Making sense of herbal medicine

Plants have provided by far the majority of medicines since before history and are the basis of many of our most important modern drugs. They still offer infinite new opportunities to improve health and will do so forever.

However the developed world has largely forgotten how to utilize plants for these purposes. Physicians and other health professionals who need to understand their patients' return to herbal remedies can only find fragments of information, reflecting science's piecemeal explorations to date. The methods of pharmaceutical research have meant that the prospects for many established treatments have been poorly investigated. Those who wish to use plants to aid their own health care will find the information available confusing and often exaggerated.

PlantMedicine™ brings the world's leading experts on the use of plants in health care to guide you through this very old country and to the richest seams of evidence. Enormous wealth lies therein ...

This is a completely new on-line resource:

EXTRACT re-lives the world of the medicinal plant explorer, taking account of all the clues available. It presents rigorously weighted and independently reviewed evidence on efficacy, safety, and plant-drug interactions. It systematically distils patterns of use over centuries and around the world. It links otherwise disparate clues into patterns that begin to makes sense. It adds expert insights into clinical use from the world’s leading practitioners.

Design and orientation is by practitioners and by experts on medicinal plants; assessment of the literature is rigorous, transparent and independent. The combination provides the richest evidence base available.

Clinical judgments will be better informed and research hypotheses more productive.

The remedy emerges as a rounded character in stories of health and illness – it begins to makes sense.

Why do we need this...?

For health professionals PlantMedicine™ will provide the most informed answers yet to such questions as:

My patient wishes to take hawthorn remedies with his beta-blocker prescription. Is this wise? Are there other approaches he could take?
Are phyto-oestrogens substitutes or inhibitors of oestrogen in the body and are there any hormones in wild yam?
What really is the potential for Echinacea?
Chinese wormwood is the new treatment for malaria and European wormwood has been used for a wide range of problems. Surely there are some further applications we could explore in these plants?
Is it safe for a patient to use celandine to manage a gallbladder problem?
What saw palmetto products are most likely to be effective for benign prostatic hypertrophy?
I have heard that burdock is used for skin disease but there is no modern evidence for this. Is this reputation worth exploring?
Blue or black cohosh is still used by midwives and women to help with labour. What is the difference in the two? Is their use ever justified?

Where would you go?

Please watch this space for further developments.