'All natural', they say. But how natural is natural?  Due to the recent economic uprising in the production and sale of herbal medicine many business men have taken over just as they took over the sachet water business.

People now prepare herbal remedies “they claim” to be all natural and with little or no laboratory analysis or validation from accredited institutions like the fda, centre for plant medicine or the department of herbal medicine go on the market and are selling them to the innocent Ghanaians who are craving for herbal medicines .

Herbal medicine is moving at a pace where we can only be safe when we put it in the hands of competent and well trained professionals.

We shouldn’t leave our doors opened for “quacks” to take over. Even for our local practitioners, we take nothing away from them; they know what they are doing.

Their knowledge was handed over to them by their grand-relatives. They may not have studies anatomy or physiology but they were the very people we relied on for healthcare before the advent of orthodox medicine.

In today’s hi-Tec world, many people are turning to a more “natural” approach to health care  and alternative therapies once dismissed as off-beat and not scientific, are now finding their place alongside mainstream medicine.

The system of medicine in most rich industrialized and developed countries is well established and highly technological. It will interest you to know that much of the modern medicine is only a few hundred years old. It dates from relatively recent scientific advances, such as joseph lister’s use of antiseptics (germ-killing chemicals) in the 1860’s, Wilhelm roentgen’s discovery of x-rays in the 1890’s and alexander Fleming’s discovery of antibiotic drugs in the 1920s.

But around the world, people have used other forms and systems of medicine for thousands of years, millions of people today still rely on them.

Many of these medical systems look simpler and more natural than today’s highly scientific western medicine. Instead of drugs made in huge chemical factories and rows of electronic gadgetry in the modern hi-tech hospital, they rely on such treatments as herbal remedies, body massage and changes in diet and lifestyle. These simple, more natural approaches are now attracting more and more people in the west.

They say it is not scientific, butthey have served generations and generations over the centuries. Thousands of people who use them over the years testify to their success.

They call it different names; fringe medicine, alternative medicine, botanical medicine and a more current term is “complementary medicine”. This is because many of the skills and procedures can be used, and even incorporated into mainstream western-type medicine.

USE OF HERBAL MEDICINES AROUND THE WORLD

One out of three Americans uses herbal therapies. Yet, less than one out of 3,000 scientific studies focuses on this increasingly popular therapy.

ABOUT FOUR billion people, (80% of the World population) presently use herbal medicine for primary healthcare, the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated

In Ghana, we are all witnesses to the use of herbal medicines

HOLISTIC HEALTH APPROACH

It concerns the approach to the patient, and reflects a common criticism that modern western medicine deals only with symptoms and diseases, and not with the people themselves.

Consider the simplified example: some-one goes to the doctor complaining of a headache. After checking for underling cause, the doctor finds nothing wrong, and prescribes pain-relieving tablets. The tablets may well take away the headache, but this is only treating the symptom. Why is the headache there in the first place?

The holistic view looks beyond the isolated symptom and even beyond the patient’s physical body. It examines the whole person –the mind and mental state, lifestyle, feelings and emotions, stresses and worries, and spiritual and religious aspects. Somewhere must lay the cause of the headache. Treating the symptom may help for a while. Treating the cause and getting the whole person back to healthy balance, is the way to surer cure.

This example is indeed simplified; in most cases, a doctor of western medicine will also look beyond the merely physical body. In one sense, the approach of complementary and holistic medicine has helped to widen the scope of mainstream scientific medicine, making it less detached and “mechanical”.

NO SIDE EFFECTS?

One aspect of herbal medicines that bore people in Ghana is when they hear one herbal remedy cures about one hundred diseases so they say and has no side effects.

All medicines come with side effects and herbal medicines are no exceptions. The dose, the time taken, who is taking it all come into play to determine the safety of herbal medicines and the degree of side effects. What most people fail to understand is that, herbal medicines are almost always a combination of herbs and each herb contains different secondary metabolites.

For example: The chemical constituents of Argemone Mexicana  a plant currently under clinical studies in Mali for it antimalarial activity  includes tannins, benzoquinones, coumarins, mucilage, sterols, triterpenes and alkaloids (berberine; protopine, alocryptopine, benzophenanthrine, dihydrochelerithrineetc); fat, organic acids, combined and free amino acids, monosaccharides (glucose and fructose) and minerals, and vitamin C; flavonoids ( rutin and quercetin) ( Singh et al. 200; Rahman and llyas, 1961) and each of the secondary metabolites have specific therapeutic properties.Most often what they are saying is it gives symptomatic relieve which is different from when they say it treat diseases. Example, fever, jaundice, headache etc are not diseases, they are mostly symptoms of underlying diseases, therefore when they claim the medicine can treat headache, jaundice, fever, it is only for symptomatic relieve.

You should consult a qualified practitioner. You the consumer has a role to play. GHAFTRAM, TMPC, TAMD are all institutions set up to help regulate the practice. The Food and Drugs Authority, Centre for Plant Medicine, Department of Herbal Medicine, are all helping with ensuring safety of herbal medicines and it use in Ghana. Its therefore depends on us as consumers to resort to the right people and not just patronize every herbal medicine we meet. You can’t trace it when something goes wrong. Better leave aphrodisiacs for now, will talk about it in the next article.

There is a revolution, the whole world is turning herbal and we need to ensure science and technology comes to bear on the practice and products whilst the consumers also resort to qualified practitioners. We are all going back to nature…

[The author is President of the Ghana Herbal Medical Students' Association, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science  and Techonology (KNUST).]