Herbal Medicine

Herbal medicine is the use of plants, or preparations made from them, to support health and well-being. The plant parts involved include leaves, roots, bark, flowers, seeds, and berries, and they are prepared as teas, tinctures, powders, capsules, extracts, oils, or topical products. It is one of the oldest and most widespread forms of care in the world. The World Health Organization reports that 170 of the 179 member states that responded to its 2019 survey acknowledged some use of traditional medicine, of which herbal remedies are a major part.

Herbal practice takes several forms. Traditional systems such as Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and Unani use herbs within their own theories of health. Western herbalism draws on European and North American folk and botanical traditions. Phytotherapy, common in parts of Europe, uses standardized plant extracts guided by research. Practitioners may be medical herbalists, naturopathic doctors, pharmacists, or traditional healers, and training and legal status vary by country. People also buy herbal products directly from shops and online.

Because a plant is natural, it is easy to assume it is harmless, but herbs contain active compounds. Some have been studied carefully and some have a long history of use with little modern testing. Reviews describe interactions with prescribed medicines, cases of liver injury, and products whose contents do not match the label. Herbal medicine is best approached as a complement to ordinary care, chosen with a qualified practitioner, and always disclosed to your doctor or pharmacist.

People have used plants as medicine for as long as written records exist, and almost certainly for much longer. The Ebers papyrus from Egypt (about 1550 BCE) lists hundreds of remedies, many of them plant-based, and Sumerian tablets recorded plant lists over 5,000 years ago. In China, the Shennong Ben Cao Jing gathered older knowledge of medicinal plants, and Ayurveda in India developed its own large body of plant medicine. In the Greek and Roman world, Dioscorides wrote De Materia Medica (about 40 to 90 CE), a reference on drugs, mostly plants, that stayed in use for well over a thousand years.

Herbal knowledge traveled with trade and scholarship, and every region built its own tradition, including Unani, Jamu in Indonesia, and the folk herbalism of Europe and the Americas. From the nineteenth century, chemists isolated active compounds from plants, and some now-familiar medicines such as digoxin, quinine, and artemisinin trace back to herbal sources. Artemisinin was extracted from sweet wormwood in 1972 by Tu Youyou, who drew on a traditional Chinese text. Today herbal medicine is practiced by medical herbalists, naturopathic doctors, pharmacists, and traditional healers, and it is regulated very differently by country: in 2018, 124 countries reported laws or regulations on herbal medicines, and many products are sold as food supplements with lighter oversight than drugs.