The wellness industry is booming, pointing to both our collective health crisis and increasing personal agency when it comes to healing. Unfortunately, this boom has been rife with manipulative marketing, ungrounded trends, magic bullet promises, and over-generalized advice. In response, there’s an increasingly loud call for a return to personalized medicine, which is a cornerstone of TCM. While our tradition champions a bioindividual approach, it’s also rooted in thousands of years of applied wisdom regarding the true foundations of health and the accessible, nearly universal pathways for its pursuit. In prioritizing balance, adaptability, and alignment with the natural world, we can cultivate a resilience that is truly the ultimate defense. 

Though absolutely capable of offering support for specific health issues, TCM’s focus is not necessarily on curing disease, but on nourishment so intelligent that it fortifies our innate capacity for vibrant health. This is precisely why we’ve dedicated ourselves to sharing TCM’s tonic herbs—a special category of essentially food-grade medicines that are both safe and exceedingly valuable for almost everybody. Each of these “superior” herbs promotes our propensity for adaptability in unique and specialized ways, all helping to bring us back into homeostasis and supporting the smooth functioning of our whole systems. 

While we talk a lot in TCM about the importance of maintaining and returning to homeostasis, there’s a modern term that perfectly describes this crucial capacity. Allostasis was first introduced by scientists Peter Sterling and Joseph Eyer, referring to the ability to maintain internal balance through change, or the capacity to achieve stability by adapting. This dynamic responsiveness highlights not only the changes to which we are constantly needing to adapt, but also the intimate relationship between us as microcosms of the larger world to which we belong. TCM places great emphasis on supporting the alignment of our bodies to the conditions of our external environments—a reminder that no one does recalibration better than the earth itself, and that the earth has gifted us natural medicines that nourish this capacity within our bodies. 

Tonic herbs, adaptogens, and immunomodulators all carry the acute intelligence to regulate one’s specific physiological conditions to varying degrees, making them generally safe for long-term, consistent use. While there is notable overlap between these three herbal categories, adaptogens take it one step further than tonic herbs with an explicitly bidirectional effect. This means that the herb’s constituents will perform as needed in order to help restore the stressed physiological conditions to a normalized state—capable of either toning down hyperactive systems or stimulating hypoactive systems. Acting primarily upon the HPA axis and the sympathetic-adrenal system, adaptogens help regulate the body’s response to stress. However, these herbs also greatly support immunity, by helping to mitigate chronic immune cell depletion, improving the body’s defenses, and exerting a balancing action on the nervous system. 

Immunomodulators are similar in that they don’t force physiological activity in strictly one direction, but rather support a state of harmonized responsiveness. With a hyperfocus on immunity, these herbs can either downregulate an overactive immune response (e.g., autoimmune or allergic conditions), or boost a sluggish immune system (e.g., chronic infections or fatigue). This is especially important as we’re living in a time of immune dysregulation on a massive scale—from chronic inflammation and autoimmune disorders to immune suppression / over-activation caused by excess stress, sleep deficiencies, high toxic load, and environmental imbalances. Like the tonic herbs, immunomodulators work in a slow, deep way to restore balance, with benefits that tend to build over time in support of overall resilience. 

As TCM is a deeply holistic tradition, it’s understood that multiple bodily systems and energetic forces are implicated in our overall immunity, with both surface-level defense and deeper regulatory mechanisms playing a role. The Wei Qi is the first and outermost layer of the body’s immune defense—a kind of boundary that shields us from external pathogens. The Wei Qi does have some regulatory actions, like maintaining the stability of our internal temperature in the face of external changes, by managing the opening and closing of pores in the skin. This highlights the importance of allostasis—maintaining internal balance through change. Immunomodulators magnify and deepen this capacity by supporting the body’s natural ability to self-regulate; this means they excel more in supporting the adaptive immune system, which holds memory, intelligence, and responsibility for long-term resilience to potential threats. 

Some of our favorite tonic herbs are also immunomodulators that build our deepest reserves to meet today’s challenges with an intelligent responsiveness and resilience to withstand.

• Reishi - indicated for both an overactive immune system (autoimmune conditions) and a deficient immune system (leukopenia, a condition characterized by a low number of white blood cells, crucial for fighting off disease). This “mushroom of immortality” enhances natural killer (NK) cell activity and reduces pro-inflammatory cytokines. It helps the body adapt to seasonal changes, environmental toxins, and life transitions.

• Cordyceps - this very special fungi both tonifies Yang and nourishes Yin, thus deeply supporting the root of our innate regulatory mechanisms. In human studies, it was found to prevent immunosuppression and help restore normal macrophage and NK cell activity, and it further enhances T-cell function and balances Th1/Th2 response. In TCM, it also supports the Wei Qi and has a particular affinity for respiratory health. 

• Eleuthero - also known as Siberian Ginseng, it has been employed for thousands of years to boost immunity, increase endurance, and reduce fatigue. Eleuthero works on multiple layers of the immune system, particularly when stress is a major contributing factor to immune dysfunction. It enhances NK cell activity, regulates cytokine production, increases T-cell and macrophage function, balances cortisol and the HPA axis, and supports the Wei Qi.  

Cultivating our adaptive immunity entails nourishing the terrain, rather than just targeting invaders. Because these profoundly intelligent herbs have bidirectional awareness and hold  long-term somatic memory, they support the immune system in appropriately calibrating its response in each unique situation. Thus, we are able to both appropriately respond to threats and downregulate—an intelligence that aptly enhances our deepest reserves and capacity for resilience. 

Interested in learning more? We highly recommend the book Adaptogens: Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief by David Winston and Steven Maimes.