Herbal Medicine

How Herbal Medicine Works

In phytotherapy, plant medicines are selected mainly to stimulate or strengthen the body’s normal functions, and so help the body heal itself. Plant or botanical medicines contain many ingredients and may have several simultaneous therapeutic biochemical actions in the body. Any herbal medicine prescribed to the patient may be a combination of plants chosen for the therapeutic actions required to treat that individual.

Each herb or plant used in phytotherapy have active ingredients, chemicals or constituents that have an effect on the body. For example, hypericin and hyperforin are considered to be the active ingredients in the herb St. John’s wort, although the benefits of St. John’s wort is not just a result of these two chemicals, but of a synergistic interaction between these two chemicals and a host of other naturally occurring chemicals found in the herb. Pharmaceutical companies often isolate an active chemical ingredient from an herb and produce a synthetic replicate of the chemical to place it into a drug. The end result of this process is a powerful drug with many side-effects, but without the benefits of the synergistic interactions of the herb’s original ingredients.

Drugs of plant origin still account for a respectable percentage of doctors’ prescriptions, and for a number of reasons, research interest in natural pharmaceuticals is again on the upswing.”

As Andrew Weil, MD, founder, professor, and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona states, ““Botany and medicine have been the closest of friends and the most distant of strangers. Two hundred years ago, anyone wishing to be a physician had to study botany, because most medical prescriptions were made from plants. Today it is unheard of for premedical students to major in botany, and interactions between the two fields are minimal. Yet drugs of plant origin still account for a respectable percentage of doctors’ prescriptions, and for a number of reasons, research interest in natural pharmaceuticals is again on the upswing.”

Phytotherapy provides a functional approach to healing – using cell signaling to affect a patient’s body early on in the disease process. Responses within cells that originate from the plant are known as phytocrines – the bioactive molecules in plants that share features with human hormones and “connect” with the endocrine system. In this respect, certain phytotherapeutic supplements aid in promoting or countering actions similar to the hormones in a patient’s system.

Another principle key to phytotherapeutic action is an adaptogenic effect, in which the patient’s body responds to and uses plant molecules in various ways, depending on how much and in what proportions are needed in regulating and metabolizing them. This is in stark contrast with pharmaceutical intervention, which can leave the body with too much or too little of the hormone or medication on board, which can ultimately result in severe vulnerability and further dysfunction.