Laurel Dewey - Plant Power: The Humorous Herbalists Guide to Finding, Growing, Gathering & Using 30 Great Medicinal Herbs

A FEW WEEKS AFTER the release of my first book, The Humorous Herbalist, people started asking me when I was going to write my next book. My next book?! was my usual reply. I was still recovering from the long, solitary hours spent writing and editing hundreds of pages. The thought of delving into another tome to herbal healing was the last thing on my mind.

But that didnt mean I wasnt willing to at least think about the idea. For two years I considered various ideas that would entice readers. As with The Humorous Herbalist, I wanted to write a book that I would want to read. It would have to be reader-friendlynever complicated and always infused with humor and interesting information to keep people turning the pages.

But there would also have to be something moresomething I wasnt yet able to put my finger on.

During this two year period, I wasnt spending every waking hour dreaming up the next herbal offering. Nearly every month of the year, I traveled from coast to coast attending alternative health shows, book conventions and herbal symposiums. I lectured and taught herb classes that included everyone from 10 year olds to senior citizens. I had the opportunity to meet many people and I began to notice things that bothered me.

There seemed to be a desire by many practitioners in alternative medicine to create an aura of mystery when discussing the use of herbs. This mystery only served to separate those who have the knowledge from those in search of the knowledge. What, in my opinion, should be an open exchange of age-old information, had turned into a kind of elitist mentality by many in the alternative health field.

For centuries, herbal medicine belonged to the people. There was an intuitive bridge between the plants and the people. Granted, most of those people lived in the backwoods and distant valleys of the world where the mind was allowed to connect to the voice of nature. But there was always a willingness by everyone to share the healing knowledgeto pass it down as one generations gift to the other. There were no rights or patents to the herbs because everyone knew that you cant patent nature.

But then science entered the picture. Researchers were tripping over themselves in an attempt to isolate what they loved to refer to as active compounds in herbs. By isolating these supposed active ingredients, and then manipulating them in a lab, they could produce a standardized herbal product deemed better than nature itself. And since science was able to alter the herbs natural form, they were now finally able to patent nature. Product labels were filled with multi-syllabic words that no one but clinical herbalists and lab researchers understood. Nevertheless, the public was enticed to try the products, always with the promise of fast, reliable, guaranteed results. In one fell swoop, science entered the herbal world with the same mindset that existed in the drug industry.