Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (49 page)

In vivo:
Rhodiola rosea
enhances the level of 5-hydroxytryptamine in the hippocampus, promotes the proliferation and differentiation of neural stem cells in the hippocampus, and protects hippocampal neurons from injury.
R. rosea
protects against cognitive deficits, neuronal injury, and oxidative stress induced by intracerebroventricular injection of streptozotocin. Salidroside protects rat hippocampal neurons against H2O2-induced apoptosis. A combination of rhodiola/astragalus protects rats against simulated plateau hypoxia (8,000 m/26,000 feet). It inhibits the accumulation of lactic acid in brain tissue and serum.

Human clinical trial:
A double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized study with 40 women, ages 20 to 68, who were highly stressed, found that a
Rhodiola rosea
extract increased attention, speed, and accuracy during stressful cognitive tasks.
Rhodiola rosea
was used with 120 adults with both physical and cognitive deficiencies: exhaustion, decreased motivation, daytime sleepiness, decreased libido, sleep disturbances, concentration deficiencies, forgetfulness, decreased memory, susceptibility to stress, irritability; after 12 weeks, 80 percent of patients showed improvements. A combination formula (Xinnaoxin capsule) of
Rhodiola rosea
,
Lycium chinense
berry, and fresh
Hippophae rhomnoides
fruit juice was given to 30 patients with chronic cerebral circulatory insufficiency; after 4 weeks the condition was significantly improved. A double-blind, crossover 3-week study on stress-induced fatigue on the mental performance of healthy physicians during night duty found that
Rhodiola rosea
extract decreased mental fatigue and increased cognitive functions such as associative thinking, short-term memory, calculation and concentration, and speed of audio-visual perception.

In vitro:
Salidroside stimulates glucose uptake by rat muscle cells;
Rhodiola rosea
extract stimulates the synthesis or resynthesis of ATP and stimulates reparative processes in mitochondria.

In vivo:
Rhodiola rosea
extracts increased the life span of
Drosophila melanogaster
, lowered mitochondrial superoxide levels, and increased protection against the superoxide generator paraquat. Four weeks' supplementation with
R. rosea
extract significantly increased swimming time in exhausted mice—it significantly increased liver glycogen levels; SREBP-1, FAS, and heat shock protein 70 expression; Bcl-2/Bax ratios; and oxygen content in blood. Salidroside protected the hypothalamic/pituitary/gonad axis of male rats under intense stress—testosterone levels remained
normal rather than dropping, secretary granules of the pituitary gland increased, and mitochondrial cells were strongly protected.
R. rosea
extract completely reversed the effects of chronic mild stress in female rats—that is, decreased sucrose intake, decreased movement, weight loss, and dysregulation of menstrual cycle. Rhodiola suppressed increased enzyme activity in rats subjected to noise stress—glutamic pyruvic transaminase, alkaline phosphatase, and creatine kinase levels all returned to normal, and glycogen, lactic acid, and cholesterol levels in the liver also returned to normal.
R. rosea
reduced stress and CRF-induced anorexia in rats. And so on.

Human clinical trial:
Twenty-four men who had lived at high altitude for a year were tested to see the effects of rhodiola on blood oxygen saturation and sleep disorders. Rhodiola increased blood oxygen saturation significantly and increased both sleeping time and quality. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study of the effects of
R. rosea
on fatigue in students caused by stress, physical fitness, mental fatigue, and neuro-motoric indices all increased (other studies found similar outcomes).
R. rosea
intake in a group of healthy volunteers reduced inflammatory C-reactive protein and creatinine kinase levels in the blood and protected muscle tissue during exercise.
Rhodiola rosea
in a placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized study was found to increase physical capacity, muscle strength, speed of limb movement, reaction time, and attention—in other words it improved exercise endurance performance. A similarly structured study found that 1 week of rhodiola supplementation decreased fatigue and stress levels but more interestingly decreased photon emissions on the dorsal side of the hand. In another study
Rhodiola rosea
increased the efficiency of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems and prevented fatigue during an hour of continuous physical exercise. A phase three clinical trial found that rhodiola exerts an antifatigue effect that increases mental performance and concentration and decreases cortisol response in burnout patients with fatigue syndrome; other studies have found similar outcomes, including the amelioration of depression and anxiety.

In vitro:
Rhodiola imbricata
protects macrophages against tert-butyl hydroperoxide injury and up-regulates the immune response. Additionally it potently stimulates the innate immune pathway and initiates strong immunostimulatory actions, increasing Toll-like receptor 4, granzyme B, and Th1 cytokines.
Rhodiola sachalinensis
extract enhances the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase in macrophages.
Rhodiola quadrifida
stimulates granulocyte activity and increases lymphocyte response to mitogens.
Rhodiola algida
stimulates human peripheral blood lymphocytes and up-regulates IL-2 in Th1 cells and IL-4, 6, and 10 in Th2 cells.

In vivo:
Rhodiola kirolowii
enhances cellular immunity—stimulating the activity of lymphocytes,
increasing phagocytosis in response to microbial organisms.
Rhodiola imbricata
enhances specific immunoglobulin levels in response to tetanus toxoid and ovalbumin in rats—the plant has adjuvant/immunopotentiating activity in both humoral and cell-mediated immune response.

Human clinical use:
Rhodiola rosea
(in combination with schizandra, eleuthero, and leuzea) significantly increased both cell-mediated and humoral immune response in ovarian cancer patients. Rhodiola significantly reduced problems and infection after the treatment of acute lung injury caused by massive trauma/infection and thoracic-cardio operations. A combination formula of rhodiola, eleuthero, and schizandra significantly enhanced positive outcomes in the treatment of acute nonspecific pneumonia.
Rhodiola rosea
increased the parameters of leukocyte integrins and T-cell immunity in bladder cancer patients.

Rhodiola, various species, has been found effective in the treatment of breast cancer. It inhibits the tumorigenic properties of invasive mammary epithelial cells, inhibits superficial bladder cancer, suppresses T241 fibrosarcoma tumor cell proliferation, and reduces angiogenesis in various tumor lines.
Rhodiola imbricata
is highly protective in mice against whole-body lethal radiation.

The plant has also been found highly antioxidant in numerous studies, to be liver protective, and to be highly protective of the cardiovascular system.

The plant is adaptogenic; that is, it increases the function of the organism to meet whatever adverse influences are affecting it, whether stress or illness. Most of the attention has been paid to its ability to increase endurance and mental acuity, but its effects on the immune system, though less studied than eleuthero's, are similar.

[Our bodies] are not distinct from the bodies of plants and animals, with which we are involved in the cycles of feeding and the intricate companionships of ecological systems and of the spirit. They are not distinct from the earth, the sun and moon, and the other heavenly bodies. It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease.

—Wendell Berry,
The Unsettling of America

Tremendous empowerment
comes from learning to recognize the medicinal plants that surround us, even more in learning how to make them into medicines for healing. And though it takes time, as your knowledge increases, as you learn how to tend to your illnesses and those of your family, the sense of helplessness that so many of us have experienced when we become ill, often ingrained since birth, begins to dissipate.

We have been trained to place our health in the hands of outside specialists who, very often, know neither ourselves nor our families, not the fabric of our lives, nor the communities in which we live. They have no understanding of, and often no interest in, the complexity in which we live and from which our illnesses emerge. But for most of
us, those specialists are the
only
place we know to go when we are ill, uncertain, and afraid, to seek help—for ourselves or our loved ones.

The world, however, is a great deal more complex than that frame allows and there are many more options to healing than that system acknowledges. All of us live, all the time, in the midst of a living pharmacy that covers the surface of this planet. And that living pharmacy is there for you, or anyone, to use—anytime you wish. Once you
know
that, once you have been healed by the plants in that living pharmacy, often of something that physicians said could not be healed, things are never the same again. You begin to break the cycle of dependence on which the health care system depends.

Taking back control over personal health and healing is one of the greatest forms of personal empowerment that I know. It does take time and effort, this kind of learning, but the learning goes quickly. Harder, perhaps, is learning to trust the plants with your life. It is a truly frightening moment, that moment of decision, when trust is extended in that way, for, before it occurs, there is no way to experientially
know
what the outcome will be. Most people on this planet, though, people who do not live in the Western, industrialized nations, make that decision every day of their lives. It is a trust they extend every moment of every day. Trusting the healing capacities of the plants is not a new experience to the human species.

The next step in the journey is learning how to turn the plants you are learning about into medicines for yourself and your family. It isn't that hard—people all over the globe have been doing it for a hundred thousand years. At least.

The first thing to understand is that there are no mistakes. You are learning a new skill and
everyone
learns what works by learning what doesn't. That is how human beings do it; we all learn to cook well by first cooking badly. So … enjoy the process, give yourself permission to make mistakes, to learn as you go.

If you are wildcrafting your medicines, the first step, of course, is getting to know the plants themselves, learning to recognize them in the wild, getting to know them where they live. I prefer finding a local plant person to help me with this; I like to be introduced to plants by someone who already knows them. It just seems more polite than learning about them from a book. An important part of this is increasing the acuteness of your
seeing
; you have to learn to see what is right in front of you. That is often hard with plants, as most of us have relegated them to the background as a sort of insentient and colorful backdrop to our city life.

One of the most common experiences herbalists have is going into the wild, looking diligently for a plant, not finding it, then giving up and sitting on a rock to rest and discovering they are in a field full of the very plant they are looking for.

As you increase your noticing, you will begin to see the plants sharply defined, as individuals, and you will find the ones you know everywhere. And as your experience of this new world opens up, you will find that plants are living beings and just like people they have their quirks, oddities, differences—plants of the same species don't always look the same. Where they live changes them (just as it does us).

If you learn them in the high mountains of Colorado and then seek them in eastern Washington State, they will look entirely different. Plants such as red root hug the ground at 9,000 feet (2,750 m) above sea level but will stand 6 feet tall at lower elevations. Plants that are pulled into themselves, conserving water resources, in semi-arid and arid regions will plump out in the humid tropics, grow fat and big with all the abundance of an easy life. They will often change so much from eco-range to eco-range that they don't appear to be the same plants—and, of course, their medicinal actions will change as well. They don't need to make the same chemicals in the Olympic Peninsula as they do in the south of Spain.

Plants, just like people, live in neighborhoods, in certain regions and habitats. Part of the journey is learning those neighborhoods and
habitats, learning where they like to grow, learning how they appear in different regions, different continents, altitudes, climates, and how their medicine changes in each of those climates as well. It also means learning how they appear at different times of the year.

Plants go through cycles, and these cycles are more pronounced if there is a cold winter where they live. Once you make the acquaintance of a plant, learn where it lives, you can visit it in all seasons of the year, learn how it looks as the seasons progress, learn the differences in its medicine in each of those seasons. Illness comes at any time; if you wildcraft you will need to know your medicines no matter the time of year. If you live in a climate that is very cold with deep snow, then it becomes important to learn the trees, for they can be found and made into medicines in any season. It is important, too, to make enough medicine of the plants that sleep through the winter so that you have them on hand if you need them. All of the
vegetalistas
—plant people—that I know have an herb room, a place where they keep their medicines and store the plants they have harvested but not yet made into medicines.