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| were profitable to hospitals and physicians, they did not save lives. In 1994, the New England Journal of Medicine endorsed "watchful waiting" rather than aggressive intervention for nearly all prostate cancers detected in older men. |
| Heart disease and swollen prostates are only two of the medical conditions common to American men. They and a host of other ailments can be improved, treated, reversed and in some cases cured by methods other than drugs and surgeryand often the most successful, well documented, effective treatments involve medicinal herbs. |
| Herbal medicine has such a long history, its origins are lost in the mists of time. Like our fellow animals, people have been treating themselves with plants for millennia. Most of the prescription drugs sold today are derived from plants, and pharmaceutical companies still send botanists to distant rain forests in the search for cures. |
| There are two approaches to using plant-based medicines. One is to isolate the plant's active ingredient and synthesize it in order to create a patented drug. The other is to use the plant itself, with all of its constituents. The first approach is refined, the second, crude. Crude plant extracts and whole leaf teas provide not only the plant's active ingredients, but dozens of interacting chemicals that may have a profound effect on the person taking them. In many cases, the same plant contains both a toxic component and its antidote. |
| For example, sassafras contains safrole, a substance that the FDA tested in large quantities on rats in the 1950s. When the rats developed liver cancer, sassafras was blamed. The same compound, safrole, is found in nutmeg, black pepper and mace, but these seasonings were never implicated. Because safrole is not soluble in water, someone drinking sassafras tea will ingest very little of it, and no case of liver damage from sassafras tea has ever been reported. In fact, the southeastern U.S., where most sassa- |
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