Julian Barker started his training in herbal medicine in North and Central America, before returning Britain as an apprentice herb-grower at Suffolk Herbs while studying concurrently on NIMH's tutorial course, at which point he joined the first cohort at the School of Herbal Medicine. In 1983, he opened a clinic in Brighton offering acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy, and osteopathy but recently has upsized to a single practice.

Teaching botany at the School of Herbal Medicine for over twenty years, Julian supervised BSc dissertations and taught philosophy on the MSc course in herbal medicine at the University of East London. Since 1998 he has worked in Paris and has studied in London with Dr. Jean-Claude Lapraz on the application of medicinal plants along Endobiogenic lines.

He is a fellow of the Linnaean Society, serves on the Accreditation Board of the European Herbal Practitioners' Association, and is a member of the College of Practicing Phytotherapists and the National Institute of Medical Herbalists.

PREFACE

THE ORGANISATION OF THE TEXT

PART ONE: POISE

SECTION ONE: HEALTH: WHAT CAN WE MEAN?

- Definitions of health

- Definition of health for the purposes of the current work

- The scope and purpose of the model

- The limitations of the model Model of health in this current work

SECTION TWO: AXIOMS, THEOREMS AND IDEOLOGY

- Split personalities

- Personalities restored

- Axioms

- Human development

- Mind, thoughts, conceptions

- The sound of one hand clapping

- There is no life without motion

- There is no life without energy

SECTION THREE: THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE ADAPTIVE RESPONSE

- Five crucial interlocking ideas

- 1/5: Mindedness

- 2/5: The interconnected matrices

- 3/5: Life as trajectory

- Human drives as a function of time

- 4/5: Capacitance

- 5/5: The distribution of energy (maintenance of a ratio between capacitance and adaptation)

- Recapitulation of Section 3 - The biological basis of the adaptive

- Some examples of accumulation and discharge

- The constant cycle of accumulation and discharge

- The adaptive capacity

- Summary of common chronic conditions

- Footnote to Section 3: adaptive capacity is not a heritable trait

SECTION FOUR: POISE AS AN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO HEALTH

- Parallel worlds

- Binaries: the garden with forking paths

- Circadian binaries and transition zones

- Symmetry

- Gaia's sister: the biosphere-separations and divisions

- Things and events

- Boundary conditions

- Bounded states

- Where do we draw the line and with what do we draw it?

- Essentialism

- Soil

- Gaia's children: fauns and fauna

- Separations and divisions

- Fixation

- Oscillation

- Fixation

SECTION FIVE: THE TERRAIN: MIND AND MINDEDNESS

- The necessity for a concept of terrain

- Organisational structure

- Structure and information

- The trajectory

- Physiology as music

- Anatomy and physiology in time

- Resonance

- Lines and penetrance

- Rationality

- Reason

- Bipolarity

- Facts and occasions

- Things and events

- The structure of the terrain

- Stabilising the trajectory

- Causality and scale: death and life

- Mindedness in the structure of poise

- The hypothalamic mind

- Mindedness

- Consciousness

- Poise as stabiliser of the trajectory

- The adaptors and regulators of poise

- The analogic mind

- Consciousness

- A memory is always an abstraction

SECTION SIX: LIMITATIONS OF THEORY

- Escape from limitations

- Time and drive

- Rheology

- Patterns and drivers

1. The hypothalamic-pituitary driver

2. Cholinergic and aminergic referees/regulators

3. Hypothalamic-posterior pituitary Intensifiers

4. Organ responders and pacemakers

- Potential applications of theory

- Configuration of the terrain within the human body

- Moravec's paradox

- The materialist defence

SECTION SEVEN: HEALTH AND POISE

- The hypothalamic mind

- Mindedness

- Consciousness

- Poise as stabiliser of the trajectory

- The adaptors and regulators of poise

- The analogic mind

- Consciousness

- A memory is always an abstraction

PART TWO: PEOPLE: WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE CLINIC

Preface to Part Two

SECTION EIGHT: PUBLIC HEALTH AND MEDICINE

- The medical theoretician

- Alternative medicine

- Traditional medicine

- What is the alternative to medicine?

SECTION NINE: THE CONSULTATION IN SOCIAL CONTEXT

- The setting the speech the style the point the outcome

- Whom do we treat?

- The presentation

- Classification of patients?

- The Worried Well

- Discomfort

- Contrarians

- Fugitives

- Preaching to the converted

- Consumer health-ists

- Difficult patients

- Self-defeating patients

- Anxious patients

- Common-sense pluralists

- One-offs

- Cost

- The functions of a physician

- Good medicine

- The great divide

- The cobbler's children go to school barefoot

- Continuity and belonging

- Style

- Loyalty and power

- Your own style

- Fashion and style

- The practice is organic

- Could herbs help my husband?

SECTION TEN: STAGES IN THE CLINICAL PROCESS

- The clinical process

- Observation precedes the physical examination

- The consultation as data collection

- Records

- Stages in the process

- Judgements

- Advice

- Assessment of the terrain from the history and examination

- The presentation of the patient

- Time of day

- The circadian moment

- Our fractal histories

SECTION ELEVEN: CLINICAL EXAMINATION

- The face

- Tongue, eye and pulse

- The voice

- Hair

- Chilly mortals

- Containment

- Bodily cavities in the axial skeleton

- The musculoskeletal system

- Zoning

- Human cartography

SECTION TWELVE: SYSTEMIC REVIEW

- Sleep

- Fatigue

- Confusion

- Lungs and colon

- Heart

- Energy, Drive and fatiguability

- Balance in the broadest sense

- Digestive system

- Teeth

- Renal or sifting system

- Skin, hair and circulation

- Hands, feet and circulation

- Menstrual history

- Asymmetric symptoms

- Seasonal

- Snap observations

APPENDIX TO SECTIONS TEN, ELEVEN AND TWELVE:

RECOMMENDATIONS SHEETS

- Sheet 1. General recommendations towards helpful dietary habits ¿ ¿ ¿

- Sheet 2. Special recommendations towards reducing the provocation of insulin (as well as blood lipids) and reducing abdominal fat

- Sheet 3. Iron

- Sheet 4. Daily breathing exercise

- Sheet 5. Seasonal fasting

- Sheet 6. GOUT and high levels of uric acid in the blood

SECTION THIRTEEN: PATTERNS OF LIFE

- Staging, cycling and timing

- The primes of life

- Integrality: comparing and contrasting

- A chart of ages

- Think of a number

- Biorhythms

- Biological time

- Photosensitivity

- Claims of sensitivity

- Meteoropathy and barometric sensitivity

- Acoustic hypersensitivity

- Biological time and infectious illness

- Recovery time

- Sleep

- The parallel brains

- Modules of sleep

- The alternation between sleeping and feeding Ratios

- In summary

ECTION FOURTEEN: THE PATIENT AS PERSONALITY

- Four element theory

- Contemporary theories of personality

- Personality and age

- The patient as personality

- Alternators

- Alternators as a failure of circadian entrainment

- Mental states

- Mood swings

- Mood stabilisation

- Containment

- Creativity

- Promiscuity and paradoxical loyalty as a response to separation anxiety

- Mental illness is always social illness

- Attachment and detachment

- Configuration

- All of our lives are a continuity

- Act and activation

- Pleasure and pain as alternators

- Personality and clinical assessment

- Anxiety and personality

- Personality and time

- Personality as behaviour

- Wilfulness and selflessness

- Will and willingness

- Personality as an emergence from family

- The pivotal person

- The sacrificial personality

- The patient as personality

- The patient as commodity

- The human economy

- The human ecology

- Personality as outcome

- Personality forgotten

- Accumulation and discharge-recapitulation Multiple choice

SECTION FIFTEEN: THE CLINICAL ARENA: SPACE AND TIME

- The appointment

- The space

- Holding the space

- Sacred space

- Mimesis

- What is herbal medicine good for?

- Enthusiasm

- The Ailment: What does the patient wish for? Where exactly is the problem? ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿ ¿

- Health: the elusive diagnosis

- Complaints: a metaphor?

SECTION SIXTEEN: THE PRACTITIONER OF MEDICINE

- Empathy and the dressing-up box

- Imagination

- Improvisation

- An actor prepares

- Ambiguity

- Style of herbal medicine in Britain

- A broad church

SECTION SEVENTEEN: THE UNCONSCIOUS

- Repression

- Leaking

- Eurocentric

- Unknowing

- Dreams and dreaming: the facets of life

- Healing

- Reflexive collectivism

- Triangles of identity

- Fixity and range

- Liminality

- Zeal, family size and escape from the shadows

SECTION EIGHTEEN: THE ENTRAINMENT OF POISE

- Symbolic and pragmatic thinking

- Evidence based medicine

- He who pays the piper calls the tune

- A definition of poise

- Uniqueness and the biology of poise

- Loss of capacitance leads to symptoms of subjective illness

- Capacitors

- Fatigue, listlessness and depression

- Poise is modifiable

- Is it really healthy to never get ill?

- Persistence

- A diagrammatic representation of poise

- Accidents, distractions and...