All traditional medicine is holistic in nature, putting as much emphasis on maintaining health as on defeating illness. In the western herbal tradition, one of the cornerstones of maintaining health is the idea of removing toxicity by cleansing the blood, using good diet and a category of herbs known as “alteratives,” which alter the body’s environment for the better, gently cleansing the blood and therefore the body in subtle ways.

How do you know when someone’s toxic if they’re not sick right now? Toxins can first show up as fatigue, mental dullness, and even a hangover kind of feeling. There is less ability to adapt to environmental stresses, and improper foods or environmental irritants more easily aggravate a person. Eventually, this can manifest as migraine headaches, allergies, poor immune system functioning, and skin disease. With a lifetime of toxic blood, toxins can create, an environment for arthritis, heart disease, and cancer.

Some cleansing herbs work in obvious ways, for example, bitter herbs that stimulate liver function, or herbs that increase urine production in the kidneys, or diaphoretic herbs that cause sweating, kind of an herbal sauna. Alteratives work in subtle ways, perhaps including stimulation of the liver, kidneys, or sweat glands, but most directly they work on the lymph system. Although some herbalists separate out lymphatic herbs from alteratives, there’s enough overlap that we’ll consider them as one category here.

The lymph system is one area to which herbalists pay more attention to than mainstream medicine practioners; herbalists have a much greater appreciation of subtlety, since herbal diagnostics are more based on pre-clinical conditions, and the remedies are gentler with a broader effect.

The lymph vessels parallel the blood vessels and are the overflow storm drain of the body fluids. When blood reaches the smallest blood vessels, fluids get pushed out of the capillaries into the tissues where they exchange nutrition and oxygen for carbon dioxide and waste products. But only about ninety percent of that fluid actually returns to the veins. The lymph system sucks up the other ten percent or so, where it stops at lymph node way stations to get picked through on its way back to primary circulation.