Herbal medicine is the use of medicinal plants for prevention and treatment of diseases: it ranges from traditional and popular medicines of every country to the use of standardized and tritated herbal extracts. Generally cultural rootedness enduring and widespread use in a Traditional Medical System may indicate safety, but not efficacy of treatments, especially in herbal medicine where tradition is almost completely based on remedies containing active principles at very low and ultra low concentrations, or relying on magical-energetic principles.To get more news about herbal medicine, you can visit shine news official website.

In the age of globalization and of the so-called ‘plate world’, assessing the ‘transferability’ of treatments between different cultures is not a relevant goal for clinical research, while are the assessment of efficacy and safety that should be based on the regular patterns of mainstream clinical medicine.

The other black box of herbal-based treatments is the lack of definite and complete information about the composition of extracts. Herbal derived remedies need a powerful and deep assessment of their pharmacological qualities and safety that actually can be realized by new biologic technologies like pharmacogenomic, metabolomic and microarray methology. Because of the large and growing use of natural derived substances in all over the world, it is not wise to rely also on the tradition or supposed millenarian beliefs; explanatory and pragmatic studies are useful and should be considered complementary in the acquisition of reliable data both for health caregiver and patients.

Keywords: evidence based medicince, explanatory trials, herbal medicine, mainstream medicine, phytotherapy, pragmatic trials, traditional medical system, traditional medicine
Herbs are natural products and their chemical composition varies depending on several factors and therefore varying from people to people, from energetic decoctions to the use of herbal extracts following Western methodologies of mainstream medicine. Traditional medicines has a very long history: it is the sum total of the practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences of different cultures and times, often inexplicable, used in the maintenance of health, as like in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement and treatment of illnesses.

In every country traditional medicines find foundation in magical or religious beliefs, or popular experience and the World Health Organization is engaged to establish definitive guidelines for methodology of clinical research and the appraisal of effectiveness of traditional medicine
For centuries traditional medical systems (TMS) were the primary medical system in the countries of origin, and now nevertheless the present dominance of the Western scientific medical model, citizens and health-caregivers are starting to rely and trust TMS substituting conventional scientifically proved therapies with unconventional ones. Generally cultural rootedness enduring and widespread use of TMS may indicate safety, but not the efficacy of the treatments especially in herbal medicines where tradition is almost completely based on remedies containing active principles at very low and ultra low concentrations, or relying on magical-energetic properties of sun, moon, etc.

In European traditional herbalism categories similar to Asiatic medicines, referring to ‘humoral-energetic doctrines’ that has qualities (like heat, cold, dry, humid), and elements (fire, air, water, earth, etc.) are used. European popular medicine still counsel the so-called depurative plants for treatment of dermatological illnesses, like psoriasis or eczemas, like it were due to intoxications, as well as diuretic plants for arthritis, or a decoction of Stachys (called ‘herb of fear’) used as bath to wash out fears, or hay baths as treatment of cancer.