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My father asked me the other day how it could be that single herbs could be applied to many different uses.  It was a logical question; throughout his career as a physician he had used synthetic drugs for very specific and targeted purposes.

Early on, as I was adopting natural therapies into my practice I followed the same line of reasoning, trying to substitute a specific herb for a drug that was used to using.  It wasn’t until I shifted my approach for treating disease from a symptom-based point of view to a cause-and-effect point of view that I began to understand how herbal therapy really works. 
Conventional medicine is symptom and diagnosis based.  The patient presents with symptoms, labs are obtained, and a diagnosis is derived from the accumulated data.  Drug therapy, defined by protocols associated with the diagnosis, is designed to reduce symptoms and return abnormal parameters back to normal.  The vast majority of drugs block specific enzymes or activate a specific set of receptors to achieve a specific desired result.  On a certain level, drug therapy works, but it does little to prevent progression of disease and side effects and long term toxicity are common. 
Natural therapies, by contrast, approach treatment of disease by addressing causes instead of symptoms alone.  Like all things, disease does have specific causes and these causes can be defined.  Without going into great detail, the major categories of disease-causing factors include oxidative stress (exposure to free radicals), toxins, poor nutrition, microbes, stress and radiation.  Different symptoms (and different diseases) occur with cumulatively exposure to the same factors because we are each genetically different.  Reason would suggest that reducing the factors that cause disease, rather than just eliminating symptoms, would be the most efficient approach for overcoming illness…and this is exactly how herbal therapy works! 
Virtually all herbs used for medicinal purposes possess anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial and detoxification properties.  Many herbs are anti-mutagenic (anti-cancer).  Most herbs positively affect the immune system and balance the hormone systems of the body.  Even herbs that seem to work best on one certain organ system still include these general qualities.  It should be no surprise to find that herbal therapies, especially when combined with healthy diet and good health practices, can reduce or reverse any and all disease processes.
The very qualities that make herbs so valuable also make them difficult to evaluate scientifically. Unlike pharmaceuticals, which generally contain only one active synthetic chemical, herbal medications typically contain many active chemicals and in some cases hundreds of active chemicals, generally all of which are beneficial. The plant synthesizes these vital substances for protection against oxidation, sunlight, microbes and other threats. In consuming the plant we gain the same protection, and humans have naturally been doing so for thousands of years. But having multiple chemicals with various actions confounds the targeted approach of science today. For this reason conventional medicine tends to leave these vital alternatives for healing on the sidelines in favor synthetic drug therapy.
In making this choice, modern medicine is passing up on literally thousands of years of recorded use of plant-based therapies from cultures around the world. In fact, large scale observational studies may be the best way to evaluate natural therapies. When scientific scrutiny of today is carefully and appropriately applied, the value of this information is generally well supported.
Though drug therapy does have important applications in certain situations, synthetic drugs can never possess the healing qualities of natural herbal therapies. The time has come for modern conventional medicine to leave bias and prejudices behind and embrace all therapies that may relieve illness and suffering.  It is my hope that this blog and the First Do No Harm Health website will become a valuable resource for those searching for natural remedies and preventative health information.

Categories: Herbal Therapy,

Previous Comments

Linda Sharpe- Oct 06, 2009

Thanks for the information, your website is fantastic!