Herbal Information

More than 30% of modern medicine’s drugs have botanical origins. For example, willow tree bark contains salicylic acid, aspirin’s active agent; cinchona bark has malaria-fighting quinine; foxglove digitalis treats congestive heart failure; rosy periwinkle has leukemia-fighting chemicals; and the evergreen ephedra is commonly used in decongestants. Even life-saving penicillin that revolutionized spinal cord injury healthcare was isolated from molds used as folk remedies.

Given such a botanical basis, why does modern medicine struggle so much with herbal remedies? After all, pharmaceutics and herbs mediate their action through physiologically active molecules. Part of the answer is that the acceptance of herbal healing would challenge modern medicine’s belief that it is a scientifically driven instead of an empirically based discipline.

Specifically, modern medicine’s drug use is based on rigorously designed clinical trials, while herbal use is based on centuries’ of experience. Because the pharmaceutical approach focuses on only one molecularly defined drug, scientists can more readily evaluate cause and effect, determine mechanisms of action, and define appropriate dosing. Such assessments are difficult for complex herbal remedies possessing a multitude of biologically active components.

As such, scientists prefer to initially isolate a remedy’s active agents believing that overall activity will be the sum of the component parts. This reductionistic view, however, is rarely true because the plant components act more in concert than individually to create the overall healing effect. In many cases, scientists have been disappointed to discover that the isolated agent had less activity than the crude herb.