How to assess what herbs are doing.
I may get a patient saying they ‘feel better’ on herbs, that’s nice to hear but not very objective. Cynics may well say it is just the placebo affect of being listened to and taken seriously. And of course that might be true in part. But I want to know if the medicinal herbs I give my patients have a direct therapeutic impact on their problems that I can measure in some way.
Of course there is always MyMop https://www.meaningfulmeasures.co.uk/mymop which is intended to assess treatment outcomes, but again – it relies on the patients giving a number to a symptom. Patients are sometimes vague and not always detached enough to be critical. I have tried this numbering of symptoms with varying success. On one instance a patient went from a number 9 [very bad] pain score, to a number 2 [very mild] pain score on her following visit. This sounds like success, and she was very much better – but I have no real way of knowing how accurate her responses were.
There are different measures for assessing very heavy periods. One of them is to count how many times pads or tampons have to be changed, as although this is a bit rough it is something that you can see.
I had a very happy patient in a couple of weeks ago. She had been troubled by very heavy periods and clotting, and her treatment included Ladies Mantle and other herbs which tone the uterus and diminish excess blood flow. She counted success in mooncups. Previous to treatment her mooncup would fill up in 20 minutes, after treatment one could last all day. Although her comment on her new blood flow now was expressed as ‘is that it?’ I relied more on the mooncup counting….
And if there is a problem, how do I work out exactly what is wrong and address it?
Mrs W with the sore throat comes to mind. I mentioned her in my last post. What was needed was a strategy to work out what was going on and which herbs could be irritating her throat.
This was my plan:
I gave her small dropper bottles of each herb that was in her tincture. I asked her to add some drops [about 0.5ml] to 30mls of water in her measuring cup and take that one day. If that was fine, then the next day to add a normal dose [5mls] to the 30mls water and take that, and write down how she felt.
After she had worked her way through all the tinctures, I wanted her to start on the dried herbs.
I weighed out the herbs in her tea in separate bags and labelled them. The instructions were to sample each tea individually, not to mix them, and only try one herb per day to give us a good chance of letting an adverse reaction take place. I asked her to write down each time she tried a herb and if it irritated her throat.
This was going to take her about a month, and may sound like overkill, but I couldn’t see any other way of isolating what the problem was with her last mix.
I was just thankful that she has remained on good terms with me and left smiling.
Or it could be that the sun was shining and she was off on holiday…
