Category:Herbal medicines

A herbal medicine is a medicine that consists of plant material, of an extract of plant material, or of a defined plant constituent prepared as a medicinal product. The category sits beneath Plants and collects the wiki's pages for the plants whose principal historical and contemporary use is medicinal in the conventional sense, as distinct from the psychoactive, ritual, and entheogenic plants collected under the Pendell-axis subcategories (Phantastica, Excitantia, Inebriantia, Evaesthetica, Euphorica). The contents of the category include the digestives (peppermint, ginger, fennel, chamomile), the nervines and adaptogens (valerian, lemon balm, ashwagandha, holy basil, rhodiola), the immune-modulating preparations (echinacea, elderberry), the women's-health botanicals (black cohosh, chasteberry, red raspberry leaf), the cardiovascular plants (hawthorn, garlic, olive leaf), the dermatologic plants (aloe vera, calendula, witch hazel), the hepatoprotective preparations (milk thistle), the cognitive-and-circulatory standby ginkgo, and the long list of less-prescribed botanicals that retain a place in clinical and traditional practice.

The history of herbal medicine is, in clinical terms, the history of medicine, full stop. The earliest medical text that survives in continuous transmission, the Ebers papyrus of about 1550 BCE, is a pharmacopoeia of plant preparations: castor oil for laxation, opium for pain, garlic for infestation, juniper for diuresis, willow bark for fever, frankincense and myrrh for fumigation of wounds. The Indian Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita, compiled in the centuries before and after the common era, describe a comparable plant pharmacopoeia organised around the doshic system of Ayurveda. The Chinese Shennong Bencao Jing, attributed to the Han dynasty but transmitting earlier traditions, catalogues 365 medicinal substances of which the great majority are botanical; the work was systematically expanded and corrected by the Ming physician Li Shizhen in his Bencao Gangmu of 1578, the most influential single text in the Chinese herbal tradition and the source of much of contemporary Chinese pharmacopoeial knowledge. The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarbus produced in approximately 50 to 70 CE his five-volume De Materia Medica, describing the medicinal use of more than six hundred plants; the work was copied, illustrated, and translated continuously for fifteen hundred years and was the standard reference of European medicine through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period.

The transition from herbal to chemical pharmacy is a story of the same plants viewed differently. The isolation of morphine from the opium poppy by Friedrich Sertürner of Paderborn in 1804 (the first alkaloid isolated from any plant; described in detail under opioid analgesics) was the founding event of pharmacognosy, the scientific study of medicinal substances of natural origin. Quinine followed from cinchona bark in 1820 (antimalarials); the cardiac glycosides from foxglove in the 1860s and decisively as digoxin in 1930 (heart failure medications); reserpine from Rauwolfia serpentina in 1952 (antihypertensives and historical neuroleptics); the vinca alkaloids from Catharanthus roseus in 1958 (antineoplastics); paclitaxel from the bark of the Pacific yew tree in 1971 (antineoplastics); artemisinin from Artemisia annua in 1972 (antimalarials; Tu Youyou Nobel 2015). Each isolation removed the active principle from the herbal context and placed it in the pharmaceutical one, with corresponding gains in standardisation and losses in the polypharmacy and synergy that herbalists had always claimed for the whole-plant preparation.

The whole-plant preparations, in the meantime, retained their use. In the United States, the Eclectic medical tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (the Lloyd brothers' Lloyd Library in Cincinnati, King's American Dispensatory of 1898, and the Eclectic medical schools that survived until the Flexner Report of 1910) defended and refined whole-plant herbal preparations for clinical use. The European phytotherapy tradition (the German Kommission E monographs of the 1980s and 1990s, the European Medicines Agency's Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products (HMPC) since 2004 with its registration of traditional herbal medicinal products through the simplified TUHMP procedure) gave herbal medicine a regulated clinical place that the U.S. Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) deliberately did not: in the United States, most herbal preparations are sold as "dietary supplements" without the efficacy review of a prescription medicine but also without the prescription requirement, in a regulatory limbo that has shaped both the commercial market and the clinical-practice context.

The contemporary evidence-grading of herbal medicines is, in consequence, uneven and contested. Several herbal preparations have substantial controlled-trial evidence for specific clinical effect: silymarin (milk thistle) for selected hepatic indications; ginger (Zingiber officinale) for nausea of pregnancy and chemotherapy-induced nausea; peppermint oil for irritable bowel syndrome; St John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) for mild-to-moderate depression (with substantial CYP3A4-induction-mediated interaction liability that is now a routine clinical concern); saw palmetto for symptomatic benign prostatic hyperplasia (the controlled-trial evidence, the CAMUS and STEP trials, has been less favourable than the marketing). Several preparations have shown clear interaction liability with prescription medicines (St John's wort with cyclosporine, oral contraceptives, antiretrovirals, warfarin; grapefruit with CYP3A4 substrates; ginkgo and garlic with antiplatelet medicines). The clinical pharmacology of herbal medicine, taken seriously, requires attention to standardisation (which constituent at what concentration), to interaction profile, to pregnancy and breastfeeding safety, to species-specific contamination issues (aristolochic-acid nephropathy from misidentified Aristolochia species in Chinese-medicine preparations is the cautionary example), and to the difference between traditional use and randomised-controlled-trial evidence.

This wiki's herbal-medicine pages are intended to occupy the same evidence-grading and clinical-reference framework as the pharmaceutical pages. Each monograph is structured by the same phytotherapy template (the PlantMedTemplate), with sections for botanical identity (binomial, family, common names, native range, parts used), traditional use (the spine of the page, history-first, geographic and cultural context), active constituents, preparations (in cultural-historical and contemporary clinical terms), indications and dosing, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics where the data exist, medicine-interaction profile (cross-linked to the wiki's pharmacogenomic interaction layer), pregnancy and lactation, and references. Citations follow the wiki standard: primary controlled-trial evidence where available, the major modern authoritative monographs (USP Herbal Medicines Compendium, WHO monographs on selected medicinal plants, the EMA HMPC traditional-use monographs, Memorial Sloan Kettering's About Herbs database) where the controlled-trial evidence is absent or weak, and ethnobotanical and historical sources for the traditional-use sections.

The herbal medicines in this category are listed below by indication-group, with cross-references to the related pharmaceutical class categories where the parallel exists. The list is in progressive build as the monograph pages are written; redlinks indicate herbs in scope but not yet drafted.

• Digestive: peppermint (Mentha × piperita), ginger (Zingiber officinale), fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), chamomile (German Matricaria chamomilla and Roman Chamaemelum nobile), caraway (Carum carvi), artichoke leaf (Cynara scolymus), aloe vera (oral and topical)
• Hepatoprotective and choleretic: milk thistle (silymarin), turmeric (Curcuma longa)
• Cardiovascular: hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna and C. laevigata), garlic (Allium sativum), olive leaf (Olea europaea), hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa), forskolin source (Coleus forskohlii, restricted use)
• Cognitive, circulatory, and adaptogenic: ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), bacopa (Bacopa monnieri), ashwagandha (Withania somnifera), rhodiola (Rhodiola rosea), Asian ginseng (Panax ginseng) and American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), eleuthero (Eleutherococcus senticosus)
• Nervine, calming, and sleep: valerian (Valeriana officinalis), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), passionflower (Passiflora incarnata), hops (Humulus lupulus)
• Mood and affective: St John's wort (Hypericum perforatum), saffron (Crocus sativus), mucuna (Mucuna pruriens)
• Women's reproductive health: black cohosh (Actaea racemosa), chasteberry (Vitex agnus-castus), red raspberry leaf (Rubus idaeus), blue cohosh (caution: oxytocic, restricted)
• Urological: saw palmetto (Serenoa repens), pumpkin seed (Cucurbita pepo), cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon)
• Immune-modulating and antiviral: echinacea (Echinacea purpurea and E. angustifolia), elderberry (Sambucus nigra), astragalus (Astragalus mongholicus), andrographis (Andrographis paniculata)
• Respiratory and demulcent: coltsfoot (restricted, pyrrolizidine alkaloids), licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra), pelargonium (Pelargonium sidoides)
• Dermatologic: aloe vera (topical), calendula (Calendula officinalis), witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), comfrey (topical only; pyrrolizidine alkaloid liver toxicity contraindicates oral use)
• Anti-inflammatory and analgesic: boswellia (Boswellia serrata), capsicum / cayenne (Capsicum annuum and C. frutescens; capsaicin topical), devil's claw (Harpagophytum procumbens), willow bark (Salix alba, the ancestor of aspirin)
• Other: wild lettuce (Lactuca virosa), eyebright (Euphrasia), activated charcoal (technically not herbal but historically grouped)

The list above will be progressively expanded by the wiki's herbalist-claude editorial role into the full set of approximately two hundred monographs intended for the comprehensive collection.

The boundary of this category is "plant or plant-derived medicine whose principal traditional and contemporary use is for non-psychoactive medical indication." Several boundaries with adjacent categories require explicit handling:

• The psychoactive plants (cannabis, the Papaver somniferum opium poppy, Erythroxylum coca, the entheogens of the Pendell-axis subcategories) are collected under Plants and under the appropriate Pendell-axis subcategory, not under this category, even when those plants also have established medicinal uses; the medicinal uses are described on the individual plant pages but the categorisation reflects the principal-use criterion.
• The plant-derived pharmaceuticals (morphine, quinine, digoxin, atropine, vincristine, paclitaxel, artemisinin, the long list of plant-origin medicines that have been isolated into pharmaceutical use) are collected under their pharmaceutical class categories rather than here; the corresponding herbal-preparation pages (opium tincture under opium, cinchona under cinchona, etc.) are listed in this category if their herbal use remains clinically relevant.
• The dietary supplements that are not plant-based (the omega-3 fish-oil preparations, the trace-mineral preparations, the synthetic vitamin combinations) are not herbal medicines and are listed under vitamins, iron supplements, calcium supplements, or the relevant clinical category.
• The animal-derived traditional medicines (bear bile, the Chinese pharmacopoeia's animal-product entries, the historical use of insects) are not herbal medicines and are mentioned only where their interaction with herbal preparations is clinically relevant.
• The mushroom medicines (Hericium erinaceus lion's mane, Ganoderma lucidum reishi, Trametes versicolor turkey tail, Inonotus obliquus chaga, Cordyceps spp.) are fungi rather than plants; they are collected under a parallel sub-category if and when that page is built, and are listed here only when the herbal-medicine tradition treats them alongside plant medicines.

The pages in this category follow the canonical plant-medicine page structure: history-first lead, 40-to-55 percent of the page devoted to the traditional-use narrative, prohibition history folded into that narrative rather than separated, current clinical pharmacology including dosing where established, interaction profile, pregnancy and breastfeeding safety, and full reference list. Citation hierarchy follows the wiki standard: primary controlled-trial evidence where available; the major authoritative monographs (WHO, EMA HMPC, USP HMC, Memorial Sloan Kettering About Herbs) where trial evidence is absent or limited; and ethnobotanical and historical sources for the traditional-use sections.

This category page is an encyclopedia article about its subject. Each individual herb monograph is a clinical-reference page in its own right and follows the canonical plant-medicine page spec. The actual index of medicines belonging to the category is generated automatically by the wiki engine, from category-membership declarations on the individual medicine pages, and appears at the foot of the page below the references.