Info about Herbal Medicine
Herbal medicine history
Herbal medicine is exactly what its name says it is: herbs that are used for medical purposes. They can be used under the form of tea or just by simply applying a leaf on a cut or other wounds. Plants that are famous for their medical purposes are aloe, chamomile, linden, ginkgo biloba and many others. Many known medications of today’s modern medicine are based on ancient rites that used plants for the purpose of healing. Some people may be skeptic about the healing powers of plants but the truth is that if it weren’t for healing herbs modern medicine wouldn’t have a secure foundation.
Herbal medicine is one of the oldest ways mankind tried to heal diseases. Most of the modern science of medicine was based on the herbal knowledge of native peoples all over the world. Since the time of the primitive man, humankind observed the beneficial uses of some plants. First they observed animal behavior and then by fault and error they separated the ones that were truly medicinal from the simple or poisonous ones. During the course of the years, ancient civilizations developed very precise herbal pharmacopoeias of a great diversity of plants. Many modern medicine drugs have herbal precursors. Aspirin, for example, was derived from the bark of the white willow and meadowsweet as well as morphine, which is a standard point to all other synthetic painkillers, and is extracted out of poppy seeds. Long before any synthetic antibiotics were discovered, doctors prescribed Echinacea as a way to fight infections. Today it was proven that Echinacea can boost your immune system and stimulate the production of white blood cells. For centuries apothecaries all over the world used plants to relieve pain, tend wounds or simply cure a sour throat. There have been discoveries of medicinal plants since the era of the cavemen to the pharaohs of Egypt and from the Middle Ages to the modern day. During the Middle Ages almost everybody had well tended medical botanical gardens because plants were the only medicine people had back then.
So don’t give herbal medicine a weird look when you hear about it because, if you check the facts, people that use plants to cure themselves are healthier than the ones that use modern medicine. In most of the cases, people who use traditional herbal medicine do not get sick enough to require modern care which is a good thing considering that all they used to tend to their health was a good warm tea and a few leafs.