By: James A. Duke, PhD.

I've spent close to 40 years (most of those in the employ of the United States Department of Agriculture) investigating the medicinal properties of plants, sampling most everything green from the north woods of Maine to the south woods of sweet home Alabama and from Amazonia to Africa, Asia and Australia. What I've learned has convinced me that modern medicine's blind faith in pharmaceutical "smart missiles"--drugs designed to strike narrowly defined disease targets--can oft times be misguided. If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the herbal alternative to be cheaper, safer and overall better for you than its synthetic counterpart. Trouble is, doctors, drug companies, even the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have so far seemed unwilling to take that bet. Open most any issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and you'll read about comparative head-on trials of various drugs: Hytrin® versus Proscar® for benign prostatic hypertrophy (enlarged prostate), dihydroergotamine versus sumatriptan for acute migraine and so on. Omitted from virtually all of these studies, however, is any consideration of the herbal alternatives, regardless of their potential.

Five "Ifs" for the New Herbalist

In my lectures over the past decade I have stridently campaigned for comparative trials of medicinal herbs and their corresponding pharmaceuticals. It's become one of the main raisons d'etre of my sunrise years. While herbal remedies may not be for everyone, every time, they're well worth considering:

If you are one of the nearly 20% of Americans who can't afford prescription drugs--or the doctors who prescribe them.

If your last visit to the doctor took less time than your last trip through the car wash. Today's HMO physicians spend on average six minutes with each patient. And, worse still, they don't seem to be listening: One study showed male doctors interrupting patient responses after 14 seconds, while female doctors cut in after 40.

If you have reason to doubt your diagnosis. Even with today's advanced diagnostic technologies, some 50% of Lyme disease diagnoses are wrong, while an estimated 20% of adult coughs are believed to be undiagnosed pertussis, or whooping cough.

If you have comorbid factors, or more than one thing ailing you (most of us do).

If you are deficient in any essential vitamin, mineral or other nutrient (most of us are).

If you fit into any or all of the above "iffy" categories, the herbal alternative may be right for you. Herbs are accessible, largely affordable and don't require an expensive visit to your doctor.

More important, most every herb contains thousands of biologically active phytochemicals, a few or dozens or hundreds of which will, if purposefully selected and ingested in the right amount, help to prevent, treat or reduce the symptoms of whatever's troubling you, plus alleviate some or all of your comorbid factors, diagnosed or not.

And, as an added bonus, the "herbal shotgun" provides many of the nutrients missing from or underrepresented in the average American diet. If it's an essential element, mineral, amino or fatty acid, precursor peptide, enzyme or vitamin you're lacking, a little--and most herbs give you a little, more of most or all of the above--can go a long a way.

But perhaps the most compelling reason to turn to herbs is that our genes and the genes of Earth's friendly flora have enjoyed a lengthy history together--a history that began several million years ago near the Great Rift Valley, where our ancestral genes first met the ancestral genes of African composites...some edible, some medicinal, some poisonous. Herbs are nothing if not biologically familiar.

They are also biologically complex. What is perhaps one of the simplest herbs, the four-chromosome Arabidopsis, has some 20,000 genes, each coding for a master chemical controlling one or more physiological activity (amazing when you consider humans, in all of our conscious glory, have only about 100,000 genes).

Among these tens of thousands of phytochemicals we are likely to find dozens that are beneficial to our health, as well as a few that, in large quantities, could be detrimental. But familiarity breeds discretion. The human body, with its proclivity for homeostasis, has through the ages become adept at sequestering the compounds it needs, and at the proper levels, while filtering out the rest--and with no guidance from you, your doctor or your pharmacist.

Conversely, the body hasn't an innate clue how to process the physician's silver bullet, which likely contains one or a few synthetic chemicals never before experienced by you or your ancestors. And even if it is a phytochemical drug--some 25% to 40% of all pharmaceuticals are plant derived--its active compounds may behave very differently outside of their "natural habitat" and in proportions not known in the wild. The human body, exposed to unnatural chemicals or natural chemicals in unnatural concentrations, is too-often stumped, sometimes with dire consequences

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