Alternative Modalities
The rising cost of traditional healthcare, the rising cost of (or lack of) insurance, and increasing distrust of the 'medical model' of health care; whether by choice or from necessity, this trifecta of factors are pushing increasing numbers of people to seek alternative modalities of healthcare.
Conceptually, by far, the most effective activities of self-care are those of prevention and health maintenance. If people would only NOT smoke, NOT drink to excess, NOT abuse intoxicants, NOT drive to endanger, NOT text while driving, NOT abuse each other, NOT indulge in gang warfare or violence in the streets; my work load in the emergency department would be much less, and maybe I could take some time off.
Conceptually, by far, the most effective activities of self-care are those of prevention and health maintenance. If people would only NOT smoke, NOT drink to excess, NOT abuse intoxicants, NOT drive to endanger, NOT text while driving, NOT abuse each other, NOT indulge in gang warfare or violence in the streets; my work load in the emergency department would be much less, and maybe I could take some time off.
Links
Recently, more practitioners of traditional medicine have incorporated the use of 'natural medicines' into their practice. I suspect this trend reflects both the demand of consumers for 'natural medicines', as well as the recognition that there is money to be made in promoting this practice. Regardless of the motivation, this has been a great step forward for availability of reliable information on the safety and efficacy of 'natural' medicines' . (Quotes are deliberate; you may have your own garden and access to herbs that are harvested and dried on site, and prepared without other additives. But a lot of people buy preparations already formed into pills, capsules, lozenges, or tinctures. To me, this is a leap of faith that the preparations are truthfully labeled. I trust what I see and do myself.)
1. http://naturaldatabase.therapeuticresearch.com/home.aspx?cs=NEWORDER&s=ND
Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database
This is a subscription web site costing $9.97/mo, $92.00/yr, or $92.00 for the printed book version. I am probably going to subscribe for a month (when I have a month where I will really look at it), and if I like it maybe buy the book. The natural materials per se will not change. The commercial formulations will. My main concern is not in keeping up with commercial formulations, but in being able to go to the 'natural farmacy' for effective treatments.
At initial look, this web site *seems* to have a reputable scientific approach with documented validity to the claims for effectiveness and safety of the described material. This is usually not the case with 'herbal handbooks'. From personal experience, I could point to several that may have in part accurate information, but also have a 'regurgitation' of inaccurate information that seems to be passed from hand to hand and is not helping anyone. This is particularly annoying with 'cut-n-paste' productions, where inaccuracies pass from site to site.
2. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/
National Institutes of Health Medline Plus; clickable links to a browseable alphabetical list of herbs.
3. http://nccam.nih.gov/
The National Institutes of Health National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
4. http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/
Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases.
I have been consulting this data base for years. Whenever I come across an intriguing and potentially valid claim for a given plant, I will research it here. Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria), for example, or clary sage, or valerian. The data is so extremely thorough, that one can see that in one and the same plant there are multiple components with potentially opposing effects. This is frustrating, and no doubt one of the motivations for extracting and purifying the compounds used in some of today's traditional medications (more of them than not are synthetic- another story). But to take meadowsweet; I had heard from an herbalist in Finland that it had anti-inflammatory effects, but also had anti-ulcer characteristics that allowed it to be less irritating than the traditional willowbark. So I looked it up. I was primarily interested in the anti-inflammatory effect- the compounds are listed, and in fact you can smell them in the plant (I detect it in the leaf in springtime; one of my perennial growers says she smells it in the root- ). So- cautiously- I waited til flowering time, collected and dried the flowers, and tried them as a tea. I had no adverse effects, and have incorporated them into my standard tea for general inflammation- I tend toward inflammatory bowel (sorry if that is too much information..) and I had previously used fennel and chamomile- now I throw in a bit of meadowsweet as well. (I just looked it up for old time's sake- you want to use 'non-ubiquitous substances' (that way it doesn't tell you ALL of the stuff in there, cellulose and etc), and 'print activities with chemicals'. Some of the descriptions go on for many pages.
I've corresponded with Dr. Duke, but have never had the pleasure of meeting him personally. He is also the author of 'The Green Farmacy' and many other publications, including the CRC Handbook of Medicinal Herbs. See Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Duke