Herbal Medicine

Summary

Herbal medicine — the use of plants for healing — is the oldest continuous therapeutic tradition in human civilization. Pollen evidence from the Shanidar cave in Iraq, dating to at least 60,000 years ago, suggests Neanderthals were selecting medicinal plants for burial rites. The Hippocratic texts contain approximately 1,500 recipes using some 380 plant species. Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, written around 65 CE, remained the chief pharmaceutical authority for 1,600 years. The WHO estimates that roughly 65 percent of the world’s population relies on herbal-based primary care. Yet the history of Western herbal medicine lacks systematic research, occupying an ambiguous historiographic position: it was the mainstay of the pharmacopoeia for centuries yet is treated in retrospect as folk medicine or quackery. The materia medica curriculum trace has been erased from modern medical and pharmacy training, and professional herbal medicine is the complementary therapy most similar to mainstream Western medicine. Stapley’s survey of two thousand years of plant medicine concludes that although plants have served as foods, dyes, cosmetics, and craft materials throughout history, their role in medicine has been their greatest contribution to human quality of life.(Stapley, 2012)

Prehistoric and Ancient Origins

The Shanidar cave burial in northern Iraq contained pollen from eight plant genera, seven of which are still used medicinally — among the earliest archaeological evidence for deliberate selection of healing plants.(Griggs, 1981)(Saad Said, 2011) The earliest literary evidence of medicinal plant use appears in the Homeric Epic, where heroes perform battlefield wound care with styptic drugs and incantations.(Longrigg, 1998)

The Hippocratic texts contain approximately 1,500 recipes using some 380 plant species; forty-four species account for half of all references.(Lane Fox, 2020) Ancient Greek pharmacology blended empirical knowledge of plant properties with elaborate superstitious rituals — including the time and manner of harvesting and the recitation of prayers — a mixture that contrasts with the rational, non-magical tone of Hippocratic prescriptions.(Longrigg, 1998)

Theophrastus preserved practical materia medica and folkloric elements, shaping medieval and Renaissance pharmacology.(Longrigg, 1998) Hammurabi, around 1800 BCE, prescribed mint for digestive problems.(Saad Said, 2011) Women served as primary healers, midwives, bone-setters, and herb-gatherers in primitive societies across cultures.(Hurd-Mead, 1938)

Dioscorides and the Classical Tradition

Dioscorides was the first applied medical botanist; his De Materia Medica remained the chief pharmacy authority for 1,600 years.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Dioscorides avoided explicit theory and classified by empirical actions — a decision that guaranteed cross-paradigm acceptance, because his descriptions could be used by Galenists, Paracelsians, and empirics alike without committing to a theoretical framework.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

Tobyn, Denham, and Whitelegg’s Western Herbal Tradition (2011) traces individual plants from Dioscorides through twenty-first-century practitioners, including American Eclectics and British Physiomedicalists, demonstrating both the continuity and the transformations of the tradition.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

Medieval and Renaissance Herbal Practice

In medieval medical practice more broadly, treatment for illness consisted for the most part of mild medication — nursing and herbal infusions — rather than aggressive pharmaceutical or surgical intervention, with preventive regimen holding a higher rank than curative treatment.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) St. Bernard of Clairvaux forbade monks to use medicines, tolerating only common herbs used by the poor.(Siraisi, 1990) Westminster Abbey’s infirmarer spent roughly five pounds per year on medicines in the 1350s, purchasing a detailed materia medica.(Rawcliffe, 1997) Margaret Hunt in 1528 combined plant lore and prayers from Welsh “Mother Elmet,” illustrating the blend of oral tradition and learned medicine in domestic practice.(Rawcliffe, 1997)

The Water of the Queen of Hungary, developed around 1370, was the first alcohol-based perfume, created by a woman herbalist.(Hurd-Mead, 1938) Culpeper’s unauthorized translation of the Pharmacopoeia democratized herbal medicine for the poor.(Porter, 1997) Culpeper’s English Physician Enlarged (1704), listing 369 plants, was known to colonial American practitioners.(Wilder, 1901)

Van Helmont found herbal medicine stagnant since the classical period — “idle discussion of Dioscorides.”(Pagel, Walter, 1982) Paracelsus taught the doctrine of signatures — the idea that the external form of a plant indicates its healing virtues.(Wilder, 1904)

The Galenic Pharmacological Legacy

Galen’s pharmacology persisted longest of all his systems; its destruction led to what Tobyn calls “therapeutic anarchy” until the North American herbal revival provided a new organizing framework.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) The “alterative” — a class of medicine that gradually restores normal function without drastic purging or depletion — was absent from Culpeper and the British Pharmaceutical Codex of 1934 despite being central to modern herbalism.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) The concept of “cleansing the blood” is a core difference between herbal and conventional medicine and a humoral vestige that persists in contemporary practice.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

Burdock transformed from a wound herb in medieval sources to a systemic “blood purifier” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) The alterative has been restyled as adaptogen, immunomodulator, or depurative — paradigm shifts, not new mechanisms.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

The British Herbal Revival

Albert Coffin imported the Thomsonian system to Britain in 1838, increasing herbal medicine’s prominence in working-class communities.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) John Skelton combined Chartist radicalism with botanical practice and became a central figure in nineteenth-century British herbal medicine.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Dr. Sarah Webb, who graduated from Cook’s Chicago college, became Principal of the College of Botanic Medicine in London — a direct American-to-British transmission of the physio-medical tradition.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

Physiomedicalism was removed from the National Institute of Medical Herbalists curriculum around 1978 as a modernizing turn toward European phytotherapy.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Western herbalists lost their direct classical tradition connection, unlike Chinese and Ayurvedic practitioners whose lineages remained continuous.(Francia, 2014)

Twentieth-Century Britain: Wars, Regulation, and Survival

The early decades of the twentieth century saw the British herbal profession attempt to consolidate. The National Association of Medical Herbalists, organized around an American-imported physio-medical orientation, published the National Botanic Pharmacopoeia in 1905 — a deliberate effort, according to Stapley, to “discard ‘lengthy formulae, adorned with astrological and superstitious fancies, and give to Herbalists rational and practical preparations.’” The materia medica described some 200 herbs, though Stapley notes that uneven quality was already evident: many entries ran only four lines.(Stapley, 2024) A training college, the Botanic Sanatorium and Training College for Herbalists at Southport, was opened by the American physio-medicalist William Webb in 1901, closed, then reopened under Association auspices in 1911; by 1907 the Association published a directory of 152 members, and Stapley records that “herbalists looked set to make progress towards registration but this was interrupted by the First World War.”(Stapley, 2024)

Wartime shortages reshaped the field’s relationship to the British state. German exporters had supplied roughly 30,000 pounds of belladonna a year before 1914, and the loss of that supply forced domestic cultivation of plants previously imported as crude drugs.(Stapley, 2024) Gertrude Jekyll organised gardeners to grow Calendula and ship the herb to France for the trenches; sphagnum moss, which absorbs twenty to twenty-two times its own weight in liquid, was gathered in large quantities from Scotland, Wales, the Lake District, and the Wye Valley as a wound dressing superior to cotton wool, and by the end of the war up to a million dressings per month were being sent to military hospitals.(Stapley, 2024) The journalist and herb advocate Ada Teetgen recorded the period’s central paradox in 1916: herbalists “flourish, especially in the country districts of the north, and many consult them,” yet “few people except the Society of Apothecaries, the wholesale herb dealers, and their own particular clients, seem to know much about present-day herbalists.” Botanical practitioners had no recognised standing.(Stapley, 2024)

The interwar period brought a sustained but unsuccessful drive for legal recognition. A Medical Herbalists’ Registration Bill passed first reading in the Commons in 1923 but was denied a second reading; in 1922 the Association’s tutorial course had accepted 112 students; by August 1925 over 100 MPs were on record as supportive.(Stapley, 2024) In 1932 the Association formally aligned with American physio-medicalism, reprinting Lyle’s 1897 textbook and issuing a new National Botanic Pharmacopoeia edited by Alfred Hall and Arthur Barker, with eighty-one herbs roughly half native British, half American. The editor of The Medical Herbalist declared in September 1932: “We are Physio-Medicals by education and training.”(Stapley, 2024) Outside the Association, Albert Orbell opened a Hospital for Natural Healing in London in 1935 with the support of West Ham Borough Council and the Minister of Health; five herbal practitioners worked there voluntarily, treating the poor, using methods Stapley describes as “Eclectic” rather than physio-medical.(Stapley, 2024)

The Second World War accelerated state involvement in herb supply. With German imports cut a second time, the Ministry of Agriculture, Kew Gardens, the Herb Growers’ Association, and the Pharmaceutical Society organised a national gathering campaign through schools, Girl Guides, Scouts, Women’s Institutes, and the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service; rose hips, haws, foxglove, valerian, henbane, and stramonium were collected on a large scale, foxglove cardiac glycoside levels were found to be highest in July with Welsh growing conditions producing the best yields, and by 1942 some 250 drying sheds were operating across the country.(Stapley, 2024) Yet the same wartime urgency produced a regulatory loss: the 1941 Pharmacy and Medicines Act, passed quickly, deprived herbalists of the legal right to supply medicines directly to their patients. Practitioners objected and continued to dispense, supplying medicines to patients as members of the Association rather than as individual prescribers.(Stapley, 2024)

After 1945 the herbal profession was excluded from the new National Health Service and forced to rebuild outside it. Orbell declared in 1947 that his Hospital for Natural Healing would give fundamentally herbal treatments. One of his students, Albert Priest, who began practising in 1948, later became NIMH Director of Education and co-wrote Herbal Medication: A Clinical and Dispensary Handbook (1959, revised 1983) — a textbook that kept physio-medical theory available to a generation of postwar students.(Stapley, 2024)

From the 1970s onward, the British scene diversified along non-Western lines. Michael McIntyre, who began herbal practice in the 1970s and had been raised in Malaysia, completed two clinical training courses at the Nanjing College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and qualified there in 1987; he then opened the first British School of Chinese Herbal Medicine with Giovanni Maciocia, importing Chinese herbs to supply it.(Stapley, 2024) The College of Ayurveda was founded at Milton Keynes in 1997 by Maroof Athique; in 2005 it entered a partnership with Middlesex University, the first British institution to recognise Ayurvedic medicine as a university degree.(Stapley, 2024) In the same year the Unified Register of Herbal Practitioners was created from a coalition of small independent schools, bringing Ayurvedic, Unani Tibb, Tibetan, Western Traditional, and Traditional Chinese herbal practitioners under a shared register; what unified them, in the Register’s own framing, was “recognition of the vital force and energetics within herbs and patients, which requires individual prescriptions” — a vitalist commitment that distinguished registered practitioners from over-the-counter herbal product manufacturers.(Stapley, 2024)

The journal British Journal of Phytotherapy launched in 1990 with Fred Fletcher Hyde and Professor Edward Shellard on its editorial board. Its inaugural article argued that “assessing plants on their total complex of constituents rather than isolated pure principles would be a step forward” — a methodological commitment that distinguished phytotherapy from pharmacological reductionism. In 1991 the European Scientific Cooperative on Phytotherapy (ESCOP) restricted the definition of plant medicines to “the active ingredients of plants, parts of plants or plant materials, or crude or processed combinations” — a definition that mattered for what could be sold and how.(Stapley, 2024)

Two regulatory crises followed. In 1994 the Medicines Control Agency moved to adopt a European Directive that placed twenty-five to thirty commonly used herbs on a restricted list; the herbal community, with public-relations help from Paul McCartney’s company, generated thousands of letters to government, and the threat was deflected by ruling that “formulations of traditional medicines would not be subject to the ruling.”(Stapley, 2024) More consequential was the Human Medicines Regulations 2012, which removed the 1968 Medicines Act exemptions herbalists had relied on. The former Schedule 3 restricted-herb list became the new Schedule 20 herbal-practitioners-only list with permitted dosages, and herbalists were no longer permitted third-party dispensing arrangements — a procedural change that constrained how practitioners could share preparation work.(Stapley, 2024)

Education contracted and then partly recovered. Several university phytotherapy programmes closed after 2012, in part because of the trebling of UK tuition fees. Three new schools opened between 2015 and 2017 — the School of Herbal Medicine in the southwest (2015), the Betonica Herbalist training programme (2016), and a Heartwood Professional course running in four- or six-year online formats. All three require 500 clinical hours and are accredited by the National Institute of Medical Herbalists.(Stapley, 2024) In 2010 the Herbal History Research Network was founded by academic herbalists to support scholarship on the history of Western herbal medicine — including, for example, “A Survey of Deletions of Plant Products From the British Pharmacopoeia Between 1864 and 1993,” a project that documents the long contraction Tobyn and Stobart describe.(Stapley, 2024)

Stapley closes her account of the period with a warning addressed to her own profession: “if we lose physical and emotional connection with our native plants along the way we will have lost the craft of herbalism which without experience cannot grow.”(Stapley, 2024) The reactive cycle she traces — wartime mobilisation, post-war exclusion, repeated regulatory threat, repeated educational reorganisation — is the most concrete answer the British case provides to the question of how an old therapeutic tradition survives inside a modern pharmaceutical state. It does so without ever achieving statutory recognition, by sustaining its own training, register, and pharmacopoeia outside the dominant institutional structure.

Stapley’s view of the tradition’s durability rests on several convictions she states explicitly in her concluding chapter. The Hippocratic tradition of patient-centred practice — attending to diet, exercise, rest, sleep, regular elimination, and a healthy environment — still underpins Western herbal medicine; these keys to health and longevity have appeared in medical instructions since the beginning.(Stapley, 2012) Over two thousand years of medicine, the healing potentiality of herbs has remained empirically constant; what has evolved is human understanding and the language for describing plants, while the emotional dimension of health has followed a more tortuous path.(Stapley, 2012) The preference for the whole plant over isolated chemical fractions reflects a conviction about the superiority of synergy that distinguishes herbal medicine from the pharmaceutical model: historically the emphasis was on the nature of a plant rather than its constituents.(Stapley, 2012) The craft of herbalism, in Stapley’s framing, is not teachable through science alone; it comes from working with herbs directly, knowing their preferences, the challenges they face, and what conditions strengthen their healing potential.(Stapley, 2012) Finally, the adoption of Ayurvedic and Chinese herbs into British practice, sometimes presented as a dilution of tradition, is in her reading a continuation of it — the latest adaptation of British herbal medicine enabling it to survive and serve, as earlier generations had adapted by incorporating Arabic and American materia medica.(Stapley, 2012)

Continuity and Change in the Materia Medica

Elecampane’s respiratory recommendations from Dioscorides and Pliny were repeated by all subsequent authors through two thousand years. Alantolactone from elecampane inhibited M. tuberculosis in vitro — modern support for a two-millennia reputation.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Robinson and Hoffmann were still following Dioscorides on hyssop “two millennia later.”(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

Vervain’s nervine tonic properties were first proposed by Parkinson; the use disappeared, then was revived by the Americans Coffin and Cook using Verbena hastata.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Paeony fell out of use by the nineteenth century; Cullen found no practitioner to testify to it; it was revived via the Chinese P. lactiflora.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Betony’s classical panacea was gradually narrowed: from Musa’s forty-seven diseases to only nervine and cephalic uses; no Commission E monograph exists.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011)

Rose’s medicinal arc illustrates the pattern: modest ancient use, a leap forward in Arabic medicine, a Renaissance crescendo, then near-absence in the twentieth century.(Tobyn Denham Whitelegg, 2011) Blood cleansing and the depurative concept may be an under-recognized survival of the sanguine humour in practice.(Francia, 2014)

The Modern Situation

The WHO estimates that roughly 65 percent of the world’s population uses herbal-based primary care.(Saad Said, 2011) The categories that structure herbal treatment vary significantly across traditions. In many African medical systems, illnesses are divided into three classes: “natural” diseases or “diseases of God,” often remedied with herbal treatments; “diseases of man,” caused by humans using sorcery to attack others; and illnesses caused by offending ancestral spirits.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Herbal medicine operates specifically in the first category, where the cause is natural and the remedy is therefore also a matter of natural substance and skilled preparation. Herbal preparations were approximately 80 percent of drugs at mid-nineteenth century; the figure is now roughly 25 percent.(Saad Said, 2011) Global herbal product sales exceed $100 billion per year; 80 percent of German physicians prescribe herbs.(Saad Said, 2011)

Regulatory status varies dramatically: herbal medicines are classified as drugs in Europe, as dietary supplements in the United States, and remain largely unregulated in the Arab world, China, and India.(Saad Said, 2011) Professional herbal medicine is the complementary therapy most similar to mainstream Western medicine.(Francia, 2014) Sixty percent of remedies for rheumatic disorders in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals likely had some effect.(Francia, 2014)

The history of Western herbal medicine lacks systematic research despite herbal practice being significant in both lay and learned care across two millennia.(Francia, 2014) By the twentieth century, herbal medicine was widely regarded as alternative, folk, or quackery.(Francia, 2014) The materia medica curriculum trace has been erased from modern medical and pharmacy training.(Francia, 2014)

Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal (1737-1739) described 500 plants from the Chelsea Physic Garden.(Hurd-Mead, 1938) Withering traced digitalis from a Shropshire woman’s herbal tea recipe in 1785.(Porter, 1997) Chemical surgeons Clowes and Banister continued relying on plants to counteract toxic minerals.(Griggs, 1981) Cnidian daphne berry, used in antiquity as an anti-inflammatory, shows modern research suggesting compounds effective against breast cancers.(Lane Fox, 2020)

Contemporary Western Phytotherapy: Theoretical Framework

The historical narrative traced above — from Dioscorides through the Eclectics to the postwar British survival — raises a question that several observers have identified but none has fully answered: what, exactly, is the philosophical framework of Western herbal medicine? Francia and Stobart note that Western herbalists have “largely lost direct connection to their classical medical tradition” in a way that Chinese and Ayurvedic practitioners have not.(Francia, 2014) Most traces of the materia medica curriculum have been “erased from modern medical and pharmacy training,” leaving Western herbal medicine less well defined culturally and historically than its Asian counterparts.(Francia, 2014) Hoffmann, writing from within the tradition in 2003, confirms the diagnosis: “The definitive text on Western holistic medicine — a guide for the practitioner that clearly illuminates these new and exciting perspectives — has yet to be written. There is a maelstrom of activity among holistic practitioners who are exploring and applying the new ideas, but we are still in the early stages.”(Hoffmann, David, 2003)

The absence of an inherited system has not prevented attempts to articulate one. Hoffmann proposes what he calls “therapeutic ecology” — a model in which the individual is “enmeshed” in four branches of healing: medicine (ingested substances), bodywork, psychology, and spiritual techniques.(Hoffmann, David, 2003) This framing positions herbal medicine as one component of a broader ecological relationship between the person and the healing environment, rather than as a self-contained pharmacological discipline. He further classifies herbs into “normalizers” — gentle tonics that support the body’s natural processes of growth and renewal — and “effectors” — herbs with specific observable impacts on physiology, some acting through whole-plant complexity and others dominated by potent chemical constituents that can become poisonous at the wrong dose.(Hoffmann, David, 2003) The preference for normalizers over effectors distinguishes phytotherapy from pharmacological medicine, which depends primarily on effectors.(Hoffmann, David, 2003)

The whole-plant principle is central to this self-understanding. Hoffmann uses meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) as a case study: the herb contains salicylates, compounds known to cause gastritis, yet clinical observation confirms that meadowsweet is effective in reducing gastric inflammation. “Such cases inevitably lead the herbalist to conclude, ‘The whole is more than the sum of the parts.’”(Hoffmann, David, 2003) This argument places herbal medicine in direct philosophical tension with the reductionist pharmacology that seeks to isolate active ingredients — a tension Hoffmann frames in broader terms as the difference between a vitalist worldview of “coevolutionary mutualism” between plants and humans and a Darwinian framework that interprets secondary metabolites primarily as plant defense chemicals.(Hoffmann, David, 2003)

The herbal actions taxonomy — the classificatory vocabulary that practitioners use to select remedies (adaptogen, alterative, bitter, carminative, nervine, and dozens more) — reflects this outcome-based rather than mechanism-based orientation. Hoffmann is explicit that these categories “reflect traditional observations of outcome” and “may or may not be in line with current scientific thinking.”(Hoffmann, David, 2003) Some categories are ancient: bitters as digestive tonics trace to the earliest pharmacopoeias. Others are modern: the term “adaptogen” was coined by Soviet scientists in 1964 to describe herbs that increase the body’s nonspecific resistance to stress, with a formal three-criterion definition requiring nonspecific activity, normalizing influence, and innocuousness.(Hoffmann, David, 2003) The Flexner Report of 1911, which Hoffmann identifies as the event that “effectively destroyed” herbal medical education in the United States by closing the Eclectic medical schools, left the Anglo-American tradition without the academic infrastructure to systematize its clinical taxonomy in the way that German phytotherapy — with its Commission E monographs and university-based pharmacognosy — partially achieved.(Hoffmann, David, 2003)

Hoffmann is alert to the temptation to fill this theoretical vacuum by importing Asian frameworks wholesale. He argues that traditional Chinese medicine, ayurveda, and unani are genuinely holistic precisely because they express the philosophical worldviews of their originating cultures; Western herbalists who adopt their diagnostic categories without their cultural matrix risk a form of “intellectual imperialism” that undermines the holistic potential of those systems while failing to develop one of their own.(Hoffmann, David, 2003) The challenge he identifies — articulating a Western philosophical framework for herbal medicine that is neither a pale copy of Asian systems nor a capitulation to pharmacological reductionism — remains the central unresolved question of the tradition’s intellectual identity.

Chinese Herbal Medicine: Clinical Evidence and Safety

Chinese herbal medicine provides the best-documented case study of traditional herbal practice under modern clinical evaluation. The tradition operates from a sophisticated theoretical basis: the Five Phases Mutual Production order (Wood-Fire-Earth-Metal-Water) grounds the Mother-Child therapeutic principle, by which strengthening a deficient Mother organ treats Deficiency in its Child. This principle is primarily applied in acupuncture, and Kaptchuk notes it is seldom used in herbal medicine, which proceeds instead through direct pattern-based herb selection.[kap00-app-f-004] The tradition also establishes that disorders of the Brain, Marrow, and Bones have been treated with herbs or needles directed to the Kidneys, not to the Brain itself — an example of how Chinese medicine routes seemingly direct organ conditions through its organ-correspondence system.[kap00-app-d-003]

Safety within the Chinese herbal tradition is not a modern concern. The Shen-nong Ben Cao Jing (ca. 150 BCE) explicitly classified 125 of its 365 herbs as “having poison” (you du) and unsuitable for long-term use, another 120 as requiring careful use, and only 120 as “without poison” (wu du) and safe for extended administration — a tripartite toxicity classification embedded in the tradition’s foundational pharmacopoeia.[kap00-app-e-011] Aconitum species (cao wu, chuan wu) present the most important direct toxic risk, containing highly toxic aconitine alkaloids; the accessory root, always further processed, is less toxic than the main root, and most reported toxicity cases have resulted from self-medication without professional guidance.[kap00-app-e-012] Hepatotoxic effects have been reported in clinical monitoring: follow-up after the London eczema trials found reversible liver enzyme elevations (7-10 times normal) in two children after treatment cessation, and a German hospital study of 1,507 consecutive patients treated with Chinese herbs found 0.9% ALT elevation.[kap00-app-e-013] Patent medicine adulteration is a separate concern distinct from herb toxicity: a survey of 260 Asian-manufactured patent medicines from California retail stores found 7% containing undeclared Western pharmaceuticals including ephedrine, chlorpheniramine, methyltestosterone, and phenacetin; no such adulteration has been documented in Chinese herbal products manufactured in the West.[kap00-app-e-014] The most serious documented iatrogenic event involved at least 100 women in a Belgian weight-reduction clinic who developed interstitial renal fibrosis after taking a combined drug-herbal product prescribed by Western physicians with no Chinese medicine training.[kap00-app-e-015]

Clinical RCTs have produced positive results in two conditions. The first important trial for recalcitrant adult atopic dermatitis, conducted in London with a crossover design in 31 patients, showed highly significant improvement in erythema, surface damage, itching, and sleep during the herbal treatment phase; an earlier trial in 47 children with nonexudative atopic eczema produced equally impressive results.[kap00-app-e-009] A Sydney trial of 116 IBS patients found both standardized and individualized Chinese herbal formulas outperformed placebo during the 16-week treatment phase; at 14-week follow-up, only those treated with individualized herbs maintained improvement — a finding that, within the RCT framework, supports the traditional argument for individualized rather than standardized prescribing.[kap00-app-e-010]

See Also

• materia-medica
• de-materia-medica
• botanical-medicine
• medical-reform
• folk-medicine
• eclectic-medicine
• thomsonian-medicine
• medical-regulation
• doctrine-of-signatures

Sources

Evidence cards used in this entry: