Advantages Of Herbal Medicines

There are two ways to use herbal medicines "scientifically." One is to use them as a natural pharmacy. Every plant contains myriad chemicals that work in myriad ways in the body. Because these plants have been around for a very, very long time, we know how all of those tiny effects add up to a single benefit that maybe we can't get from another medicine. Another way is to use them as a source of single chemicals that have known effects, and to standardize the herbal medicine to deliver a known amount of that chemical. That's the idea with the way we standardize St. John's wort (you need enough St. John's wort to get 900 mg of hypericin a day for the herb to affect depression) and green tea catechins (you need a certain dose of these green tea chemicals to have an effect on weight loss), for example.Generally, herbal medicines are simply medicines that happen to be natural and gentle, when used with knowledge of how they work. You can use herbal medicines as medicines that happen to herbal. In folk medicine the uses of herbs tend to be expressed in magical terms, in traditional Chinese medicine the uses of herbs tend to be expressed in what I'd call symbolic terms (ditto Japanese, Korean, Ayurveda, Unani, and so on), and those aren't necessarily bad systems. They just aren't "scientific."