for example, ashwagandha or valerian. whenever you search them up it states something akin to “safe to use for up to 6 weeks. long term effects are unknown”
people have been using these medicines for centuries… can’t they just conduct research?
In: Biology
We have more potent, synthetic alternatives to those plants.
Researching the long term effects of a drug costs money. It is considered worth it if there are benefits to distributing and using them, wether those benefits are financial or for the betterment of society.
So, although it would be nice to know what these effects are, there are currently better places to put that research money.
Yes, they *can*, they just *haven’t.* Research costs time and money and long term research is actually pretty difficult because you’d have to monitor some group of people over a long period of time. The longer you monitor them the more factors you have to account and control for.
Herbal medicines that were found to be effective in clinical studies, became medicine, such as using quinine (from Cinchona tree bark) for treating Malaria, Willow bark for headaches became aspirin etc. the ones that were tested and fail to produce a measurable effect became “herbal medicine”.
Testing the effectiveness of a new drug would cost millions of dollars. If it were, say, a new high-tech treatment for COVID, the pharmaceutical company could rest assured they could make those millions of dollars back in the profits from selling the drug. No everybody has the equipment to make cutting-edge medication, and they would get a multi-year patent where no one else was allowed to copy their formula.
But if they paid millions of dollars to test valerian, they would never make that money back. They can’t patent a plant that everyone’s known about for millennia and that grows freely outside. Anyone with the seeds could grow and sell it and take a giant cut of the profits.
Not to mention, getting FDA approved is hella expensive. There’s mandatory random inspections and testing. You have to verify the purity of your product to a much higher degree. If you can just sell some half-rate valerian with a “This product has not been approved by the FDA” label and people will still buy it, why bother?
Don’t quote me but observing the Chinese medicine system, everything is about trying to gear your system toward harmony.
In Chinese medicine, 5 organs are the 5 elements,(earth, fire…) and the blood is ‘water’, and vessels are canals.
What I’ve observed is that Chinese medicine aims to harmonize how these 5 elements link together by combining herbs. But seeing a bunch of dried veggies and spices, that’s only the tip of the ice berg. A traditional doctor finds out which is out of balance, they boost that function, and reduces what’s being out of balance. Not only that, the herbs combination is changed by the season/weather because cold means a person’s circulation and bodily function changes.
So while it’s all too intangible and under-researched. This thousand-years system of herbal medicine proves that one herb is never the magic potion for everyone at anytime. It’s just that the advertising for herbs always make everything, from snake oil to vaseline sound like they are key to eternal life.
My Exhibit A is : CBD hype a few years ago
Because it is extremely expensive to run a useful study on some random herb long term. Or really anything.
Like an actual RCD trial:
Not just hm we got some case reports of liver damage in people who admit to using the drug.
You gotta recruit a few hundred people, supply the medication to them, split into placebo and verum group, and then watch those 100+ people for several years while they take their provided dose of the medication. I.e. frequent testing that they are really taking it, or the drug needs to be applied by the study team.
You‘ll note how that’s gonna cost millions.
And then you won’t get the important part anyway: shady herb are virtually always contaminated with hepatotoxic moulds. Because they aren’t stored properly. Allowed to get wet etc.
So the study would show herb A is safe longterm, people buy some uncontrolled gas station variant of the herb take high dosages contaminated with the mould toxins and end up with liver cancer etc.
If the drug is safe short term with no noticeable organ damage, the incidence of long term damage is also going to likely be low and thus require that high number of test subjects.
one thing to consider here maybe:
while there is no /not enough studies on long-term-effects on certain herbs, there might very well be studies on substances these herbes contain!
herbal medicine has the disadvantage that you’ll always consume a cocktail of different substances, while modern medicine focusses on extracting (or recreating) the substance that they want to use.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metformin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metformin)
This medication is for treatment of diabetes. It’s origin is a natural herb called goat’s rue (Galega officinalis). It was used as a healing herb long before modern medicine.
The consumption of this herb, however, had plenty of negative side-effects- which is why they identified the substance that is helpful and recreated it chemically – this medication, called Metformin, is working much better with less side-effects.
To make **a human study on long-term effects of goat’s rue would therefore be unethical**
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