Endobiogenics
The cause of the cause of the symptoms….
I have just come back from a two-day seminar on Endobiogenics. When our Airbnb host asked what sort of seminar I was attending, and I told him Endobiogenics, he said;
‘Ah. Let’s just leave that there…’
I have not found it easy to explain what it Endobiogenics is that doesn’t sound like a lengthy foreword to a textbook. Even though I am in my second year of this area of study, I still struggle to explain it. However, in our classes we are making our way through the theory and applying it to patient case histories. It feels exciting. It feels like we are really getting to the original source of the problem.
You could say that Endobiogenics describes a systems biology approach to medicine that studies how internal factors regulate the body's function. It was developed by two French Doctors, Christian Duraffourd and Jean-Claude Lapraz in the 1980s and examines how the hormonal and nervous systems interact to maintain health or contribute to disease.
These two doctors had been discouraged by the results that had been achieved by their patients while they employed the modern orthodox medicine approach.
“During his medical studies, Christian had been struck by the dissociation which existed between the physiological complexity of the organism as taught by our medical professors and the simplistic practice of giving the same treatment for all. It was a kind of therapeutic funnel focused only on symptoms despite recognizing multiple different pathophysiologic and physiological mechanisms that play a role in starting and maintaining the disease.” [Lapraz]1
Having developed a deeper ‘systems biology’ they wanted to find a way to nudge the hormonal and nervous system back into balance. Modern pharmaceuticals were too harsh.
And they found the answer in herbs….
“In 2002, we published A Treatise on Clinical Phytotherapy, which laid the main principles of our vision of clinical and laboratory research used to rationally determine the selection of medicinal plants in clinical practice. I started disseminating new concepts on clinical phytotherapy and an introduction to the study of endobiogeny.”
The term ‘phytotherapy’ is the name that is predominantly used in Europe to denote herbal medicine. Perhaps these doctors chose it because it sounds more scientific, and herbal medicine sounds twee. They had an attitude problem to address…
“it can be challenging to convince men of status and influence of the efficacy or seriousness of a custom tincture preparation much less a tisane. These treatments may be held in contempt compared to a single powerful drug that a doctor at a prestigious academic institution prescribes for a single problem.”
There are four volumes of The Theory of Endobiogeny [and I don’t recommend that you buy them for two reasons; 1. They are too complicated to get a grasp of without training, 2. They are massively expensive, and you can download the PDFs free…].
In these medical texts written by orthodox physicians it does give one a rare satisfaction to see them recommending Ribes, Melissa, Leonorus, Vitex, Matricaria, Agrimonia and so on, for quite mainstream and complicated diagnoses.
All the disease processes are treated with medical herbs.
These are medical textbooks!
I was taught that orthodox medicine treats the symptoms of disease, and that herbal medicine gets at the cause of the problem. I think Endobiogenics is the step before herbal medicine, where we look at why the cause happened in the first place. If you like it is the cause of the cause of the symptoms.
1 The Theory of Endobiogeny: Volume 1: Global Systems Thinking and Biological Modeling for Clinical Medicine. Kamyar M. Hedayat MD and Jean-Claude Lapraz MD | 18 Jun 2019
If you want to dabble in medicinal herbs, I would love to see you in my HerbWorks membership at just £9.99/month. We have a monthly group Q&A where you can pick my brains…