Controversy of Medicinal Herbs

by Kelsey Ligon

As someone who is naturally suspicious of anything that someone tries to sell me, I was also suspicious of medicinal herbs.  My thinking was, why not just get a regular prescription from a doctor if something goes wrong? 

The thing is, the more I read about healthcare, the more I realize how fallible it actually is.  Doctors are frequently overworked, and they are constantly being sold drugs by pharmacy sales reps.  These pharmacy sales reps are in hospitals and clinics daily, and they bring with them all sorts of goodies to entice the doctors to buy their goods.  I knew someone that worked in a clinic, and she said that she never needed to bring her lunch because there was always a decent spread of food from one sales rep or another.

Keeping this in mind, are doctors actually prescribing the best medication?  When they are seeing several patients a day and sorting through the information related to symptoms, causes, and treatments, they are bound to slip up or even pick the first drug that comes to mind, which is probably the one that the sales rep with the Jimmy John sandwiches was trying to sell him yesterday.

Frankly, I would love it if my doctor prescribed me more natural treatments than drugs.  I think we need a health care system that focuses more on preventative, natural, and holistic care. For example, the health care system in Japan encourages doctors to look at the patients a long time before symptoms get really bad, and they prescribe preventative options.

Dried Rosemary: can be used in lotions and ointments. 

Additionally, there are some doctors here in the United States that are practicing a form of preventative medicine in which they give their patients a prescription to get fruits and vegetables from the farmer’s market.  In their minds, getting patients to focus on a healthy lifestyle instead of a new trick drug will help patients develop healthy habits and reduce their needs for prescription medication. 

I apply this same kind of thinking to medicinal herbs.  They are plants that are grown locally, and you can even grow your own at home.  They have fewer negative side effects than prescription drugs.  Aside from the difference in side effects, the only difference between medicinal herbs and prescription drugs is the length of time for them to take effect.  Prescription drugs are designed to be fast acting, which is what we typically want when we get sick.

However, because medicinal herbs are slower acting, they are also better for your body and easier for your body to digest.  They follow the same principle as the prescription for natural foods from the farmers market.  The food that you get at a farmer’s market is not going to have immediate and fast results, and in this culture, that can be a turn off because people really want fast-acting drugs. 

Going back to the example of doctors subscribing fruit and vegetables, getting fresh fruits and vegetables to make yourself healthier takes time.  So do medicinal herbs, and that’s fine.  If we really want to take care of our bodies, we have to take the time to take care of them.  We have to give them the nutrients they need and stop filling them with artificial and mass-produced pills.  We have to take the time (and care) to research and read up on the best practices for our bodies. 

Herbs I've grown in my garden and kitchen. 

This is why we’ve started this blog.  We really want to help people understand in their own terms what herbal medicines can do.  These medicines have been around for centuries.  The problem is that when people hear that lemon balm was used in Ancient Greece to banish anxiety, they think that medicinal herbs supported superstitious beliefs because back then, people didn’t really understand science the way we do now.

That’s partly true, but in the case of a lot of medicinal herbs, a lot of those ancient doctors really knew what they were doing.  After hundreds of years of observations of patients, they figured out that some medicinal herbs really worked to alleviate symptoms.  Lemon balm has recently been found to help alleviate agitation in patients.

Furthermore, Catherine Ulbricht, PharmD, a senior attending pharmacist at Massachusetts General Hospital, says about medical herbs, “Practically all of the most widely used drugs have an herbal origin . . .  Many statins are based on fungi; and Tamiflu originated from Chinese star anise.”

For this reason, I am starting a series to help people understand what medicinal herbs once were to people and what research has shown them to do in recent years.  I hope you’ll be interested in the history and excited to create a healthier lifestyle for yourself.

References:

Woodard, Stephanie.  “Ancient Remedies Modern Cures.”  Prevention.  Feb. 2009, Vol. 62 Issue 2, p. 102-108.