ALTERATIVES

ALTERATIVES:

“[Alteratives] improve the quality of the blood, increase the appetite, promote digestion, and accelerate the process of elimination.”  Harvey Wickes Felter, 1922

The word alterative has variously been defined as something that “alters” the body in a non-specific but broadly beneficial way, a blood purifier, blood cleanser, and detoxifier...

Every physician would agree that individual cells could not be viable at all if they 

could not absorb nutrients and eliminate their cellular wastes.  So too, there could 

be no bodily life at all if an organism could not obtain high quality energy and 

nutrition and rid itself of metabolic waste products.  To any complex multicellular 

organism, the delivery and removal of such vital substances depends on a healthy 

digestive system.  The more one studies physiology, the more obvious it becomes 

that the quality of the fluids in each and every cell, depends on quality of the blood, 

which depends on the efficacy of digestive, absorptive and eliminative processes.  

Whether you are an amoeba, an earthworm, an aardvark, or a human, you are 

what you eat/digest/absorp/don’t eliminate/etc.  Simple though it may sound, 

the use of alterative herbs could indeed alter one for the better.  

Any tool a physician/herbalist has to increase the strength of the digestive 

and eliminative functions, the quality of the blood, and the delivery of nutrients to

 individual cells, could only support health and vitality. For this reason, 

alteratives are the mainstay of herbal and naturopathic medicine.      

some examples of Alteratives:

Taraxicum (Dandelion) , Arctium lappa (Burdock), Rumex (Yellow Dock), 

Mahonia (Oregon Grape), Achillea (Yarrow), Trifolium (Red Clover)

Alterative herbs are those which are capable of improving overall health by balancing 

and tonifying basic bodily processes.  Alteratives stimulate digestive and 

absorptive functions thereby optimizing nutrition.  Alteratives also promote

elimination functions and thereby the removal of wastes, minimizing toxic 

accumulations and enhancing intestinal aerobic flora.  Due to these actions, 

alteratives are considered to be cleansing and general tonics.  Alteratives 

improve the nutritional status, improving the quality of the blood, correcting 

deficient absorption and metabolism, and clearing toxicity.   

Alteratives accomplish all this primarily by stimulating secretory activity of 

the digestive organs and optimizing gastrointestinal health  Alterative herbs 

also contain nutrients, minerals including trace minerals, electrolytes, and 

hormonal precursors that all nourish and stimulate metabolism.