Herbalist

A herbalist is a person who prescribes primarily herbal remedies for various medical ailments. The practice is very old and may be dated to two millennia B.C.E in Egypt and China. It continues to be popular in China and east Asian countries, although from the time of the Industrial Revolution, the practice became increasingly discredited in Western countries as new scientific techniques seized the imagination of people in those countries.

In modern times, herbalists have received something of an upturn in fortunes because many people have come to feel that Western medicine is too reliant on chemical sciences which cannot be trusted and which are mediated by pharmaceutical companies that have dubious intentions. Nevertheless, at the heart of herbalism is a belief in the restorative or curative powers of herbs which, in many cases, has no verifiable basis and, in other cases, obscures potentially dangerous side effects.

Because a herbalist is required to be able to recognize a wide range of plants and to identify their specific uses, it as customary in preindustrial societies for the herbalist, possibly in addition to other religious or sacred duties, to spend years studying the art, perhaps as an apprentice to an older herbalist. In some societies, women were able to enter the profession, perhaps as part of duties which also included midwifery. At a basic level, the herbalist would have been required to identify safe and unsafe wild plants and to advise on pain relief and health-giving preparations. In countries where poppies grew, opium became known as a method of pain relief and other examples exist of herbal remedies actually performing the functions required of them, although they may have undesirable side effects and other issues. In other cases, societies became dependent on particular herbs and attributed great power to them even though no scientific evidence for their efficacy exists.

An example of this is the use of ginseng in Korea, which is prescribed for a very wide range of ailments and generally believed to have numerous benefits, although these have yet to be substantiated in laboratories. In other cases still, herbalists used items that have subsequently come to be used in different but genuinely efficacious ways. The impact of quinine on preventing the spread of malaria, for example, has become well known.

Irrespective of the demonstrated ability of herbalists to prescribe effective treatments, it is certainly true that the decoupling of many people from the land on which they live has led to a number of negative impacts, not least of which is loss of knowledge about local plants and flowers. Local wisdom may still be useful in the modern world and, as the pace of global climate change and environmental degradation intensifies, it would be unfortunate if knowledge of plants becomes extinct, as well as the plants themselves.

Western medicine should be chosen over the prescriptions of herbalists because evidence exists of its effectiveness, which may be repeated in laboratory conditions and because of the study of side effects or interactions with other substances. Furthermore, medicine deriving from companies that adhere to strict government regulations is much more likely to have strict quality-control issues which ensure that it is of the same, advertised strength and quality on a consistent basis.

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