The difference between Medicine and Herbs (Archived)

The difference between Medicine and Herbs 1:

Recently, the spread and popularity of trading with natural herbs and the increasing demand on it, with a fact that, most of those herbs are not supported or certified with scientific studies or ‘Controlled Trials’, even ways of use and benefit from them and their side effects has not been harnessed in ways known or acknowledged by scientific mediums that are globally recognized.

We say this, by believing that amongst many of those herbs benefits that are owe to be studied and researched in the most proper scientific ways to benefit the public from, including grade materials and avoiding harmful effects of toxic substances that can mix with it.

What encouraged us to write this article is due to an advertisement in one of the Arabic newspapers, starting with a big title that says: “Calling all diabetes patients” and continues by explaining that a new herb has been discovered from the deepest tropical jungles of Ghana, which cured thousands of diabetes patients for good. The promoters of those herbs claim that it’s the hope and cure for diabetes patients, and the founder, a professor in one of the prestigious American Universities has thankfully ‘Approved’ to give way for the Middle East to distribute limited quantities of this herb to their markets.

This advertisement is filled with mistakes and scientific contradictions which requires a lot of clarifications and corrections, unless the purpose of it was, for deceiving and deception, which is the last thing to be investigated by Health Ministries.

The first mistake in the advertisement is that, there is no final cure to diabetes in this day and age yet. Research and studies are in the making in many countries of the world, Americans on top of them, by annually funding billions of dollars for studies dedicated towards diabetes disease and ways to cure it.

But the claims of herbal promoters as being a final cure, needs tens of years to prove that a diabetes patient who’s been taking those herbs would never relapse back in sugar increase after years of the treatment, which needs accurate studies on long term basis, considering that the herb “as confirmed by the Advertisement” is newly discovered, and so confirming that the medicine has not yet taken its required time course.

The difference between Medicine and Herbs 2:

To continue the subject we started earlier about Medicines and herbs, we would like to clarify for our readers about some herbs which cause side effects, either by mixing them with other harmful substances or ingredients, or the lack of purity of some samples during preparation processes.

All medications that are recognized globally require studies and long research processes that could take tens of years. The cost of producing one medicine in the United States alone would sum up to over than 200 million dollars.

In the United States of America, the F.D.A sets laws to control the production, manufacturing, distributing of medicine and food, the purpose of these laws is to protect the consumer and to make sure that all terms and conditions are applied, those terms, need to be present before obtaining a license to produce, manufacture and distribute is:

1-      The production company should prove that any manufactured medicine is ‘effective’ and delivers the outcomes meant from its production, to which the production company claims, including the presence of research and studies that are subject to recognized laws of global nature, which might drain a lot of patients along its path.

2-      The production company should prove that any manufactured medicine is safe to use and does not harm consumers, and is clear from any dangerous side effects, all this requires studies and extensive research on long periods of time.

3-      The production company should prove that recommended dosages of the medicine have been based on scientific factors.

The herbal market is not subject to any of these laws, and so the production company has the right to sell their products without the need to present any studies that proves its efficiency or if it doesn’t have any side effects, those production companies have the right to even advertise about their productions the way they see it benefits without any profs to backup those claims, they do not even require obtaining any clearances’ before production or marketing, and so there are no guarantees that these herbs or compounds would provide the outcomes those production companies claim.

In many occasions, producers do not take in consideration the results of those herbs on longer periods of time, not only, it doesn’t offer guarantees on herbal compounds effectiveness, that is already obtained by the pills available to the consumers, and where nobody knows if there was a way to prepare this compound that allows the human body absorb and benefit from its ingredients of not.

There are many things that we cannot explain to the full extent in this article, but the conclusion is that there are many of those misleading and misguided claims that benefit from the ignorance of consumers, but would even go further to the extent of using fake professors and doctor names that probably never existed, and if it was true, what they claim in their advertisements, why then would this professor give the rights of distribution to a small office in an Arabic country, where at the same time, medicine companies and researches spent by the billions of dollars to study everything that falls under their hands to cure diseases such as diabetes, but would also reward those researchers and explorers with amounts that overpass imagination in this region, by maintaining their rights and percentages of the profits throughout their lives ‘especially if the explorer is a professor from a prestigious University’.