The author of this article, Dylan Warren-Davis, emigrated to Australia from Britain four years ago. Since completing his herbal training, Dylan has been involved in further research of his own rediscovering the lost European metaphysical teachings, upon which Western herbal knowledge is based. He has been engaged in the commercial production of herbal tinctures and has been a consultant on the manufacturing of herbal tinctures to the herbal industry in Britain. The vital force is also seen as the substance out of which all ideas are formed. Accordingly particular mental attitudes influence emotional responses which, in turn, affects physiological function.
Vitalism embraces the inter-relationship of mental, emotional and physical experience.
From a vitalistic stance, health is synonymous with the harmonious or ease of flow to the vital force through the body and psyche, while dis-ease arises when the flow of vital energy is disrupted. Therapeutically the objective of the medicine or healing is to restore the harmony to the flow. Modern conventional medicine regards vitalism as outdated and having been disproved with the apparent success of biochemical physiology in explaining how the body functions. This is not strictly true. As physicians started using reductionist scientific ideas they simply lost the ability to understand the subtlety of vitalism.