Really interesting post Thomas, thank you! I was interested in the study which you described as ashwagandha inducing psychosis episodes on withdrawal, but with the study you've cited, it explains that the symptoms started 1 hour post ingestion which improved shortly after rather than starting on withdrawal. I wanted to bring this to your attention as you are a diligent writer, and the way it's been described makes it sound like there is a possible risk of psychosis on withdrawing from use which is not how it's been described in the study, however, very interesting that it can create psychotic symptoms so soon after ingestion!
Excellent catch! The psychosis and withdrawal are two separate issues and Ive worded that very poorly. There’s the acute psychosis which seems very rare, a case report of mania with psychosis 6 months after protracted withdrawals, and then other scatter withdrawal cases in the literature, along with the withdrawal I’ve had and seen in clinic. Less reliable, but worth pondering is the slew of Reddit posts of people having adverse reactions of all types.
I'm so curious about this. I was taught by my first herbal studies teacher (trained clinically but teaching out of folk/community herbalism lineage) that adaptogens are herbs that help bring the body back to homeostasis by nourishing and supporting the adrenals. Sort of analagous, I thought, to how a hepatic does the same for the liver. And so for depleted, stressed out, overtaxed etc. nervous systems you want to nourish your adrenals (among other things). The plants you mention here were not in our materia medica, the teacher was talking about nettles, whole plant dandelion, borage, licorice root, staples in my materia fornlots of reasons.
As I have learned more, from other teachers, I've been questioning some of the things taught by that first teacher, as being, hmm, insufficient for understanding A&P and herbal actions, and sometimes coming out of these kind of unfounded claims that sound nice but aren't grounded in much more than...vibes. It's annoying to unlearn/relearn but makes me a better herbalist.
At any rate, I guess my question is, is there anything useful about how I was taught to understand adaptogens? Or are there more specific ways to understand what these plants are doing in the body that, oh yeah, also help the stressed out adrenals recover?
Anne, thanks for this! I have lots of thoughts. First, no one really considers nettles, dandelion, borage, or licorice adaptogens - those are nutritives, bitters, and in licorice’s case something moistening and more complex. But this is what happens when a bullshit category invades a developing field: anything that helps with stress and doesn’t sedate you becomes an adaptogen. Category scope creep of the worst kind, because the original category was already incoherent.
“Unfounded claims that sound nice but aren’t grounded in much more than vibes” is a painfully accurate synopsis of a lot of herbal education right now. I think a big part of what happened is that when online herbal education exploded 15 years ago it expanded faster than clinical mentorship could scale. It’s relatively easy to learn enough to teach introductory herbalism. It’s much harder to develop the clinical depth that comes from years of working with complex cases, making mistakes, seeing what actually happens over time. We have ended up with a generation of teachers passing on frameworks they learned but never pressure-tested against clinical reality. You don’t know what you don’t know, and confident explanations feel like understanding until you’ve seen enough cases to realize they’re not.
On top of the modern education crisis, many of those frameworks were developed before Western Herbalism integrated modern physiology, and instead of updating them, we just… kept teaching them. Then we layered marketing language on top. Now we have this strange situation where someone can complete an herbal training program and come away with less accurate understanding of how the body works than they’d get from a college A&P course.
The adrenal explanation you were taught is a perfect example. “Nourishing the adrenals” sounds plausible. It maps onto how we intuitively think about organs - they get tired, they need support, we feed them and they recover. But that’s not how the adrenal glands work. They’re not a battery. They don’t get depleted in any meaningful sense. They produce hormones in response to signaling from the hypothalamus and pituitary. When someone feels “adrenally fatigued,” their adrenal glands are almost always functioning normally - the issue is upstream in the signaling, or it’s about receptor sensitivity, or it’s half a dozen other things we’re missing or mislabeling.
So what was your teacher actually observing? Probably people who were depleted - nutritionally deficient, chronically stressed, running on fumes. And their instinct to reach for nutritive, building herbs rather than stimulants was sound. Nettles provide minerals. Dandelion supports digestive function (and you can’t recover from anything if you’re not digesting well). Borage is moistening and a mild nervine (caution with those pyrrolizidine alkaloids). These herbs help some depleted patterns. Just not by “nourishing the adrenals.”
Here’s what I think happened historically. Clinicians observed that certain herbs helped certain patterns of exhaustion and stress. They needed an explanation, and “supports the adrenals” was available and sounded reasonable thanks to Selye. The observation was valid. The mechanism was confabulated. And then it got taught as fact for decades. This is actually a recurring pattern in herbal education. Valid clinical observation, wrong mechanistic explanation, calcified into doctrine. The problem is that wrong explanations eventually lead you astray. If you think you’re “nourishing adrenals,” you might give the same herbs to everyone who’s stressed - but the fried and dried have different needs than the wired and tired. The category obscures exactly what you need to see.
To your actual question - is there anything useful in how you were taught? Yes: the clinical instinct to support depleted people with nutritive herbs rather than pushing them with stimulants. That’s good thinking. What needs replacing is the explanatory framework. Instead of “nourishing adrenals,” think about what these herbs actually do - mineralizing, supporting digestion, building fluids, calming without sedating - and match those actions to what the person in front of you actually needs.
The annoying unlearning/relearning you’re doing? That’s the job. That’s what it looks like to develop as a herbalist. That’s how the field moves forward. I’ve got an upcoming article on categorical thinking that I hope will help clarify more!
Thank you so much, Thomas, for this thoughtful response to my curiosities and questions. I so appreciate you taking the time to help me understand the context in which I was taught, and what "good thinking" / "sound instincts" can be carried forward in my practice. I'm very grateful!
Thanks for writing this. It's a great articulation of the many, many problems, and I don't think the term is clinically helpful either. Still, I've wondered what would make the 'adaptogen' label meaningful, rather than superfluous or misleading. Two main possibilities have come to mind.
The first, obvious one, would be if a distinct, fairly unique mechanism was found (beyond what other herbs routinely do) which herbs called 'adaptogens' have in common. Panossian and others have gone looking for this mechanism in hormesis or nitric oxide pathways, but the evidence isn't there yet. And those mechanisms aren't unique to adaptogens anyway.
The second plausible use of the term could be as a kind of shorthand label for herbs that happen to affect multiple pathways relevant to stress resilience (like sleep, HPA axis, autonomic tone, inflammation/redox defenses, perception of effort), and because their mechanisms, even if they're not in any way unique, aren't reducible to just one or two actions, we might use the term 'adaptogen' to signal that they're affecting stress mediators in a complex way. Again, I haven't seen any evidence that this is what's happening with these herbs, but it could be a defensible use of the word if it was.
Thanks Dave, this is the kind of thoughtful engagement I was hoping for.
Your second possibility, that adaptogens could be useful shorthand for pleiotropic effects on stress-relevant pathways (if found), is something that might make the term meaningful - but then we have to ask, wouldn’t that make SSRIs adaptogens? They’re classic dirty drugs - serotonergic effects on mood, anti-inflammatory activity, antimicrobial properties, platelet inhibition, neuroplasticity effects, gut motility and microbiome changes. They affect multiple stress-relevant pathways in complex, not-fully-understood ways. By that definition, Prozac qualifies. But nobody would call it that - so either the definition captures too much, or there’s some unstated criterion that includes ashwagandha but excludes fluoxetine.
I think the problem is that ‘adaptogen’ smuggles in additional claims beyond pleiotropy - the intelligent normalization, the non-specific resistance, the safety. If we stripped all that away and just meant ‘pleiotropic effects on stress,’ the term becomes redundant. If we keep those additional claims, the term becomes incoherent.
That said, I appreciate you thinking through what would make it meaningful. That’s the stuff we need more of!
Thanks for writing this, it gives a lot to think on! I've heard folks name adulterated Ashwagandha as being to blame for some of the adverse effects/poor outcomes and note that aside from being potentially exacerbating constitutionally there are no known issues, so helpful to know about this. I am curious to hear your thoughts on how often, if ever, adulterated Ashwagandha might be at play? I imagine with the RCTs that's obviously not an issue.
Excellent question! We know from RCTs using high-quality ashwagandha extracts that one of its effects is thyroid stimulation, even in healthy people. So the adverse effects like thyrotoxicosis aren’t random contamination - they’re extensions of the plant’s actual pharmacology in susceptible people. Interestingly, the traditional Ayurvedic contraindication of heat signs might be protective against thyroid overstimulation - old wisdom pointing at real pharmacology.
I’m also rethinking something I used to teach. I’d tell students that people often didn’t realize how much ashwagandha was helping until they ran out and their ‘baseline stress’ returned. I now think some of that was tolerance and withdrawal, not revelation of benefit. I have confirmed cases of abrupt discontinuation causing severe insomnia and agitation. The case reports of withdrawal-induced psychosis fit this pattern. I feel good about the quality of ashwagandha in the cases Ive confirmed so I don’t know how much adulteration plays into the problem.
If we are picking the most useful terms to describe important properties of plants, I’d put toxic, hallucinogenic, emetic, laxative, and cathartic at the top of the list :)
Thank you for bringing up some of the most outdated terms in our herbal culture as surely that is what you had ment when slandering such species with, “toxic.” A rose could tear the skin however it is best to smell from the center. Paracelsus as we know debunked this concept over 500 years ago showing the spectrum of dose and the tradition of transmuting elements from poison to medicine. Hallucination known to define something experienced that is not actually present when in fact many of them described in this manner are used to shed the veil of illusion and see with extra sensory perceptions. No. The reason the public has had such a robust response to the term adaptogen is because, although it could be ill defined by the vulgar, subconsciously there is an understanding that sharing the blood of the ecosystem becomes a function of transmutagen overall. This may bring chaos to the order of how we describe things, because what is known is far less than what is unknown in mechanism of action, still it is currently the most accurate. In appreciation of your wisdom truly. ;)
This response is a good example of what happens when you try to defend ‘adaptogen’ - there’s no clinical content there, so you end up with word salad about transmutation and veils of illusion. The term adaptogen is popular because grifters with PhDs sold pseudoscience to a stressed public. That’s not the same as being useful. Clinical utility means a term helps you make better decisions - who gets it, who doesn’t, why this herb over that one. ‘Toxic’ tells me something actionable. ‘Laxative’ tells me something actionable. ‘Adaptogen’ tells me nothing I can use.
Well, thank you for the reflection, yet I see no salad here. It has been well articulated when an adaptogen could be used by others. For a very simple example, when an individual is in a phase of enhanced stressors. Maybe a long trip to Mars? Most herbal actions and descriptions have baggage, I’m just not sure why you are throwing out the baby with the bath water and striking out. You seriously don’t find it clinically useful language? Also, even if it is not useful in the clinic itself, the pathway of research leads to discovery, which indeed aids in the clinical setting. Stories are important. Frankly, you surely should be able to find relevance of transmutation and illusion veils. It seems you prefer a very specific type of language over another. Poetry I have found to be most accurate.
I love poetry. I also need to make actual decisions about actual people. ‘A phase of enhanced stressors, maybe Mars’ doesn’t help me decide who gets Rhodiola versus Ashwagandha versus neither versus a referral. If the best defense of a term is that it works as poetry, that’s a concession that it doesn’t work as clinical language. To answer your question directly, I find no value at all in the concept of adaptogens. I abandoned the concept and term over a decade ago and haven’t missed it. I’ve taught some version of this critique to students for a decade, many of whom practice clinically without this concept. I’m certainly not the first to point out the problem with adaptogens, Paul Bergner was the one to point out the issues with it to me. There’s just no good evidence adaptogens actually help anything during periods of increased stress, and some evidence that some adaptogens actually make stress worse.
Yeah, like you said there is some evidence about use. Yet you only acknowledge evidence of adapted genes, making stress worse, but not aid in the beneficial described adapt genes way. That is odd. Looking at the pattern of adaptogen is a great pathway for more research to move forward to gain more evidence to use in the clinic. It is the imagination that moves us forward and adaptogen have captured this great resource. You surely have an idea when someone could use American Ginseng for example. It seems like you are holding adaptogen to a higher standard than other herbs/actions because they all have nuance. I give no concession and think it best you embrace your shadow by delving deeper into the art, science, and language of the adaptogen to mine absolute gold you have been missing the whole time. Many say that the philosophers stone was never achieved, yet by it comes the very scientific method and so many elixirs. Similarly the concept of adaptogen can and will forge a way to many breakthroughs and discovery. Only you can convince yourself, never the poetry. Yes the word itself my not lead you to specific use on each person or which actual herb or extraction technique to use, but I still find it to be a VERY important concept through nuance you should be able to use it clinically very effectively. I’m not sure why not. As far as the potential to, “make stress worse,” this could be since stress and resistance can help model and bring about healthy response so then using them at the correct timing is key. The concept and label of adaptogen is not going to tell you which one to use for who nor does any other action of an herb, that’s your job. However I maintain its value for we have only scratched the surface, and so maybe it is true as you say that it is not clinically helpful, yet will this change in the near future as more is discovered? I believe so. I personally find it an absolute asset if only for the excitement of the public from which trance induction can be channeled towards health. Thank you for the discussion.
Really interesting post Thomas, thank you! I was interested in the study which you described as ashwagandha inducing psychosis episodes on withdrawal, but with the study you've cited, it explains that the symptoms started 1 hour post ingestion which improved shortly after rather than starting on withdrawal. I wanted to bring this to your attention as you are a diligent writer, and the way it's been described makes it sound like there is a possible risk of psychosis on withdrawing from use which is not how it's been described in the study, however, very interesting that it can create psychotic symptoms so soon after ingestion!
Excellent catch! The psychosis and withdrawal are two separate issues and Ive worded that very poorly. There’s the acute psychosis which seems very rare, a case report of mania with psychosis 6 months after protracted withdrawals, and then other scatter withdrawal cases in the literature, along with the withdrawal I’ve had and seen in clinic. Less reliable, but worth pondering is the slew of Reddit posts of people having adverse reactions of all types.
I'm so curious about this. I was taught by my first herbal studies teacher (trained clinically but teaching out of folk/community herbalism lineage) that adaptogens are herbs that help bring the body back to homeostasis by nourishing and supporting the adrenals. Sort of analagous, I thought, to how a hepatic does the same for the liver. And so for depleted, stressed out, overtaxed etc. nervous systems you want to nourish your adrenals (among other things). The plants you mention here were not in our materia medica, the teacher was talking about nettles, whole plant dandelion, borage, licorice root, staples in my materia fornlots of reasons.
As I have learned more, from other teachers, I've been questioning some of the things taught by that first teacher, as being, hmm, insufficient for understanding A&P and herbal actions, and sometimes coming out of these kind of unfounded claims that sound nice but aren't grounded in much more than...vibes. It's annoying to unlearn/relearn but makes me a better herbalist.
At any rate, I guess my question is, is there anything useful about how I was taught to understand adaptogens? Or are there more specific ways to understand what these plants are doing in the body that, oh yeah, also help the stressed out adrenals recover?
Thanks for this piece!
Anne, thanks for this! I have lots of thoughts. First, no one really considers nettles, dandelion, borage, or licorice adaptogens - those are nutritives, bitters, and in licorice’s case something moistening and more complex. But this is what happens when a bullshit category invades a developing field: anything that helps with stress and doesn’t sedate you becomes an adaptogen. Category scope creep of the worst kind, because the original category was already incoherent.
“Unfounded claims that sound nice but aren’t grounded in much more than vibes” is a painfully accurate synopsis of a lot of herbal education right now. I think a big part of what happened is that when online herbal education exploded 15 years ago it expanded faster than clinical mentorship could scale. It’s relatively easy to learn enough to teach introductory herbalism. It’s much harder to develop the clinical depth that comes from years of working with complex cases, making mistakes, seeing what actually happens over time. We have ended up with a generation of teachers passing on frameworks they learned but never pressure-tested against clinical reality. You don’t know what you don’t know, and confident explanations feel like understanding until you’ve seen enough cases to realize they’re not.
On top of the modern education crisis, many of those frameworks were developed before Western Herbalism integrated modern physiology, and instead of updating them, we just… kept teaching them. Then we layered marketing language on top. Now we have this strange situation where someone can complete an herbal training program and come away with less accurate understanding of how the body works than they’d get from a college A&P course.
The adrenal explanation you were taught is a perfect example. “Nourishing the adrenals” sounds plausible. It maps onto how we intuitively think about organs - they get tired, they need support, we feed them and they recover. But that’s not how the adrenal glands work. They’re not a battery. They don’t get depleted in any meaningful sense. They produce hormones in response to signaling from the hypothalamus and pituitary. When someone feels “adrenally fatigued,” their adrenal glands are almost always functioning normally - the issue is upstream in the signaling, or it’s about receptor sensitivity, or it’s half a dozen other things we’re missing or mislabeling.
So what was your teacher actually observing? Probably people who were depleted - nutritionally deficient, chronically stressed, running on fumes. And their instinct to reach for nutritive, building herbs rather than stimulants was sound. Nettles provide minerals. Dandelion supports digestive function (and you can’t recover from anything if you’re not digesting well). Borage is moistening and a mild nervine (caution with those pyrrolizidine alkaloids). These herbs help some depleted patterns. Just not by “nourishing the adrenals.”
Here’s what I think happened historically. Clinicians observed that certain herbs helped certain patterns of exhaustion and stress. They needed an explanation, and “supports the adrenals” was available and sounded reasonable thanks to Selye. The observation was valid. The mechanism was confabulated. And then it got taught as fact for decades. This is actually a recurring pattern in herbal education. Valid clinical observation, wrong mechanistic explanation, calcified into doctrine. The problem is that wrong explanations eventually lead you astray. If you think you’re “nourishing adrenals,” you might give the same herbs to everyone who’s stressed - but the fried and dried have different needs than the wired and tired. The category obscures exactly what you need to see.
To your actual question - is there anything useful in how you were taught? Yes: the clinical instinct to support depleted people with nutritive herbs rather than pushing them with stimulants. That’s good thinking. What needs replacing is the explanatory framework. Instead of “nourishing adrenals,” think about what these herbs actually do - mineralizing, supporting digestion, building fluids, calming without sedating - and match those actions to what the person in front of you actually needs.
The annoying unlearning/relearning you’re doing? That’s the job. That’s what it looks like to develop as a herbalist. That’s how the field moves forward. I’ve got an upcoming article on categorical thinking that I hope will help clarify more!
Thank you so much, Thomas, for this thoughtful response to my curiosities and questions. I so appreciate you taking the time to help me understand the context in which I was taught, and what "good thinking" / "sound instincts" can be carried forward in my practice. I'm very grateful!
Thanks for writing this. It's a great articulation of the many, many problems, and I don't think the term is clinically helpful either. Still, I've wondered what would make the 'adaptogen' label meaningful, rather than superfluous or misleading. Two main possibilities have come to mind.
The first, obvious one, would be if a distinct, fairly unique mechanism was found (beyond what other herbs routinely do) which herbs called 'adaptogens' have in common. Panossian and others have gone looking for this mechanism in hormesis or nitric oxide pathways, but the evidence isn't there yet. And those mechanisms aren't unique to adaptogens anyway.
The second plausible use of the term could be as a kind of shorthand label for herbs that happen to affect multiple pathways relevant to stress resilience (like sleep, HPA axis, autonomic tone, inflammation/redox defenses, perception of effort), and because their mechanisms, even if they're not in any way unique, aren't reducible to just one or two actions, we might use the term 'adaptogen' to signal that they're affecting stress mediators in a complex way. Again, I haven't seen any evidence that this is what's happening with these herbs, but it could be a defensible use of the word if it was.
Thanks Dave, this is the kind of thoughtful engagement I was hoping for.
Your second possibility, that adaptogens could be useful shorthand for pleiotropic effects on stress-relevant pathways (if found), is something that might make the term meaningful - but then we have to ask, wouldn’t that make SSRIs adaptogens? They’re classic dirty drugs - serotonergic effects on mood, anti-inflammatory activity, antimicrobial properties, platelet inhibition, neuroplasticity effects, gut motility and microbiome changes. They affect multiple stress-relevant pathways in complex, not-fully-understood ways. By that definition, Prozac qualifies. But nobody would call it that - so either the definition captures too much, or there’s some unstated criterion that includes ashwagandha but excludes fluoxetine.
I think the problem is that ‘adaptogen’ smuggles in additional claims beyond pleiotropy - the intelligent normalization, the non-specific resistance, the safety. If we stripped all that away and just meant ‘pleiotropic effects on stress,’ the term becomes redundant. If we keep those additional claims, the term becomes incoherent.
That said, I appreciate you thinking through what would make it meaningful. That’s the stuff we need more of!
Thanks for writing this, it gives a lot to think on! I've heard folks name adulterated Ashwagandha as being to blame for some of the adverse effects/poor outcomes and note that aside from being potentially exacerbating constitutionally there are no known issues, so helpful to know about this. I am curious to hear your thoughts on how often, if ever, adulterated Ashwagandha might be at play? I imagine with the RCTs that's obviously not an issue.
Excellent question! We know from RCTs using high-quality ashwagandha extracts that one of its effects is thyroid stimulation, even in healthy people. So the adverse effects like thyrotoxicosis aren’t random contamination - they’re extensions of the plant’s actual pharmacology in susceptible people. Interestingly, the traditional Ayurvedic contraindication of heat signs might be protective against thyroid overstimulation - old wisdom pointing at real pharmacology.
I’m also rethinking something I used to teach. I’d tell students that people often didn’t realize how much ashwagandha was helping until they ran out and their ‘baseline stress’ returned. I now think some of that was tolerance and withdrawal, not revelation of benefit. I have confirmed cases of abrupt discontinuation causing severe insomnia and agitation. The case reports of withdrawal-induced psychosis fit this pattern. I feel good about the quality of ashwagandha in the cases Ive confirmed so I don’t know how much adulteration plays into the problem.
“Adaptogen,” just might be the most useful and accurate term ever to grace the history of herbal medicine.
If we are picking the most useful terms to describe important properties of plants, I’d put toxic, hallucinogenic, emetic, laxative, and cathartic at the top of the list :)
Thank you for bringing up some of the most outdated terms in our herbal culture as surely that is what you had ment when slandering such species with, “toxic.” A rose could tear the skin however it is best to smell from the center. Paracelsus as we know debunked this concept over 500 years ago showing the spectrum of dose and the tradition of transmuting elements from poison to medicine. Hallucination known to define something experienced that is not actually present when in fact many of them described in this manner are used to shed the veil of illusion and see with extra sensory perceptions. No. The reason the public has had such a robust response to the term adaptogen is because, although it could be ill defined by the vulgar, subconsciously there is an understanding that sharing the blood of the ecosystem becomes a function of transmutagen overall. This may bring chaos to the order of how we describe things, because what is known is far less than what is unknown in mechanism of action, still it is currently the most accurate. In appreciation of your wisdom truly. ;)
This response is a good example of what happens when you try to defend ‘adaptogen’ - there’s no clinical content there, so you end up with word salad about transmutation and veils of illusion. The term adaptogen is popular because grifters with PhDs sold pseudoscience to a stressed public. That’s not the same as being useful. Clinical utility means a term helps you make better decisions - who gets it, who doesn’t, why this herb over that one. ‘Toxic’ tells me something actionable. ‘Laxative’ tells me something actionable. ‘Adaptogen’ tells me nothing I can use.
Well, thank you for the reflection, yet I see no salad here. It has been well articulated when an adaptogen could be used by others. For a very simple example, when an individual is in a phase of enhanced stressors. Maybe a long trip to Mars? Most herbal actions and descriptions have baggage, I’m just not sure why you are throwing out the baby with the bath water and striking out. You seriously don’t find it clinically useful language? Also, even if it is not useful in the clinic itself, the pathway of research leads to discovery, which indeed aids in the clinical setting. Stories are important. Frankly, you surely should be able to find relevance of transmutation and illusion veils. It seems you prefer a very specific type of language over another. Poetry I have found to be most accurate.
I love poetry. I also need to make actual decisions about actual people. ‘A phase of enhanced stressors, maybe Mars’ doesn’t help me decide who gets Rhodiola versus Ashwagandha versus neither versus a referral. If the best defense of a term is that it works as poetry, that’s a concession that it doesn’t work as clinical language. To answer your question directly, I find no value at all in the concept of adaptogens. I abandoned the concept and term over a decade ago and haven’t missed it. I’ve taught some version of this critique to students for a decade, many of whom practice clinically without this concept. I’m certainly not the first to point out the problem with adaptogens, Paul Bergner was the one to point out the issues with it to me. There’s just no good evidence adaptogens actually help anything during periods of increased stress, and some evidence that some adaptogens actually make stress worse.
Yeah, like you said there is some evidence about use. Yet you only acknowledge evidence of adapted genes, making stress worse, but not aid in the beneficial described adapt genes way. That is odd. Looking at the pattern of adaptogen is a great pathway for more research to move forward to gain more evidence to use in the clinic. It is the imagination that moves us forward and adaptogen have captured this great resource. You surely have an idea when someone could use American Ginseng for example. It seems like you are holding adaptogen to a higher standard than other herbs/actions because they all have nuance. I give no concession and think it best you embrace your shadow by delving deeper into the art, science, and language of the adaptogen to mine absolute gold you have been missing the whole time. Many say that the philosophers stone was never achieved, yet by it comes the very scientific method and so many elixirs. Similarly the concept of adaptogen can and will forge a way to many breakthroughs and discovery. Only you can convince yourself, never the poetry. Yes the word itself my not lead you to specific use on each person or which actual herb or extraction technique to use, but I still find it to be a VERY important concept through nuance you should be able to use it clinically very effectively. I’m not sure why not. As far as the potential to, “make stress worse,” this could be since stress and resistance can help model and bring about healthy response so then using them at the correct timing is key. The concept and label of adaptogen is not going to tell you which one to use for who nor does any other action of an herb, that’s your job. However I maintain its value for we have only scratched the surface, and so maybe it is true as you say that it is not clinically helpful, yet will this change in the near future as more is discovered? I believe so. I personally find it an absolute asset if only for the excitement of the public from which trance induction can be channeled towards health. Thank you for the discussion.
People think any “adaptogen” is good medicine for everybody. It's insane.