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Herbal-Medical
Glossary
The herb and medical terms are listed alphabetically.
Use the links below to navigate.
DECOMPENSATION - The failure of the heart to maintain full and adequate circulation.
DELIRIUM TREMENS (DTs) - A distinct neurologic disorder suffered by late-in-the-game alcoholics, characterized by sensory confusion (is it red or sour, hot or loud, smelly or wet, am I thinking or screaming); part of the problem is the result of diminished myelination of nerves and decreased brain antioxidant insulation (cholesterol), with nerve impulses "shorting out" across temporary synapses. It sounds ugly.
DEMULCENT - An agent that soothes internal membranes, traditionally separated from external soothing agents, emollients.
DERMATOMES - As spinal chord nerves branch out into the body, some segments fan out across the skin; these are the nerves that monitor the surface and are the source of senses of touch, pain, hot, cold and distension. All this information is funneled back in and up to the brain, which learned early on to correlate WHAT information comes from WHERE. Think of the brain as the CPU, with the spinal chord nerves uploading raw binary data; the brain has to make a running program out of this. It must form a three-dimensional hologram or homunculus from the linear input, and retranslate it outwards as binary data. The surface of the forearm, as an example, has sensory input gathered from several different and very separate spinal chord nerves. The brain will origami-fold these separate data streams into FOREARM. If you were to inject Novacain into the base of the left first sacral nerve (LS1), you would find that a whole section of skin became numb. So well defined a section that you could outline in charcoal the demarcation between sensation and numbness. This section would be a long oval of of numbness around the left buttock, under to the groin, perhaps part of the thigh...and the left heel. That spinal nerve is solely responsible for carrying sensation from that zone of skin...that dermatome; your brain mixes all the dermatomes together to get a working hologram of your total skin surface. That particular nerve also brings and sends information about the uterus, abdominal wall and pelvic floor. If you are a woman suffering pelvic heaviness and suppressed menses, a hot footbath might be enough S1 (heel dermatome) stimulation to cross-talk over to the S1 pelvic functions...and heat up the stuck uterus. Much of acupuncture, Jinshinjitsu, and zone and reflex therapy (not to mention Rolfing) uses various aspects of this dermatome crossover phenomena (by whatever name) and zone counterirritation was widely used in American standard medicine up until...penicillin. It was still being described in clinical manuals as late as 1956, although with the mention that it was only used infrequently and with a "mechanism not understood" disclaimer.
DIABETES - Properly diabetes mellitus, it is a disease characterized by high blood sugar levels and sugar in the urine. Diabetes is really several disorders, generally broken down into juvenile onset and adult onset. The first, currently called insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM or Type I), is somewhat hereditary, and results from inadequate synthesis of native insulin or sometimes from auto-immunity or a virus, and occurs most frequently in tissue-types HLA, DR3, and DR4. These folks tend to be lean. The other main group is known as non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM or Type II). It is caused by a combination of heredity, constitution, and lifestyle, where high blood sugar and high blood fats often occur at the same time, and where hyperglycemic episodes have continued for so many years that fuel-engorged cells start to refuse glucose, and the person is termed insulin resistant. These folks are usually overweight, tend to have fatty plaques in their arteries, and usually have chunky parents.
DIAPHORESIS - Sweating.
DIAPHORETIC - A substance that increases perspiration, either by (1) dilating the peripheral blood vessels, (2) directly stimulating by drug action the nerves that affect the sweat glands, or by (3) introducing a volatile oil into the bloodstream that performs both tasks.
DIARRHEA - A watery evacuation of the bowels, without blood.
DIASTOLIC - The lower number of a blood pressure reading signifying the myocardial and arterial relaxation between pump strokes. Too close to the higher number (systolic) usually signifies inadequate relaxation of the heart and arteries between heartbeats.
DIE-OFF - The phenomenon of killing so many infectious organisms so quickly that the amount of dead biomass itself causes liver overload, allergic reactions, or a mild foreign-body response. It can occur with antibiotic therapy, treatment of candidiasis, and even with use of some herbal antivirals. Outside of prescription antifungals, it is seldom acknowledged as a medical problem. If you use a liver stimulant, diaphoretic, and diuretic, you will increase the efficiency of transport, catabolism, and excretion, and lessen the effects of die-off.
DISTENTION - An excess expansion of a tissue or organ, either from inflammation, injury or, as in the Bean Syndrome, gas.
DIURETIC - A substance that increases the flow of urine, either by increasing permeability of the kidneys' nephrons, decreasing the reabsorption of filtered serum back into the blood exiting the nephron, increasing blood supply into the nephrons, or increasing the blood into each kidney by renal artery vasodilation.
DIVERTICULOSIS - Having congenital pouches of the type found in many organs, particularly the colon, that are benign, but, being little cul-de-sacs, are likely to become inflamed from time to time. Diverticulitis is the term for inflamed diverticula.
DUODENUM - This is the beginning of the small intestines, and it empties the stomach. It is 9 or 10 inches long, holds about the same amount of food as the digestive antrum or bottom of the stomach, and, through a papilla or sphincter, squirts a mixture of bile and pancreatic juices onto the previous stomach contents. These juices neutralize the acidic chyme; the pancreatic alkali and bile acids form soap to emulsify and aid fat digestion; and the duodenum walls secrete additional fluids and enzymes to admix with the pancreatic enzymes to initiate the final upper digestive investment. The duodenal wall secretes blood hormones to excite gallbladder and pancreas secretions, and, if overwhelmed, can inhibit the stomach from sending anything else down for a while, until they can catch all their collective breath.
DURAL HEADACHES - Perhaps the most common type; those resulting from autotoxicity or an excess of blood metabolites, such as from liver dysfunction or hangovers.
DYSCRASIA - Presently a term referring to inadequate synthesis of blood proteins by the liver, especially clotting factors. Formerly the term described an improper balance between blood and lymph in an organ or a whole person. Archaically, it referred to an imbalance between the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and the postulated black bile.
DYSENTERY - Severe diarrhea, usually from a colon infection, and containing blood and dead mucus membrane cells.
DYSMENORRHEA - Painful menstruation.
DYSPEPSIA - Poor digestion, usually with heartburn and/or regurgitation of stomach acids.
DYSPLASIA - Abnormal tissue growth...classically midway between hyperplasia (overgrowth) and neoplasia.
DYSPNEA - Air hunger with pained breathing. It occurs normally from physical exertion, and abnormally either from impaired respiration, emotional distress, or a breakdown in nerve responses.
DYSURIA - Painful urination.
EBV - Epstein-Barr Virus, a relative of the herpes virus, is the cause of infectious mononucleosis, an African malignancy called Burkitt's lymphoma, and at least part of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. A very common virus, most of the time it only causes a head cold.
ECLECTICS - The name commonly applied to the American School Physicians, a distinct group of Medical Doctors who trained in their own schools, and were licensed as M.D.s. They specialized in low-tech, nonhospital rural health care...the famous country doc with a black bag. Besides standard medical procedures, they used a more holistic approach to disease, sometimes terming themselves Vitalists. They grew out of the settlement and usurpment of the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, with a sparse population and no organized hospitals, relied on methods that were not invasive (unless emergencies dictated), used therapies that relied on strengthening natural resistance (no hospitals, just someone's sod hut) and made particular care to explain and prepare the family or neighbors for THEIR part in caring for the patient...long after the physician left. Scudder, John King, Felter, Ellingwood and Clyce Wilson were some of the more famous Eclectics, and John Uri Lloyd was the most famous pharmacist/ pharmacologist within the profession. The Eclectic movement lasted from 1840 to 1937...when the only remaining medical school, unwilling to change to a Flexnor Curriculum (as had the rest) closed its doors in Cincinnati. They lost the licensing wars and are no more. Their tradition was exported by practitioners in Germany and Mexico, and the German Eclectics, transformed by that peculiar culture into wild-eyed Nature Curists such as Ehret and Lust, started the nucleus for the Naturopathic movement in Yellow Springs, Ohio (next-door to Goddard College) in 1947, helping to found the initial form of the National College of Naturopathic Medicine...10 years after, and 50 miles away from the last Eclectic Medical School. Without benefit of Tanna Leaves or Charleton Heston and an armful of pickled mummy-organs, Eclectecism was reborn into the body of Naturopathy.
ECTOMORPH - A thumbnail description of the somatotype who is dominated by the ectoderm, specifically the skin, nervous system, and endocrine glands. Less arcane, a tall and thin person, with long limbs, narrow chest, and a somewhat oversensitive nervous system.
ECZEMA - A chronic dermatitis, more common in those with thin skin or allergies of an atopic or IgE-mediated type, and often clearly and distinctly aggravated by emotional stress.
EDEMA - A localized or systemic condition in which the body tissues contain an excessive amount of fluid. Systemic edema can be as mild as premenstrual water retention (I mean mild by comparison) or involve loss of blood proteins or kidney and heart failures. Local edema is the result of extensive or extended inflammation, with blood protein leakage and the loss of interstitial colloid.
EHT - Essential Hypertension...the early, mesomorphic stages of high blood pressure, caused mostly by thick blood and accompanying sodium retention.
ELECTROLYTES - In my context, acids, bases, and salts that contribute to the maintenance of electrical charges, membrane integrity, and acid-alkaline balance in the blood and lymph.
EMPHYSEMA - A pulmonary condition with loss of elasticity in the alveoli and the interalveolar septa...the meat-foam and their interleaving sheaths that you fill up when you breathe. If a septum gets too stretched over time, several of the little sacs will coalesce together, decreasing the surface area for oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange. If enough of these sacs lose their separateness, like small soap bubbles joining to make a few larger ones, breathing gets harder because each breath accomplishes less interchange of gases, resulting in emphysema. Caused by years of bad asthma, tobacco smoking, chemical damage, and other chronic lung disorders, it can be halted but not reversed. The first breath you take defines forever the number of the alveolar bubbles...they cannot be regenerated if they coalesce together.
ENDEMIC - Confined to a limited geographic or ecologic niche.
ENDOGENOUS - From within the body, either a native function or the product of the extended colony...normal flora in the colon are considered endogenous.
ENDOMETRIOSIS - The presence of endometrial tissue outside of the uterus. The endometrium is the mucus membrane inner lining of the uterus, with glandular cells and structural cells, both responding to estrogen by increasing in size (the proliferative phase); if there is endometrial tissue outside of the uterus, the tissue expands and shrinks in response to the estrus cycle, but the normal shedding of the menstrual phase can be difficult. The most common type of endometriosis is found in the fallopian tubes; the abnormal fallopian endometrial tissue can shed and drain into the uterus, but it hurts! It's funny, but little tiny ducts, like the ureters, bile ducts, and fallopian tubes really cramp. The colon and uterus are big muscular tubes and, when cramped up, cause rather strong pain. When one of those little bitty things gets tenesmus, your face gets white (or light tan), you start to sweat, shiver, and revert to a fetal position. Endometriosis that occurs around the ovaries or inside the belly and therefore can NEVER drain is a purely physical and medical condition, but fallopian presence of endometrium usually reaches its peak in the early thirties. It can be helped by ensuring a strong estrogen and progesterone balance, thereby decreasing the tendency to form clots in the tubes, and to experience severe cramps every month.
ENTERIC - pertaining to the small intestines.
ENTERITIS - Inflammation of the small intestines.
ENTIRE - A leaf with a straight, untoothed margin.
EOSINOPHILIA - A group of conditions having the characteristic elevation of eosinophils. These somewhat mysterious granulocytic leukocytes (white blood cells filled with cottage cheese) are definitely involved in parasite resistance, seem to initiate strong inflammation under some conditions, can facilitate clotting by inhibiting heparin, yet also are a part of the process of healing and inflammation control as an infection winds down. Eosinophilia is on one hand an inherited condition associated with atopic dermatitis (common, relatively benign, and irritating as hell), but, when acquired from chemical contact, drug reaction or spontaneously surfaced auto-immune response, it can destroy muscles, nerve, lungs, even kill. It caused the notorious string of chemical reactions that was triggered by tainted Japanese tryptophan.
EPIPHYTE - An air plant, growing on or with other plants but not in any way parasitic.
EPISTAXIS - Nosebleeds.
EPSTEIN-BARR VIRUS - A large, ubiquitous, and normally benign, herpes-like virus with both DNA and capsid. It is sometimes implicated in mononucleosis and at least two types of lymphomas. Recently it has been become connected with the symptom picture called chronic fatigue syndrome (as has been CMV) and can produce many ill-defined (but subjectively distressful) symptoms, including fatigue, fevers of an unknown origin (FUO...love those acronyms!), and emotional lability. Immunosuppression, from whatever cause, allows the syndrome to occur. Many people in and out of medicine have come to regard it as both another form of Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS, naturally) and a sequel to excessive medical use of immunosupressant anti-inflammatories.
ESOPHAGUS - The dense, muscular tube, 9 to 10 inches long, that extends from the back of the throat (pharynx) to the stomach.
EXOGENOUS - Arising from the outside; the opposite of endogenous.
EXPECTORANT - A substance that stimulates the outflow of mucus from the lungs and bronchial mucosa.
EXTRASYSTOLES - A premature contraction of the heart. It can be caused by nervousness, indigestion, a tired and enlarged heart - anything up to overt organic heart disease.
EXUDATES - The feral and congested fluids built up in a bruise or infection. Unlike a transudate, which is merely edema from lymphatic congestion, exudates contain dead cells, erythrocytes, white blood cells and often pus.
FAUCES - The throat.
FEBRILE - Feverish.
FIBROIDS - Also called a leiomyoma or fibromyoma (or myofibroma, for that matter), it is an encapsulated tumor made up of disorganized and irregular connective tissue. A uterine fibroid is benign, there may be one or many, they grow slowly, have unknown causes, and may or may not cause painful menses or mid-cycle bleeding. Much depends on where they are in the uterus and whether or not they extend far enough into the cavity to impair and thin out the endometrium. If they do, they cause distress.
FLATUS - Intestinal or stomach gas. If it rises upwards, it is an eructation (burp or belch); if it descends, causing borborygmus (love that word), you are flatulent (fartish).
FLAVONOIDS - From flavus, Latin for yellow. A 2-benzene ring, 15-carbon molecule, it is formed by many plants (in many forms) for a variety of oxidative-redox enzyme reactions. Brightly pigmented compounds that make many fruits and berries yellow, red, and purple, and that are considered in European medicine to strengthen and aid capillary and blood vessel integrity, they are sometimes (redundantly) called bioflavonoids.
FLUIDEXTRACT - An extract of an herb that is made according to official (and unofficial) pharmaceutical practice, with a strength of 1:1. That means each ounce of the fluidextract has the solutes found in an ounce of the dried herb. Advantageous for some herbs (such as Arctium or Taraxacum), where the active constituents retain the same proportions as in the plant, even though reduced to a very small volume of menstruum, it is deadly for others (such as Hydrastis or Lobelia), whose constituents may have wildly varying solubility, and whose fluidextract will contain only the most soluble constituents and lack others completely. The gradual disappearance of herbal preparations in Standard Medicine in the 1930s can partly be attributed to the almost complete reliance on fluidextracts. Some manufacturers (notably Lilly and SK&F) sold Tinctures (1:5 strength and meant to, at the least, contain EVERYTHING in the plant) that were made from diluted fluidextracts. Some fluidextracts were even made from dilutions of what were termed Solid Extracts....heat-evaporated tars, easy to store, easy to make in huge labor-minimal batches, where 100 pounds of Blue Cohosh could be reduced to 25 pounds of solid extract. This convenience pitch, with many constituents oxidized by heat, others never even extracted, could be diluted four times to sell as a fluidextract, TWENTY time to market as a tincture. These practices by American pharmaceutical manufacturers, with eyes perhaps on the larger drug trade (the use of crude drugs being a diminished part of their commerce, yet needing MANY different preparations...and being labor-intensive and profit-minimal...and sort of old-fashioned) ended up supplying terminally impaired products. Their value being reduced, physicians relied more and more on mainstream pharmaceuticals...and the medical use of whole plant preparations died.
FOMENTATION - A hot, wet poultice used on painful, inflamed areas. The usual form is a towel dipped in tea and applied hot or warm to the swollen tissue, being changed when it cools.
FUNCTIONAL - An imbalance of response, without permanent tissue damage, and generally reversible.
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