Although modern Americans may tend to think of herbal medicines as the sort of thing that might be prescribed by an ignorant witch doctor, the truth is that herbal medicine has be around for a long time, and has a respected history. Many of the medications we use in the twenty-first century were developed out of ancient healing traditions that used specific plants to treat specific health problems.

In fact, modern science has isolated the useful medicinal properties of a great many kinds of plant materials, so that their healing components could be analyzed. Huge labs now synthesize a great number of plant-based chemicals so that they can be used in pharmaceutical preparations. For example, digitalis, a drug used to regulate the heart, vincristine, a drug used to fight tumors, and ephedrine, a drug used as a bronchodilator that serves to decrease respiratory congestion, all originally came to be known through research on plants.

Additionally, salicylic acid, the material on which aspirin is based, originally came from the bark of the white willow and from the meadowsweet plant. Cinchona bark is used to make the malaria-fighting drug quinine. Vincristine, which is employed in the treatment of certain types of cancer, is derived from periwinkle. The opium poppy is the original source for morphine, a powerful pain reliever; for codeine, used to treat coughs; and for paregoric, which is used to treat diarrhea. A tincture of the opium poppy was also used to make laudanum, a 19th-century tranquilizer.

Before antibiotics were discovered, the herb echinacea, which is made from the purple coneflower plant, was among the most widely used medicines in North America. Modern research has found that the herb improves the way the immune system works by stimulating the body's production of white blood cells.

Origins in shamanism

In China, herbal medicine had its roots in shamanism. During the period of the Warring States, in the first millennium B.C., it was thought that diseases in humans had a relationship to the discord within society itself, and that sickness was the result of the malevolent actions of demons. Herbal medicine was used to overcome these unworldly forces. Only later was this knowledge refined and written down, until it became the basis of the modern medicine in that part of the world.