Total Body Wellness Through Tonic Herbs:       

Balance in Body Systems
The basic concept underlying tonic herbs is balance. Tonic herbs restore and maintain balance. Their action is directed toward whole body systems and individual physiological processes. Body systems would include the nervous, digestive, musculo-skeletal, cardiovascular, cerebral, reproductive, and immune systems. Processes include those physiological and biochemical functions that affect blood pressure, blood sugar levels, cholesterol levels, the function of electrolytes, buffers, neurotransmitters, hormones, enzymes, vitamins, and so forth.

Of all the terms associated with tonics, the most difficult to grasp is "balance." Superficially, the word is a simple one and should not create any confusion. Furthermore, most people find nothing objectionable about the word; it seems to make perfect sense. But I often encounter a reluctance in many people to distinguish one herb from another on the basis that one restores and maintains balance while the other does not. Objections to this distinction range from "don't all herbs do that?" to "so what?" In reality, balance is not a characteristic of most herbs. Indeed, it may be the rarest of all properties. It is so unique that only a handful of all of the hundreds of thousands of plants in the world possesses it. Therefore, I admonish the reader to not overlook the word, or assume he or she automatically knows what is meant by it, or dismiss it as commonplace, irrelevant or primitive.

The action of any ingested chemical, whether from food or supplement or drug, is to "push" some physiological process in a certain direction, commonly to either increase a process or decrease it. For example, vitamin C increases certain processes inside cells throughout the body that affect the healing process. Essential fatty acids find their way into cell membrane physiology. Silicon, from horsetail, increases the rate of tissue growth and becomes part of the structure of new tissue. Certain substances from gentian root stimulate the flow of gastric juices. Substances from onions cause the tears to flow. "Pushing" processes is what physiologically active substances do. Most substances push processes in one direction only.

"Balancing" processes requires pushing them in opposing directions. It assumes that a process works best if maintained within certain limits. This assumption is indeed correct. All physiological processes operate within fairly narrow limits. While operating within those limits, they are said to be in a state of homeostasis. Think of a teeter totter. When the board is perfectly level, equal weights on both ends, it is balanced. This is homeostasis. The normal, or healthy, state of a body process or system is one of balance. As the teeter totter board begins to dip in either direction balance is lost. Likewise, in the body, deviation from a normal, balanced state produces imbalance or disease. Stated simply, balance equals health and imbalance equals disease, or a state of ill health. Correcting the imbalance restores balance and health.

In today's world, stress is perhaps the number one cause of disease Stress is any force that tends to push any body system out of balance. Stress can create hyperactivity (overactive) as well as hypoactivity (under active) Thus, there are diseases of under active processes and over active processes. For example, an under active immune system is susceptible to infection, colds, flu, etc. Likewise, an overactive immune system tend toward symptoms of imbalance, including hay fever, allergies, an, autoimmune disorders. In our teeter totter analogy, stressors would be weights applied to either end of the board forcing it out of balance.

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