Herbal Medicine In Reading

Herbal medicine is a complementary therapy that uses plants or plant extracts to treat illness. There are numerous herbal products available that claim to treat the symptoms of a wide range of problems, from depression to colds and flu.

I've been going to one at 31 Prospect Street, Caversham, Reading for a year, and it seems to be working. Anna Cannon will make you a lovely healthy herbal tea. Call her at 0118 946 4022.

Many well established medicines originally come from plants., morphine comes from poppies, aspirin comes from the bark of willow trees and digoxin (a drug used to treat heart failure) comes from foxgloves.

Traditional herbal medicine has been used in the UK for centuries and it remains popular today. Although it's classed as a complementary medicine in the UK, it's actually the most widely practised form of medicine across the world - 80 percent of the world's population are dependent on herbs for their health.

Traditional herbal medicine makes a diagnosis based on factors that are no longer used by conventional medicine. You will be prescribed a herbal mixture that is individual to you and based on your characteristics.

There are a number of other therapies that use plants as remedies:
aromatherapy
homeopathy
Ayurvedic medicine (which treats the mind and body together with herbal medicines, yoga, massage, diet and meditation)

The gold standard for pharmaceutical testing is repeated, large-scale, randomized, double-blind tests. Some plant products or pharmaceutical drugs derived from them are incorporated into medicine. To recoup the considerable costs of testing to the regulatory standards, the substances are patented and marketed by pharmaceutical companies.

Herbalists criticize mainstream studies on the grounds that they make insufficient use of historical usage, which has no relevance to the medical efficacy of a product's usage. They maintain that tradition can guide the selection of factors such as optimal dose, species, time of harvesting and target population.

Five billion people rely on traditional plant-based medicine as their primary form of health care.

http://hcd2.bupa.co.uk/fact_sheets/html/herbal_medicine.html
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/herbalmedicine.html
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/319/7216/1050