Why it isn’t Popular
Scientific research into medicinal plants has been scarce for several reasons:
- Strict herbal medicine takes a holistic approach and considers the synergistic interactions of plants, termed “polypharmacy”. Modern scientific research usually studies one specific substance at a time. The problem is that itdoesn’t really paint the whole picture of a plant’s efficacy or bioavailability.
- As a holistic practice, the individual is part of the healing equation. A mass-produced drug can’t consider the specific needs of the person using it.
- Most pharmaceutical research is funded by pharmaceutical companies with billions of dollars to spend. An equivalent infrastructure with the financial wherewithal doesn’t exist for plant-based medicine. That’s partly because plants can be grown in your backyard, and are therefore less profitable.
- Although many pharmaceuticals are plant-derived, “active” ingredients are isolated and purified in the laboratory. Then, the rest of the plant (and any potential combination with others for more effective results) is discarded.
The evidence for the need for herbal medicine is clear, however.
As the editor of The British Medical Journal stated:
“It is a basic principle of pharmacotherapy that all drugs have beneficial and harmful effects… Unfortunately in the balance between benefits and risks, it is an uncomfortable truth that most drugs do not work in most patients.” (7)
The Pros of Herbal Medicine
A meta-analysis of studies on the use of plants individually, in combination with other plants, and in conjunction with pharmaceuticals for the treatment of critical illness was published in 2014 by the European Herbal & Traditional Practitioners Association.
They found that medicinal plant therapy is effective for the following illnesses:
- cardiovascular conditions
- diabetes
- irritable bowel syndrome
- skin conditions
- respiratory conditions (including asthma)
- depression
- arthritis
- gynecological conditions
- migraine
- obesity
- as an antibiotic for a bacterial infection
The study concludes:
“Many of the diseases identified in this review are instances where conventional treatments are far from satisfactory or, as in the case of antibiotics, where the potency of existing drug treatments is starting to wane…Novel approaches such as evidence synthesis (the development of techniques to combine multiple sources of evidence) can be used to integrate and interpret existing information drawn from a wide spectrum of data sources that might otherwise be excluded from the standard systematic review. This will help to illustrate areas where herbal medicine can make an immediate contribution to public health care.
“Regulatory bodies…need to adjust the somewhat restrictive requirements specifically designed to test pharmaceuticals to render them sufficiently flexible to incorporate trials that validate both herbal practice and its plant medicines…This is surely squarely in the public interest.” (8)
The Bottom Line
Kew’s 2017 report on medicinal plants puts into perspective the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. Plants nourish and heal us effectively because we are all of the same earth. Whether labeled medicine in a bottle, grown on a windowsill or plucked from a bush in the forest, our ancestors used what was given to fix what was broken. It worked too, (fairly effectively, it seems) since we’re still here.