Evidence Base

There is a growing amount of evidence-based research supporting various botanicals, as this section will show.

There is currently a vigorous debate about whether botanical medicines are effective, and whether it is ever appropriate to use them in a modern medical setting. Some criticisms have stated that clinical studies of botanicals are of poor quality, limited by factors such as small sample sizes, limited duration of therapy, and poorly characterized products.

However, similar criticisms have been directed at clinical trials of pharmaceutical medicines. In fact, one recent study compared the quality of clinical trials using phytomedicines to matched trials using conventional medicines and came to the surprising conclusion that the method and reporting quality of Western clinical trials of herbal medicines was on average superior to that of conventional medicines (Nartley et al., 2007).

This Section: ~10 min.

Some botanical medicines have
been used for thousands of years.