The Pharmacy In The Forest
Plants and herbs as natural healers and alternative medicines, including: yarrow, pumpkin, privet, meadowsweet, goldenseal.
Herbal Remedies
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As you walk down the aisles of your local drugstore seeing
the array of brightly colored bottles and boxes whose
contents are designed to treat an almost endless variety of
ailments, could you ever imagine them as flowers once
growing on a forest floor or as bark cut from one of its
trees? Is there even a remote relationship between the life
of the woods and the bottles on the shelf?
The nationally known author and environmental scientist G.
Tyler Miller tells us that in America one of every four
drugs sold either over-the-counter or by prescription has
its origin in plant life. From the chemicals developed by
nature have actually come 25 percent of all our
medications. In some nations the percentage is as high as
50. There is a pharmacy in the forest.
The history of the relationship between products from
living plants and healing medications goes back to the very
beginnings of medicine itself. There are museum records of
prescriptions dating back to Egypt in 3700 B.C. Their work
was followed by the Chinese, and later, Greek and Roman
medicine came into its own. By 600 A.D. the Arab world had
developed a health care system while scientific medicine
and pharmacy began to flourish in Europe in the eighth
century.
The American experience is deeply rooted in the lore of
Native Americans. Indian nations from coast to coast
developed a considerable volume of knowledge of natu ral
substances and used them with great success in treating
their sick. The first official compendium (called a
Pharmacopeia) was published in 1778, just two years
following the American Revolution. By 1787, an American
physician, Dr. Schoepf, had published his Materia Medica
Americana, listing not only European remedies, but also
dozens of drugs coming from our indigenous plants.
Information regarding their preparation and uses had come
largely from the accumulated knowledge of native American
medicine men.
Unfortunately the relationship between these natural
products and viable healing drugs was to suffer an image
problem when those motivated by quick profit got into the
act. The many Western movies with their portrayal of the
traveling medicine show and its list of "cures for what
ails you" wasn't a fabrication but an actual and dominant
part of the medical scene. Lost in the vaudeville shuffle
of questionable oils and tinctures was the fact that
hundreds of pharmaceutical manufactures and dedicated
physicians continued to produce and dispense medications
which served to improve the health of our people. Many of
these medications came from plant sources and were very
effective.
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