About 50% of our drugs come from herbs, but there have been few drugs made from plants in the last 40 years. Cancer drugs such as Taxol came from the Yew tree; the Rosy Periwinkle or Madagascan Periwinkle gave us vincristine. Before the 1960’s when this drug was discovered childhood leukaemia was a certain death sentence, now patients have a long-term survival rate of more than 90%. From the same plant Vinblastine helps cure most cases of Hodgkin’s disease.
Foxglove gave medicine Digitalis to treat chronic heart failure, Ephedrine from the herbal bush Ephedra is widely used in respiratory medicine. Quinine, from the bark of the Cinchona tree gave us a treatment for Malaria, and there are other drugs made from Cinchona bark.
It costs anything up to $500.000,000 ($500Million) from the start of research to the pharmaceutical shelf, and working with plants is often unpredictable, and fraught with danger. Pharmaceutical companies have about 30 years to recoup their money before other companies are allowed to release cheaper versions of the same drug.
Science has been able to bash herbal medicine by never trialing the herb against their drug; it would be very damaging to find a cheap herb being superior to an expensive drug. Pharmaceutical funded trials usually show failure of herbs to perform. This further damages the credibility of herbal medicine when reputable scientists such as Edzard Ernst, do Meta analysis of published papers. In meta analysis they pool all of the published papers as if they were one experiment, but if negative results are the only results published, then herbs are always going to look bad.
For almost three quarters of the world’s 6.2 billion people the only medicine available is herbs, and for them in serious illness failure to work means death.
From what the Penan tribal herbalists told me in Borneo (Sabah - Sarawak) they have very few failures and hold herbal medicine in very high regard, perhaps we use it wrong, perhaps herbal cocktails, scientifically tested of course, is the way to go.
Cheers
