So I have some lemon balm and peppermint in my garden and we use it to make tea.
I really like the smell and aroma of lemon balm and if I look online, it mentions for example that lemon balm is used for relieving anxiety, stress and can improve cognitive function.
But how is this tested, how can people even tell?
Does it really have this effect? And what would happen if you drink a lot of it?
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Either there’s a scientific double blind experiment or people are pulling those effects out of their asses.
I suppose a lot of these effects were known based on what people told they were useful for in traditional medicine or such. The question is if those assumptions are correct.
I do believe that people might have been able to tell better in the past what the effects of these things were, because that was the only options they had at that time. But I feel I can’t tell either way.
You asked how people can tell. What you presented is how people decide to conduct a study. Those are two separate issues. You can decide to believe anything with whatever level of evidence you deem sufficient. But no one can decide it for you. If you want the closest thing to facts, that means scientific consensus.
I’ve actually had moments where I was considering trying to use a significantly higher amount to test if I could feel any change. Like brewing a tea with 10 bags instead of 1. Or maybe drinking 10 teas a day.
If it has any effect, you would expect it to be very noticeable then. In reality it would probably just make me feel sick, so I haven’t tried it yet!
You could also be overloading your liver or kidneys, depending on the ingredients. Unlikely, but if they are indeed carrying enough active chemicals for one tea to be effective, a 10x dose will not come without risks.
I suppose a lot of these effects were known based on what people told they were useful for in traditional medicine or such.
The thing about useful ideas from traditional “medicine” is that modern medial research has done a lot to check into a lot of the remedies suggested. The ones which did prove useful in double blind studies were examined, the active ingredients isolated and synthesized. This then just became part of modern medicine. A lot of the rest though, has been tossed aside as quackery. But, because it’s “traditional” people still cling to it, pretending that people who had trouble counting above ten had some “ancient wisdom”. It’s complete crap, usually useless and sometimes outright harmful. But, people like their superstitions.
Are there still some traditional remedies out there which could lead to medical breakthroughs? Sure, there are a lot of uncontacted tribes which may have found legitimate uses for plants which haven’t been well studied. But, most of the stuff people talk about isn’t that. It’s usually some offshoot of Chinese Traditional Medicine, which seems interesting and mystical to western audiences in the same way Orientalism seems to sweep European and US audiences every few decades. Again, it’s pretty well known stuff, and largely superstitious crap.
But hey, if you get a good feeling from drinking tea, drink tea. Psychosomatic effects are very real and so long as you aren’t chopping up endangered species or ingesting mercury salts (a fantastic Traditional cure-all, which you absolutely should NOT ingest), then it’s probably fine.
Honestly, I don’t find I notice much with modern medicine either, which is why I typically don’t really use medication (or herbs for that matter)
Even things like coffee, which supposedly have quite a noticeable and consistent effect for people, don’t really work the same way for me. If I drink coffee, I either notice nothing, or I get very sleepy. So then I kinda started to doubt if things have the effect that people say it has, and how to check better what effect it has on me specifically.
Once, a doctor also prescribed me these pills with passionflower extract to relax. And I found it so weird that one would have to pay quite a lot for pills that just contain some plant that can grow indefinitely in your garden. Either way it didn’t matter because I didn’t feel any effect, medication or herb.
When viagra was first available, Chinese herbalists where spiking their pricey extracts with it. Lot of bullshit in herbal “medicine”.
This then just became part of modern medicine. A lot of the rest though, has been tossed aside as quackery.
I wouldn’t say they were classified as quackery. There will always be a snake oil salesmen somewhere, but most research that did not result into a it being incorporated into modern medicine does not necessarily mean they did not work. It’s usually the case of it not being economically viable, such as the market being small, saturated with another common drug, adverse side effects, hard to stabilize/isolate/synthesize compounds, technological barriers, etc
According to this study (Natural products as sources of new drugs from 1981 to 2014), around 65% of the new drugs discovered between 1980 and 2014 were secondary metabolites of plants. Yet have you found them all at your local drug store?
Medicinal plants are commonly used as anti-inflammatory alternative treatments, and several in vitro and in vivo studies have confirmed the ability of immune modulation by purified molecules from natural origin (See this study as an example: Herbal Phytochemicals as Immunomodulators). This is of particular interest since several commercial anti-inflammatory drugs have deleterious side effects, which highlights the importance of new drug discovery and studies
Of course I’m not advocating anyone to do a Steve Jobs, but I’m just not as dismissive of plant based medicines as some people are
Historically, by drinking and recording how it made them feel, over the course of generations.
Currently we have the ability to perform mass spectrometry and chemical assays to determine what the active chemical compounds produced by plants are. For example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8998931/
Some people swear by their effects, while others don’t notice them at all. Everybody processes the compounds differently, and there’s certainly a psychosomatic component at play as well.
I suppose I’m one of those people who don’t notice much at all. Even with modern medication. But that might be more of an issue with how my brain works, rather than that medication does not work whatsoever.
For teas, the only thing I can tell for sure is that when I drink chamomile, I just fall asleep. For others, I am not the best person to tell because I drink tea rarely.
Tinctures, I started making them just a few years back, so I’m a quite new, but I do use them all the time. So, tinctures can be used to eliminate a symptom (ex. take X tincture to break a fever). You can take tinctures to prevent stuff / balance your system, for me this is extremely important (ex. X tincture in lower dosage boosts immune system, so you take it during winter not to get a cold). If tincture X doesn’t work for you, maybe Y would or Z, so in a way the more you use them, the more you know about what works for you.
And lets remember that the base of pharmaceutical medicines come from all the collected knowledge of the effects of plants for millenia. Consequently, there is a tone of scientific research on plants and herbal therapy. For example, here are several scientific articles about herbal therapy and multiple sclerosis. In the same time the scientific research is not enough because pharmaceutical companies prefer creating elements in the lab instead of harvesting them from plants.
Personally, I use both western medicine and herbalism. I don’t trust herbalists who tell you not to go to the doctor and stuff like that. I don’t trust doctors blindly neither, because scientists can disagree on diagnoses, cures, approaches, etc. Appart from genuine disagreements, some love too much what the pharmaceuticals offer them. Herbalists have very different opinions, so if I dare say so, you have to formulate your own and allow it to evolve with time. There are a lot of amazing resources online for that. I use some resources relevant to where I live, and for more general info I like this site a lot: https://www.herbalreality.com/.
Thanks for your insights!
I do find people to very much quickly grab certain medication or such when feeling bad. Like taking a pain-killer when they have a headache. I’ve never heard a person drinking like 2 liters of tea and taking it every day.
I tend to agree with you about pain-killers, they can be a tricky thing. Sure, if you have a terible hangover and you take a pil every now and then, it’s one thing. Taking them often is another.
If you don’t know why you feel the pain, it can be a totally different story, especially if the pain, discomfort, etc is reoccuring. Pain can be like an alert the body emmits to make you aware that something is wrong, and needs your attention. Shutting down the alert doesn’t fix the problem. On the contrary, pain-killers can make you ignore it until it’s too late for it to be fixed.
With herbal medicine you first need to discover why you feel the pain and then try a few things in relation to the cause, not the symptom. If something works great, if not the solution is to go to the doctor to get examined. When (should I say if?) the docs tell you that you have this condition you can see what herbal medicine you can use to complement the suggested medical treatment, after talking about it with them. At least this is how I see things with what I learned so far.
(I seldom write that much. it’s a topic that I find so fascinating and I haven’t thought about for a while, so thank you for reminding me. And now I stop, I promise! hahaha)
Thanks for writing! I do agree it can be tricky.
Perhaps that’s why I find myself avoiding medication and traditional medicine in general.
My pain/discomfort is often recurring and does not have clear reasons (at least not to me) And I think it’s usually not because of a single reason, which makes it difficult to treat.
So I could take one medication and it might actually help, but I would still feel bad because there are maybe other things still affecting me. That makes it feel like no medication helps. But the reality might just be complexer than that.
I really hope you manage to find out the root cause(s) of your pain/discomfort. It was lovely talking to you :)
Thank you, appreciate it!
Historically, they have been scientistic method to test things out depending on the technology available and how far the knowledge of a domain went. This was always perform by scientist, or whatever the equivalent of a scholar name at the time. At the same time, there is also people who want to tell you how to cure yourself based on how their neighbor got better once.
Every plant have an effect. You are eating them after all. But the ones with too strong effect to be consumed outside medication are often famous for that, or for being toxic. If you don’t have a strong medical conterindication, you should not fell more that mild positive or negative effect when consuming a eatable plant in reasonable quantity. And for seeing real effect, that’s a doctor or nutritionniste job. You can’t do anything at home without playing with your health.
But sometimes playing with your health is a way to figure out what things work for you and what doesn’t right? I suppose the reason specific medication or herbs are being properly tested with the scientific method is because some researcher decided to ingest it or accidentally touched it and experienced the effects. Then decided to study it properly and ask people to do the same.
I’ve also found that some things that have well know effects, like coffee. Don’t work for me at all or have the opposite effect. So you always have to test it someway on yourself, even after checking the scientific consensus.
I won’t call trying some plant with famously wild effect playing with my health. I could try different way to drink tea and coffee and see the effect for myself. But I shouldn’t try to find out what happened to me if I injest some plant with famously strong medical effect such as Artemisia absinthium or Ruta graveolens .
Yeah, everything depends on the plant and mostly the dose. Both examples you give are apparently safe to use in small amounts as a herb for flavouring food or drinks. (from wikipedia) So I suppose even for those plants with know strong effects, just eating a leaf wont do much.
I won’t supposed so. A single pinch of woodworm make a whole kettel if herbal tea with already medicinal effect. In households, aruda is used for its smell only, as consumption could quickly harm someone.
I have never had anything I could say is a noticable health effect from herbal teas or tinctures but noticable effects are hard. I take fish oil pills because it has a noticable effect on my dry eye and I hope the omega-3’s and vitamin and such help. I take diosimin because it has a noticable effect on my hemroids but its supposed to help otherwise vascularyly and I hope it will be more helpful in other ways. I could drink teas with Buchu Leaf but its pricey and the pills are cheaper. Would love to drink the tea instead though. I have had other things I have taken with only knowing they are theoretically good for me but I can’t say for sure from my day to day.
It’s all bullshit. Especially the antioxidant claims.
Yes, sitting a drinking a nice tea can relieve stress, that’s not pharmacology.
