Our search tool – let's call a spade a spade!

You may know, I went back to school for a course on the human body… there’s no age limit to learn. As I plunged into my first anatomy classes, in which I discovered the human being from the inside, I was shocked when I read that the leg is in fact not a leg. The leg, for me, goes from the top of the thigh to the ankle. In anatomy and medicine, this part of the human body is called the lower limb. In medicine, the leg is limited to the part of the body between the knee and the ankle.

So when you tell someone that he or she has beautiful legs, are you talking about their lower extremities, namely the part that goes from the top of the thigh to the ankle, or the calves?

No but that’s nonsense!

Yes and no, it’s true that in medicine, they use very strange terms to name things, as in all disciplines I suppose. While the books I consult to gather information on medicinal plants are written by people familiar with the medical world, they use either precise and very technical terms, or they use vernacular terms, that is, everyday words.

For example, for upper digestive functional disorders, one can find the word dyspepsia for the technical term and indigestion, digestive discomfort, heaviness after meals, poor digestion, slow digestion, difficult digestion, upset stomach, digestive congestion, digestive pains and slow digestion for everyday terms. Another example is pyrosis for the medical term and acid reflux for the common term. Acid reflux, that speaks to me, but heartburn, a “burning sensation going from the epigastrium to the throat, often accompanied by the regurgitation of an acidic liquid” (Robert), spoke to me much less.

However, at one time or another it is necessary to organize disorders in order to collect the maximum number of plants for a given disease. If you are looking for the plant that is best suited for a upset stomach, the plant useful in cases of dyspepsia must also appear in the results, since they are two equivalent if not synonymous ailments.

The union of the two worlds, technical terms and vernacular terms, is very complex, since it involves bringing together a whole bunch of hyponyms under one hyperonym. I too can use technical terms that almost no one knows… unless you are a linguist.

In short, all this to say that the difficulty of the task is to find a generic term that would group under its umbrella all a series of words whose meaning would also be included in the sense of the generic term. For example, diarrhea could be the generic term for lienteria, watery stools, current, chiasse, etc., and why not dysenteria, even though not all are perfect synonyms.

The classification of ailments is an important and complex step, it takes a lot of time, but it is absolutely necessary to optimize the search for plants appropriate to a given disease.

See you very soon for the next phyto-info newsletter!

sylvie