The Green Pharmacy

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And finally, standardized Hawthorn Extract is my first-choice heart guard - and a must for cardiac-prone people given that heart disease is the number-one killer in America, claiming lives at the rate of about one a minute.

For more information on the healing properties, dosages and potential side effects (both good and bad) of the above herbs, check out Dr. Duke's new book, Dr. Duke's Essential Herbs (Rodale Press, October 1999).

The accompanying tables (next page) show potential herbal alternatives to commonly prescribed and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and synthetics for more than 85diseases we confront. All the herbal products listed have been used safely by at least some physicians in this country and are recommended by some physicians here and many physicians in Europe. Some are GRAS (generally recognized as safe) herbs and many you will recognize as familiar foods. I have not presented any herbs in this table that I would be afraid to test myself or to ask female members of my family to test.

You may find it entertaining and informative to ask your physician what pharmaceutical he or she would recommend for a given disease included on the chart. Then you can really entertain yourself by asking hurt or her if there is any proof that the recommended drug is better than the herbal alternative. Since our FDA rarely accepts data from overseas, we will continue to wallow in our own ignorance. Until comparative, U.S. trials have been performed, neither you nor I, nor your nor my physician, nor any pharmacist can say for sure that the pharmaceutical is better than the herbal alternative.

My resolution for the New Year (and century and millennium) is to catalyze these comparative head-on trials here in America. And my timing may just be right: I am delighted to report that Duke University (no relation) is involved in a three-year clinical comparison of Zoloft (sentralin) and St. John's wort (hypericum). This is the first big American comparison of a top-selling drug with a top-selling herbal extract. Let me predict the outcome, rightly or wrongly: The herb will prove to be as (or almost as) effective, but will have fewer side effects. That is what German researchers found when comparing saw palmetto with Proscar® (finasteride), the first FDA-approved pharmaceutical for treating enlarged prostate, and that is the prediction I will venture for most of the couplets, the David's versus the Goliaths. America deserves and needs the best medicines. Until the better herbals have been compared with the better pharmaceuticals, we simply don't know that we have the best drugs.

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