Handmade Medicines: Simple Recipes for Herbal Health

Nutrition Forum, May, 1999 by Varro E. Tyler

Handmade Medicines: Simple Recipes for Herbal Health by Christopher Hobbs (Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 1998), 120 pp., $12.95, paperback. ISBN 1-883010-50-0.

Except for their use in the preparation of non-caffeine-containing beverage teas, the age of unstandardized ground-up herbs and products prepared from them is rapidly passing. Scientific herbal medicine based upon extracts standardized by sophisticated techniques such as high-performance liquid chromatography for a variety of constituents and subjected to controlled clinical testing in humans is rapidly replacing such outmoded usage.

This causes one to view a 1998 book devoted to Handmade Medicines in the same light as a post-Henry Ford volume on the manufacture of buggy whips. With so many high-quality, standardized, clinically tested herbal products available in pharmacies, health-food stores, and supermarkets of all kinds across the nation, this volume, dealing largely with what once was, is principally of historical interest to persons other than herbal Luddites.

I shall skip over the introductory chapters, except to mention that the section "The Top Medicinal Garden Herbs" must be read with caution: burdock is not an antibiotic, that designation being reserved for products, of microorganisms; California poppy has never been proven safe for children; unless analyzed to assure minimal pyrrolizidine alkaloid content, comfrey should not be taken internally; so many chemical races of feverfew exist that one simply cannot tell without testing if a plant is active or not; the heating and cooling effects of Asian and American ginseng are Asian philosophical concepts, not supported by science; simple filtering does not produce the necessary sterility required to assure safety of goldenseal eyewash; hops have never been proven to facilitate sleep; and so on and so on.

The chapter "Preparing Herbs for Use" is generally quite good but somewhat limited in scope. It would have been helpful to explain the differences between tinctures, which are discussed, and fluid-extracts and extracts, which are not. The latter term, in particular, is much misused in herbal medicine. No discussion of encapsulation of powdered herbs, also easily carried out at home, is included.

Some formulas for tinctures, oils, salves, and the like are provided in the chapter "The Recipes: Combining Herbs for Healing," but the majority are for herbal teas. Many of these contain six or seven ingredients and are thus more reminiscent of Chinese or European traditional medicine than of simple herbal recipes. Needless to say, the effectiveness of such complex mixtures has never been scientifically validated.

If you are curious about how some types of herbal dosage forms are prepared, this book will provide easily understood explanations. If you want to use an herbal remedy for maximum and uniform effects, purchase a standardized. clinically tested product marketed by a reliable manufacturer.