Herbal Remedies Healthy Medicine

Herbal medicine is as old as mankind, and every human culture on Mother Earth has practiced herbal medicine in one form or another.

In India, the herbalist tradition was Ayurvedic, focusing on the use of metals, herbs and parts of animals generally considered inedible, prepared in solution. These herbs and other compounds are used in varying proportions to remedy specific ills, and may be applied internally as pills or infusions, topically as ointments, inhaled as smoke, or pressed to the body as powders.

In the old Americas, without a written tradition to work from, most herbalism is carried by oral traditions from various tribes; this has proven invaluable when looking for herbal remedies in the rain forests and Andean uplands. Much of the American herbal tradition is tied to shamanism and spiritualism.

In China which exists more than 2000 years, herbalism and herbal remedies are very common to use for any kind of dhealth issues. In Chinese herbalism the aim is to bring the body systems back into balance by treating it as an electrical system using acupuncture, reflexology the life force energies qui or chi which have yin and yang elements.

Herbal medicine involves taking plants, ingesting them, and research if some of the elements in the plant have a palliative effect on the symptoms of the ailment.Most traditional herbs are aromatics - the compounds we use to treat illness are an effect of plants conducting chemical warfare on each other and to fend off herbivores. The same compounds that make many herbs bitter or smell strongly are the ones used in herbal medicine and clinical trials.

Herbal remedies have formed the basis of traditional medicine for millennia, and have formed the root of modern pharmacology. While science from roughly the 1880's onwards has striven to isolate the active compounds found in medicinal herbs, the list is ever growing

Among the healing agents isolated from herbal remedies are salicylic acid aspirin, derived from white willow bark, the vincristine series of anticancer agents, derived from periwinkle, several stimulants such as ephedra and cocaine and several analgesics and paralytics such as morphine, a tincture of the opium poppy.

As medical science has delved into molecular biology, and the ways these compounds work has been explored, validation for a number of types of herbal remedies have been found, including phytochemicals used as anti-oxidants, and the benefits of various vitamins for the body, and the use of Echinacea to boost white blood cell counts for fighting off disease.

While herbal remedies can be beneficial, do understand that they are not an either-or proposition with modern medicine, though there is a strong establishment precedent for treating them that way - up until the early part of this century, most of the remedies prescribed by doctors were herbal and natural remedies. Do consult with your health care provider about possible interactions between herbal remedies and prescription drugs.

Herbal Remedies the natural resource