Dr. Duke's Essential Herbs: The Only Herbs You Need to Disease-Proof Your Body, Boost Your Energy, and Lengthen Your Life

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Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.: chapter one

Herbs for Good Health

First the word, then the plant, lastly the knife.

--Aesculapius of Thassaly, Greek god of healing, circa 1200 B.C .

BY THE TIME THEY REACH THEIR SEVENTIES, most people take seven different synthetic medications every day. All last year, I took only seven. (They were all over-the-counter Aleve tablets for my arthritic knee.)

I think I've chanced upon a better way to maintain health, a way that's much better than the prescription drug path.

Chalk up much of my good fortune to good genes, good diet, good exercise, good stress management, and a measure of good luck. The rest of it, I'm firmly convinced, stems from ingesting herbs and herbal supplements.

Will herbs and their phytomedicines improve your health and reverse illness? Should you bother to read this entire book to find out? Follow along with my "Five Ifs," and you'll know right away.

If you can afford to go to your doctor and pay for all the medications he or she prescribes

If you can communicate with your physician comfortably and have faith in him or her

If your doctor correctly diagnoses your ailments

If you have one and only one health problem

If you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're not deficient in a vitamin, mineral, amino acid, essential fatty acid, or any other nutrient

... then put this book back on the shelf. You don't need it and couldn't appreciate the advice contained herein. Your doctor's man-made magic silver bullet may actually help you. It really may be one of the best possible medicines for you.

Iffy Propositions

Still with me? Thought so.

I can be so seemingly brazen because few people can answer each of these five ifs positively. Let's fill in a little detail behind each of these conditions.

Means. More than 10 percent of all Americans can't afford to go to a doctor or pay for a prescription. Across the world, 80 percent of all people lack such financial means. Some 43 million Americans, as of July 1999, have no health insurance. (For more information, see "Cheaper by the Duke's Dozen" on page 4.)

Communication. The average HMO doctor spends about six minutes with each patient. He or she probably spends more time making a sandwich during a commercial break.

I was shocked when I heard the following sorry statistic, from none other than former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D., who spoke at the World Med Conference in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area in 1996. After asking a question, male physicians interrupt a patient's answer in an average of 14 seconds. Female physicians are somewhat more polite, interrupting rambling patients after about 40 seconds. No wonder surveys report that most people feel they can't communicate effectively with doctors.

Accuracy. In detecting Lyme disease, physician's diagnoses are wrong 50 percent of the time. They bat somewhat better or worse with other ailments. Twenty percent of all hacking done at doctors' offices are undiagnosed cases of whooping cough (pertussis), according to a 1996 issue of Science News.

Sickness. Few of us have one and only one ailment at any given time. Whether we (or our doctors) know it or not, several things are usually wrong.

Nourishment. We all like to eat, and we all think we eat rather healthfully. But no matter how well-fed you might be, there's a good chance you don't ingest optimum amounts of many nutrients. A lot of us are deficient in basic vitamins and minerals.

In contrast to the pharmaceutical industry's perfect poster person, I offer you myself: Though I still can afford my doctor and my doctor's prescriptions, I try not to buy into the deal. I talk quite plainly and am easy to understand. I'm never presumptuous enough to diagnose, but I can make guesses and take wild stabs that are sometimes correct. I have a handful of health concerns of my own for which I'd like answers. And while I can chow down with the best of them, I still don't think I or anyone else can consume sufficient amounts of some fundamental nutrients solely from food. I've learned enough in my day as a botanist to know that the vegetables, fruits, and plants we eat often are almost bereft of nutrition (especially given how breeders and the food industry process them).

What's Really Safe?

Every once in a while, you'll hear a story on the evening news about someone dying from an extreme allergic reaction to something he or she has eaten. In 1998, about 100 people died in the United States after ingesting common, ordinary nuts. In the same period, fewer than 100 Americans died after consuming an herb in some form, and more than 90 percent of these people were intentionally abusing certain of the more potent members of our herbal pharmacy. To the best of my knowledge, no one died in the United States in 1998 from ingesting an herbal product in a safe, recommended dosage.

Yet critics of phytomedicine cite safety as a primary concern. The faultfinders apparently want zero jeopardy and absolute safety from herbs. I guess we can therefore expect that from their preferred medicines, synthetic drugs, right? Hardly. Once those things ricochet around inside the body, they kill by the thousands.

In 1994, between 70,000 and 130,000 people in the United States died because of the pharmaceuticals they took--pharmaceuticals that were properly prescribed and duly taken. It has been implicated that, every year, complications from taking commonplace nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) cause about 7,600 deaths.

Of all people admitted to the hospital, 30 percent will suffer an adverse effect to a properly prescribed drug, according to the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Project. Anywhere from 3 to 28 percent of all hospital admissions are related to a bad reaction to a medication. In other words, bad reactions to medications will kill 3 out of every 1,000 people who go to a hospital, according to a 1997 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Cheaper by the Duke's Dozen

Here's a cost comparison between leading synthetic pharmaceuticals and the equivalent phytomedicinal dosage.

Condition Pharmaceutical Herbal Alzheimer's disease Cognex $5.63 Ginkgo biloba $.59 Angina, cardiopathy Verapamil $.51 Hawthorn $.37 Anxiety, stress Valium $2.15 Kava kava $1.18 Arthritis Hydrocortisone $2.78 Turmeric $.77 Benign prostate Proscar $2.86 Saw palmetto $.98 enlargement Hytrin $1.55 Evening primrose $.59 Chronic venous insufficiency Compress or stockings $2.78 Horse chestnut $.29 Cirrhosis, hepatosis Interferon $120.49 Milk thistle $2.16 Depression Zoloft $2.25 St. John's wort $.50 Flu, bronchitis, colds Flumadine $4.98 Echinacea $1.60 Gout Allopurinol $.70 Celery seed extract $.60 High cholesterol Zocor $3.73 Garlic $.23 Maculitis Eyeglasses $200 Bilberry $1.07

Let us not forget the emotional toll exacted on thousands and thousands of families that lose a loved one in the blink of an eye simply because that poor person followed doctor's orders and took some synthetic substance.

True, few, if any, herbal supplements have been proven safe and effective-- at least not in strictly conducted American studies. But average people have been conducting their own informal studies on herbs for millennia, and we get fewer than 100 deaths a year, primarily from ill-advised, intentional overdosing. In ironic contrast, ostensibly above-average scientists have been conducting rigidly controlled experiments on synthetic medications and making exacting calculations for the last several decades, and we get thousands and thousands of deaths.

Let the Best (Medicine) Man Win

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