PILLS TO PLANTS

How a Lifetime of Chronic Illness Led Me Back Home to Herbal Medicine

Before I knew the names of medicinal plants, I knew the names of medications.

I was eight when chronic migraines introduced me to the medical system. By fourteen, I had been diagnosed with stage 3 endometriosis and uterine fibroids through laparoscopic surgery.

For most of my childhood and adolescence, that became the pattern: something hurt, something wasn’t functioning the way it should, and there was another medication or intervention meant to make it stop.

And for a long time, I didn’t question that.

It was medicine. It was what I knew.

Until my senior year of high school, when medication nearly took the year away from me.

For months, I was incredibly sick. I was missing so much school that I eventually had to drop every class I didn’t absolutely need for graduation, just to make the workload remotely manageable while my body was falling apart.

I was seeing specialists, having tests done and sitting in doctor’s offices while everyone tried to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. I had an endoscopy and was misdiagnosed with a gastrointestinal hernia. At one point, I was told I had a 2% chance of graduating with my class.

Somehow, I still did.

Eventually, a physician at Boston Children’s Hospital looked at my medication list and recognized what months of testing hadn’t: the medications I was taking together were causing serotonin syndrome.

I stopped them under medical direction, and slowly, I got better.

Months of appointments, specialists, and testing, yet one of the biggest clues had been sitting on my medication list. The list that passed through the hands of every doctor, nurse, and pharmacist I saw.

But, this wasn't exactly new to me.

Medication had already been part of another cycle in my life for years.

But I never really got an answer for why these chronic cycles kept happening. Instead what I got was prescribed more medication, this time in the form of antibiotics.

Again and again.

By my early twenties, years of recurring UTIs and repeated antibiotic use had become their own cycle. The UTIs kept returning, the antibiotics were prescribed for those and countless other illnesses, but every round seemed to leave me with a yeast infection to treat next.

Eventually, I also developed allergies to several of the antibiotics I had been given repeatedly.

This just became another version of a pattern I was beginning to recognize: treat what was happening in that moment, move on, and wait until it happened again.

But I didn’t want to spend my entire life waiting for the next infection.

I wanted to understand why my body had been struggling with this since I was a little girl.

That experience planted a question in me that I wouldn’t fully understand until years later:

Why had I learned so much about suppressing what my body was doing, but so little about understanding why it was doing it?

At nineteen, that question got louder.

Years of relying heavily on both over-the-counter and prescription NSAIDs for endometriosis pain had taken a toll on my stomach. I developed ulcers, experienced gastrointestinal bleeding, and eventually had to take a leave of absence from esthetics school.

Once again, something I had been using to manage one problem had created another I now had to figure out how to manage.

And strangely enough, esthetics would become part of the path that led me somewhere completely different.

FROM SKINCARE TO PLANT MEDICINE

I didn’t find herbal medicine because I decided pharmaceuticals were evil.

I found it because I loved skincare.

I became fascinated with ingredients, formulation, and the plants being used in topical preparations. I had always loved herbal tea, but I had never really stopped to think about what was actually inside my cup.

Then I started learning.

And once I started, I couldn’t fucking stop.

The plants I had thought of as “just tea” contained complex combinations of constituents with physiological actions. The herbs appearing in topical formulations belonged to traditions of plant medicine extending far beyond anything I had encountered in esthetics. Traditional systems of medicine had been working with many of these plants for generations.

Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at a cup of tea anymore.

I was looking at medicine.

And for the first time, I started looking at my own body differently too.

I had spent most of my life learning how to make symptoms go away.

Herbalism made me want to understand where they were coming from.

Because symptoms are messengers.

That became one of the most important shifts in the way I understood my health.

Pain isn’t happening because my body hates me.

A changing cycle isn’t my body being difficult.

Digestion, skin, sleep, energy, inflammation, mood, pain: these things can give us information about what is happening underneath the surface.

Sometimes symptom relief is necessary.                                                                                              Sometimes medication is necessary.                                                                                    Sometimes modern medicine saves your fucking life.

But quieting a symptom and understanding why it exists are not always the same thing.

And I had spent enough of my life quieting symptoms.

Eventually I didn't want to mask them under another band-aid. 

I wanted to understand the root.

SO I LEARNED THE BODY AND I LEARNED THE PLANTS.

What began as curiosity eventually became formal education in clinical herbal studies, aromatherapy, and hormone health, with a focus on anatomy & physiology, pathophysiology, plant phytotherapy, aromatherapeutic chemistry, formulation, safety, cautions/contraindications, and herb-drug interactions.

I didn’t want a Pinterest list of “10 herbs for hormones.”

I wanted to know why.

I wanted to understand the science behind it.

Why this plant?

Why does it have this action in the body?

Which constituents are responsible for that action?

How do those constituents work?

Why this person?

Why this symptom?

What systems are involved?

What is happening hormonally?

What is happening neurologically?

What is happening with inflammation?

What happened before the symptom appeared?

What pattern is the body repeating?

Knowing that an herb has traditionally been used for something wasn’t enough for me.

I wanted to understand why it worked.

That is still how I approach herbalism now.

And ironically, studying plant medicine taught me more about pharmaceuticals too.

The worlds of plants and modern medicine aren’t nearly as separate as they’re often made out to be. Numerous pharmaceuticals have histories connected to compounds first identified in plants or other natural sources, repeatedly learning from compounds found in the natural world.

Willow, for example, contains salicin, whose study contributed to the development of salicylate medicines and eventually aspirin.

Modern pharmacology may isolate, modify, or synthesize particular compounds and standardize them into medications with specific actions.

Herbalism asks me to look at something differently:

What happens when we look at the whole plant?

And it taught me to look at the person through that same holistic lens.

Not one symptom.

Not one organ, or one system.

Not one hormone, or one cycle phase.

The whole body. The whole person. The whole picture.

PILLS TO PLANTS DOESN’T MEAN “PILLS BAD, PLANTS GOOD.”

My medicine cabinet looks very different now.

I personally use very few pharmaceutical medications, but that is my story, not a prescription for anybody else’s.

I believe there is a place for modern medicine and a place for traditional plant medicine. There are medications, surgeries and medical interventions that save lives every single day.

I also believe we have become far too comfortable treating symptoms as the problem instead of asking what they might be trying to tell us.

I know what it feels like to treat one symptom, experience another problem, treat that problem, manage a side effect, and slowly accumulate interventions without ever feeling like anyone has stepped back and looked at the whole picture.

Herbalism gave me that wider lens.

It taught me that I don’t have to be at war with my body.

I can listen to it.

I can learn its patterns.

I can understand my cycle.

I can ask why.

And I can choose tools intentionally instead of reaching automatically for the only ones I was ever taught existed.

FROM PILLS TO PLANTS WASN’T ONE DECISION.

It was the little girl with migraines.

The fourteen-year-old diagnosed with endometriosis, told she may never conceive.

The teenager who almost lost her whole senior year.

The nineteen-year-old whose body finally said enough.

The esthetician who became fascinated with the plants inside her skincare.

The student who needed to know why.

And eventually, the clinical herbalist standing inside her own apothecary.

Sometimes that part still gets me.

I knew the names of medications before I knew the names of the medicine growing from the earth around me.

Now those plants line my shelves.

I formulate with them.

I teach about them.

I grow with them.

And the little girl who knew only that her body hurt became a woman who learned how to listen to what it was saying.

That journey became Walk The Earth Apothecary.

And maybe that’s what Pain to Power has always meant to me.

Not pretending the pain never happened.

Not rejecting modern medicine.

Not pretending a plant can magically fix everything a pill couldn’t.

But taking everything I lived through, everything I learned, and everything my body taught me…

and turning it into something I could finally use.

Something rooted.

Something intentional.

Something alive.

From pills to plants.

From pain to power.

And eventually,

back to myself. 🌿