Our search tool – project start!

“Without wanting to rehabilitate the outdated therapies [of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen], it is our duty, at the beginning of this third millennium, to no longer regard the knowledge of the ancients with disdain or condescension” (Morel, 2017, pp. 60–61).

I could have started my introduction with something like “Once upon a time, she was passionate about simple people who no longer knew where to turn their heads to find the relevant plant that… blah blah blah” and to write big, pretty sentences to detail the progress of the project. After careful consideration, I decided that it was better to be brief and to the point. Let’s be pragmatic, we all have so much information to read per day, that it’s better to reduce the number of words when possible. All this to say that I don’t pretend to write a novel in each of my newsletters and that my reviews will get to the point with a few illustrations.

For my first newsletter, I’m starting with the reasons that prompted us to develop this search tool.

Well then, what is this project?

The idea for this project was born out of the frustration I experience when I search (on the internet or in books) THE plant that works well to alleviate a particular problem.

Let’s say you’re looking to alleviate a digestive problem (that’s good, we’ve just finished Christmas, pancakes and Candlemas), well the first Internet search for “which plants for indigestion” gives us roughly 116,000 results. We have a choice of plants, but which one should we choose? Of course everyone gives their recipe and preferences, the only catch is that you don’t always know where the information mentioned on many sites comes from. Should we trust without asking questions? Hmm, my little researcher from another life (well yes I have a doctorate in philosophy) tells me that you should always check your sources. This is both a blessing and a problem since I check everything but it takes me a lot of time.

The illustration for this post comes from my research on indigestion. I am not questioning their suggestions (I have not checked), I would just like to know where they get this information from to determine for myself if the source is reliable or not. Unfortunately, nothing is mentioned about this on their site. So my question is this: how do they know all this? As my daughter said when she was little, “I learned it by myself in my bedroom” 🙂

Besides the lack of sources, we also discover an incalculable number of plants to relieve indigestion. Onatera offers us black radish, artichoke, desmodium, turmeric, milk thistle, rhubarb, angelica, fennel, peppermint and sage. Nature AZ suggests ginger, cider vinegar, fennel, turmeric, lemon, chamomile, cumin, garlic and greater celandine. I could go on like this for a long time. By examining these two results, we notice that fennel and turmeric are mentioned in both cases, which suggests that these two plants might be the most appropriate.

That’s all very well and good, but how do you choose the right plant with “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe”?

Our search tool will sort through all these possibilities to best advise on choosing the right plant. The role of the platform will be to offer the most relevant plants recommended by recognized phytotherapy specialists according to a confidence index. All of this will be explained in my next newsletters.

Now, having declared loud and clear that I would make short interventions, I will leave it at that for this first issue.

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

sylvie