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The World Health Organization estimates that over 80% of the world uses herbs for healing in some way. Herbalism, to a certain extent, is appreciated by a majority of the world’s people. Whether it be Chinese herbal medicine, traditional African medicine, Native American medicine, or the more ‘classical’ Greek and Roman ideology, herbs are perceived by the average individual to have healing properties. But is this all just a matter of faith? Is there any truth behind it?
This depends on your personal background, but there are many varieties on how exactly a society perceives the roles of herbs in their medicine. In the modern era, we tend to discount any theories that herbs can affect people in a magical or unexplainable way. So the earliest shamanistic ways of explaining herbs are mostly ignored. Instead, three primary schools of thought are derived from herbs as a explainable medicine. You can perceive herbs to work on a faith-based reasoning, where you administer herbs along with other ingredients to restore a spiritual balance, like in traditional Chinese herbal medicine. You can also think in a purely functional manner, where you don’t know or care exactly why something works, but you can explain the direct connection between the application of an herb to the effect it produces. And finally you have the more western attitude of the chemical applications of plants where the specific identifiable chemicals inside a substance are the reason for administration to a patient. For example, you would not administer an herb just because you know it’s worked in the past, but because it contains a specific ingredient that you know will produce the effect you are looking for.
No matter which you believe in, people who practice herbal medicine usually agree that the pharmaceutical approach to medicine is superior to herbal treatment in the case of emergency, when time is very limited. So herbalism mostly has a role in long term treatment and building up resistances to disease and other ailments.
