Herbal Pills And The Big Pharma Backlash Fallacy

In the last few years, herbal pills and other herbal remedies have become more and more popular. There are many ideas as to why this may be, but the prevailing theory is that it is due to a public backlash against the practices of large pharmaceutical companies who exploit their considerable wealth and lobbying power and produce medications that are more profitable than beneficial.

Medicine today is a branch of science, just like chemistry, physics or engineering, but this is only a recent development. For all of our prehistory and almost all of our recorded history, medicine was more about ritual, magic, beliefs and the propitiation of gods, devils, or sorcerers. This is only to be expected, for how can we treat something if we do not understand it? Herbs and their extracts or preparations were the only form of 'medicine' that offered any hope of actually curing a malady, even if the actions by which herbal remedies worked were not understood.

With the coming of the enlightenment came the very beginning of ideas about medicine as a science. Advances in chemistry and the study of anatomy, physiology and pathology allowed us for the first time to appreciate how our health is governed by factors such as our environment and our nutrition. Perhaps the greatest revolution in medical history though was the discovery that microscopic organisms were the root cause of many of our most deadly diseases. The development of the germ theory of disease banished forever our ignorance about how many common diseases spread and infected us. No longer do we need fear curses, the wrath of God (or gods) or demonic possession, however much ignorant faith healers and other assorted charlatans would like us to.

In historical terms, herbal medicine was just as much about ritual and magic as it was about healing. As we saw above, we cannot hope to understand how to cure an illness if we do not understand the illness itself. Because herbs and their extracts are made of chemicals just like everything else around us and contain no intrinsic 'magic' or other mysterious properties, we can isolate, study and replicate the active chemicals they contain, using herbal extracts as we would any standardized synthetic pharmaceutical compound.

So how about our objections to 'big pharma' corporations with which this piece opened? Only a complete cynic could not be moved by the appalling way in which some of these companies conduct themselves as businesses, but this does not detract from the science behind the production and testing of the drugs they make. We may abhor their focus on marketing and profit over public health - especially health in the developing world (unless we happen to be shareholders) but then we do not live in a utopia, by any stretch of the imagination. If we want a pharmaceutical industry that focuses solely on curing diseases and leaves considerations of profit aside, then we must be prepared to fund it through taxation or the charitable sector.

Whatever our feelings about pharmaceutical companies, we expect the medicines they produce to work, and the (normally stringent and incorruptible) science of in-vitro testing, in-vivo animal testing and multiple double-blind human clinical trials providing definite and repeatable results allow us to have confidence in the medicines they produce.

I contend that whether we realize it or not, we demand the same evidential standards of our herbal pills and herbal remedies as we do of our pharmaceuticals. Whilst a surprisingly large number of us are yet swayed by ill-informed celebrity endorsement, consumer testimonials and other feeble forms of anecdotal 'evidence', most of purchase herbal pills because we expect them to work, and we expect them to work because scientific studies have shown that naturally occurring compound 'X' has a similar action to pharmaceutically synthesized compound 'Y'.

We trust some herbal pills because their ingredients have demonstrated their effectiveness - not because we dislike pharmaceutical corporations, even if we do.