While that’s generally true, sometimes they are good enough. I use Hypericum perforatum for mild seasonal affective disorder, with very good results. As for other herbs, I hear that people use medicinal strains of cannabis for pain management, sometimes also with good results, and with less side effects than opioids.
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Of course they do.
Any material that you ingest for the purpose of inducing a physiological response is, by definition, a drug. If you get that material directly from a plant, then it’s not pure; its safety and efficacy will generally not have been ascertained with the same rigour as a drug that went through Phase III clinical trials; and its dosage will vary wildly depending on how the plant extract was prepared, which chemo-, geno-, or phenotype of the plant you used, and probably what time of year (or day) you harvested the plant. But it’ll still trigger biochemical changes and a physiological response, so it’s very much a drug.
Which means, like any drug, it necessarily has side effects and contraindications with other drugs, because your body is pretty complicated and because there are only so many P450 enzymes to go around. I mean, you’ll have no idea what they are, because nobody’s tested it, but it’s natural, and that’s the important thing.
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I agree with the rest of your post, but that ‘nobody tested it’ is frequently not true. There’s a lot of articles in scientific journals about it. I’ve even personally did experiments for testing of biomechanical properties of tissue during such tests.
Sure. Natural health product chemistry is a huge research field, and there are multiple high quality, high impact journals on the subject. Two former presidents of my country’s research society in the area are in offices a few metres down the hall from me. But identifying possible bioactive compounds in a plant extract, or analyzing how the concentration of those compounds varies from sample to sample, or even running in vitro studies of the effects of those compounds on various cells in a 96 well plate, is not the same thing as Phase III clinical trials. When I say “tested it”, I mean tested in a placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trial involving human beings, not a principal component analysis or studying cultured cells in a polystyrene dish. Those are important studies, and they can give you lead candidates for the clinical trials, but they don’t tell you the same things that those trials do.
If those trials have been run, then you know with certainty that a particular purified molecular compound or combination of compounds, taken in this dose for this period, has this specific therapeutic effect, and these specific side effects, and you know that it’s safe when ingested under specified conditions.
If you use raw plant material, you don’t know any of those things, and you can’t know any of those things, because the concentration and bio-availability of the potentially active compounds in the plant varies so wildly: it varies with sub-species, it varies with plant tissue, it varies with location and conditions of harvest, it varies with preparation. There is no way to guarantee any control over dosage of a supposedly pharmaceutical active material, no way to know what side effects it might induce, no way to know whether the perceived effects are genuine (rather than due to placebo effect or confirmation bias) and no way to know that’s it’s actually safe.
The people that do natural health product research get that, and they are generally in favour of greater regulation of natural health products, because they understand that the current state of the natural health product industry encourages people to self-medicate with products that contain highly variable amounts (including, often, zero) of drugs whose efficacy and safety has not been proven.
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That, at least, isn’t absurd. Not very efficient in most cases, but used within reason the benefits/risks ratio can be worth it. Depending on your needs, it can fall into “good enough” territory.
Speaking of herbs, there’s a good example of how self-contradicting homeopathy is: arnica. Arnica is well known for its soothing effects on bruises, it’s largely used for that in “conventional” medicine, phytotherapy and aromatherapy. Yet it’s also a staple of homeopathy, used for the exact same purpose, which is in blatant contradiction of the “like heals like” principle, the most fundamental of homeopathy, exposed right there in the etymology of the word.
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It depends what kind of regulation it would be. If we are talking about removing evidence-free health claims from herbal supplements, then it would definitely be a good idea.
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Thanks for your thoughts here, very helpful!
Do you have any about Echinacea? Family members take it too ward off catching a cold, which I’ve heard has been deemed silly. But I’m more concerned about the dosage variability you mentioned, and of course possible side effects.
If you notice that I no longer have an ass, it’s because I laughed it off.
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If ther’s no evidence that something works, but that thing also has known negative side effects, then just by simple math it’s irrational to use it.
No no. Open the file in notepad, delete 99% of the symbols and click save.
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