Science Fictions: Critically Evaluating Herbal Science

In recent decades, many herbalists have looked to biomedical research about plant constituents to guide their practices. Like any model, the model that biomedical research uses in approaching herbs is useful, but flawed. The model assumes that plants have fixed levels of constituents, that each medicinal plant has one or two "active compounds," that these compounds act like "keys" in the "locks" that are our receptor sites, and that they will act in similar ways in most people's bodies. None of these assumptions is true – but they can provide a framework for generating useful information. Join us as we talk about how to critically evaluate biomedical research about herbs and human bodies.