Lanny Kaufer - Medicinal Herbs of California: A Field Guide to Common Healing Plants

In 2012 researchers studying dental calculus on the teeth of 50,000-year-old Neanderthal skulls in a Spanish cave made a surprising discovery. They were looking forand findingevidence of the plant foods that made up the diet of early humans, but they also found remains of two not-very-tasty plants, chamomile and yarrow, known today as medicinal herbs. The researchers suggested that self-medication is the best explanation for this finding. It is highly likely that as long as humans have inhabited the Earth, weve used herbs for self-healing, probably from observing animals such as bears do the same. Today, the World Health Organization estimates that 60 percent of the worlds population80 percent in developing countriesrely on herbal medicines for their primary health care.

As humans evolved, Indigenous tribes created their own localized herbal medicine traditions, based on trial and error and passed down orally. At the same time, two major herbal medical systems developed in India and China that are still in use today. The Ayurvedic system of herbal medicine in India was first described in writing about 3,500 years ago and may have been developing for thousands of years before that. It continues today uninterrupted, with practitioners around the world. The earliest recorded Chinese pharmacopoeia (catalog of medicines), the Pen Tsao Ching, dates back to the second century AD but is thought to be based on thousands of years of oral teachings. The Chinese plant medicine system continues to this day in the form of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), practiced by acupuncturists and Doctors of Oriental Medicine (OMDs) worldwide.

A different story unfolded in Europe, where for thousands of years, in the absence of a unifying system, folk healers (mostly women) treated people with local herbs. Those herbalists whose remedies worked gained followers and apprentices. Herbal knowledge spread by word of mouth. Meanwhile, a more formal herbal medical tradition evolved in Greece around the writings of two physicians: Hippocrates (c. 460c. 370 BC), known as the Father of Medicine, and Dioscorides (c. AD 4090), who wrote the first Western pharmacopoeia. In the early days of the Roman Empire, another Greek physician and author, Galen (AD 129c. 210), used his newfound knowledge of anatomy and physiology to become the emperors physician. His teachings, which dominated Western medicine for more than 1,000 years, included complex and expensive herbal formulas, as opposed to the single-herb remedies of the folk herbalists known as simples.

After the fall of Rome, the European tradition of plant medicine was squelched by the Catholic Church and replaced with religious beliefs about the source and treatment of illness. Throughout the Dark Ages, local herbalists continued their work in secret, often paying for their witchcraft with their lives. Meanwhile, monks in monasteries transcribed the Greek medical writings. Their manuscripts fueled a renewed interest in herbs when the Renaissance blossomed in Europe in the 1500s with a flurry of lavishly illustrated books called herbals. The result today is an ongoing European interest in time-honored plant medicines.

North America was an entirely new frontier for Western herbal medicine. The English and other European settlers in the eastern part of the continent and Spanish missionaries and pioneers in the West brought an assortment of herbs and recipes with them from their homelands. They soon discovered that Indigenous tribes already had well-developed medical traditions based on herbs they gathered, cultivated, or acquired through trade. Native American herbal remedies and healing practices had been tested in the crucible of time for thousands for years. Unfortunately for the future of American medicine, most of the Indigenous knowledge was lost as tribal lands were overrun in what can only be described as a genocide. Furthermore, a racist bias prevented most Europeans from accepting medical advice from people they deemed to be inferior or, even worse, subhuman.

A few early American physicians did, however, value Indigenous medicine. Aided by the observations of pioneering anthropologists and ethnographers who recorded American Indian healing practices, these physicians began to establish a uniquely American brand of medicine by combining European and Native American herbalism. They wrote books and started medical schools, practicing what was known as Eclectic Medicine, physio-medical therapeutics, and naturopathy, among other names. These schools and the doctors they produced rode a wave of popularity that was peaking in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s.

This promising evolution came to a halt in 1910 with the release of Medical Education in the United States and Canada by Abraham Flexner, now known as the Flexner Report. Commissioned by Andrew Carnegie and funded by John D. Rockefeller, the report was promoted as a scientific attempt to assess the unregulated state of medical education in the United States, which was, indeed, in need of improvement. While at the time it seemed a worthy philanthropic cause for the public good, todays historical perspective reveals another possible motive. Carnegie, Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and other millionaire industrialists and bankers of their day were invested in oil and mineral extraction that produced the ingredients used in place of plants by the fledgling pharmaceutical industry to create synthetic chemical drugs. The Rockefeller fortune soon became heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industryand remains so to this day.

The Flexner Report resulted in the elimination of more than half the existing medical schools, including those who taught herbal or naturopathic medicine as well as those who trained Black and women doctors. Schools that survived and became accredited were the beneficiaries of generous funding by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Similar changes already under way in the US Pharmacopoeia (USP) picked up steam after the Flexner Report. Following the isolation of morphine from the opium poppy in 1805, whole-plant drugs were gradually replaced with laboratory versions based on a plants active constituent. This so-called biomedical approach focused on one isolated component while overlooking the synergy of the many compounds found in a whole herb.

In the first USP, published in 1820, 70 percent of the drugs listed were derived from plants. By the eleventh edition of 1936, the number had dropped to 45 percent. This trend resulted in part from the inability of pharmaceutical companies to patent a whole plant.

Ironically, the very word drug is derived from the Old Dutch drgi, referring to dry herbs. Yet today, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines a drug as a substance recognized by an official pharmacopoeia or formulary and, secondly, as a substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. The result is that even though many herbs have a history of use and a few still exist in some form in the USP, they cannot be considered medical drugs unless they are approved by the FDA. Herbs are now placed in the regulatory category of dietary supplements. Since they cannot prescribe them, physicians do not learn about herbs in medical school and pharmacists no longer learn about them in pharmacy school. In California, only licensed acupuncturists and naturopaths can prescribe whole herbs. The botanical medicines they prescribe will be found in their own herbal pharmacies or in retail health food stores, but not in medical pharmacies or drug stores.

The legal status of medicinal herbs, or lack of it, did not stop American consumers from spending $8.8 billion on herbal supplements in 2018. Meanwhile, Native American communities continue to tap into their legacy of plant medicine. Hopefully, by bringing together the long-standing contributions of California Indians and the latest studies in plant pharmacology, this book will be able to play some part in restoring the status of medicinal herbs. At the same time, it may empower you, its readers, to learn how to identify and sustainably collect some common California herbs to create your own herbal pharmacy of home remedies.