www.times.spb.ru/index.php

note: "coal" is actually regular old activated charcoal, "mumiyo" is probably shatavari (I think that's what that's called? it's an adaptogen used in some Asian herbalism), the mustard remedy is the same as mustard plasters in other herbal traditions.

I grew up with all that stuff they're talking about, and more- one of the things they don't mention in the article is that herbalism survived because people really didn't have good pharmaceutical healthcare widely available for several decades after it was widespread in the West. There are also interesting cultural differences between Americans and Russians that probably contributed to modern attitudes- and it gives us a glimpse of how "a different world is possible" when it comes to blending pharma and herbal approaches to medicine in a culture.

The Soviet history about attitudes towards herbalism would be an interesting one for someone to research (as is the history of how herbal medicine was nearly eradicated among most economic classes in the US). There are several interesting issues I'm aware of from talking to family members or reading about the American histories of pharmaceutical and herbal medicine:

-no AMA type politics lke happened to the US herbal doctors in the early 20th century (see what Michael Moore and others wrote about the history of the Eclectics, MD's who practiced herbalism and were victims of a witch hunt by another branch of physicians at the start of the AMA)

-poorly available pharmaceutical solutions to health care. There were plenty of hospitals and doctors, but the equipment that they had was truly atrocious for most of the Soviet history. A lot of drugs were unavailable- things like painkilllers and virtually everything else was in short supply at one point or another due to the terrible economy.

-doctors tended to be women. This meant two things- they were poorly paid, and they sometimes had less "attitude" than American doctors, because they were poorly paid and not viewed with the same prestige as American doctors. They may have been less invested in getting rid of patient self-treatment than American doctors seem to be.

I'm not saying that they were more compassionate than male doctors or US doctors, but because of the lack of prestige, there was less of the weird ego games that get in the way of some American pharma doctors' doing of their jobs. This is probably balanced out by the fact that a lot of people were really mean during the soviet era, and power games of all sorts got played in the course of commerce, business, mediicne, etc- people in the West can't begin to imagine how nasty some Russians became under communism due to the Soviets attempt at destroying traditional culture and behavior. Think China during the Cultural Revolution and you get some idea of the Russian version. Anyway, I suspect that some of the bad attitude that American doctors sometimes have towards patients taking their health into their own hands, is related to ego due to the prestigiousness of the profession, and related to the horrible history that the AMA had with trying to eradicate all competition from other modalities such as chiropractic, homeopathy, midwifery, and herbal traditions.

-I think that Slavic cultures are much more recently agrarian than some Western European ones, and more so than 20th century Americans. We have a hell of a lot more superstitions around the agrarian calendar, etc, people in the 80's and 90's were more likely to grow gardens than in the US, and the Orthodox church didn't make a concerted effort to wipe out old pagan ways the way the Catholics did a few centuries ago, so I think traditions that tie people to the land were stronger in the 20th century and today than they are in 20th century America and even parts of Western Europe. It seems to me that herbalism is just more widespread there because it's just part of the many agrarian traditions we practiced in modern times. For instance my mother, who's a total city person who doesn't pay any attention to health issues, was able to rattle off a bunch of traditional herbal lore when I showed her the section on Russian herbalism in one of Susun Weed's books, and she was able to tell me a bunch of additional things the plants in the book were used for, some of them using folk sayings and rhymes.


-there was a period under Stalin when the government attempted to destroy traditional folk culture because of it's link to traditional farming (whcih they were trying to change with enforced collectivization) and a lot of other issues. I think- I might be wrong- that they outlawed herbalism for a while at least as a practice by doctors. I could be wrong abput this. It would have been in the 30s.

I was told there was an official reversal of this policy once things got bad enough with pharma supplies. (a similar reversal happened when they started to allow shamanic rituals sometime during the 40's , after conducting a huge campaign against practitioners and jailing or killing a lot of elders who practiced these religions in their non-Slavic, primarily Siberian cultures. There's a very similar analogy in the US policy towards Native Americans at various times. Anyway, at some point there was a political need for more support for difficult Soviet policies, and the government actually began to allow rituals again in some areas and thawed it's attitudes towards other religious practice, including Christianity in Christian areas.

I was told that when the Soviet Union was courting China politically, they allowed Chinese herbalists to come to the Soviet cities and set up practice- which was great for the Soviets, considering their medical system was a shambles. So when my brother was a kid in the late 60's and had asthma, the family got an expatriate Chinese herbalist to treat him (pretty much succesfully- she pretty much got rid of his asthma completely).

I recall other kids getting 'cupping' treatments for colds or flu (I think that's what it was for- we didn't do it in my family), which is related to the mustard plaster remedy that the article above describes, at least in terms of the rationale I heard for it. I'm curious how much that particular practice- cupping- had to do with Russian traditions versus was imported from China. I don't recall that anyone talked about acupuncture points, or that acupuncture was at all mentioned by my family.

This is curious to me because I think the opposite may have happend in the US when Traditional Chinese Medicine came here- I've been told (by Bay Area herbalist Adam Sellers, I think) that when Traditional Chinese Medicine came to the US, and went through a fight for legitimacy and licensing, one of the things that was downplayed was the herbalism aspect, since the medical boards, AMA, and other influential parties in American medicine were deeply biased against herbalism (there's a long political history behind this, at least in the case of the AMA). I can see how the opposite would have been true in the Soviet Union- they'd been doing herbal research in the 50's and 60's when these Chinese practitioners were coming over, and I can see how they'd have adopted just that aspect of TCM rather than the more unfamiliar acupuncture. Virtually every family in Russia and related cultures probably practiced herbalism at that point, although I think that at one point prior to the political flirting with Communist China, the official Soviet party line was actually biased against herbalism (I was told that the coming of the Chinese doctors was a reversal of political policy)- part of Stalin's attempt to eradicate folk 'superstitions' for various political reasons. Like many things in Soviet history, expediency forced a change- poor pharmaceutical availability, eroding political support during hard times, meant that they thawed some hard-line attitudes towards practices that were previously on the blacklist.

Thoughts, anyone?