I am constantly amazed at the disillusionment of governments and health organisations in this day and age with their constant endeavor to try and treat herbal medicines as medical drugs.
I have no issues with medical drugs – after all they have been revolutionary in helping fight serious infections for 50 or 60 years now and when it comes to the crunch, and you are keeled over in pain, then a chemical pain-killer is a great thing. However a herb is not the same as a drug. Medical drugs are the result of modern chemistry and much trial and error, are very potent substances, often with some serious side effects, especially if you are on them for the long-term. They certainly deal with symptoms.
Herbs on the other hand are not chemical substances grown in a lab but rather plants that grow in nature. They rarely have side-effects. An herbal medicine, in Ayurveda is in general made from either the root, stem, bark, leaf, flower, fruit or seed of a plant. Some medicines are a mixture of various plants. Thus they are organic in nature rather than some synthetic product in the lab. Herbal medicines, such as Ayurveda medicines have been used for several hundred years with many of them dating back several thousand years with their usage well documented in texts over 2 thousand years old. They are not fast acting products but have a general slow effect on the body. An herbal medicine often needs to be taken for 3 to 6 months to be effective and needs to be monitored by a qualified practitioner.
Medical drugs really began with the founding of penicillin in the early 1900′s from which the chemical drug industry grew. Lots of experimental drugs were introduced to the market in the early days some of which resulted in serious side-effects due to inadequate testing. The industry was therefore forced to have any new medical drugs undergo very serious testing.
Today we find our governments and medical bodies putting forth the idea that herbal medicines should undergo these same strict tests that medical drugs go through. This is crazy when we have been using these drugs for thousands of years and when the use of these herbs have been extremely well documented. To suggest that the use of herbs have the same side effects as drugs is really an odd assertion by those who make it.
Certainly a person dispensing herbs needs to have the appropriate skills and qualifications. An understanding of herb-drug interactions today is important. Also a person purchasing herbal medicines needs to have some discernment about where the products are purchased from and confidence that have been professional manufactured.
Today the government and medical bodies are struggling to understand where complimentary medicine fits into the health model. They are often labeled as alternative but in reality they have a place in the health care system as can be clearly seen by the statistics regarding the number of people who use complimentary medicine as well as keeping in touch with their GP. They can fit together quite well as we can see in some of the multi-discipline practices beginning to appear in the world.
I fear that the debate or dialogue on what the modern health care system should look like and how it works needs to be much more inclusive and look outside the box of the current medical model. There is no reason why we could not be incorporating complimentary practice in our health care system, especially as a first stage of health care and health wellbeing.
We just need to courage to move away from seeing one as good and one as evil, to seeing how they compliment each other. When you have been educated to see health in one particular way it is often hard to see another framework or model because it is outside the understand or comprehension of the one you have studied. This has never stopped true scientific inquiry before and I welcome the day I see some open-minded inquiry with regards to health and wellbeing in our medical systems again.
