Medicinal herbs

Phytotherapy is a therapeutic method that treats diseases by using natural plant extracts or medicinal herbs.

Phytotherapy recognizes scientific evidence for some herbs, to the extent that some of their herbal extracts are fully included in the category of drugs and are prescribed as such.
In tradition and folk medicine, the use of herbal preparations is quite widespread. In fact, man has always placed great trust and respect in nature using it for food and care. Over the millennia, all those medicinal plants that could be effective in curing or preventing certain diseases have been selected and described.
The traditional remedies are based on somewhat coarse preparations that allow the use of medicinal herbs as such without directly extracting the active principles.
Modern phytotherapy deals instead with selecting and obtaining purified extracts. In this way all the principles contained in medicinal herbs are made safer and more effective. Phytotherapy allows therefore to use the essence of the plant giving scientific evidence to what the popular tradition had sensed for centuries. Let's see some examples:

Centella asiatica is an herb that in traditional Indian medicine was used in its entirety to exploit its sedative effect. After many centuries it was discovered that specific substances contained in it (triterpenes) had a specific activity on the venous system. Today these substances have been isolated and registered as a medicinal product indicated in the therapy of venous insufficiency and hemorrhoids. It is therefore an indication of use completely different from the traditional one and mostly without the risks of the tincture or powder of this medicinal herb (sedative effect).
Even cypress if used in the form of fluid extract is particularly useful in the treatment of venous insufficiency and more generally in cardiocirculatory problems (eg varicose veins). By distilling the berries and extracting the essential oils contained therein, a preparation is obtained with a fluidifying action on catarrhal secretions and a cough sedative. Also in this case the medicinal plant is always the same but the properties are clearly different.

With modern extraction techniques, you can extract from the medicinal herbs the substances you need by eliminating the harmful substances responsible for side effects. A normal plant contains in fact hundreds and hundreds of chemical substances, some of which are toxic or in any case have no beneficial effects.
Herbs can therefore also be dangerous for our health (hemlock, castor seed, oleander leaves, etc.). In phytotherapy obviously these plants are avoided, or are treated in such a way as to separate the toxic substances from the beneficial ones.

Effectiveness of medicinal herbs

Medicinal herbs are a valid support to traditional medicine but generally can not replace it. Some diseases can instead be treated effectively using only medicinal herb extracts recognized by the Ministry of Health. When it comes to phytotherapy, it is not just a question of unconventional or alternative medicine, but a real therapeutic method that can cure specific diseases.
In other cases, medicinal herbs have proven to be helpful in relieving symptoms and contributing to medical therapy. The healthy efficacy of these herbs must then be considered in a preventive perspective, without forgetting that adjective "medicines" that should make us think before their use (some medicinal herbs have very strong effect). Finally, it must be considered that just as the active principles contained in medicines, even those extracted from plants have a minimum threshold of effectiveness below which the result obtained is null, or in any case modest.

(to be continued)