What is herbal medicine?
Herbal medicine is the art and science of using herbs for promoting health and preventing and treating illness. It has persisted as the world’s primary form of medicine since the beginning of time, with a written history more than 5000 years old. While the use of herbs in America has been overshadowed by dependence on modern medications the last 100 years, 75% of the world’s population still relies primarily upon traditional healing practices, most of which is herbal medicine.
Many different types of natural medicine use herbs as part of their practice. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners generally use plants native to China or Asia. An herb can be a root, a piece of tree bark, a mushroom, seed, berry, or anything else which grows naturally and falls into the plant kingdom. An herbal practitioner utilizes herbal formulas that may contain any or all of these plant components as a method of providing nutritional balance.
Herbal medicine, sometimes referred to as Herbalism, Botanical medicine or Herbology, is the use of plants, in a wide variety of forms, for their therapeutic value. Herb plants produce and contain a variety of chemical compounds that act upon the body and are used to prevent or treat disease or promote health and well-being. A brief history of herbal medicine. Humans, and even Neanderthals, have used plants to treat their ailments for at least tens of thousands of years; most likely even longer than that. The first written accounts of the use of herbs originate in China, although all other civilisations from the ancient world were using plants as natural remedies for their ailments. Western herbal medicine dates back to ancient Greece and its famous doctors like Hippocrates and Galen. The 15th to 17th centuries were the most popular time for herbalism in Europe. Herbal remedies are still relatively popular today, mainly due to the fact that they are regarded as harmless because they ar
