Some ‘herbal’ supplements are not herbal. What should we do?
First of all, I want to run a thought by my pharmaceutical scientist colleagues and friends. We have tried for 80 plus years now in search of cures, have we found any signs of any synthetic drug that doesn’t simultaneously cause major damage, some of which turn into new diseases that end up in our vicious cycle? This cycle affords its owners perpetual income with impunity, but toxic drugs to you, me, and the rest of our society with their attendant miseries, such as side effects and new diseases. Do you think that’s ethical, fair, or humane? And these drugs will also affect your grandchildren and theirs. Isn’t it time we reset our thinking in this extremely costly ‘scientific’ pursue of our drug-therapy, at least for the benefit of our future generations? A lot of traditional natural remedies do work and can complement or even replace synthetic drugs to serve all humans at affordable costs. After 50 years as a home-grown herbalist and also as a scientist, I can attest to that!
You may have the feeling that many herbal supplements are not what they claim to be. You are right.
Many of them are not, for 2 main reasons: (1) We, as scientists, don’t seem to know how to deal with them scientifically, using technologies developed for well-identified pure chemical drugs, trying to apply them to complex multi-chemical herbs that are in most instances not different from foods. (2) As herbalists, many of us who have no scientific training are easily bamboozled by anyone with a science degree into going along with determining the identity and quality of an herb by one of its countless chemicals, and call this chemical ‘marker’ of identity and quality for the herb or formula; and declare that this is scientific. Then, we standardize the finished herbal product (supplement or medicine) against this chemical and call the product “herbal supplement.” This invites adulteration! I personally have been a victim of it. Which is one of the reasons I had fought this single-handedly for decades, especially after the DSHEA was passed in 1994. See one of my descriptions of this “standardization” in Issue 10 (Sept/Oct 1997) of my Newsletter republished in My Life & Rollercoaster Career (p. 263). Then, in the following decades, I have written many more times about it. Although this standardization thing has gotten less egregious over the last 10 to 15 years, it still happens, and more than you think. Hence, some herbal supplements are still not what they claim to be. What should we do?
Before reintroducing some tried-and-true herbal remedies, passed down from generation to generation over millennia or time immemorial, we need to first start fixing the identity and quality of the existing herbal supplements. Since these products are not like drugs that can easily be analyzed, some other scientific methods must be used. Instead of using drug techniques specifically developed for chemicals, which are unsuitable for complex herbs, we should start treating herbal supplements more as foods, which was the original intent of the DSHEA, either by design or by chance. For example, ascorbic acid is no orange or lemon. So, the best we can do now with herbal supplements is to provide some ‘fingerprint’ that can tell us what they look like compared to others. With this fingerprint, identifying the tablets, capsules, or powders, in a bottle of ‘herbal supplements’ is roughly comparable to our identifying oranges or apples by organoleptic means. That is, not by any of their chemicals such as ascorbic acid or pectin, but by sight, touch, taste, smell, etc., which we used to use for judging raw herbs until chemistry started to be involved, analyzing only arbitrarily selected marker chemicals.
For doing this, we already have the basic technology to make fingerprints. The best is through HPTLC, HPLC, IR, and UV, as we have been doing with our Phyto-True system since around 2005. One of the labs has already volunteered its efforts at cost. And I am planning to use 75% of the gross profits of my books to establish a nonprofit, to be run by younger people not from my generation, though a few of us will initially provide the appropriate technologies, experience, and wisdom to help get it started.
In the next post, I’ll describe my plans for starting the introduction of modernized natural therapeutics to complement or replace synthetic drugs. So, until then, all the best!