What are my favorite anti-inflammatory herbs...

What are my favorite anti-inflammatory herbs...

I get this question quite often in classes; stick with me for a story...

Our bodies inflammatory pathways are a complex cascade of factors. Which always makes things harder to pin down. There are more than 88 different  targets in the inflammatory response pathway some of which you might be familiar with in the natural health world either through bio-hacking or whatever internet health rabbit hole you have slid into recently. Some examples are: TNF (tumor necrosis factor),  nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells (NF-κB), nitric oxide (NO), I could go on.

Because of the complexity of this pathway we have to recognize that each condition we run up against is going to have a different route through the maze and we are going to need to put pressure on specific triggers, markers, and targets throughout that maze.

To phrase this in another way: different herbs are going to work more readily/effectively on different inflammatory pathways.

This has been and will continue to be clarified more deeply though scientific research on inflammatory cascades and herbs but as of right now we continue to have traditional uses to tide us over until we have good research on the many “ anti-inflammatory” herbal medicine interventions available to us.

So, I return to the primary question: what are my favorite anti-inflammatory herbs...

Mayyyybe a more effective question would be:

How can we interface herbs and our deeper understanding of physiology, healing, and the beneficial and sometimes detrimental impacts of our oft glitchy inflammatory processes?

AND

Which conditions respond most effectively to which herbs due to their impacts or inhibition of different mechanisms or triggers, in the complex inflammatory pathway in our bodies?

AND

When do we want to suppress inflammation and when is inflammation actually a healthy and important part of healing due to it’s role in tissue repair, immune system activation, and angioneogenisis?

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