Yeah, everything depends on the plant and mostly the dose. Both examples you give are apparently safe to use in small amounts as a herb for flavouring food or drinks. (from wikipedia) So I suppose even for those plants with know strong effects, just eating a leaf wont do much.

But sometimes playing with your health is a way to figure out what things work for you and what doesn’t right? I suppose the reason specific medication or herbs are being properly tested with the scientific method is because some researcher decided to ingest it or accidentally touched it and experienced the effects. Then decided to study it properly and ask people to do the same.

I’ve also found that some things that have well know effects, like coffee. Don’t work for me at all or have the opposite effect. So you always have to test it someway on yourself, even after checking the scientific consensus.

Thank you, appreciate it!

I’ve actually had moments where I was considering trying to use a significantly higher amount to test if I could feel any change. Like brewing a tea with 10 bags instead of 1. Or maybe drinking 10 teas a day.

If it has any effect, you would expect it to be very noticeable then. In reality it would probably just make me feel sick, so I haven’t tried it yet!

Thanks for writing! I do agree it can be tricky.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself avoiding medication and traditional medicine in general.

My pain/discomfort is often recurring and does not have clear reasons (at least not to me) And I think it’s usually not because of a single reason, which makes it difficult to treat.

So I could take one medication and it might actually help, but I would still feel bad because there are maybe other things still affecting me. That makes it feel like no medication helps. But the reality might just be complexer than that.

I suppose I’m one of those people who don’t notice much at all. Even with modern medication. But that might be more of an issue with how my brain works, rather than that medication does not work whatsoever.

Honestly, I don’t find I notice much with modern medicine either, which is why I typically don’t really use medication (or herbs for that matter)

Even things like coffee, which supposedly have quite a noticeable and consistent effect for people, don’t really work the same way for me. If I drink coffee, I either notice nothing, or I get very sleepy. So then I kinda started to doubt if things have the effect that people say it has, and how to check better what effect it has on me specifically.

Once, a doctor also prescribed me these pills with passionflower extract to relax. And I found it so weird that one would have to pay quite a lot for pills that just contain some plant that can grow indefinitely in your garden. Either way it didn’t matter because I didn’t feel any effect, medication or herb.

Thanks for your insights!

I do find people to very much quickly grab certain medication or such when feeling bad. Like taking a pain-killer when they have a headache. I’ve never heard a person drinking like 2 liters of tea and taking it every day.

I suppose a lot of these effects were known based on what people told they were useful for in traditional medicine or such. The question is if those assumptions are correct.

I do believe that people might have been able to tell better in the past what the effects of these things were, because that was the only options they had at that time. But I feel I can’t tell either way.