For thousands of years, women have used herbal remedies for emergency medicine and wellness support. Local herbs were (and are) collected seasonally, dried, and saved in containers impervious to light, air and water, and stored in cool environments. Later they would be made into teas, infusions, salves, poultices, tonics, restoratives, and immune boosters. This was the healing pharmacy available in most villages and towns before the modern era, and still is today in many parts of the world. Women working in the kitchen were the barefoot doctors ministering to the everyday hurts and ills of the community, while the physicians were left to deal with more complex conditions, ailments and traumas.

Chinese Herbal Remedies

In China, herbal remedies for female complaints were handed down from grandmothers to mothers to daughters in an unbroken chain hundreds of generations long. Chinese women didn’t visit their physicians when PMS symptoms or postmenopausal depression hit, they brewed a traditional soup or tea according to a time-honored family recipe.

Chinese medicine draws on over 5000 herbs in various combinations for all known ailments. Herbs are usually combined in formulas that serve more than one purpose. For example, a single formula may be used to restore harmony to the body, balance any adverse side effects of the treatment, and direct the healing to the right parts of the body. This synergistic approach is a major difference between Eastern and Western medical treatments.

Herbs and Modern Medicine

In modern times, high-tech medicine has been dismissive of these grassroots traditions, arguing that medicinal herbs are untested, potentially toxic, not standardized, and therefore unreliable in effectiveness. Those who know the most about herbs, herbalists, medical botanists, pharmacognocists (experts in plant drugs), and naturopathic physicians, suggest otherwise.

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Herbs are known to be useful in treating thousands of conditions and disorders, and in fact, are the basis of many conventional pharmaceutical preparations. A famous example is white willow bark, the precursor to aspirin. Salicylic acid, the chemical name for aspirin, was first purified from willow bark in 1838! Now, a small daily dose of aspirin is universally recommended to mature adults in North America as a way to avoid heart attacks.

Herbal Craze of the 1970s

The benefits of traditional medicine weren’t generally acknowledged in North America until the 1970s, when, according to Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, ‘Inklings of the old homeopathic, eclectic, Asian acupuncture, and herbal modalities started appearing between the cracks in the medical assembly line as people began to look for ways to stay healthy and avoid modern medicine’s side effects.’ (from the book, Death by Modern Medicine, by Carolyn Dean, MD, ND).

Herbs, in fact, became the basis of a new “gold rush” as teams of scientists from biotechnology companies and the government’s medical research agency (NIH), were sent to scour the earth to find plants that could be the basis of new, genetically-engineered drugs to combat virtually every condition known on earth. At the same time as the drug companies launched their search for patentable, disease-fighting plants in the forests, jungles, and oceans of the planet, new medical models were emerging as a basis for the practice of medicine in the industrialized world, especially for preventing and modifying the progression of chronic diseases, which were becoming rampant.

There was growing awareness that many conventional drugs only suppress symptoms, while herbs and other natural remedies can be effective in directly tackling the causes of disease. According to the World Health Organization, 80% of the world’s people rely on herbs for most of their healthcare needs. In Germany, 70% of doctors regularly prescribe herbal medicines for their patients. These prescriptions include herbs that are powerful weapons in the fight against cancer, heart diease, high blood pressure, pain, depresssion, and other common health problems.

In an era when every body of water tested in the US contains measurable amounts of drug residues, we may be reaching the point of saturation with prescription drugs. In that case, herbal remedies stand to become in even greater demand, both as powerful healing tools and as environmentally safer choices.

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