Choosing and using is the workflow once you already want a blend. This page is the gate: when.
A single plant is enough when
- The job is narrow: guayusa in the morning instead of a third coffee.
- You are dieting one teacher. Luna’s order was one plant at a time for a reason.
- You do not yet know how you react. Adding four barks on day one hides the culprit.
A formula earns its pot when
- Two or three systems are loud at once — gut, sleep, and a thin immune winter.
- One plant at a useful dose is too harsh, and overlap lets you stay gentler.
- You are past the acute purge and need a reconstruction blend, or the reverse.
That is the logic behind Why use herbal formulas and the four rules in How to combine.
When not to
- Emergency: chest pain, surgical abdomen, anaphylaxis, a stone that is blocking a kidney. Hospital. Not Espíritu del Lago.
- You cannot name your drugs. MAOIs, warfarin, chemo, immunosuppressants — a random “immune booster” is how people get hurt. Cat’s claw plus an immunosuppressant is a fight.
- Pregnancy, unless the person in the room has delivered babies and cooked these plants.
- A formula whose H2 is a disease name. If the label says it treats cancer or diabetes, put it down. Our own formula pages have been cleaned of that habit; the internet has not.
Start, stop, rotate
Start after the acute fever has broken, or after you have told the truth about the SSRI. Run two to four weeks. Stop if rash, black stool, jaundice, or a depression you did not come in with. Rotate from cleanse to tonic when the tongue and the sleep say the terrain has changed — not because a 28-day challenge ended.
Timing is the craft. The plants are just the ingredients.
