Hashing over herbs
http://www.standard.net/standard/84194Tuesday, July 11, 2006
By Becky WrightStandard-Examiner staff
bwright@standard.netBook promotes the value of herbal medicine
Need to lower your cholesterol? Try treating it with prickly pear. Suffering from severe migraine pain? Use periwinkle vine. Prone to kidney stones? Pick and prepare some of the mallow around your yard.
Local plants have many medicinal uses, according to Charles W. Kane -- so many that he wrote a book, "Herbal Medicine of the American Southwest: A Guide to the Identification, Collection, Preparation, and Use of Medicinal and Edible Plants of the Southwestern United States" (Lincoln Town Press, $29.95).
"I've been helping people with chronic issues, stress problems and lifestyle problems for a while," said Kane, who is a lay practitioner with the Tucson Clinic of Botanical Medicine.
In his book, Kane discusses more than 250 plants, offering step-by-step instructions for making everything from teas and salves to poultices and cough syrups.
Stephen L. Clark, a botany professor at Weber State University, says the ideas presented in Kane's book may seem strange and new to some people, but herbal medicine has been around for a long time.
"In fact, this is the oldest of medicines. Our Western medicine is the new stuff," he said. "The chimpanzees use medicinal plants, so it actually predates human history."
More important, Clark said, it works -- sometimes better than modern treatments.
"Probably 80 percent of the people in the world use plants for medicine. Not in the sense that we go to a pharmacist. They just go into the savannah or the woodlands or the rain forest, and they collect plants," he said. "If you get sick, you go see the local healer and they treat you with the plant or plant concoctions."
And it's from those healers -- shamans and medicine men -- that scientists get ideas for new drugs.
"It wasn't that Pfizer or Merck put a bunch of research scientists together in a laboratory somewhere and concocted this stuff," said Clark. "The thing you have to understand is that almost all of the knowledge we have in modern medicine came from a traditional healer. You go down and become one of those people and gain their knowledge through trust."
The difference
Clark says there is a fundamental difference between herbal preparations and pharmaceutical preparations. Pharmaceutical companies try to find a single chemical compound that is the active ingredient and isolate it.
"Then they give you a massive dose of a single compound and, granted, they are very effective. You can't say too much bad about the history of Western medicine -- it's good, it works -- but oftentimes you have very, very powerful side effects, too."
Herbal medicines are based on multiple plant compounds.
"It takes longer amounts of time to see the effects," Clark said. "And barring any kind of allergies or reactions, typically you don't have horrible side effects."
Clark and Kane recommend a balanced approach.
"I think what people should do is use the best of Western medicine and the best of traditional medicines -- use what works," Clark said. "If you have a severe infection of any kind and you need an antibiotic, there is no substitute in an herbal for a powerful antibiotic, there really isn't. ... If you have major trauma, or you have a heart attack, you go see a doctor."
Do careful research
If you want to make and use herbal medicines, Clark says, do your homework.
"I'm firmly convinced that lots of plants, and I use many of them, have absolutely incredibly valuable medicinal uses -- but I have checked the research on every one of them. And you have to do that."
That means not only reading several how-to books, but also finding the results of research conducted on plants.
According to Clark, the American Botanical Council is a good source, producing books and a Web site, www.herbalgram.org. Web searches can turn up additional credible sources.
The bibliography of Kane's book includes references such as the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and the journal Phytochemistry.
Beware interactions
Research not only confirms or refutes claims about plants, but also contains important information about possible drug interactions.
For example, Clark says, it's not a good idea to treat a heart condition with garlic if you're taking a prescription medication such as Plavix.
"The garlic interferes with the treatment of the Plavix, so there are drug interactions that take place," he said. "Anyone who is on any kind of prescribed medication from your doctor has to be very cautious not to just shotgun approach it, and say 'Well, let's do this other stuff, too,' because there can be very powerful, and sometimes very dangerous, interactions between a lot of these plants and whatever medication they're taking."
Deadly plants
Many people have the mistaken idea that because it's a plant, and it's organic, it's safe, said Clark.
But most plants are toxic. Local toxic plants include larkspur, monkshood, baneberry, locoweed, hemlock and most members of the carrot, buttercup and potato plant families.
"I can probably think of more plants up here that will kill you than I can think of plants you can use for medicine," Clark said.
That's why it's also important to check multiple sources and to take classes in plant identification and collection.
Some useful plants have deadly look-alikes.
"There are three plants that you might find within inches of each other: sego lily, blue camus and death camus," said Clark. "The bulbs look alike. ... You may think you're digging blue camus, but one-third of the bulbs in your pot may be death camus, which isn't cool."
Common plant names can also cause dangerous confusion.
"Years ago, I was watching TV and a guy was teaching an outdoor survival course," said Clark. "He talked about a plant that was edible called skunk cabbage. Well, skunk cabbage in Utah is an incredibly toxic plant (that) is a powerful chromosome mutagen -- I mean it resequences all your DNA. ... He was a really neat guy, and a very qualified guy in what he did, but he was not a botanist and he didn't know the plants. He had seen reference to a plant called skunk cabbage, which is edible, but it's a different plant (that) grows in Wyoming. ... So if you see a reference that says skunk cabbage is edible, you better know for sure which plant you're talking about."
Spread the word
A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, Clark stresses.
But an interest in plants as medicines, and an understanding of their importance, could be a great thing for their survival and ours.
"Humans in the Western world have lost contact with plants, and have become so silly as to think that we don't need them -- that we can denude the mountains and cover them with subdivisions and trams," he said.
"I'm surprised we haven't gotten rid of cows because milk comes in a carton. It's like thinking 'Who needs plants, when medicine comes in a little pill?' "
Clark says that kind of attitude will cause suffering in decades to come.
"We're losing botany, and we've got to make people aware of the fact that we still need plants."
