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eCAM 2007 4(Supplement 1):37-40; doi:10.1093/ecam/nem096
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© 2007 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Herbal Medicine Today: Clinical and Research Issues

Fabio Firenzuoli and Luigi Gori

Center of Natural Medicine, S.Giuseppe Hospital, Empoli, Italy

Herbal medicine is the use of medicinal plants for prevention and treatment of diseases: it ranges from traditional and popular medicines of every country to the use of standardized and tritated herbal extracts. Generally cultural rootedness enduring and widespread use in a Traditional Medical System may indicate safety, but not efficacy of treatments, especially in herbal medicine where tradition is almost completely based on remedies containing active principles at very low and ultra low concentrations, or relying on magical-energetic principles.

In the age of globalization and of the so-called ‘plate world’, assessing the ‘transferability’ of treatments between different cultures is not a relevant goal for clinical research, while are the assessment of efficacy and safety that should be based on the regular patterns of mainstream clinical medicine.

The other black box of herbal-based treatments is the lack of definite and complete information about the composition of extracts. Herbal derived remedies need a powerful and deep assessment of their pharmacological qualities and safety that actually can be realized by new biologic technologies like pharmacogenomic, metabolomic and microarray methology. Because of the large and growing use of natural derived substances in all over the world, it is not wise to rely also on the tradition or supposed millenarian beliefs; explanatory and pragmatic studies are useful and should be considered complementary in the acquisition of reliable data both for health caregiver and patients.

Keywords: evidence based medicince – explanatory trials – herbal medicine – mainstream medicine – phytotherapy – pragmatic trials – traditional medical system – traditional medicine

For reprints and all correspondence: Fabio Firenzuoli, MD, Center of Natural Medicine, Director S. Giuseppe Hospital, Via Paladini 40 – 50053 Empoli, Italy. Tel: +39-0571-702601; Fax: +39-0571-702639; E-mail: f.firenzuoli{at}usl11.toscana.it


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