What
It gets complex very fast. Helen assumed that "the body knows best". The wisdom of the body and all that. I think that this should be a starting point for all, an axiom. The problem is that the body - once stuck in a chronic state - thinks short-term. It says "I can't afford to upregulate this X process because the produced ROS would damage me too much": it does not have the insight that this "short-term" damage would be crucial for it to "break the feedback loop" that is maintaining the chronic state. That's how I see it.
For the last 1-2 years I've been reading books about TCM and been following chinese medicine communities online. I met and talked to a few classically trained (way different than modernized/western version) chinese doctors. The consensus is: "if a patient is experiencing symptoms during treatment, you have failed to consider all aspects of the pattern". Some guy even said that he considers what we call herx/healing reactions to be completely avoidable and a sign of incomplete herbal formulation (aka sign of insufficient knowledge). However it's not herbalism as we know it in the west: consider that proper TCM docs very rarely prescribe pre-made formulas; they make up new ones that fit the specific pattern of the patient and modify them based on observable changes in the patient's physical appearance and behaviour (btw, most TCM docs I've talked to do say that inquiry - questioning the patient about their current symptoms, medical history, and lifestyle - is usually most informative, followed closely by tongue analysis and examination of other aspects of the body; but there was one that said that one of the best TCM doctor he knows requires his patients to be totally quiet for the duration of the examination: no talking takes place). And this is not 2-4 herbs at a time but rather 10-20 herbs (it is considered a great achievement if a doctor has very high treatment success rate and averages less than 10 herbs per formulation). This is totally unheard of here in the West. It gets very VERY expensive... Well, acupuncture and tuina and moxibustion and gua sha and so on - all these interventions can achieve more than "the best drug that conventional medicine can offer" if done correctly. But herbal therapy is still considered to be inavoidable in most complex chronic conditions in TCM... (Although I have met people with PFS and ME/CFS that "magically" recovered after 1-3 sessions of some TCM massage. So it's not a joke...) Supposedly TCM is the primary treatment method in like 10% of all hospitals in China, and in more than 40% of hospitals they have dedicated TCM departments.
All that being said, I think that for chronic health problems TCM herbal therapy simply isn't sustainable for most people. In the future it might become an elite/high class only thing. So maybe we need dynamic biochemistry refined by TCM principles and knowledge-base. I think TCM's pattern approach is basically what Helen (and Bruschi) was attempting to do via modern biochemistry (crucially, not the "static" kind of biology but rather systems biology). I have not yet came across a fruitful synthesis between the thought style that Helen excelled in and advanced TCM pattern-thinking. I think one could cure anything if they mastered both thought styles...
I think Helen grasped the essence of a good standard protocol for most people, a bit of fasting, chelation, good nutrition. But complex chronic conditions require a more nuanced bioindividual approach.
