Herb & Remedy

This section covers what people have used plants for, across four major traditions and a great deal of folk practice — and what pharmacology and toxicology have to say about it.

It is the only territory on this site where the traditional claim and the modern laboratory genuinely meet. Everywhere else, the site reports what a tradition holds and then reports, separately, what the evidence shows. Here the two overlap, because some of it works, and the reason it works is chemistry.

Aspirin came from willow bark. Digoxin came from foxglove, identified in 1785 from a folk remedy for dropsy. Morphine came from the opium poppy, quinine from cinchona bark, paclitaxel from the Pacific yew. Artemisinin was extracted by Tu Youyou from a fourth-century Chinese text, and won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. Anyone who wants to dismiss herbal medicine wholesale has to account for that list.

And the same fact is why this is the most dangerous section on the site. A plant with real pharmacological activity is a plant that can really hurt you. Aristolochia causes kidney failure and urinary tract cancer. Comfrey is hepatotoxic. St John's Wort quietly disables hormonal contraception and several classes of prescribed drug. A quarter of imported traditional preparations sampled in published studies have contained undeclared pharmaceuticals or heavy metals.

Both of those things are true at once, and holding them together is the whole job.

Three commitments

No instruction, ever. This section describes what traditions have used plants for. It gives no dosages, no preparations to follow, no "take this for that", and it never will. The boundary is in the site's editorial rules and it is drawn hardest here, for the obvious reason.

Toxicology gets equal billing with tradition. A herbal on this site that lists a plant's traditional uses and not its interactions has done half a job badly. The articles on herb–drug interactions and on the genuinely toxic plants are not appendices. They are the reason the section is defensible.

Four traditions, compared rather than blended. Western Galenic herbalism, the Chinese bencao tradition, Ayurvedic dravyaguna and Unani all classify plants by quality — hot, cold, dry, damp — and all arrived at that independently. They also disagree about almost everything downstream of it. Treating them as one "ancient wisdom" is the mistake that this section exists to avoid.

Two things worth saying at the outset

"Natural" carries no information about safety. Digitalis, aconite, hemlock and ricin are all entirely natural. The word describes an origin, not a risk profile, and it is used commercially as though it described a risk profile.

And the single most useful sentence in this whole section is a practical one. Tell your pharmacist and your doctor everything you are taking, herbal included. They can check interactions in minutes, they have seen it all before, and they will not lecture you. Any practitioner who suggests you keep it from them, or who suggests stopping or delaying prescribed treatment, has told you something important about themselves.