By James N. Dillard, M.D.
(04/02/2009) A clerk in a health food store recently told me that half of all prescription pharmaceutical drugs come from natural
Foxglove
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products like herbs, and that all of the great physicians in history were also herbalists. I didn’t know if he had just been smoking some funny herb in the back, so I decided to look into the history a bit more. Besides, they usually don’t sell that stuff in health food stores.
Maybe he was exaggerating just a bit, but he actually wasn’t that far off. Perhaps 15 to 20 percent of modern pharmaceuticals are derived from natural sources, and most of the great physicians, up until very recently, were herbalists. It’s actually an interesting story, so stick with me here — I’ll plant some seeds for thought.
We humans have had a very beneficial relationship with plants for a long time, though sometimes maybe it hasn’t been so great for the plants. After all, we do kill off thousands of acres of rain forest every day. Many rare species of plants are being lost because of our indiscretions.
First off, we probably owe our very existence to the development of flowering plants about 65 million years ago. The new presence of seeds, fruits, and nuts as concentrated food sources allowed the small mammals of the time to evolve into hominids, or early humans. The first human tribes were sustained by plant life for many millions of years. Plants have provided food, fiber, shelter, fuel, intoxication, and fragrance for our species for millenniums. And plants are clearly the finest staple of our diet.
There is good evidence that we have used plants for medicine since the very beginning of time. Cave paintings and archaeological digs document the use of medicinal plants from as much as 60,000 years ago.
But why would plants have these properties? Well, plants cannot run away from predators, so they have to make complex and often noxious defense compounds to keep from being eaten all the time.
These pharmacologically active substances — what chemists call alkaloids, phenolics, glycosides, and so on — are not necessary for a plant’s normal life but are made solely for defense. Many of these compounds have pharmacological activity, and so we have learned to use them as medicines.
Every ancient human civilization used medicinal plants for healing, including the Chinese, Indians, Sumerians, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Africans, and Native Americans. Hippocrates used more than 300 herbal remedies, including colchicum for gout, the same drug we use today for gout in the modern pharmaceutical colchicine.
The botanical books of Dioscorides, a first-century Greek physician, and Galen, the second-century Roman physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, set the standards for botanical medicine for more than 1,500 years. This knowledge was retained through the Middle Ages by the religious orders in monasteries.
Then came along an interesting chap from the Tyrolean Alps named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. That was his actual name, but his friends just called him Paracelsus for short. He wasn’t short on ego, either. This is evidently where the word “bombastic” comes from.
Paracelsus studied medicine all over the world and during the 1500s was the first to advocate the use of toxic mineral drugs like mercury, lead, arsenic, bismuth, gold, silver, and copper in very low doses. He is considered to be the father of modern pharmacology for this reason. He also coined the term “essential oils,” as he believed that these purified plant derivatives represented the fifth essence of existence (along with earth, fire, air, and water). Hence the term “quintessential,” or “fifth essence.”
After Paracelsus died, his disciples started upping the doses, making a lot of folks sick. Quite a battle ensued between the traditional herbalists and the followers of Paracelsus. The herbalists decried the Paracelsians for their reliance on toxic metals like mercury, a k a “quicksilver,” or “quacksalver,” as it was called at the time. This is where we get the word “quack” for a phony or dangerous practitioner.
But herbal traditions continued to be quite strong. By the 18th century, the British physician William Withering began using foxglove (digitalis) because a patient, seriously ill with dropsy (swelling of the legs and heart failure), was saved by a brew containing this herb from a witch woman in Shropshire. We still prescribe a lot of digitalis for weak hearts today.
Laboratory chemistry advanced to the state where, by 1804, morphine could be isolated from the opium poppy. Synthetic medicines began to be developed by the late 1800s, and yet the “eclectic” physicians (kind of like our modern naturopaths) kept herbal traditions alive from the 1850s until about 1930. In 1936, most herbal medicines were dropped from the official pharmacopoeia in this country, mainly because of disuse, not from a lack of safety or efficacy.
They slowly showed up again in health food stores through the 1950s and 1960s, and of course blossomed to extraordinary levels of use through the late 1990s to today. A Prevention magazine and Princeton Research Associates survey indicated that 49 percent of 2,000 randomly sampled Americans had used an herbal remedy in the last year, and that 24 percent used herbals on a regular basis.
So you see, herbal medicines have been with us all along. This doesn’t mean that herbal remedies are adequate substitutes for our modern medications when the latter are needed, but well-prepared herbal medicines do have medicinal properties and can be helpful in certain circumstances (with properly trained professional guidance). And we need to be particularly careful with potential drug-herb interactions.
Many of our modern medications, such as theophylline, quinidine, ephedrine, digoxin, and Taxol, are derived directly from plants. After all, the word “drug” comes from the Dutch word “droog,” meaning to dry, as it was common to prepare medicinal herbs by drying them out first.
The major pharmaceutical companies have taken natural products and herbs very seriously in the last 10 years, instructing all their employees to collect any unusual samples of medicinal plants they come across while on vacation in foreign lands. These samples are then thoroughly analyzed in the company’s laboratories for possible compounds that might lead to the next immensely valuable wonder drug.
We should have respect for our herbal traditions and try to understand when these medicines are helpful and when they are not. And we also need to have respect for the natural world and not kill off lots of ancient plants for no good reason. This approach would certainly earn the approval of Hippocrates, Galen, Withering, and yes, probably even Paracelsus.