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?
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.
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”.
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