugs. And so unless we know exactly what the patient is taking, it's not very safe to give blanket answers.
And I know that's not what your listeners want to hear, but I I have to be safe in in what I tell people because otherwise, it doesn't help them. No.
I I think it is what people want to hear because this is all about putting it all in context and and and knowing, what to realistically like. Like a like a person here, I'm reading their question. They asked, what can we realistically expect her to do in a treatment of cancer? So we're not I mean, I think, you know, it's known that, of course, you have somebody that you need to see in person.
But, I think that I think well, I I an acupuncturist and and and I do have that kind of I've had that thing with patients in the past where they where they feel like they can't talk to their doctor about what they're doing or they don't know what's you know, they they may be like, oh, I don't wanna tell them I'm going to acupuncture. I don't wanna tell them I'm I'm taking this this tincture. And so I think this is where, you know, is it possibly just that they need to be open with their practitioners and and tell them and maybe there there might be a connection they can make? They might be surprised.
Yeah. I I think that's a very good point. I I do not take on a patient in in my cancer practice who doesn't have, at the very least, a primary care practitioner, but preferably an oncologist on board because there's much information that I can't gather. I can't order up MRI's, even the blood some blood work I can order but not everything a cooperative physician on-site.
But more, I think, to the point is that if the patients don't tell a doctor why, you know, what's happening in their body and why they may be getting better, how will the doctors ever learn that herbal medicine works?
So when I have patients who are doing really well on their herbal program, I actively encourage them to talk about it with their doctors and, and myself actually will with the patient's permission will very often contact the doctor myself to say this is what we're doing together just just so that they're in the loop. They often don't respond. They often don't know what it means. But if enough times that goes on, eventually, somebody starts to pay attention. So if we want the doctor to take herbal medicine seriously and realize the efficacy of what we have to offer, they have to know it exists.
Right. Right. Okay.
It's also a respect thing. I need to know Mhmm. What drugs the patient is taking. I maybe I'm naive, John, but I kind of assume that a doctor would want to know exactly what their patient was taking.
The fact is most of the doctors don't know what the herbs are, and they don't bother to find out. But it's still for me, it's a respect thing. It's an ethical thing. I full disclosure is what a practitioner requires.
So I think a bit a thing for for people that is confusing or they don't know what to do is, let's say, they they they see that there's an opportunity. Let's say they ask you a question here and and there's maybe a lot of people don't know where to go for advice like this because there's not too many specialists like yourself out there doing this and especially if someone lives out and where there's not their resources locally.
So Right. If if they're in that kind of position, where would they seek out a consultant or somebody that could work with them, personally, like that? Because say they're in, you know, I don't know, Iowa or there's no city or the place where there's there. You know, like around here in the Seattle area, there's lots of opportunities and you can but not not everywhere.
So I think that It's a very good point and, you know, of course, herbal medicine is not licensed anywhere in North America and naturopathic medicine is only licensed in some states and provinces, not not all of them.
So it is sometimes difficult to find a good practitioner.
And it's true that many, many natural health providers don't choose to work with cancer care. I I myself didn't really take any cancer patients for many years until I ended up going back after, eighteen years or six, seventeen years as a clinician. I went back to school to do my master's degree, and I specialized in cancer care during grad school.
And it was a sort of default thing. I didn't set out saying that's what I want to go into, but it's opportunities presented and suddenly there I was doing my, my graduate thesis on breast cancer and natural medicine.
And I found that there is a remarkable amount of stuff that we can do. A really encouraging amount of things that we can offer to help that I hadn't really not appreciated before I dived into it deeply.
But there are few of us willing to take it on because it is frankly, it's quite heartbreaking work sometimes. We don't we don't always have the outcomes we want. Patients tend to come to us as a last resort after trying many, many things and weakening their body and damaging their body with, with conventional treatments that didn't work for them. By the time we get them, it's often a very, very difficult situation.
So many practitioners are not willing to do this work, and that makes it harder for the patient. What I would say to your listeners, though, who are scattered far and wide is, the American Herbalists Guild does have a referral directory on the website of professional herbalists.
And while that individual in in your town may not have extensive experience themselves with managing cancer care. They will know enough to keep you safe and out of trouble.
And there are many others in the American Herbalist Guild who offer a mentorship program. That means, for example, with myself, if, if a practitioner, a herbalist, or or indeed any other type of health care provider, contacts me and wants to review a case or discuss a situation, then I have a a plan to do that. So I become like a sounding board for the practitioners who are struggling with difficult cases. And I offer that, worldwide.
I have people who use me as a mentor from Australia, from New Zealand, from the UK, as well as the states and Canada. And that allows the practitioner to get second opinions, essentially. And I myself have a mentor. I also call up two or three people if I'm struggling with a case that I need some guidance or some input.
And that's what professionals do to help each other out.
So for your listeners, I would suggest they go through the website of the American Herbalists Guild, find the person nearest to them, and if that person says, oh, I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of cancer or this kind of chronic disease or I'm not sure what I can do, then the, the potential patient can say, well, look, you're the only person in my account, so I need you to help me. But if you don't feel comfortable or confident, can you reach out and get some guidance yourself?
Okay. And one of the, questions too that was a person was explaining, cancer that her husband has was wondering if there are any resources or books that recommend, how that about the journey. Like, so if somebody is has cancer and they want to figure out how to integrate, natural Yeah. Remedies or natural health care into it, Are there any resources for for that out there for folks as a starting place?
Yeah. Actually, there are a lot of really good resources. Almost too many at this point. It becomes a bit overwhelming sometimes. But but things books that I have found particularly helpful, for someone who is, really a patient with no background, with no training themselves, but who just needs to kind of read around their own situation, then I actually recommend a very slim little paper paperback that was written actually by one of my patients who's a long term cancer survivor.
And the book is called, You Did What?
Saying No to Conventional Cancer Treatment.
So I'll say that again. The book is called You Did What?
Saying No to Conventional Cancer Treatment. And the author the husband and wife, actually, Holly and Patrick Quinn.
Mhmm.
And, you can buy that directly from them through the, Internet.
So if we just somebody can just Google Holly, h o l l I e, Holly Quinn, and you'll find the book. And Holly wrote her book. Now she's close to ten years since diagnosis. She's done nothing but, herbal medicine through my practice.
And she, wrote a book about how she implemented the protocols. So, it's a very personal story about how she got diagnosed and she was twenty eight and pregnant in at the time of diagnosis. So it was very traumatic.
And, of course, she was told she would be doing chemo and would never be able to have more children, and none of that happened. She did have another child who's very healthy, and everybody's doing very well.
But Holly wrote her book about how she processed the diagnosis and how she found her way to my practice and how she applied the suggestions I was making, including how she handled the diet change. And, it's a very inspiring book about a very normal person who had a terrible diagnosis and worked through it to, not just cancer free, but actually overall some old chronic health issues all cleared up.
So that one, I think, is a really good I actually recommend it to all my cancer patients. It's she had breast cancer, but it's relevant to everybody.
The sort of inspirational book about normal people can do this.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, just because it gets over They're overwhelming to people.
You know, people come to my practice and they go out with screeds and screeds of literature to read and diets to follow and herbs to take and all of them to roll a little hole and curl up, you know. Right.
So the book is really useful to encourage people that they too can make these changes and have these kinds of successful outcomes.
On a more, a more technical level, I would say the couple of books that I find particularly useful and that patients also can work through. There is a very wonderful, naturopath in Victoria, British Columbia called doctor Neil McKinney.
And doctor McKinney has a book out called Naturopathic Oncology, and it's published by Liaison Press.
So naturopathic oncology, doctor Neil McKinney, published by Liaison Press. Mhmm. And he has gone through many different types of cancer and identified treatment protocols compatible with the allopathic strategies. So if you have myeloma, for example, and you get offered Velcade as a chemotherapy, he talks about why you shouldn't be using green tea.
That's one of the contraindicated products. So it's really detailed, really, really detailed. Excellent book. Technical, but, but manageable.
Do you find that there's a difference?
Outside of that, I I would recommend for people who want to read in, you know, in detail and go in-depth maybe more in in the practitioner arena, I would say the book by Jon Voik, b o I k.
Natural products in cancer therapy, natural compounds in cancer therapy? Do you do you Yeah.
Those are ones that I that I think are good places to begin.
Well, you you know, they've mentioned the one book by the naturopathic physician. Do you find there's a big difference in the way that you as a medical herbalist, you know, work at the AG and all that and your colleagues approach, cancer care, versus naturopathic physicians?
There are lots of similarities and then a few differences.
Naturopathic physicians in the provinces or states in which they're licensed have more tools at their fingertips than an unlicensed herbalist. For example, they can do things like the mistletoe injection, the Iskador injections, which a herbalist it's a herbal product, but a herbalist doesn't do injections.
So the naturopath may have certain tools, maybe even some diagnostic tools to work with, and they have a broader palette of treatment options in terms of does this person need acupuncture? Does this person need homeopathy? Does this person need a herb?
However, as someone who now has been nine years running the herbal medicine department in the naturopathic school in Vancouver, what I would say is that a naturopath and a herbalist are actually very good colleagues working together because a naturopath has this this very broad view of the body and the strategic approaches.
But the herbalist has the expertise and the depth in the one discipline.
So you put the two together, what you can get is a naturopath can cover a lot of board brush stroke kind of treatments and helping to create, adrenal balance and good elimination and so on. And then the herbalist can go very, very precision work in-depth with specific herbs for that individual person.
Not that individual tamper, John, that individual person. And that's interesting.
You know, Hippocrates, think this quote has been attributed to many people over the years, but I but my understanding is it came originally from Hippocrates that it is more important to know what kind of person has the disease than to know what kind of disease a person has.
Wow.
So what he's saying there is that ten people with breast cancer get ten different treatments.
On the microscope, it might look identical, but one of them is twenty five and one of them is fifty five. One of them has not had children, one of them has had five children, and one of them is a vegan, and one of them is a carnivore. And of course, their treatments will be different because their physiology is different and their constitution is different.
So I think that is the that is the art of global medicine. There is, there is little to no science at that point. But based on thousands of years of empirical evidence, we have a capacity to customize in a way that, that nothing premixed already made is ever going to do. And regrettably, because the naturopathic specialize in in the time allowed in school.
Of course, afterwards, they go on and specialize in a variety of of different disciplines. But, the the sad part about using, lots of different disciplines is that you can only scratch the surface, you know, in in most of them. And so that's again why a naturopath and a herbalist work very well together with an naturopath can do a lot of primary diagnostic work and a lot of groundwork, sort of foundation building work. And then the herbalist can come in and do the really particular individualized blending and formulating that is customized to an individual.
Wow. That was that's great. Thank you for that explanation because, that could be even confusing to myself sometimes. You know?
So let's move to there's Carol's was curious about because you had mentioned before about autoimmune disorders and, I was interested in how one would treat autoimmune disorders with herbs. And can you point me in the right direction to begin research?
Yes.
Again, a bit like cancer, autoimmunity is a sort of catch all phrase now for a lot of very fundamental dysfunctions in the body.
It's, autoimmune disease covers a lot of different things from from, rheumatoid arthritis through lupus, through thyroid problems. And there were a couple of different questions that your listeners sent in about thyroid issues. And autoimmunity essentially says that your, immune system is attacking yourself.
And then the question arises, why does it not recognize self as self? Why does it think that's a foreign protein that it needs to attack?
And although you may not find this in the mainstream medical literature, in the natural health world of herbalist naturopaths, what we believe and it's shown to be true through clinical evidence is that most autoimmune disease traces back to, to well, let let me let me say this again. Autoimmune disease occurs when your body fails to differentiate self from non self. So your body is primed to attack a certain shape of protein. And if that protein that has entered your body looks like a piece of your own body protein, then then your immune system may not tell a difference. So for example, if you have inflammation in the gut, then you may have patches in the gut that are more porous than they should be. And And proteins can cross from the from the lumen of the gut, from the colon, from the small intestine, can cross into the bloodstream.
And those proteins may set up an immune response.
And if that protein happens to look like some of your tissue, then that immune response may be directed against your own tissue.
So what that comes back to is, first of all, why would a protein cross the gut in a way that it shouldn't? We're we're supposed to absorb amino acids, which are, very, very tiny broken up pieces of protein.
If we don't digest our food well, then it may be large proteins that are further down in the gut than they should be, and that's irritating to the gut lining. And that irritation causes inflammation, and that makes it a more leaky or porous tissue. And then we're into this leaky gut syndrome.
So then we come back to what are those proteins and why are they not broken down properly.
And really and truly, most of those proteins are things that we think, simplicity think are healthy foods like beans and grains and even milk proteins, none of which are natural foods for the human body. We didn't we weren't designed. We didn't evolve drinking milk or eating beans and grains at any significant amount until about ten thousand years ago.
So for seven point whatever million years of evolution of the human genome, we didn't have those things in our body. And now we have a great deal of them, and the gut doesn't handle them very well. So proteins don't break down appropriately.
They can go down the system too far, irritate, and then cross into the blood. And some of those proteins have bits on them that look like your protein, and then your body is set up to attack yourself.
So long winded answer. Mhmm. Fundamental treatment of autoimmune disease comes back to diet and gut health.
And so when I'm working with an autoimmune situation, that's where I start. I don't start by giving anti inflammatories for the thyroid gland or, immune suppressants.
I try and get back to the to the root of it, which is what are you eating? Does it agree with you? Are you digesting it well? How is your gut working?
And that way, we may still do the symptomatic treatment, but we need to try and get behind the problem to actually switch it off.
And that treatment then is dependent upon the patient's compliance in managing their diet properly.
You know, I'll just say a side note here. By the time this is going on, Herb Mentor, that a colleague I recorded a a audio series with your colleague up there in British Columbia, Todd Caldicott, and, called, based on his Food Is Medicine book. So that's a good resource for people who want to listen a little more about diet.
So Yeah.
Todd is an absolutely fantastic practitioner. I I definitely send patients to him and, he was a student of mine years ago, and it's so gratifying when your students become the people you make referrals to.
Must be.
Well, it's fantastic audio series, and we're looking forward to more of those on there.
And so would you say what you were saying here basically, with autoimmune, would that be, just the general advice for many of the people's questions here that they submitted?
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, in any autoimmune disease, a a holistic practitioner is going to start by looking at diet and gut health.
Right.
After that, you start to look at the individual case. So if it's rheumatoid arthritis, we're going to choose the anti inflammatory herbs as a symptomatic treatment that have specificity to joints. Now as it happens, turmeric and licorice are both anti inflammatory herbs with specificity to the joint but also to the gut lining.
So those would be very explicit.
If you had a thyroid inflammation autoimmune inflammation, thyroid, it can put your thyroid up or down. So high or low thyroid may be from autoimmune disease.
At which point, we would choose different herbs. So if the thyroid is very high, we might be using, bugleweed, lycopus to bring it down. If the thyroid is low, we might be using things like blue flag and poke root to stimulate it.
So those are targeted to the, to the condition in that individual.
But behind that, there's going to be a more, if you like, a generic approach of, again, diet and gut health.
Okay. And don't forget that your immune system in your gut is, controlled by cortisol, which is your stress hormone. So the more stressed you are, the lower the immune resilience of your gut and the more likely you are to have inflammations that allow porosity or leakiness of the membrane.
So again, in my practice, somebody presents to me with an autoimmune disease.
I run testing to lab testing to find out the condition of the immune system in their gut so that I can address that if it's specifically indicated.
Right. Stress, it just gets in the way all the time, doesn't it?
Fresh.
Yes. It is it's sort of the, you know, the Achilles heel for all of us. We we should be teaching our children in school how to meditate and how to do stress management. Oh, and how to do nonviolent communication if we all practice the nonviolent communication model, well, I should have a lot less stress.
You know, in my I did this three year, herbal apprenticeship here in this area at where, nonviolent communication, was part of the curriculum. So that was that was pretty cool.
As it should be.
Yeah. It was Yeah.
It should be in it should be in primary school curriculum.
Right. Right. Yeah.
We we, definitely And and definitely some of our leaders should be paying attention.
I don't know if you ever watch the TVs of the of the Canadian parliament, but it is an embarrassment to be Canadian and watch what those the shenanigans those politicians get up to yelling at each other and just just bullying, really.
And then we wonder why we have bullying in the schools.
Right. Sorry.
That was way off topic.
No different here.
Yeah.
You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So it's, that's yeah. And then For Nonviolent Communication is that book by Marshall Rosenberg called Nonviolent Communication, which is a good place to start.
So what about you wrote you wrote a book on fibromyalgia, and, there was just a simple question from Marjorie here about, she wants to find a remedy to take away her fibromyalgia pain. So I'm I'm guessing that, there's a there's a deeper thing to look at here. We're just looking for the remedy. Right?
Yes. I wish I had the remedy to take away pain because, I'd be sitting on a beach in Hawaii right about now probably.
Retired.
Yeah. But it's a very valid question. Of course, there is no simple answer. I mean, fibromyalgia is such a huge topic. Pain is is a daily reality for those patients, but it's only a part of the story.
So, yes, there are pain remedies. There are herbs that alleviate pain. They tend to also be sedative. So you start to talk about things like California poppy and wild lettuce and perhaps the, bleeding heart in the Pacific Northwest or the Coradalis poppy out of China, which is a cousin of bleeding heart. Those are very, very effective pain remedies, but they are somewhat sedative. And if you go up to the very strong pain remedies, which only a practitioner would be able to use, things like yellow jasmine, you know, that is that is really knocks people out.
That isn't necessarily useful because you're taking a pain remedy so that you can continue to function somewhat. Otherwise, maybe you just have a hot bath and go to bed.
So our pain remedies tend to be better at night for the kind of pain that keeps people awake.
We do have a number of topical pain remedies that are non sedative. So you start to work with things like cramp, bark, lobelia, TRYEN, which can be applied topically.
But it's a very limited strategy in managing fibromyalgia. It's a very symptomatic approach which is useful but not adequate.
So, I suppose I have to plug my book here Oh, yeah.
Please.
And tell people that there are a lot of answers in there. The book is over ten years old, and, consequently, there are some parts of it that I would have to say should be updated now. Mhmm. When you sign up with a large international publishing house, they own your book in perpetuity, and I would have to. They don't wanna redo it now, so I would have to buy it back to redo it and I haven't gotten to doing that yet. But the book still has a lot of useful information and, you know, I I guess I would encourage people to have a read of it to find some some basic things that they can do for themselves.
Okay.
Excellent.
And, since since we have so many, got a little bit more time here, so, since we might as well stay on the topic here of all this chronic illness, because there's the there's the there's like that, underlying, threads going on in a lot of these. Like, for a person, Diane asked about chronic inflammation associated with Crohn's disease and to relieve some of the pain provided. And there must be, you know, with inflammation really is a root of many things here. Right?
Yes. Inflammation is the root of much disease, including incidentally cancer. There is a school of thought that feels that cancer is sort of like inflammation that never switched off. Inflammation is, of course, appropriate and necessary.
It's part of the healing cycle in the body. But if it doesn't, abate, if it doesn't reach resolution, then you have chronic inflammation, and that may show up as autoimmunity. It may show up as cancer. It may show up as something even like asthma that can have a chronic inflammatory underpinning to it.
So inflammation is is pretty fundamental. And, in terms of what somebody can do to minimize that, there are, some foods that are known to aggravate inflammation and they are all the usual suspects, sugar being number one. Mhmm.
Andrew Weil, doctor Andrew Weil has an interesting some interesting material on diets of anti inflammatory diets that are essentially low red meat, but not not necessarily vegetarian or vegan, but a low red meat content and and little to no sugar.
And definitely looking at the quality of meat, if you are a meat eater, then the higher the arachidonic acid in the meat, the more inflammatory it becomes and arachidonic acid is formed in meat from animals that eat grains instead of grasses.
So your cows and your chickens are I mean, sure they'll eat some grain in the meadow, but their primary diet is meant to be green leafy material or, of course, with chickens, they eat lots of bugs and things too, but they are not designed to eat corn.
And if you feed animals, even if it's organic, if you feed them a lot of grain, they build arachidonic acid in the meat, in the milk, and then you get an inflammatory response in the body.
So, you know, with with dealing with inflammation, there are some dietary things to look for. Definitely stress is an aggravating factor. Cortisol will, cortisol reduces inflammation in the body, but we burn it up. We use it up and we don't have enough of that kind of damping effect.
And, in terms of herbs, there are some general things that are useful for pretty much everybody.
Turmeric is probably the number one anti inflammatory and it's available as a dietary aid. You can simply use it in cooking, although it does have a strong flavor. It's easy to take it in capsules.
And maybe I should just comment on the language I'm using because anti inflammatory implies something that stops the inflammatory process.
And in the drug world, that's exactly what they do. So if you take your ibuprofen, your Tylenol, they stop inflammation.
That is actually not useful because inflammation is serving a purpose. And if it's allowed to get through all its stages and steps, then you get revolution and healing. If you stop inflammation before it's finished, before it's done, then you don't get healing.
So you may be pain free but you haven't healed the problem and so behind now you're not in pain, you go and climb that mountain, you go and do that bike ride and you actually injure the joints even more because the pain signal wasn't there to stop you from overusing it. So in the herb world, we don't have any anti inflammatories actually. We have mediators of the inflammatory process. We have things that regulate the rate and extent of inflammation to get you to resolution.
And traditional herbalists even go so far as to do something called a counter irritant treatment. When you have an inflammation, let's say a joint is inflamed and it's hot and red and throbbing, and we put heat onto that to get it even hotter to bring even more blood in the area and speed up the healing process, aggravate the inflammation, speed it along to reach resolution.
Quite the opposite of taking an anti inflammatory.
But it's a really important point because masking symptoms with herbs or with drugs is not a solution. It may be a part of a treatment to keep you comfortable, but it's not actually treating the problem.
And and, you know, I think this can really connect in with this, last question that I'll ask you here because you just so everyone knows, we we we we kinda tied in probably about twelve questions and all that we know and all of this that we even the few that we ask because we kinda threaded them together to help as many people as we could. But you're saying, like, about not masking, you know, it's I guess, when I'm getting at this question here was how does this is moving over to gardening. Right? So how does she maintain the quality of her soil to assure her medicinal herbs are strong and effective?
And and I'm sure there's a metaphor there between that as well as how we take care of ourselves. Right?
I think that comes back around to the horticulture therapy component, wouldn't it?
Right.
You know, very briefly because I know our time is short. The the book I mentioned at the beginning, The Healing Fields, they talked about the metaphors of composting and how we throw away all that stuff from the kitchen and it's smelly and slimy and we turn it in the compost pile, and it's ugly. And eventually, it turns into this black gold that we can grow flowers and fruits from.
So, you know, metaphorically, we have to do that for ourselves. We have to churn and turn and look at all our garbage until we can process it to something beautiful and healing.
How I keep my soil healthy, in essence, is I feed my soil. I live by the ocean. We put seaweed in. We put grass clippings.
We put mulch of all sorts. When when we when we take our weeds off, we wilt our weeds and often put them back into bed, especially horsetail. We love our horsetail. We've made peace with horsetail in our gardens.
We tow it, never get the roots as you never will. We just lay it back on the beds, and it mulches really, really well.
And there was a further question in the notes there about, can I grow can we grow herbs here from foreign countries and have them be the same? I don't know the answer to that because the research hasn't really been done. You know, ginger is meant to grow in tropical countries, and if it's grown in a greenhouse here, is it the same? I don't know the answer, but I do know that healthy plants require healthy soil, and healthy soil needs to be fed.
Soil is a living being, and you have to feed it and water it just as you feed and water your plants. My husband is a soil scientist and teaches about that aspect. And that's something I've learned a lot from him is about keep your healthy soil, your plants will be healthy. It's similar metaphor in human body.
If you maintain the soil, the actual physical corporeal shape, then your well-being is not entirely assured because we have genetic hands we guard out and environmental pressures. But at least we have resilience when those challenges come, just like our plants.
That's that's brilliant. Thank you. So if one wanted to, learn from you, Changsha, do you have classes that you offer that people can find out about on your website?
I do. I host a lot of different classes and programs all through the year. They're all listed on my website, chan chal cabrera dot com. I teach, cooking classes. I co teach that with a chef.
We call those food as medicine classes. I teach all kinds of herbal classes. I do have, an advanced program starting in September, which is one weekend a month for ten months. So people from further afield can come into that.
And, and I do teach in other locations around the country herbal gathering, right on is in recently started up a herbal gathering, right on is and is that on the farm, an Innisfree farm?
Yes. That's on the farm. Regrettably, by the time this show goes out, it will have just been and gone. But for folks that are interested in getting together, it'll probably be running every two years. And there is a website for that, which is w w w dot herb gathering dot org. Herb gathering dot org. And we will maintain that web your listeners will have missed it when we when we show the air this show.
Well, I wanna come to the next one because, where it's Vancouver Island. I mean, where I'm moving in about a month.
It's just like a half hour drive and a ferry ride up.
That's right. And and Vancouver Island is very beautiful, and and I would encourage all your listeners to plan a holiday on the island. It's a fabulous place. And, if they're in the neighborhood, they should come and visit at the farm.
Fantastic.
And, your book, the on fibromyalgia, can you get that on your website as well?
You can. I do sell the book through the website. Yes. It's also available on Amazon.
Yeah.
But I like it's always great to support the author and order off their own site.
Mhmm.
Alright. So let's see. I I I, you know, I think that's probably about it. I mean, it's just it's amazing how these hours fly by. Isn't it?
I was just gonna say an hour goes very fast, and I'm sure we didn't answer many of the of the questions that were sent in.
But I guess I would just encourage people to contact me individually if they need particular guidance.
And again, everyone, go to ChanchalCabrera.com. And, Chanchal, thank you so much for joining me today on Herb Mentor Radio. Really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.
It was my pleasure entirely.
Thank you.
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