“In the UK we have an abundance of dandelions growing all around us (restoring the kidneys and liver), and also hedges laden with hawthorn berries (tonic for the heart and controlling blood pressure). When we consider the UK’s major health conditions it may be wise to look around us to see how Mother Nature is reaching out to us.”
Our modern industrialised culture is fast seeing plants as only ornamental objects for our homes and gardens, yet this strange cultural anomaly has only existed in our own recent history. To every other culture, the plants that surround us are an all-in-one living supermarket, pharmacy and even off-licence. In just a few generations, we in the West have lost a huge amount of common knowledge of the varied and vitally important uses of the botanical world.
Yet we are just as reliant as we have ever been on plants for our daily survival – we just don’t realise it. They are responsible for the air we breath, the food we eat, and the stability of the earth’s climate, and are the basis of a large part of our medicine, with up to 50% of the world’s top proprietary drugs being originally derived from natural sources. And still the research continues to find new medicinal plants among the world’s disappearing rainforests and mistakenly viewed wilderness. Understanding the medicinal uses of plants around us is the way every other culture on earth sees plants, so how did we get here?
Many of these beliefs are not just old wives’ tales or urban myths that have to be swept away by reason and science. Traditional plant knowledge has provided modern Western medicine with some of its most important drugs such as aspirin, morphine and penicillin and is still offering some important tip-offs that may lead to new breakthroughs. The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 80% of the world’s population relies on plant-based medicine as the key form of health care and actively promotes its use. Some of us may remember our grandmothers or if we’re lucky our mothers brewing some chamomile tea for a tummy ache, or opening the elderberry vinegar for a sore throat, but sadly most of us don’t have many such memories and were offered paracetamol with some remaining wisdom of honey and lemon.
We have lost our connection and interdependence on nature but we’ve also been encouraged to mistrust our natural and instinctive knowledge. Doubt has been successfully sown among us by the practice of modern medicine, and urbanisation has successfully removed nature’s remedies further away from us. It is cheaper and easier to run to a pharmacy rather than a polluted hedgerow where we could get confused and pick the wrong plant.
In recent years there’s been a surge of interest in using natural remedies to treat common ailments. Many of us consider them to be natural, cheap and less harmful to the body than pharmaceutical drugs, able to ease both everyday and the chronic health problems that orthodox medicine finds so difficult to treat.
The science of herbal medicine or phytopharmacy covers plants with powerful actions like belladonna and phytolacca as well as gently acting herbs such as chamomile and mint. Gentle does not mean less powerful: they simply do not have any appreciable toxic effects and can be safely taken over an extended period of time. With the gentler herbs there is often no standardised active principle that determines the therapeutic action; rather there is a comprehensive complex of active principles, with individual components interacting with others, so that only the complex as a whole will produce the therapeutic action.
Herbal medicine has come a long way since the days of ancient herbalism. Until the 20th century, plants were the only medicines available; today we have the advantage of modern science helping us to identify the most effective remedies but with 50,000 medicinal plants grown across the globe we still have a long way to go.
The study and use of medicinal plants is now a scientific subject. Knowledge of medicinal plants has been recorded from antiquity yet the rise of chemistry and the development of synthetic drugs have caused herbal knowledge to be neglected. A new climate was created by a methodology concerned predominantly with effects that were measurable under experimental conditions. Within this mindset it is difficult to know what to do with medicinal plants. Chemical compounds could always be exactly analysed and in phytotherapy this method on the whole applies only to medicinal plants with powerful actions. Difficulties arise when working out active ingredients in the gentler herbs whose ingredients work together and can have many therapeutic actions across the whole body.
Natural remedies and medicinal plants are a complete product of nature with innumerable individual constituents, active principles and other substances that may make a significant contribution to the total medicinal action. This is similar for pure and whole foods rather than processed and fortified foods. This is perhaps why many people would prefer a gentler natural alternative to harsher chemical pharmaceuticals.
To put it rather too simply: on the one hand we have thousands of years of knowledge and experience of herbal remedies and their therapeutic action and on the other, tried and tested chemical compounds that produce fast acting and powerful drugs. Phytotherapy is still developing to bring the two together, ancient knowledge with today’s scientific possibilities. In the middle are the physicians who not only try to listen to all the needs of the patients but have a personal relationship with the medicinal plants they prescribe.
Reference source: Rudolph Fritz Weiss MD ‘Herbal medicine’.